World of The Third and The Hegemonic Capital

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
World of the Third and

Hegemonic Capital
Between Marx and Freud
Anjan Chakrabarti
Anup Dhar
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assis-
tant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published
in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political
perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre
of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
Anjan Chakrabarti · Anup Dhar
World of the Third

and Hegemonic
Capital
Anjan Chakrabarti Anup Dhar
Department of Economics The Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler
University of Calcutta Center (KKC) for Cultural
West Bengal, India Psychology and Historical
Anthropology
Ruhr-University Bochum
Bochum, Germany
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-25016-3 ISBN 978-3-031-25017-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25017-0
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Titles Published
1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014.
2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideol-
ogy” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach
chapter,” 2014.
3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism,
2015.
4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A
Critique of Marxism, 2016.
5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical
History, 2016.
6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to
Read Marx, 2017.
7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017.
8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of
Karl Marx, 2018.
9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of
the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st
Century, 2018.
10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals:
Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018.
11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins
of Capitalism, 2018.
vii
viii TITLES PUBLISHED
12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, 2018.
13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian
Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral
Capitalism, 2019.
14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and
Political Theory, 2019.
15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and
Metaphysics of Domination, 2019.
16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-
Time Political Analysis, 2019.
17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Saba-
dini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist
Analysis, 2019.
18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl
Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the
Bicentenary, 2019.
19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism:
Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019.
20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile:
The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019.
21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020.
22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020.
23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A
Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe,
Turgot and Smith, 2020.
24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020.
25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and
Marxism in France, 2020.
26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and
Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction,
2020.
27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020.
28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduc-
tion, 2020.
29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th
Anniversary Edition, 2020.
30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twen-
tieth Century, 2020.
TITLES PUBLISHED ix
31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),

Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and
the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020.
32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in
France and Italy, 2020.
33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021.
34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism,
Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021.
35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st
Century, 2021.
36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a De-
alienated World, 2021.
37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021.
38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolu-
tionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021.
39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and
Aesthetics, 2021.
40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisa-
tion: Critical Studies, 2021.
41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives,
2021.
42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings
of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021.
43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The
Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists,
2021.
44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and
Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021.
45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and
Marxism, 2021.
46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Self-
organisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021.
47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The
Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021.
48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga
(Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism,
2021.
49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-
Century Italy, 2021.
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50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and

Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021.
51. V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism
in India, 2021.
52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism:
Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022.
53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of
Finance, 2022.
54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022.
55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State:
General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022.
56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome
Capitalism, 2022.
57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.),
Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022.
58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.),
Marxism and Migration, 2022.
59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022.
60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value
Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022.
61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries,
Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022.
62. Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism,
2022.
63. Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian
Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci, 2022.
64. Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism, 2022.
65. Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st
Century: Perspectives and Problems, 2022.
66. Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the
Realm of Communism, 2022.
67. Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism:
Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism, 2022.
68. Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, 2022.
69. José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of Interna-
tional Relations, 2022.
70. Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography,
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Classes, 2022.
72. Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times,
2022.
73. Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred
Years of History of the French Communist Party, 2022.
74. Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter
Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis, 2023.
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Cosmopolitanism
Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century
Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist
Analysis and Alternatives
Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian
Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci
Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Poli-
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Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dicta-
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Thomas Kemple, Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology
Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’
Insubordination of 1968
Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and
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Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of
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Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for
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Europe: A Hungarian Perspective
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xiv TITLES FORTHCOMING
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Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx
Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism
Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The
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Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism
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Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of
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Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future
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Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the
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Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis
Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and
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David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory
of the Working Class
Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and
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Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker,
Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society
Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism,
Subjectivity and Critique of Religion
Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism
Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A
Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation
Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and
History
Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and
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Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism
Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism
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Theory for the 21st Century
Gary Teeple, The Democracy That Never Was: A Critique of Liberal
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Alfonso García Vela & Alberto Bonnet, The Political Thought of John
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Preface
Given that Marx provided an analysis of nineteenth-century western

European capitalism, what conceptual handles or windows can Marx offer
today? Can he offer anything? Would we at all turn to him for an under-
standing, interpretation, and explanation of contemporary capitalism? Or
would he be irrelevant in the Southern situation, given the birth of his
theory in a western context? Do concepts travel? Would his concepts
be relevant in another culture and another time? How do we concep-
tualize Marxism in the South, if at all and why at all? Could we at all
conceptualize a Marxism that was turned to the South? How would we
attend to the scorn of the cultural difference theorist who would say that
Marxism’s western moorings impart a certain incommensurability to its
invocation in non-Western realities? How would we do away with the near
religio-scientific belief of the Universalist who would see the possibility of
a core applicability of Marxism transcending (non-Western) particulari-
ties? Would a rethinking of Marxian questions and concerns in the South
mean a radical displacement of much of Marxism; such that Marxism
becomes ab-original —that is, both, ‘other than the Original form’ (say,
for example, other than the historical materialist form) as also ‘singed with
a certain subalternity-indigeneity’? Would it also mean a rethinking of the
very description of the South that has hitherto hegemonized us? Would
it mean a rethinking of the category of ‘third world’—third world as the
representative category for any description of the South?
xvii
xviii PREFACE
Taking off from questions as to why and how Marxism could matter
in the context of the South, it appeared to us that both western Marxism
and third world as is usually deployed in classical and conventional rendi-
tions are deeply problematic. Even the bulk of the so-called critique of
modernity, whether they be postmodern or postcolonial, falter when faced
with the third world. A culturalist critique would tend to forget capital;
and an economistic critique is inclined towards putting aside the ques-
tion of modernity and culture (as also the psychic, including questions
of need, desire, phantasy and delusions that interpellate us and hold us
hostage). Resultantly, the specificity as also the burden of the history and
the experience of colonial modernity and the evolution of capitalism, all
of these in their overdetermined and contradictory imbrications, remain
unaccounted for at a more theoretical level. We wondered: how does one
bring to dialogue questions of economy, culture and power (and nature)?
How does one bring to dialogue questions of political economy and
concerns of libidinal economy? How does one rethink class, capitalism,
third world in their mutual constitutivity and not one by one, turn by
turn? How does one rethink all of them at a conceptual level and not just
at an empirical level? How does one leave no stone unturned? Because
it is only after rethinking all the conceptual ‘given’-s, all the theoretical
a priori-s that one can rethink the relationships among them. This was
Marx’s methodology in Capital.
This theoretical problem, by no means peculiar to Marxism, acquires
additional urgency in a Marxian space since western Marxism has never
really faced up to the category of third world; nor has it come face to face
with the experience–language–logic–ethos of the South. Rather, it has
often turned away from this encounter; such a turning away is perhaps
reflective of an implicit Orientalism. Whether in the North or South,
wittingly or unwittingly, irrespective of ideological dispositions, the efforts
to rethink Marxism and third world in the Southern space have, with
few exceptions, remained forestalled. For us, therefore, the more pressing
questions are related to how Marxist theory would encounter the speci-
ficity of third world. In turn, how would third world encounter Marxism?
How do the understandings of Marxism and third world change because
of this encounter? This book deals with these questions; it proposes in the
process the inauguration of a counter concept ‘world of the third’.
This work thereafter fleshes out a description of world of the third and
of its encounter with global capitalism, with India as the background of
analysis and in the context of the present phase of globalization. Indeed,
PREFACE xix
globalization has been a recurring sub-theme in the encounter of the ‘rest’

with the West throughout the history of capital and the current phase
represents another passage, with its own unique effects, of this ongoing
encounter. By virtue of its unique disposition, Marxian questions tuned
to world of the third enunciate a quite different trajectory of explaining
and understanding this encounter.
However, one may still ask: Why invent a new name world of the third?
Does a change in name solve the problem? Naming has to it the suspicion
of a colonizing burden, especially in the South. Nobody has borne the
consequences of the cultural imputations involved in naming more than
the Southern people. Southern thinkers, to name a few, Franz Fanon, Che
Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Aimé Césaire, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath
Tagore, and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya (author of Swaraj in Ideas )
have struggled against the stifling grip of markers coming to their home-
land like metonymic meteors from the West. For them, the purpose of
social struggles was never to just win political independence, but primarily
a struggle over mindsets-attitudes, over worldviews; decolonization meant
decolonization of minds; swaraj meant ‘swaraj in ideas’. That is why
language (whether oral, written, practical, ethical or aesthetic) was so
important to all these thinkers and resultantly their struggles became a
struggle over the symbolic orders as also over subject positions. These
currents of intellectual and social opposition to discourses of colonialism
and then modernization have subsequently taken various forms and have
continued to redefine the intellectual and practical landscape of social
resistance and at times social reconstruction in the South. In many ways,
these intellectual and social movements talk not simply to their own
people, but to the West as well by pointing out that what seemed obvious
to the latter was only a particular construction of the ‘rest’ by the West.
They argued that the lived experience of the South could not be reduced
to the conceptual frame (explanatory or interpretative) generated in and
by the West. The problem is also of reducing (cultural, economic, and
political) difference to frames of discrimination; it is one of organizing
worlds that are different in terms of step-ladder hierarchies, where one is
not different from the other, but where one is either superior or inferior
to the other (in this case it is all about reducing the difference that world
of the third institutes into the hierarchy of first and third worlds). The
problem is, therefore, about being sensitive to a fundamental dissonance
that has appeared as a result of the encounter of the ‘rest’ with the West.
In this context, the deployment of world of the third (as different and
xx PREFACE
as outside) against the given of third world (as the lacking inside of the
developed First World) is crucial.
Our endeavour takes us to a provisional conclusion: the foreclosure of
world of the third is produced through a foregrounding of third world.
The hegemonic (here, global capitalism) is then a product of foreclo-
sure (here, world of the third) and foregrounding (here, third world).
Critiquing western Marxism and various other strands of ‘post’ thoughts
for having missed this crucial mode and node of modernist thinking that
motored the conceptualization of and intervention in the so-called third
world societies, we offer an interpretation of how this conceptualization
of and intervention in the so-called third world societies is a process
constitutive of global capitalism.
Further, by defamiliarizing and denaturalizing the given of global
capitalism and third worldism (as also development–globalization), we
propose a language of resistance premised on the return of the foreclosed
world of the third. Consequently, resistance to the hegemonic cannot
but be founded on the return of the foreclosed, on the return not of
the third world but of world of the third. A world of the third Marxian
approach thus not only provides a distinctly different language/worldview
for analysing the hegemonic, but in the same turn lays down the contours
of a possible world of postcapitalist living beyond the hegemonic.
Parts of the book have appeared in journals and edited volumes.
We thank the referees/reviewers for their inputs. Number of
ideas has been put to test in seminars and in refresher courses.
Chapter excerpts have been taught in MSc, MPhil, and PhD
Courses (titled Political Economy of Development, Economics of
Marx, Indian Economics, Idea-Knowledge-Ethics, Politics-Resistance-
Transformation, Deconstructing Normalcy, Philosophy of Development
Practice, Listening-Communicating-Relating and Gender and Develop-
ment) in the Department of Economics, Calcutta University, and at
the Centre for Development Practice at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Univer-
sity Delhi. In the process, the book has taken many unpredictable turns.
We are indebted to the students of these courses for their interest in
the project and the critical lens through which they have scrutinized
our analysis of the contemporary economic. The book was written, re-
written and given final form during a Fellowship at the Hans Kilian
and Lotte Köhler Center (KKC) for Cultural Psychology and Histor-
ical Anthropology, Department of Social Theory and Social Psychology,
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany between 2022 and 2023; where a
PREFACE xxi
Course titled ‘Hegemony: Between Marx and Freud’ was also taught;
the Course has contributed significantly to the making of this book. We
would like to thank Jürgen Straub, Leon Brenner, Dieter Haller, Christian
Gudehus and Bent Ole Schiemann of KKC. The intellectual richness and
kind hospitality at KKC made the book possible. Special thanks are due
to Pradeep.Chakkarath, who is not just a supportive colleague, a caring
host and a sharp interlocutor, but a true friend.
The political space of Kolkata is a challenging one and we were priv-
ileged to have been provided with ample space (both in the written
form and in the form of formal-informal discussions) by numerous orga-
nizations, both party and non-party, to share some of our thoughts
with people who showed no mercy to our often uncomfortable ques-
tions regarding the received field of left activism, regarding what was
already consensus among Marxists. However, this encounter was for us
(and hopefully for them as well) stimulating and gainful since it forced
us to face and address many disconcerting questions. It convinced us
beyond doubt that Marxism, development and the idea of third world
need to be rethought. Our immersion in postcapitalist praxis in indige-
nous spaces in India with Bhavya Chitranshi, Swarnima Kriti, Namrata
Acharya, Neeraj Kapoor, Gautam Bisht, Arunopaul Seal, Sindhunil Chat-
terjee, and Ashutosh Kumar helped us appreciate the need to theoretically
produce a Marxian language of world of the third and a world of
the third language of Marxism. Three Courses taught to the Practical
Philosophy Research Collective titled (i) Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII ,
(ii) Reading Lacan’s Seminar XVII , (iii) Reading Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s Anti-Oedipus: Between Capitalism and Schizophrenia and the fourth
Course that is currently being taught titled (iv) Psychoanalysis in Practice:
Between Philosophy and Neuroscience have also shaped the ideas that have
been developed in this book.
Numerous people have become close associates in the process of this
rather long journey; some have become friends; some critics; and some
have empathized with the project. The names below certainly do not
exhaust the list of people who have heard, read, commented upon,
confronted, praised, and critiqued portions of the book. Some have added
important insights. It is an understatement to say we have benefited from
this exchange. Without naming them, we thank them all.
Serap Kayatekin, S. Charusheela Ceren Özselçuk, Maliha Safri, Antonio
Callari, Joel Wainwright, Pranabkanti Basu, Yahya Madra, Seongjin Jeong,
xxii PREFACE
and Satyaki Roy have reviewed our work with kindness. We can’t thank
them enough.
Ajit Chaudhury, who is our teacher, and who has been at the fore-
front of rethinking Marxism and the idea of third world in the Southern
setting, who raised questions pertaining to Brown Orientalism and Need,
and who has been in search of a Subaltern Lenin, has provided us with
necessary encouragement and conceptual openings that turned out to be
important for taking our project forward over the long term.
No amount of gratitude could be enough for our family, mainly
our parents and of course, Mahua Chakrabarti, who bore through our
maddening and at times idiosyncratic schedule for such a long time with
a sensitivity that made possible our journey.
We are honoured to be members of the group on Advances in
Marxian Theory which has been meeting every Sunday for the last
two years for intense discussion on Marx’s writings and whose inputs
have helped clarify and deepen our understanding of Marxism. We are
intellectually indebted to the members of the group, Anirban Chattopad-
hyay, Byasdeb Dasgupta, Deepro Majumder, Sayonee Majumder, Kaustav
Saha, Anandamoy Sinha, Prithwiraj Saha, Subham Kanjilal, Aryaman Roy,
Bodhisattwa Sarkar, Nilanjan Ghosh, and Mekhla Bhowmick. We are
particularly grateful to Kaustav Saha and Anandamoy Sinha for offering
direct inputs on a few chapters of the book. To Sayonee Majumdar we
owe a special gratitude for minutely going over the Chapters, offering
sharp criticisms and suggestions. Needless to say, it helped us enor-
mously. Finally, this book would not have seen the light without the help
and support of Aryaman Roy who read and commented on the entire
book. He also helped us collate, correct, and structure the contents of
the book. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of
the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF-2021S1A3A2A02096299).
Special mention though must be made of Stephen Cullenberg (Steve)
who was Anjan’s Supervisor, then our common friend and collaborator
in many nascent ideas, articles, and books we published. His untimely
passing away on 28 February 2021 was an emotional, intellectual, and
political blow to us. The cruel reality is that this is the first book we will
not be able to gift to him.
West Bengal, India Anjan Chakrabarti

West Bengal, India Anup Dhar
Contents
1 (Un)doing Marxism from the Outside 1

2 Class and Overdetermination 21
3 The Secret Abode of Need: From Hegemonic Need
to Radical Need 59
4 Foreclosure, Delusional Veil, and the Lacanian Real 85
5 Global Capitalism as Hegemonic: World of the Third
as Outside 125
6 Political Economy of Development: From Critique
to Reconstruction 149
7 Global Capital and Its Circuits 171
8 World of the Third as Foreclosed: Third Worldism
as Delusional Veil 207
9 World of the Third: Encounters with the Hegemonic 241
10 Expanded Communism: From World of the Third
Subject-Positions 277
Author Index 311

Subject Index 315
xxiii
CHAPTER 1
(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside
Introduction
In contemporary analysis of the relation of psychoanalysis to [Marxian]

politics, the real has place; the psychical and the social are conceived as a
real tight unit ruled by a principle of pleasure. I propose to show that it is
the real that unites the psychic to the social.
—Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists
The book’s focus is on the outside, as also on hegemony. The urgency of

rethinking an outside to capitalism stems from the need for critical reflec-
tion on two sets of ideas incumbent upon the South: one set marked
by (capitalist) globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms
such as local, third world, underdeveloped, backward, and especially, pre-
capital. Such a critical reflection takes the book to also a rethinking of
the given script of historical materialist Marxism from the outside, reen-
gaging with advanced Marxian reflections on questions of hegemony
and psychoanalytic exegeses on questions of repression (Verdrängung ),
‘(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside’ is the title of the paper by Chakrabarti,
Dhar and Cullenberg (2016).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
A. Chakrabarti and A. Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital,
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25017-0_1
2 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
negation (Verneinung ), disavowal (Verleugnung ), foreclosure (Verwer-

fung ), and the missing signifier (Verworfen) in the subject’s affective
economy (Lacan 2017: 132, 139).1 Interrogation of extant theorizations
on hegemony and foreclosure leads 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
move, we feel, also has the potential to tease open new avenues to think
of the question of the political and the subject. We have designated such
an imagination of political praxis in terms of postcapitalist transforma-
tion (not transition as in historical materialist Marxism) and postcapitalist
reconstruction of both the subject and the social.
This book is about writing debt or debt-writing: debts that were
incurred between 1978—the date of publication of Orientalism by Said
(followed by “Colonial Hegemony: A Critique of Brown Orientalism”
by Chaudhury in 1994)—and 1987—the date of publication of Knowl-
edge and Class by Resnick and Wolff (followed by The End of Capitalism
by Gibson-Graham in 1996); “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Spivak (in
1983) and “In Search of a Subaltern Lenin” by Chaudhury (in 1987)
came in between. We are thus indebted to two largely parallel intellec-
tual traditions—the post-orientalist (including the postcolonial and the
decolonial) and the postcapitalist (including anti-capitalist critique), and
it is also an attempt at bringing the largely parallel two into dialogue.
First, the postcapitalist tradition. Building on a neo-Althusserian2 polit-
ical philosophy, we are making the process of writing critical Economics
[or critically writing/righting Economics] fundamental to the “task of
winning proletarian hegemony” (Wainwright 2016: 271). Building on
a deconstruction of the economy, a taking apart of the givenness of
the economy—a givenness which existed only as a conceit of capitalist
1 Verwerfung “is not simply what is inaccessible to you, that is, what exists in the
Other as repressed and as signifiers. That is Verdrangung, and it is the signifying chain.”
… Verworfen is a “missing signifier or a missing letter in the chain of signifiers, one that is
always missing in the typography. The space of the signifier, the space of the unconscious,
is effectively a typographical space, which we must try to define as being constituted
of long lines and little squares, and as corresponding to topological laws” (Lacan 2017:
132).
2 The idea of the “Althusserian” is intimately tied to a dialogue between Marx and
Freud/Lacan; in fact, that dialogue forms the conceptual and methodological framework
of the book (see Dhar and Chakrabarti 2015).
1 (UN)DOING MARXISM FROM THE OUTSIDE 3
hegemony—the book addresses “the question of the subject and of the

geography of the subject from the outside” (Callari 2016: 268).
Second, the post-orientalist tradition. Building on postcolonial-
decolonial and postdevelopment literature, which in turn designates the
“various twists and turns of hegemony and governmentality—the two
nodal concepts that have dominated most of postcolonial discourse in
India” (Basu 2016: 260) and the Global South, we are making the process
of writing the language of non-capitalist economic cultures fundamental
to the task of extricating Marxism from third worldism. The tradition
Basu marks as postcolonial is also the tradition of thinking from the
outside, of thinking an outside, if not the outside.
The Lacanian Real (Lacan 1997, 2006) emerges as a difficult short-
hand of the outside in this book (see Chapters 4 and 5); the turn to the
Lacanian Real also inaugurates in postcolonial economies an appreciation
of the (constitutive) outside. In the absence of a theory of the outside in
the discipline of Economics, as also in Marxism, postcolonial economies
look not just transparent and non-resistant but emerge as easily assimil-
able clusters of lacking others. Postcolonial societies require such a theory
of the outside so as not to remain altogether outside Theory. It is largely
the theory of Verwerfung /foreclosure in Lacan that offers theories a way
of not remaining foreclosed in Theory any longer (see Chapter 4).
Where, in what form, and through what kinds of impasses does the
question of the postcolonial and the outside come to dialogue in our
understanding of the economy and of development? They come to
dialogue over the question (among many other questions) of the “rela-
tionship between capital and its others (‘precapitalist’ and ‘noncapitalist’)”
(Wainwright 2016: 272). This question of pre-capital and non-capital has
haunted Marxism for a long time and in many ways:
Marx analyzed capital’s relation with not-capital in the Grundrisse (1857),

and the concluding section of the first volume of Capital (1867) links
primitive accumulation with slavery and colonialism (and the destruction
of precapitalist societies) Yet it was not until 1913 that Rosa Luxemburg,
in The Accumulation of Capital , proposed that there is a determinant
relationship between the expansion of capitalism [an expansion that has
taken an urgent form in conditions of global capitalism], the destruction
of precapitalist societies, and the realization of surplus value. (Wainwright
2016: 272)
In addition to the question of capital and pre-capital–non-capital,

the vexed question of the relationship between global and local (see
Hardt and Negri 2000; Gibson-Graham 2003), and between global capi-
talism and the third world (see Chapter 8) has served as an impasse in
contemporary Marxism:
… the historical evolution of a theoretical system, especially one like

Marxism, is in terms of … impasses produced by some confrontation
between the script of the particular system of thought as it exists at a
moment in time and “other” developments: at some point, new characters
seem to enter the scene, some characters seem to have vacated it, contin-
uing characters seem to have new personalities, and so the script no longer
seems to work. (Callari 2016: 263)
Which script no longer works? We have argued in this book that

third worldism—that is, the tragic (self-)description of otherwise hetero-
geneous non-capitalist experiences that are in actuality deeply decen-
tred and disaggregated—as pre-capitalist—that is, as homogeneous and
as lower, lacking, or lagging steps of a ladder of economic matura-
tion/development—is a script that no longer works for Marxists.
Building on the redundancy of the script of capital–pre-capital and
third worldism that has dominated historical materialist and develop-
mental thinking, this book asks: how do we (re)conceptualize capital’s
outside (to reconceptualize capital’s outside, we, however, need to recon-
ceptualize capital and capitalism)? Post Hardt and Negri’s theorization
in Empire, is there an outside anymore? Is pre-capital the outside? Or is
non-capital the outside? Or is it neither? Does one, then, need to think a
third, to think the new script? World of the third (and circuits of global
capital)—as against the dualism of first worlds and third worlds, developed
and underdeveloped worlds, global and local—is for us the new script.
The emergence of the new script is thus tied to a reconceptualization of
(global) capitalism as a hegemonic formation and world of the third as
the constitutive outside. World of the third (WoT) and circuits of global
capital provide in this book a new geography. The old cast of economic
characters is thus displaced and re-anchored; what is inaugurated in the
process is the WoT subject position as marking contingent outsidedness
with respect to the circuits of global capital. This outsidedness is not an
a priori outsidedness. It is also not marked by any kind of identitarian
metaphysics. It is contingent upon evanescent subject positions that are
birthed in an overdetermined and contradiction-ridden milieu. One such

subject position is the world of the third subject position. Such a subject
position is the Grundrisse for postcapitalist becomings.
Rethinking Marxism
Resnick and Wolff (1987) inaugurated rethinking on and around class,
understood as processes of performance, appropriation, distribution, and
receipt of surplus labour. Gibson-Graham (1996) opened space for the
Other of capital (i.e., disaggregated non-capital) through critiques of
capitalocentrism. The class-focused approach challenged the old script
of national or third world economies and mode of production through
the fragmentation of the economy into an originary multiplicity of class
processes; consequently, both the first and the third world became hetero-
geneous entities (see Basu 2016: 257). In this book, they are found to
be split further in terms of capitalist and non-capitalist (not pre-capitalist)
class processes (more on class in Chapters 2, 6, 7, 8, and 10). We show
how the capitalist class process, however, comes to hegemonize our appre-
ciation of economic reality. Or in other words, the work of the hegemonic
is engendering the belief that the 1/11th of the iceberg (i.e., the capitalist
form) visible above water is the whole iceberg. The whole of economic
reality thus looks to be just capitalist. The 10/11th of the iceberg below
water (i.e., the multifaceted non-capitalist class processes) is relegated
to the realm of pre-capital. Pre-capital works as a delusional veil over
non-capital. Such a delusional veil is in turn engendered through the
foreclosure of class (see Chapters 2 and 4).
The decentred and disaggregated space of non-capital is found to be
split further, not just between exploitative and non-exploitative forms, but
also between those that are hooked to the circuits of global capital, and
those that are not.3 The (lived) space and experience, especially subject
position, marking contingent outsidedness with respect to the circuits of
global capital, have been designated as world of the third in this book (see
Chapters 7 and 8); the world of non-capital, however, requires further
3 See Chapter 7 for the way certain noncapitalist class processes 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 transaction.
disaggregation under conditions of global capitalism. Hence, this book

can also be read as the archaeology of non-capital.
But then, as Chapters 4 and 5 show, the work of hegemony involves
a perspectival shift, and the insertion of an angularity to this picture
of capital and non-capital, especially if the privileging of “something”—
something related to capital—is to be secured. This requires a redrawing
of the map of otherwise decentred and disaggregated social spaces and
class existences, including postcapitalist possibilities they may harbour;
the otherwise disaggregated space of non-capital harbouring diverse non-
capitalist class processes gets redrawn as the homogenous other of capital,
and homogeneous non-capital is designated as pre-capital (or third world)
in the South. The space of specific non-capitalist class forms, in particular,
and the space of non-capital, in general, hence required rethinking in the
South and, why not, even in the North as well. Hence, one needed a
critique of continuing orientalism, especially in developmental discourse,
both white and brown, in addition to a critique of capitalocentrism.
In that sense, this book is lamellar in nature and spirit; three mutu-
ally constitutive lamellae remain in a kind of difficult communication:
(1) the homogenous third world (as lacking other of capital or as the
victim subject of structural poverty in the Global South) and heteroge-
neous world of the third; (2) homogenous pre-capital/non-capital and
the disaggregated “what are not capitalist processes and experiences”; and
(3) the inside and outside of the circuits of global capital. Of the above,
(1) and (2) are perspectival; it is a matter of how we see or perceive. The
axis of (3), however, is spatial. Of the above, (1) and (2) are descriptions
of the same space. The axis of (3), however, is about two spaces: one
marking contingent outsidedness to the circuits of global capital, and the
other hooked to those circuits. Chapters 6, 7, and 8, as also 10, show
which subject positions are marking outsidedness and which are hooked
to the circuits of global capital—subject position and not subject, because
the same subject may occupy a position within the circuits of global capital
at one moment and be outside the circuits of global capital at the next
moment.
This book is also being written on how the otherwise disaggregated
space of non-capital could create conditions for the rethinking of the
question of the postcapitalist subject in Marxism, thinking it perhaps a
little differently from the way it has been hitherto thought in terms of (1)
collective identity (i.e., the working class, peasant communities) and (2)
the individual in the noun form (i.e., the worker, the peasant, the subal-
tern). We argue—in the tradition inaugurated by Gibson-Graham (1996,
2006) and taken forward by Madra and Özselçuk (2010)—that the disag-
gregated perspective of non-capital in general, and world of the third
in particular, could take us to the doorstep of the question of postcap-
italist subject formation, which is one of the most fundamental impasses
in Marxism (Callari 2016: 264).
Basu’s questions also become relevant in this context: “What about
the question of leadership once the concept of class as physical existent
(noun) position is abandoned in favour of class as a qualifier of a partic-
ular process? How does the foreclosed return? How do you turn outward
from within? Is that possible?” (Basu 2016: 257). We remain sensitive
to the Lacanian leash, to Lacan’s (in)famous ethico-political binder he
placed upon us all in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis: “Imagine There is No
Poland”. What would the Poles (who would now no more be Poles) do
if there were no Poland? What would the Poles do, how would they form
a collective if they were stripped of the transcendental refuge: Poland?
Or perhaps to put the Lacanian leash in our context: Imagine there is no
Working Class (Working Class with a capital W and a capital C). How
would we think class politics once we are stripped of the transcendental
refuge: Working Class (more on this in Chapter 10 in the section titled
‘The Counterhegemonic Subject)?

This book sub-titled Between Marx and Freud has drawn on the
Althusser-Lacan dialogue to engage with these questions incumbent upon
contemporary Marxism (not necessarily answer them) through an exami-
nation of the relation between a philosophy of structure and a philosophy
of the subject. The philosophy of structure is, in turn, marked by the
philosophy of the inside in Althusser and the philosophy of the outside
in Lacan. Althusser’s philosophy of the inside—marked by unconscious
interpellation to both repressive and ideological apparatuses, especially
hegemonic ideological apparatuses—thus comes to speak with Lacan’s
philosophy of the outside, marked by foreclosure and the Lacanian Real
(Dhar and Chakrabarti 2015). Questions like ‘can the world of the third
as outside speak?’, or ‘can the world of the third be ground for counter-
hegemonic (ideological) production?’ has remained a running footnote
to this dialogue between Marx (and Althusser) and Freud (and Lacan).
Chapter 10 is a reflection on these questions. This chapter, however,

argues that the different geography of world of the third is not the
immediate cause or natural author of counterhegemony; it is only the
ground: ground for a philosophy of outsidedness, a possible outsid-
edness to (global) capital that in turn creates possible conditions for
counter-hegemonic subject production.
The writing of this book is driven by a bifocal impulse, partly obstinate.
On the one hand, it is about a search for “Swaraj in Ideas”. It is about
working through two kinds of impulses: one kind marked by a “rootless
[Western] universalism” and the other by a “clinging [Indian] particular-
ism” (see Bhattacharya 1954: 107). The first impulse, rootless Western
universalism is marked by contemporary attempts to globalize develop-
mentalism, which in the process also pathologizes the Global South; at
work here is a developmentalist discourse that sees the South (or the
third world) as the lacking/lagging other of an always already devel-
oped West/North. The second impulse, clinging Indian particularism, is
an attempt to culturalize development and to celebrate local processes
that mark the provincial particularity of the South. The danger here is of
“national conceit and the unthinking glorification of everything in our
culture and depreciation of everything in other cultures” (Bhattacharya
1954: 107). Swaraj in Ideas thus meant an (im)possible liberation from
both rootless universalism (championed by growth and poverty allevi-
ation models) and clinging particularism/localism (championed largely,
though risking reductionism, by some strands of the postdevelopmentalist
and postcolonial school) in contexts of global capitalism and inclusive
development.
On the other hand, this book is about a third: a third that is neither
first world nor third world, but one that always walks beside first and
third worlds; one that always walks alongside the two; one that is both
present and absent—present in terms of forms of life but absent in
discourse: the discourse of global capitalism and inclusive developmen-
talism in the Southern hemisphere, a discourse which is marked by both
capitalocentrism and orientalism. It is about a third kind of world: a world
beyond what are conventionally known as first worlds and third worlds.
It is about a third perspective: a perspective beyond capitalocentrism and
orientalism. It is about a third kind of experience: an experience that
is neither capitalist nor pre-capitalist, but disaggregated non-capitalist (it
could also be the ground for postcapitalist revolutionary subject forma-
tion and praxis). It is about a third location: a location that is not
imbricated within the logic of local–global markets, and even if imbri-

cated in an abstract or notional sense, it is a location that is not within
the actual circuits of global capital. It is hence about that which is outside,
marking outsidedness to the circuits of global capital in terms of capital’s
language-logic-experience-ethos.
The process of working through the question of the outside (i.e., fore-
closure and the Lacanian Real as concepts) led to the realization that,
at one level, there are no two spaces. There is just one space. It is a
matter of how one looks at it. Looked at from a capitalocentric-orientalist
perspective, the world looks third worldish, lacking, underdeveloped, pre-
capitalist, and hence in need of either rescue, uplifting, benevolence, or
annihilation—that is, in need either of a certain presencing as victim or
absencing as the object of primitive/original accumulation, where original
accumulation is historically inevitable.4 Looked at from a postcapitalocen-
tric post-orientalist perspective, the same world looks to be the dance of
the lived world of the third, a disaggregated non-capitalist (at times post-
capitalist) third, beyond the familiar dyad of capital and pre-capital. Third
world is a (underdeveloped) space on a global map. World of the third
is an existent in the human geography; it is a contingent experience of
being outside; it is also a form of life with perhaps its own worldview or
its own lokavidya/know-how (Basole 2015).
We shall see in Chapter 8 how the world of the third comes to be
conceptually located in a spatial sense, once one engenders a class-focused
decentring (and a hegemonic recentring, albeit contingent) through (i)
crypted nodal points/anchors and (ii) delusional veils, of what looks to be
the all-encompassing Leviathan of global capitalism. It looks like there is
an incitement to discourse around and on the question of the third world;
one thus has knowledge of the third world. One, however, does not have
the truth of the outside; the truth of the world of the third eludes us; the
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 move-
ments 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
industrialized 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 char-
acteristic of ‘Third World’ countries was a shared ‘underdevelopment’” (Berger 1994:
269).
third world as lacking underside works as a delusional veil on the truth

of the world of the third as outside. In the framework of capital/pre-
capital, there is only one history, or perhaps no history, because history is
always already scripted to the teleology of capitalist development. When
one inaugurates thinking around a disaggregated understanding of non-
capital, on the non qua non of capital, then the question of ethics and
politics—and by default, of the subject—is inaugurated. “Both the first
and the third world become heterogeneous entities. If history loses its
teleology, then no transition is inevitable. There is no objective or ‘scien-
tific’ meaning of progress, and so the need for ethics, of value judgments,
of deciding what path to espouse” (Basu 2016: 257).
One can then inaugurate thinking around anti- or postcapitalist poli-
tics (we would like to distinguish sharply between anti- and post-): the
first gestures towards (class and need) struggle and the second towards
community reconstruction (à la Gibson-Graham 2006); the first looks
primarily at subject and power; the second looks at the troubled interstices
of subject, power, and desire in the creation of a contingent, emergent
being-in-commons. The inauguration of the question of the subject brings
psychoanalytic depth to the dialogue between the first and the second.
The Moebius of Inside-Outside

This book is about a rewriting of the logic of inclusion/exclusion and
inside/outside as foregrounding-foreclosure: that is, as the foreclosure of
world of the third through a foregrounding of third world. It is in this
context that the idea of the “constitutive inside” and the “constitutive
outside” of global capitalist hegemony emerges, where the Lacanian Real
understood as foreclosed (and not just as inassimilable) is the constitu-
tive outside of the hegemonic (in Chapter 4). A glimpse of this method
is found in Marx: ‘there is also … a case of foregrounding and foreclo-
sure by the hegemon: capital foregrounds and absorbs labour-power as
the other within its logic (the logic of exchange/commodities), therefore
enabling an apparatus of containment and a regulation of labour … The
meek labourer, “timid and holding back, like the one who is bringing his
own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding”, following
the “one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business” (Marx
1990: 280) is the other of capital, and is capable of being just as “suf-
fering” or “evil” or “utopian” as the third-world other’ (Callari 2016:
269).
We have designated this foregrounded other as the small “other”,

as the appropriate[d] other, i.e., as the meek labourer; we have desig-
nated the foreclosed other as the big Other, as the inappropriate[d]
Other, i.e., as the revolutionary labourer. The Global South also finds
itself in a Moebius of the foregrounded other (i.e., the third world as
victim/evil/utopian) and the foreclosed Other (i.e., the world of the
third). Further, just like the meek labourer and the revolutionary labourer
could be one and the same person but different in terms of their respec-
tive subject positions, different in terms of their subjective geography or
cartography—third world and world of the third could be the same space
but different in terms of how we look at it, as also different in terms of the
subject position: one (i.e., the third-world subject) is the meek insider of
global capitalist hegemony; the other (i.e., the world-of-the-third subject)
is the potential revolutionary outside(r).
With respect to the related question of capital’s inclusiveness and/or
exclusiveness, Wainwright (2016: 272) is correct in pointing out that
“there is a determinant relationship between the expansion of capitalism,
the destruction of pre-capitalist societies, and the realization of surplus
value—that is, to the essence of capital’s reproduction”. There is. But it
is not the destruction of pre-capital; capital need not destroy pre-capital;
capital would love to include pre-capital as its lacking other; it is post-
capitalist praxis and postcapitalist imagination that troubles capital. It
is postcapitalist futurities that make capital anxious. Pre-capital is capi-
tal’s dead remainder; disaggregated non-capital is a living reminder of
difference and Otherness. Capital’s inclusiveness or exclusiveness hence
requires a deeper and a more complex theorization. Perhaps we need to
move beyond the question of capital’s inclusiveness and capital’s exclu-
siveness; capital is neither inclusive nor exclusive; capital foregrounds
certain subject positions (e.g., the meek labourer, pre-capital, or the third
world as lacking other) and forecloses others (e.g., the revolutionary
labourer, non-capital, or the world of the third as marking outsidedness
to global capital). The question of inclusion/exclusion (usually reduced
to the question of who, i.e., who is included/excluded) also cannot be
addressed without relating it to the theorization of inclusion/exclusion—
that is, without asking what (and why/how) is inclusion/exclusion
(see Dhar 2021)? Devoid of the what (and why/how) question, and
despite claims of being radical or non-mainstream, discussions on inclu-
sion/exclusion will remain merely empirical or incidental (in the first or
last instance), open to being relocated into the domain of World Bank
discourse, or what we have designated as hegemonic need in Chapter 3 (to

be accommodated and recast in the teleology of capitalist development).
Capital, Capitalism and Hegemony:

Between Suture and Delusional Veil
In the process of engaging with the question of the outside (or non-
capital), this book has engaged once again with the question of what is
capitalism (as also, what is global capitalism), primarily because the inside
and the outside are in a constitutive relation: one needs an understanding
of the inside (à la Althusser) to understand the outside (à la Lacan). One
has to ask: is capitalism a homogeneous economic reality and a stage in
economic history? Or is capitalism decentred and disaggregated in terms
of class processes? Is capitalism then a complex ensemble of capitalist and
non-capitalist class processes, where capitalist class processes form only a
part and not the whole of what has come to be known as capitalism? What
then is capitalism? Is it a hegemonic formation? How do we understand
the hegemonic? As (i) contingent suturing of the open-ended reality as
Laclau and Mouffe (1985) suggest, through what Lacan calls the point
de capiton, or (ii) as a delusional veil over something secret, something
cocooned yet crypted (see Chapter 4)? As Lacan (1997: 45) avers,
Many passages in Freud’s work show that he felt the need for a complete
articulation of the symbolic order, for this is what is at stake for him in
neurosis, to which he opposes psychosis, where at some time there has
been a hole, a rupture, a rent, a gap, with respect to external reality. In
neurosis, inasmuch as reality is not fully rearticulated symbolically into the
external world, it is in a second phase that a partial flight from reality, an
incapacity to confront this secretly preserved part of reality occurs in the
subject. In psychosis, on the contrary, reality itself initially contains a hole
that the world of phantasy will subsequently fill. (as cited in Chaudhury
2012: xv–xxvi)
This book argues, however, that the question of hegemony, especially

capitalist hegemony, is to be predicated both in the image of the Laca-
nian model of neurosis and also in the image of the Lacanian model
of psychosis. The hegemonic’s operations find form through contingent
suturing of an open-ended economic reality; Lacanian point de capiton or
nodal points impute anchorage to such an open-ended economic reality.
The hegemonized, on the other hand, is unconsciously interpellated to

a delusional veil . This raises the question: is capitalism a concrete reality?
Or is capitalism, as Marx (1969: 77–78) suggests, “a delusional appear-
ance of things?” Is it a kind of delusional veil over the performance and
appropriation of surplus labour and its constitutive relations and effects?
Capitalism, in this book, has not been taken as given, or ubiquitous, or
historically inevitable, nor is it seen as an all-encompassing Leviathan.
We have theorized reality as disaggregated and decentred yet hegemonic,
where hegemony is not just the subaltern’s simple accrual/consent to, or
collaboration with, the elite’s persuasive principles (this being the classical
understanding of hegemony) but is rather an unconscious interpellation
into a “delusional cosmology” called capitalism. Taking off from Marx,
conventionally misread as an arch materialist, we have seen capitalism
(not the capitalist class process) more as a delusional appearance of things
wherein the delusional cosmology is what covers up the tear (in the
symbolic order) created due to foreclosure. We have thus moved away
from a realist rendition of capitalism. This is, however, not to suggest that
the delusional cosmology is antithetical to what could be called materi-
ality. Rather, such delusions are a constitutive component of a deeper
understanding of the materiality of the subject. We have also argued for
an expanded understanding of realism by invoking foreclosure and the
Lacanian Real. The foreclosed is neither present (in a simple sense, in the
Lacanian Symbolic) nor absent (in a simple sense, in the subject world). It
is both absence and presence: presence in the sense that it has real subject
effects and absence in the sense that the hegemonic structure resists it.
What one had conceived of as reality is a world of fantasy (as in Lacan),
or a delusive appearance of things (as in Marx). It is in fact a delusional
cover over that which has been foreclosed. What has been foreclosed, on
the other hand, is real. What has been foreclosed—class and, by default,
world of the third—is a necessary but disavowed fragment of reality and
could be the ground for subject formation. But such subject formation
grounded in the Lacanian Real or the foreclosed is not obvious or auto-
matic, because the crux of the hegemonic is premised on the interminable
keeping at bay, “putting to burial”, or keeping in a crypt the foreclosed
(Abraham and Torok 1986).
Overdetermination takes us beyond simple rationalism-empiricism
(Resnick and Wolff 1987, Chapter 1). This work is an attempt to move
beyond the simple distinction of real/unreal. Marx’s methodology in
Capital is premised on the dual play of, on the one hand, defetishizing
the fetish (the location of the critique) and, on the other, of working
through the dialectic of real and unreal, commodity as material and
sensuous, concrete labour and abstract labour, and so on. Marx thus
moves beyond the watertight compartmentalization of object-subject,
thing-idea, and concrete-abstract, or the strict bifurcation of idealism-
materialism. To miss the methodology of Marx is to reduce the proposed
delusional nature of reality, and the real nature of the delusional, into
simple matter/idea and true/false-consciousness frameworks. It is also to
miss the process by which the capitalist class process as particular takes
the form of a hegemonic universal: capitalism. This book hence asks: can
capitalism then be rethought as the Moebius strip of what Lacan calls the
neurotic phenomenon (i.e., as buttoning a multiplicity, even if contin-
gently) and the psychotic phenomenon (i.e., as productive of a delusional
appearance of things), where “foreclosure” (à la Lacan) and the produc-
tion of the delusional appearance of things (à la Marx) are the grounds
that resist the return of the real?
World of the Third: Beyond Global and Local

We have already referred to class-focused reality as decentred and disag-
gregated yet hegemonic. But instead of asserting the presence of the hege-
monic, the burden on this book is to demonstrate how the hegemonic is
engendered out of the decentred and disaggregated class-focused reality.
It is only through an alternative conceptualization of the economy (rather
than taking it as given, in a homogenous and universal sense) that we can
show how a particular—the capitalist class process—takes the appearance
(albeit delusional, as Marx suggests) of the universal—capitalism.
The work of Resnick and Wolff (1987) and Gibson-Graham (1996,
2006) has decentred (from) the North by way of first disaggregating the
economy and then arguing that the centrality of the capitalist class process
(which in turn remaps the economy into a simple dualism: capitalist and
non-capitalist) constitutes a capitalocentric remapping of the economy.
But this, in and by itself, does not lead to the hegemonic reconstruc-
tion of the otherwise decentred and disaggregated economy in the South.
We need to decentre (from) the South as well; we need to first engage
with extant renditions of the pre-capitalist (i.e., orientalist) positioning
of large parts of the South and examine two conduits of sanctioned
violence: (1) the historical inevitability thesis and (2) the necessity of orig-
inal accumulation. The decentred rendition of the Southern economy (see
Chapters 7–9) and its relocation to the simple dualism of capital/pre-

capital through capitalocentric-orientalism (see Chapter 6) takes us to the
doorstep of the world of the third-third world (foreclosed-foregrounded)
couplet and to global capitalism as hegemonic.
This outside is world of the third, a complex and contradictory
ensemble of exploitative and non-exploitative class processes. No kind of
value—ethical or nonethical, competitive or shared, violent or tolerant,
rich or poor—can be imputed to world of the third a priori. World of
the third can be located in the rural and the urban; it can span across
sectors, regions, and nations. World of the third is not located in just
the South; even the North is studded with large pockets of world of the
third, including the metropolis. It is conceptually akin to what Foucault
(2006) called the “hollowed-out void” that, through the mutually consti-
tutive effects of class processes and other socio-economic processes, takes
diverse forms in concrete scenarios.
Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire lacked this conceptualization of an
outside to (global) capital; this book in that sense is a response to Empire.
Our rendition takes us beyond the familiar and hitherto dominant cartog-
raphy of national economies, of third-world economies. It also takes us
beyond the now fashionable global-local and even beyond what we have
provisionally called the North–South (to ultimately tease out what we
called earlier the world of the third perspective). We thus end up with
indeed a different geography that actually and as a possibility, displaces
the extant cast of Marxian characters.
But this spatial outside to the circuits of global capital does not
appear as a space of difference; instead, depending on how one is
(inter)subjectivized, it emerges paradoxically as a devalued, decrepit other
in postcolonial conditions. This involves a further transmutation of the
capitalocentric rendition of the economy through orientalism. If capitalo-
centrism turns the diverse “what are not capitalist” into a homogenous
other qua non-capitalist, then orientalism captures the further turning of
non-capital into the devalued, pathological, decrepit other: pre-capital.
World of the third as outside thus slides down the stepladder of progress
and emerges as a lacking pre-capitalist underside qua third world. This
slide in turn legitimizes the project of management and social engineering
of world of the third, all in the name of the development of the third
world; it also legitimizes violence over world of the third via original accu-
mulation. From the perspective of capital, original accumulation looks
justified, even needed. From the perspective of world of the third, original
accumulation looks to be unjust (Chapter 9).
What is hegemony then? Is hegemony a provisional or contingent
clumping (à la Laclau and Mouffe) of the multiple non-capitalist class
processes around the capitalist class process? Or is it a delusional veil of
the subject positions pertaining to the capitalist class processes over the
rest, the varied non-capitalist class processes? Perhaps a new balance will
have to be struck between understanding hegemony through the allegory
of clumping and through that of the veil.
Consequently, global capitalist hegemony works through three nodal
signifiers in the South—(i) private capitalist surplus value appropriation,
(ii) local–global market, and (iii) hegemonic need—which is anchored
by and in turn, provides anchorage to a host of floating signifiers (such
as profit, competition, efficiency, individualism, capital accumulation,
market, private property, social capital, community, informality, the poor,
the indigenous, the third world woman, and the third world child). The
hegemonized, however, is under the spell of the delusional veil of third
worldism.
The Hegemonized
In this context, we also consider the question of the lived experience of
world of the third important, because in much of the Global South, we
“either accept or repeat the judgments passed on us by Western culture,
or we impotently resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own,
wrung from an inward perception of the realities of our position”. This
becomes either a kind of “unthinking conservatism” or “an imaginary
progressiveness merely imitative of the West” (Bhattacharya 1954: 104).
This is why we think that Marxian theory is required to be premised on a
bidirectional or dual critique of both the West’s hegemonic principles and
principles (emanating from either the West or the East) that hegemonize
the Orient. The attention to dual critique took us to the doorstep of
the concept of world of the third. Can the theory of world of the third
inaugurate in turn a critique of capitalocentric-orientalist theory as also a
theory of critique from the Global South, including of conditions within
world of the third? How to arrive at (pro)positions when our theories are
being adapted to our lived experiences and not our lived experiences to a
Theory?
The auto/bio-graph (Derrida 1987: 336) of world of the third that we

have found-founded need no longer be exclusively class focused. Third
worldism is essentially structured around the needs discourse pertaining
to distribution of social surplus whose operations produce a displacement
of WoT into a platform that is under the hegemonic control and manage-
ment of institutions including the World Bank and the organs of the
state. Such a set of needs, call them ‘hegemonic need’ (see Chapter 3),
is conceptualized as emanating from the basic human rights paradigm,
which then becomes the nodal signifier for a certain third worldism.
This is secured and reiterated through, among others, the production of
an array of needs that enables the hegemonic to encounter, confront,
displace, control, and subdue the platform of world of the third into
a different domain—that of third world. In this way, third worldism is
essentially produced through the repudiation of a chain of fundamental
signifiers that govern the social life of world of the third, a repudiation
that is secured through the production of another chain of signifiers—
substitute signifiers—that anchor the need-related conceptualization of
the hegemonic.
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CHAPTER 2
Class and Overdetermination
Overdetermination,
Contradiction and Entry Point
Following Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2006), the basic analytical unit of
Marxian theory is process, i.e., an entity in a state of ceaseless change
(also see Madra 2017). Overdetermination captures a specific kind of
relation among processes. It suggests that each process, including class
process, constitutes and is constituted by other processes; they mutually
constitute, i.e., bring one another into existence. No process can exist
independent of the rest and hence be outside of (mutual) constitution.
There is a related way to state overdetermination. Each process is consti-
tuted by the combined effects of all other processes, some even unknown;
these constituting processes are the conditions of existence of the process
that they constitute. What is true for one process is true for all the other
processes. Properties of mutual constitution and mutual conditions of
existence require that a process always occurs together with and in rela-
tion to a group of other processes. Relationships (say, a relationship of
friendship), practices (say, organizing a trade union in a factory), activi-
ties (say, cooking food at home), or events (say, a social movement) are
to be seen as the combined effects of mutually constituting processes. No
social relationship, practice, activity, or event can thus be reduced to one

Switzerland AG 2023
or a few processes; all are the result of a constellation of processes (known

and unknown) imparting their effects in combination with one another.
The concept of contradiction is embodied in overdetermination.1 This
is not the conventional, simple, and dualist concept of (simple) contra-
diction, say, between positive and negative. Here, contradiction signifies
the differences in terms of the institution of distinct and opposing effects
of the various processes that, as they operate in combination with one
another, bring a particular process into existence, making possible its
particular and contingent state of being. Consequently, the combina-
tion of these contradictory effects entails that the process they constitute
gets pulled and pushed in various ways and directions, putting it in a
constant state of change. The change in the constituted process will, in
turn, induce change in other processes that it constitutes. Every process
being a bundle of contradictions produces a condition of ceaseless change,
with all processes being in a state of flux that cannot be pre-predicated or
forecasted. Change and becoming as against fixity and identity is therefore
what overdetermination emphasizes, which is also why it stands opposed
to positivism, rationalism, and empiricism (Cullenberg 1996; Chakrabarti
and Cullenberg 2003; Madra 2017).
Overdetermination and contradiction have serious consequences for
our understanding of whole and part. Since any and every process, say A,
is the end result of an ensemble of the combined effects of contradictory
processes (of B, C, D, E, and so on), A is a whole—a ‘contingent whole’.
It is contingent since changes in its ever-moving constituting processes
change the whole. Further, and at the same time, in so far as A’s distinct
effect contributes to bringing into existence other (contingent) wholes,
say B, C, D, and so on, A is also a part—it is a constituent part of another
whole. Each process by virtue of being both the cause and effect is simul-
taneously a whole and a part; change in any is then evidently a change in
both whole and part.
Marxists sundered between Cartesian and Hegelian philosophy have
had much ado about the relationship between whole and part, which is
subservient to, subsumed within or emanate from which. This method-
ological schism created tension and even long drawn struggle among
Marxists, as is revealed in case of the unending debate between humanism
(individuals as parts determining the structure/whole) and structuralism
1 See Wolff (1996) for a dialogue and possible reconciliation between Hegel and
Althusser on the issue of contradiction.
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 23
(structure/whole determining the individuals/parts). Either way, both

these approaches share something in common. They end up producing
a centred totality, a totality centred on either the whole (Hegelian) or the
part (Cartesian). In contrast, the anti-reductionism of overdetermination
renders the whole or totality decentred (Cullenberg 1996).
We define site as a space where groups of overdetermined and contra-
dictory processes forming a set of relationships, activities, and practices
occur, and whose combined effects constitute the site and the embodied
subjects in it (Cullenberg 1994). An individual, enterprise, household,
economy, nation, etc., are all examples of a site. Because each site is
uniquely constituted by a confluence of combined effects of contradictory
processes, each site will be changing in a unique, uneven, and unpre-
dictable manner. There is no one central site to which the other sites can
be reduced to or mirrored.
It also follows from the above that it is impossible to produce a knowl-
edge of this overdetermined reality from the web of infinite number of
interconnected processes that are forever in transit and are moving in a
non-teleological manner. Where does one begin and end? One way to
produce a partial knowledge of reality is by choosing a process or a combi-
nation of processes as an entry point (Resnick and Wolff 1987, 2006).
Entry point is thus needed to produce a theory. Different entry points
create different theories, each capturing the border and order of what
they seek to focus on.
Given its understanding of reality as an overdetermined web of contra-
dictory processes, a Marxian theory distinguishes itself from other theories
through its unique entry point of class as process of surplus labour. If
we classify, for convenience, the overdetermined reality into economic,
cultural, political, and natural processes, albeit existing in their mutual
constitution, then the entry point of class as process of surplus labour is
an economic process. This focus on class, an economic process, is a discur-
sive privilege (to make the entry possible in order to produce knowledge),
but it does not imply any epistemological and ontological privilege; it
does not confer upon the entry point an autonomy (relative or other-
wise) from overdetermination (Resnick and Wolff 1987, Chapters I and
II; Spivak 1994). Courtesy overdetermination, no class process occurs
alone in any concrete scenario; it always occurs in a mutually constitutive
relation containing non-class processes. In so far as it is class focused and
not class centred, Marxian theory becomes the rigorous explication of
how the class process of surplus labour constitutes and is constituted by
non-class processes. As the relation between class and non-class processes

change so does the argument in and of Marxian theory and with it that
of the Marxian standpoint.
Class, Economy, and Society

The concept of class process arises in association with labour process
which involves the use of labour-power (mental-physical-emotional
capacity to labour) with the help of means of production (raw materials,
tools and machines) to produce use value (goods and services, material or
immaterial). In the labour process, the total labour time embodied in the
production of use value (goods and services) can be divided into necessary
labour time and surplus labour time; together, they define the working
day. Labour exerted during necessary labour time, i.e., necessary labour,
is equivalent to what is socially required to reproduce the performers of
use value, and the labour exerted above necessary labour time is surplus
labour. Those who directly perform surplus labour in a working day are
referred to as direct producers. Surplus labour can take the form of either
surplus produce or surplus value, depending upon whether the fruits of
labour are in use value or in value, form respectively.
Further, we classify class into fundamental class process (FCP), as
comprising of the performance and appropriation of surplus labour (the
realm of production), and subsumed class process (SCP), as encompassing
the distribution and receipt of surplus labour (the realm of circula-
tion). The rest of the processes—consisting of various economic, political,
cultural, and natural—are classified as non-class processes. Those who
personify the FCPs as performers and appropriators of surplus labour
occupy fundamental class positions. Similarly, those who personify SCP
as distributors and receivers of surplus labour occupy subsumed class
positions. As occupiers of positions, subjects personify processes; relation
between processes produces a social relationship between subjects and the
scenario of procreation of their diverse class and non-class positions (to
follow later).2
2 “As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the
characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic
relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with
each other” (Marx 1990: 179, 191). We extend this insight here.
To be more precise, following Marx (in Capital, Vol 1), it is the FCP
that differentiates the economic forms of society in Marxist theory and
becomes its entry point.
What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the

distinction between for example a society based on slave labour, and a
society based on wage-labour,is the form in which this surplus labour is in
each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker. (Marx 1990:
325)
The choice of FCP as entry point is not to infer that SCP and non-
class processes are any less important than FCP in either the ontological
(understanding of the being-in-the-world) and epistemological (what and
how of knowledge) sense, but rather to merely emphasize the importance
of the concept of entry point. This choice of Marxian entry point has an
additional implication as we shall explain later.
Recall that relationships, activities, and practices are all combined
effects of contradictory processes. No FCP can exist on its own. SCP
and other non-class processes are FCP’s conditions of existence; their
contradictory effects constitute FCP. Likewise, FCP constitute SCPs and
non-class processes. As an extension of the problematization of class
essentialism, we surmise that since the economic process of class and
the relations of production it embodies constitute and get constituted
by other non-economic processes, economic determinism too gets prob-
lematized. Those position holders who personify the FCPs, SCPs, and
non-class processes come to be socially related through these processes,
which they are subjected to (getting effected by) and which they are
subject of (do effect); thus, individuals are social beings a la Marx.
The varied set of relationships, practices, and activities that exist around
different FCPs, SCPs, and non-class processes make society all the more
decentred and disaggregated.
The ‘economy’ can also be perceived as an originary multiplicity of
coexisting and interdependent class enterprises. Class enterprise is an
overdetermined and contradictory site of FCP (processes of performance
and appropriation of surplus labour), SCP (distribution and receipt of
surplus labour), as well as of numerous non-class processes (pertaining to
the market exchange that takes place, the property relations, the rules of
authority and power in the workplace, and so on). The adjective ‘capi-
talist’ is deployed before an enterprise if it is marked by a capitalist FCP;
feudal if marked by a feudal FCP; and so on. Notwithstanding its identi-

fication in terms of class, an enterprise cannot be reduced to one process,
say FCP, or a combination of prioritized processes such as FCPs, SCPs,
capital accumulation, and profit, which could be preconceived as the
rational or most essential element; nor can it be reduced to any under-
lying law of existence or a telos that serves as deus ex machina to underpin
the relations and their transition. Rather, as the site of diverse effects
of contradictory processes, class enterprise is a decentred totality that is
constitutionally unstable. These contradictory effects will change the class
enterprises they constitute in unique, unpredictable, and uneven ways,
even to the point that some may even become extinct. The ‘economy’ if
perceived as a configuration of varied, coexisting, and interdependent class
enterprises (which is the overdetermined constellation of FCPs, SCPs,
and non-class processes) is likewise irreducible to the centrism or logic
of capital.
Modes of Appropriation and Exploitation

Unpacking the entry point concept of FCP at a basic level, we can identify
three modes of appropriation of surplus labour: (i) exploitative, (ii) self-
appropriative, and (iii) collective. Exploitation occurs when the surplus
labour is appropriated not by its performers, but by non-performers;
this scenario entails exclusion of direct producers from appropriating
the fruits of their surplus labour, whether in use value or value form.
Non-exploitation rules out such an exclusion; this can be of two types—
self-appropriative, if the surplus labour performed by the individual is
appropriated by the same individual, and collective, if the appropriation
of surplus labour is done in a shared manner without any exclusion of
direct performers from the process of appropriation.
We shall describe in the following section how the three basic modes
of appropriation can be further deployed to classify the FCP into a variety
of its forms: capitalist, slave and feudal, communist, communitic, and
independent.
Class Matrix and Class Set: A Detour on Method

The next section introduces six FCPs through a class matrix and then, at
the end of the chapter, the concept of class sets which will take twenty-
four forms. These will play an important role in the book. One note of
caution: we are not suggesting that the class-focused economy can now
be reduced to just six FCPs or twenty-four class sets. The six FCPs in
the class matrix and the twenty-four class sets presented are just a limited
representation of the economy, which would become more complex with
the consideration of other processes pertaining to the distribution and
receipt of surplus labour, income distribution, as also questions of prop-
erty, power, race, gender, etc. The class-focused economy is much more
intricate than what the matrix or class sets represent. Class matrix and
class sets are just an expression of a slice of the whole economy deployed
for analytical illustration. They are like a moment’s still photograph of
an economy, while the whole economy is more like a conglomeration of
moving and shifting images. The six FCPs and twenty-four class sets are
to an economy what a photograph is to a film. Their analytical power and
utility lie in illustrating the object that is being studied; the descriptions
and conclusions the class-focused analysis engenders will only deepen by
bringing into consideration additional processes.
Class Matrix and the Forms of FCP

Following Chaudhury and Chakrabarti (2000), the preliminary classifica-
tion of FCP can be sharply presented by identifying three broad types
of positions with respect to performance and appropriation of surplus
labour: (i) individual labour (symbolized by A), (ii) non-labour (B), and
(iii) collective labour (C). In the production of a good or service, while
B signifies non-performers, A and C refer to direct labour performed
individually and collectively (via certain division of labour), respectively.
The rows indicate surplus labour performed individually (A) and collec-
tively (C) while the columns capture the appropriation of surplus labour
by A, B, and C. The first and second letters of the alphabet stand for
performance and appropriation of surplus labour, respectively.
As indicated in the Table 2.1, whether the mode of appropriation is
self-appropriative, exploitative, or non-exploitative will depend upon the
manner in which the performers of surplus labour, either individually or
collectively, are excluded or not excluded from the process of the appro-
priation of surplus labour. Considering all the class processes and their
modes of appropriation, AA and CC designate independent and commu-
nist FCP, respectively; AC and CA represent two forms of communitic
FCP, and the rest AB and CB map out into different kinds of exploitative
class processes to be further classified as capitalist FCP, feudal FCP, and
slave FCP.
28
Table 2.1 Fundamental class process and modes of appropriation
Appropriation of surplus labour
Performance of surplus labour Individual Labour Non-labour Collective Labour

(A) (B) (C)
AA AB AC
(performance & appropriation by (individual performance, but (individuals performing labour on
the same individual) appropriation by non-labourer); their own (A), but appropriation
done by all individuals collectively
(C));
Self-appropriative/non-exploitative Exploitative Non-exploitative
(no exclusion of the labourer (exclusion of the labourer from (no exclusion of the labourer
A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
from appropriation, but involving appropriation) from appropriation)

no sharing either)
(example: individual directed (example: Uber - taxi operated (example: community farming)
farm) individually by the driver/worker
but surplus appropriated by the
non-performing company
capitalists)
CA CB CC
(performance collectively (C) but (performance by a collective of (performance and appropriation
appropriation by only one labourers but appropriation by done by the same collective);
member of that collective (A)) non-performers);
Exploitative Exploitative Non-exploitative
(exclusion of labourers from (exclusion of labourers from (no exclusion of labourers from
appropriation) appropriation) appropriation)
(example: family farm) (example: Microsoft or KFC) (example: workers self-directed
enterprise – Mondragon
Cooperative Complex)
Source Chakrabarti et al. (2020: 509)

As explained earlier, class enterprise as the site of overdetermined class

and non-class processes gets its name from the type of FCP (independent
enterprise, capitalist enterprise, feudal enterprise, and so on). Given FCP’s
vital importance as an entry point and for analytical purpose, it is apt to
briefly summarize each of its forms; we shall then examine capitalist FCPs
in detail as it comprises an important component of this book.
Independent FCP (sometimes referred to as ‘ancient’) represents a self-
appropriating scenario where the individual performing surplus labour is
also the one appropriating it (Gabriel 1991). This is neither a case of
exploitation as in slave, feudal, and capitalist FCP, nor that of collective
appropriation under communist FCP. By default, it excludes sharing in
both performance and appropriation. Much of what comes under ‘self-
employment’ would pertain to independent FCP (Chakrabarti et al. 2015,
Chapter I).
Slave FCP is defined as the appropriation of surplus of slaves by their
non-performing masters in a setting where the slave is the ‘property’ of
the master in perpetuity (Weiner 2003); here, the embodied slave herself
is a commodity, not her labour-power. Slave class process can take place
under commodity or non-commodity conditions, although the nature
of its produced commodity is very different from that of the capitalist
commodity by virtue of its distinct mode of exploitation and the absence
of wage labour.
Feudal FCP refers to another exploitative arrangement where the
surplus labour performed by serfs is appropriated by the non-performing
lords in a personalized relation of ties and attachment rooted in organic,
religious, or familial settings. The serfs could also be tied to a higher
authority or entity such as the Czar, personifying the Russian state
(Resnick and Wolff 2002); feudal FCP in household could also tran-
spire under a traditional family set-up in contemporary society, where
the woman may be bound to the husband through non-economic ties
and attachment, including by way of loyalty and obligation (Fraad et al.
2009). The serfs are neither the property of lords as in slavery nor do they
sell their labour-power for a wage as in capitalist relations. Feudal produc-
tion of use values could also take place in a commodity or non-commodity
setting.
While both AB and CB are exploitative class processes, further qual-
ification is needed for differentiating the exploitative mode of capitalist
process from the feudal and slave forms. To isolate and state the defini-
tion of capitalist class process, it is important to recognize the specificity
of its organization of exploitation in value form, which we will do in

detail in the next section. At this point, it suffices to define capitalist FCP
as the appropriation by non-performing capitalists of the surplus value
created by direct producers through a unique combination of commodity
values of inputs (labour-power and means of production) and outputs.
The commodity form could be market driven or state-sponsored, and the
capitalist appropriators could be private individuals or connected to the
state.
Communist FCP entails a non-exploitative arrangement where the
collective appropriates the surplus labour that they perform; here, labour-
power can be in wage-labour form or alternatively procured as part of
other social arrangements. Resnick and Wolff (1988, 2002) have talked
about two kinds of communist class process—type I, where “all adult
individuals in society participate collectively in that class process as appro-
priators of surplus labour, but only some individuals (a small number)
perform surplus labour” (1988: 21), and type II, where “only those
particular individuals who perform surplus labour collectively appropriate
it” (1988: 21). Cullenberg (1992) pointed to a middle ground and a
third possibility, where rather than the entire society (type I), or the direct
performers of surplus labour (type II), what makes a class process ‘com-
munist’ is its feature of “shared appropriation” of direct performers with
those whose labour provides non-class conditions of existence to the FCP
within an enterprise. Whatever their variations, the minimum condition
of a communist FCP is that the direct performers of surplus labour are
not excluded from the process of appropriation.
Marxian theory connects the character of commodity to FCP which in
turn also helps to remove many misconceptions about communist class
process (Resnick and Wolff 2002). Let us explain. One can have commu-
nist FCP with commodity value that embodies the component of surplus
value, the value of labour-power and value of the means of production.
The commodity then takes the name of communist commodity signi-
fying the attachment of the commodity values to the collective mode of
appropriation of surplus value. Moreover, if the communist appropriation
of surplus value embodied in commodity value is mediated by private
exchange, then this commodity is a market communist commodity. On
the other hand, if the commodity value is not market determined, then
the form of communist commodity undergoes a change. For example, if
the commodity values are administered by the state, then the commodity
becomes a state communist commodity. One needs to extract the commu-

nist existence from the rather sterile state-market dichotomy that has
hitherto determined and stifled the debate and fate of communism.
Capitalism and communism’s respective association with private and
state appropriation too needs to be revisited. Capitalist FCP often gets
tied to ‘private’ appropriation disconnected from the state, and commu-
nist FCP tends to get bracketed with ‘state’ appropriation. Any such
correspondence based on necessarily reducing the communist FCP to
a rigid private-state dichotomy is mistaken. For instance, as long as the
private direct producers are not excluded from the process of collec-
tive appropriation, that FCP qualifies as being communist. Likewise,
as long as the collectives of direct producers are excluded by state-
appointed appropriators, that FCP despite being a part of state enterprise
is state capitalist. In case of state administered commodity values, we
would have state capitalist FCP if the surplus value embodied in the
state capitalist commodities is appropriated by state-appointed directors.
State capitalist enterprises in the erstwhile Soviet Union functioned prin-
cipally on the basis of state capitalist commodity. On the other hand,
one could have state capitalist FCP with market capitalist commodity
if the commodity values are mediated by the market, even as the state
sponsors the appropriation of surplus value through its appointee—by
excluding the direct performers from the process of appropriation. Many
state capitalist enterprises all over the world have operated and continue
to operate in connection with market capitalist commodity. The point
remains that Marxist theory looks at commodity from a class-focused
perspective and emphasizes upon producing meanings and nosology of
commodities, depending upon its specific articulation with FCP.
Communitic class process is a scenario where sharing holds in only
one instance, either at the level of performance of surplus labour or
its appropriation. Accordingly, communitic class process could be of
two types—CA type and AC type. CA type communitic FCP signi-
fies a situation where work is done collectively in the sense of being
shared, but one member of the collective appropriates the total surplus
labour performed, including his own. CA class set is exploitative since all
except one performer are excluded from the process of appropriation. An
example would be a family farm where the entire family (‘head’ of the
family, spouse, children, relatives, etc.) takes part, through some division
of labour, in producing a crop, but only one person, say, the “head of the
family”, appropriates the fruits of surplus labour of all including that of
his own, which he then distributes according to some, usually traditional

patriarchal, norms.
AC type community class process symbolizes a situation where the
‘community of collective’ producers appropriate the ‘fruits of labour’
collectively, while surplus labour is performed individually in distinctly
different labour processes. Consider a situation where the production of
a homogenous use value, say, a crop, is performed individually (A) by
many independent farmers on their respective plot of land. Given this,
further suppose that these individuals then form a cooperative, so as to
pool in and sell their produce through it. From the received commodity
value, they collectively (C) appropriate the surplus value, after deducting
by some agreed-upon criteria, the payments to the respective producers.
It is to be noted that there is a fine distinction between the communitic
class process and communist class process (CC). By definition, communist
FCP is characterized by non-exploitation which makes it different from
exploitative CA communitic FCP. Despite both being non-exploitative,
in AC communitic FCP the performance of surplus labour is individu-
ally separable even though it shares with communist FCP the feature of
collective appropriation. Communist FCP is collective at both the levels
of performance and appropriation of surplus.
Once we bring into contention the SCPs and the other non-class
processes that constitute these variegated FCPs, the depth of decen-
tring and the width of the disaggregation of class-focused society only
increase. Our analysis leads us to one of the central questions of the
book (Chapters 4–6): how can we conceptualize capital-ism as a hege-
monic formation from within an otherwise decentred and disaggregated
class-focused economy? What could be the possible nodal signifiers that
will anchor the otherwise decentred and disaggregated economy into the
master signifier ‘capitalist’—with all the attendant affective, fetishistic, and
delusional associations? Evidently, if the hegemonic is to be capitalist, the
nodal signifiers holding it together must reside within the womb of the
capitalist class process. This then requires us to undertake the preliminary
task of defining capitalist class process and specify the nodal signifiers.
Introducing Capitalist FCP and SCP

All labour processes do not entail a corresponding class process. Some do,
and even within them only a subset satisfy the conditions of a capitalist
class process. These are ones which create new value (what Marx calls the
valourization process) through commodity production. Capitalist process

of production is a process of commodity production through the “unity
of labor process and the process of creating value” (Marx 1990: 304).
Consider a labour process where both inputs (means of production
and labour-power) and produced output are mediated by exchange value,
i.e., through the market. A commodity is measured by value or socially
necessary abstract labour time (SNALT) which acquiring exchange value
can be expressed in money form, i.e., price.3 The money price there-
fore expresses a magnitude of value or SNALT. This value of produced
commodity, W, is the summation of three values—value of labour-power
(V), value of means of production (Cc ), and surplus value (SV). Under
a scenario where inputs and produced output are in value form, capi-
talist FCP (could be AB or CB) is defined as the process of appropriation
by non-performers of surplus value produced. Therefore, the adjective
‘capitalist’ before a class process refers to a distinct exploitative mode
of appropriation of surplus labour in value form, i.e., as SV in FCP. It
also shows an inalienable connection of capitalist commodity with capi-
talist FCP. Let us explain briefly how this particular exploitative mode of
appropriation is situated.
The embodied SNALT/value contained in constant capital Cc (means
of production produced earlier by other enterprises) is transferred via
market exchange from its sellers to the buyer who—the productive capi-
talist—then directs its use by labourers in a labour process to produce a
new commodity. Cc adds no new value in the labour process. In contrast,
3 The aspect of ‘socially necessary’ in the definition of value captures the point that
value is a sign—a socially determined number capturing the worth of a product—socially
determined in the sense that it results from the overdetermined web of economic, cultural,
political, and natural processes. The aspect of ‘socially necessary’ is a social construction
of an average amount of labour time considered necessary to produce one unit of the
commodity. Thus, while value or SNALT seems to be located in the realm of production,
it is not simply determined by the conditions of production alone. Rather, SNALT is
like a social estimation, a kind of socially determined standard or property to express the
‘doings’ and income (capturing the components of paid and unpaid labour). Far from
reducing value and value relations to an economic content and getting into the trap of
economic essentialism, Marx understood value and value relations as an overdetermined
product of varied kind of social processes, and not simply the economic ones. Economic
processes related to the presence or absence of market or planning, technical conditions
of production, strategies of appropriators, of managers, of workers, role of buyers and
sellers; political processes and cultural processes related to trade union activities, corporate
groups, state, gender, race, caste, and even desire; natural processes such as climate are
only some of the factors that go in the determination of value of a commodity.
a market for labour-power is an arrangement between the sellers and

buyers of labour-power to exchange (via a contract, written or unwritten)
the labourer’s capacity to labour. Against a promised wage (value of
labour-power), the purchasers of labour-power buy it because it has the
following use value: when deployed in the labour process, the labour-
power has the capability to add new value in the production of commodity
(V+SV), greater than the value at which it is purchased (V). The wage
labourers are the direct producers whose labour creates this new value
and the SV contained in it; SV/V ( NS LL = UPaid
npaid Labor
Labor ) indicates the rate
of surplus value or rate of exploitation; surplus value can be expanded by
lengthening the working day (absolute surplus value production) or by
technology-driven productivity increase and labour intensification/speed-
up (relative surplus value production).4 Therefore, commodity inputs of
Cc and V bought with initial money (M) beget through the production of
a new commodity (C/ ) the generation of more money (M/ )—a process
depicted succinctly as M-C-P-C/ -M/ . This money form of surplus value
(some magnitude of SNALT that is the value form of surplus labour) is
defined as capital; this capital must not be confused with the elemen-
tary forms of capital—money and commodities. From the standpoint
of capitalists, capital is the monetary expression of the self-expansion of
value (SV) in FCP; that capital, from the standpoint of the workers, is
manifestation of unpaid labour time. As the director of the process of
self-expansion of value through commodity production, the (productive)
capitalist gets possession not only of the produced commodity value, but
4 A much-discussed case is the garment and textile industry in the Tiruppur regional
cluster that contributes to nearly 90% of total cotton knit wear exports from India. At
the heart of its success is the Sumangali system of contractual labour recruitment of
tens of millions of lower caste, women workers from adjoining rural areas as apprentices
against lump-sum payments for a specific period (say, 3 years) and housing them in
hostels that allows total control over the living labour in production. Capitalists’ control
over labour market to continuously gain access to this form of waged labour-power and
over its consumption process in the labour process was a result of the combined effects
of many conditions of existence that favoured them—flexibility to alter the conditions
of capital-labour ratio, gender and caste composition of productive and unproductive
workers they employed, labour supply arrangement, apprentice system, payment mode,
mandatory hostel for the workers, etc. These conditions were facilitated by the regional
state policy that legalized and allowed such a system to emerge and flourish. The systemic
and enduring high rate of surplus value the capitalists achieved through its control of the
working day (i.e., the necessary and surplus labour time) helped the employer/industrial
capitalists to successfully create one of the biggest industrial clusters in India that firmly
placed itself within the circuits of global capital.
also in the process, after deducting for the cost of production (Cc +V), of
the surplus value embodied in it too.
At a preliminary level, this monetary form of gross surplus value in
capitalist FCP is alternatively referred to as congealed/undifferentiated
profit; this class-focused interpretation of profit as an expression of SV
or unpaid labour time is obviously occulted in non-Marxian approaches.
However, this is only an initial concept of profit invoked in Volume 1
of Marx’s Capital that gets further modified with the consideration of
additional SCPs and non-class processes, to which the capitalist FCP is
related. Analytically, in Marxian theory, the usage of profit depends on
the specific set of class and non-class processes taken into consideration
(more on this later); indeed, historically, the usage of the term profit has
varied.
Unlike in mainstream approaches which look at capital as a thing, Marx
conceptualized capital as a relationship between a set of processes and
subjects, as the occupiers of these processes get interlocked. To high-
light the relations of exploitation specific to capitalist FCP, Marx names
the surplus value creating wage labourers as ‘productive labourers’ and
those who personify its process of appropriation as ‘productive capitalists’.
These two subjects are two different but related capitalist fundamental
class position holders in capitalist FCP, and are locked in an exploitative
class organization of surplus. The struggle between productive capitalists
and productive labourers over the type, arrangement, and magnitude of
capitalist FCP is one of the loci and axes of class struggle. Evidently, class
struggle is applicable to any FCP with class divisions between performers
and appropriators of surplus labour—master-slave, lord-serf, etc.
Therefore, if one takes the minimum condition, we can identify capi-
talist surplus value appropriation (exploitative mode of appropriation in
capitalist FCP) and capitalist commodity (the commodity connected to
capitalist FCP and that which belongs to the productive capitalist) as
the two defining nodal signifiers of capitalist FCP. Notwithstanding all
variations, the structure that gets constituted in overdetermined rela-
tion to it must, at the minimum, refers to its presence (Chapters 3–6).
As discussed in the earlier section, the capitalist FCP and its associated
capitalist enterprise can acquire state or private form; private and state
capitalist FCP/enterprise can occur with market or planning, or a mix of
both. To keep our focus on the corpus of concepts needed for the book,
it is sufficient to consider only its market form.
The connection between capitalist FCP and SCP can be alternatively

summed up in this way. Every commodity has two inescapable encounters
with performed labour (Roberts 1987). First, every commodity incor-
porates performed labour under specific material and social conditions.
Second, each commodity (with embodied labour) is a market claim on
other commodities (i.e., an entitlement on performed labour contained
in other commodities). When the commodities are sold, revenues and
incomes are generated. There is then a relation between labour performed
and income generated—wage income of productive labourers is the value
portion of paid labour time contained in the total performed labour time.
An allied relation of the amount of unpaid labour time (surplus value)
with wage incomes other than that of productive labourers (referred
to as unproductive labour) and non-wage incomes (tax, rent, interest,
etc., as will be explained) appears; these are the numerical expressions of
the distribution and receipt of surplus value. It is the latter connection
between capitalist FCP and SCP that we will briefly explain now.
The surplus value generated and appropriated in capitalist FCP cannot
be wholly retained by the productive capitalists. Rather, they must
distribute a part of it to those delivering the necessary non-class processes
that secure the FCP: this constitutes the rent (tax) to landlord (state)
for the leased land; the interest to banker/financier for loans; the trading
fee to merchant for selling the product and realizing the value of the
commodity; the dividends against ownership capital provided by the
shareholders; the wages to the employed managers and supervisors who
monitor workers, and devise and implement enterprise-level policies,
strategies, marketing, and sales; the funds to managers for capital accu-
mulation to fight competition; the payments to media (print and social
media and government) to advertise its product or build its brand; the
tax to the state for securing legal and police protection; the contributions
to the political parties to do its bidding; and so on. The distribution and
receipt of surplus value to these non-class processes constitute another
set of class processes—the subsumed class process (SCP); note, concep-
tually, the non-class process of leasing of land must not be conflated.
With the process of subsumed payments against it (rent); that is, non-
class processes and SCPs must not be conflated. With all such SCPs
caught amidst the pull and push of the contradictory effects of non-class
processes, the formation of any capitalist FCP or the enterprise associ-
ated with it becomes inherently uneven and unpredictable. Instability is
weaved into the capitalist system comprising of the web of capitalist FCPs,
SCPs and non-class processes. If any of these non-class conditions of exis-

tence do not materialize or fail to do so satisfactorily (say, banks failing to
advance loans due to financial crisis), then the extant FCP is undermined;
and if the negative effects are widespread across enterprises, industries,
and sectors, their combined effect may even lead to a crisis of the economy
as a whole. That these SCPs encapsulate distinct contradictory processes
implies that the aspect of distribution of surplus value cannot be a priori
reduced to any one of these claimants, or even be ranked as more or less
important. Ergo, we find deeply questionable any assumption of capital
accumulation (ΔCC +ΔV) that is construed as a deeper-level drive, a kind
of gravitational force, miming a law of motion that is deployed to define
an enterprise or an economy or the essence of a crisis.
Productive capitalists who distribute appropriated surplus value, and
those who receive a portion from that same pool, by virtue of occupying
different subsumed class positions, could well be engaged in a struggle
over the distribution and receipt of that surplus value. Moreover, conflict
might also erupt between the subsumed class position holders themselves,
like those between different receivers of surplus value, each of whom
provides different critical non-class conditions of existence to the enter-
prise; thus, subjects occupying all those subsumed class positions remain
engaged in another axis of class struggle over subsumed class payments.
For example, the funds used by managers to activate the process of capital
accumulation (ΔCc +ΔV) depend not only on the quantum of created
capital, but also on the competition between the various contending
claimants of surplus value. This kind of class conflict is unavoidable since
capitalist enterprise cannot do without capital accumulation (say, to stave
off competition), just as it cannot do without the land that the landlord
(or the state) supplies it with, or the share capital provided by the owners,
the credit by the banks, the legal permissions, security and political protec-
tion the state guarantees, and so on. They remain locked in a struggle,
both with the productive capitalists and with one another to secure their
respective positions.
Our emphasis from time to time on capital accumulation in the book,
crucial as it is for capitalist development, must not be conflated with any
conferred privileged or essential property assigned to it. All processes are
subject to contradictory effects that, among other things, undermine and
strengthen the class enterprise itself. Capital accumulation is no excep-
tion. In this regard, Norton (2017) foregrounds the difference in the
treatment of capital accumulation in Marx as compared to that in Adam
Smith whose framework has no place for or sense of overdetermination

and contradiction (a tradition continued by his modern followers). As
he does with other concepts (commodity, money, property, income and
original accumulation), Marx views capital accumulation in relation to
the class process of surplus labor. Using this method, Marx and later
Marxists showed that the very process of capital accumulation propelling
repeated waves of productivity increase through technological develop-
ment and cheapening of wage goods produced the contradictory effects of
(i) “accumulation of excess population, labor market distress and renewed
entrapment of workers in an unfair and unreliable position of depen-
dence” (Norton 2017), (ii) a tendency for market concentration and
monopolization (Baran and Sweezy 1966), (iii) of colonisation, imperi-
alism and extractivism (Ruccio 2003, Gago and Mezzadra 2017), (iv)
of systemic instability and business cycle (Cullenberg 1994, Resnick and
Wolff 2006, Norton 2013), and (v) an ecological crisis (Saito 2018); their
combined effects enable and undermine at the same time the capitalist
system. In Chapter 9, we shall further explore the contradictory effects of
capital accumulation on the world of the third (WOT).
The Working Class and Capitalist Class

Productive and Unproductive: Workers
Adam Smith uses productive and unproductive to differentiate between
the material and perishable. J.S. Mill distinguishes them in terms of the
effects of activities on human beings (e.g., education and health being
productive). In sharp contradiction, the productive/unproductive distinc-
tion Marx introduced has nothing to do with the physical nature of the
produced commodity or of the effects of human activities; the concep-
tual distinction is purely with reference to the class process of producing
SV. Confusing this distinction is a categorical mistake which often leads
people to wrongly attribute to Marxian theory all service-related labour
as unproductive or unnecessary. ‘Sectors’ are not the units of Marx’s
economic analysis and, like in every sector, what goes off as ‘service sector’
should primarily be deconstructed into activities that produce surplus
value and those that do not (Tregenna 2011); “he [the unproductive
labourer] performs a necessary function, because the process of reproduc-
tion itself includes unproductive functions” (Marx 1992: 2, 209). Marx’s
intent in using these terms and their distinction was to specifically classify
the location of subjects within class and non-class processes and to focus
on the relations they are involved in (Olsen 2017).5
The term “productive” labour refers to direct producers, who are
engaged in creating surplus value in capitalist FCP. Apart from the
productive labourers, the rest of the condition providing labourers
intended to reproduce the capitalist FCP is classified as “unproductive”.
This displaces and problematizes any a priori inference of the term
‘working class’ as a homogenous category.
To exemplify the difference between productive and unproductive
workers, consider the case of a capitalist enterprise, say, an industrial
corporation. In it, the board of directors constitute the productive capital-
ists who directly personify the process of appropriation and distribution of
the surplus value created by industrial, productive workers. Let us further
classify the conditions of existence of the FCP of this industrial capitalist
enterprise into ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conditions.
The external conditions of existence may include processes that are
reproduced by subjects not directly employed, i.e., not on the payroll of
the enterprise. This would include shareholder capitalists, bank capitalists,
merchant capitalists, the state, etc. For providing various non-class condi-
tions of existence, these condition providers receive a distributed amount
of the surplus value. However, the subsumed class positions of bank capi-
talists, merchant capitalists, state, etc., must not be confused with those
of the labourers who work for them.
For example, to successfully negotiate and complete the non-class
process of advancing loan to industrial capitalists and receive in return
the contracted subsumed payment, the bank capitalists must employ a
host of people such as managers, risk analytists, accountants, auditors,
security personnel, and lawyers. In this bank enterprise, these employees
are unproductive labourers who participate in reproducing various non-
class processes of the bank enterprise: they help secure the non-class loan
of bank capitalists to the industrial capitalist and the successful reproduc-
tion of the subsumed class position of the bank capitalists. They receive
in return for their labour time a wage and/or commission that involves
further redistribution of surplus value from the bank capitalists; by virtue
5 The Marxian discussion on productive and unproductive is rich, complex, and often
at odds with another (Resnick and Wolff 1987, Chapter III; Savran and Tonak 1999;
Shaikh and Tonak 1994; Roberts 2011; Tregenna 2011; Olsen 2017). We follow Resnick
and Wolff’s interpretation.
of not being the direct receivers of subsumed class payments, the unpro-
ductive workers’ wage is a non-class income. Just as the bank capitalist
is different from the industrial capitalist, the unproductive bank workers
must also not be confused with the productive workers who produce
surplus value for the industrial capitalists in capitalist FCP.
Other than the external conditions of existence, a range of subjects
may be internally employed by the industrial capitalists to facilitate the
reproduction of other non-class economic, cultural, political, and natural
processes that help secure the capitalist FCP. Examples of internal non-
class processes needed for the reproduction of capitalist FCP include
purchase of constant capital and variable capital, monitoring the sale of
produced commodities, the process of capital accumulation, the cultural
processes of advertising the product, or of educating the workforce in
the workplace about the company culture and product, the political
process of controlling the behaviour of workers and their work time,
and natural processes of maintaining the legally mandated environment
in the shop floor. Against these non-class conditions of existence, a host
of subjects (such as, to name a few, accountants, clerks, security, super-
visors, human resource managers, and top management) may have to
be employed by the industrial capitalists. Because the wages of these
‘internal’ unproductive workers are paid out of the appropriated surplus
value, they—from managers to workers—occupy subsumed class posi-
tions. Depending upon the class and non-class processes, the workers may
even occupy multiple positions simultaneously, including both produc-
tive and unproductive positions. Let’s say, the workers—productive and
unproductive together—in a capitalist enterprise organize themselves into
a trade union (a non-class process); through class struggle (collective
bargaining or successful strike)—another non-class political process—they
achieve a wage above the necessary labour equivalent value of their
labour-power, where the difference between the two is a portion of the
surplus value distributed by the productive capitalists. In this instance, the
productive workers in addition to fundamental class position also occupy
a subsumed class position of being recipients of distributed surplus value;
the internal unproductive workers in addition to their existing subsumed
position as wage recipient occupy an additional subsumed class position
of receiver of negotiated extra surplus value. What and who is productive
and unproductive will depend upon the class and non-class positions the
workers and others occupy; the undifferentiated wage too needs to be
situated in terms of the connection of its various components with class

and non-class processes.6
Productive and Unproductive: Capitalists

The subject ‘capitalist’ is closely associated with ‘capital’ which, following
Marx, is understood as the monetary expression of the self-expanding
value, capturing the relationship of a set of processes. As explained, Marx
defines productive capitalist as non-performers who (as board of direc-
tors, partners, or sole proprietor depending upon the legal specification)
appropriate the surplus value in capitalist FCP. As the appropriators of
surplus value, the productive capitalists also occupy the additional class
position of directly distributing SV, i.e., personify SCP too. However, the
term capital and capitalists are not peculiar to the process of self-expansion
of surplus value in capitalist FCP.
Unproductive capitalists personify self-expansion of value in circula-
tion process, using initial money in processes disconnected with FCP,
to procure more money than what they started out with (say, through
interest bearing capital M-M/ by using the financial market, or by using
initial money capital to buy cheap a produced commodity, CP , from
producers and sell it dear for a premium, i.e., M-CP -M/ ). We define
the possessors of the surplus value generated in the circulation process
of trading and finance as merchant capitalists and financial capitalists,
respectively; these kinds of capital and capitalists have predated produc-
tive capital and productive capitalists. Merchant capitalists and financial
capitalists as occupiers of SCP provide capitalist FCP with important
non-class conditions of existence and therefore forge a social connection
with productive capitalists. The three circuits of capital—M-C-P-C/ -M/
(productive), M-CP -M/ (merchant), M-M/ (financial)—are interlocked
and so are the capitalists. Further, these might forge relations with other
non-capitalist enterprises (say, independent or CA communitic ones) to
facilitate the process of expanding value, as is the case with the circuits
of value chain (see Chapter 7). Finally, the unproductive capitalists might
generate value expansion through non-FCP-related processes (stocks and
other financial securities, second-hand trading, and so on). For the time
6 On Marxian theory of wage, profit, and income, see Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2006).
being, our focus remains on the relation of merchant and financial

capitalists with the productive capitalists.
The distinction of productive capitalists from unproductive capitalists
enables Marxian theory to clearly point out that exploitation as a mode
of appropriation of surplus value is associated with productive capitalists,
and not with capitalists generally. Unproductive capitalists such as the
merchant capitalist or financial capitalist neither appropriate surplus value
in capitalist FCP nor do they distribute it; hence, they do not exploit even
though they provide crucial non-class conditions of existence to exploita-
tive FCP, including capitalist ones. In other words, just as the working
class is disaggregated into productive and unproductive workers, so too
is the capitalist class. The capitalists, after all, are not just brothers but
‘hostile brothers’.
Our above exemplification shows that, alongside a host of other social
actors like state, landlord, managers, etc., the ‘productive’ and ‘unpro-
ductive’ capitalists and labourers reveal the irreducible, multi-varied,
simultaneous web of subject positions they occupy, and the relations they
forge through the combination of class and non-class processes.
At this point, it may be appropriate to flag the issue of the connection
of the capitalist class and the working class per se with our class-focused
analysis, based on the unit of process. Class process and classes are not the
same; classes are subdivisions between people based on the positions they
occupy in class processes (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 117–124). Following
our analysis, the invocation of capitalist class as a group is predicated
upon those who personify self-expansion of value—through commodity
production in capitalist FCP (M-C-P-C/ -M/ ) and through circulation
process in trading, finance, and land. It also means that the term capitalist
class when invoked (which Marx did in the Communist Manifesto and at
times in Capital ) cannot and must not assume away, or underplay its
disaggregated form into diverse productive (a la fundamental classes) and
unproductive capitalists (a la subsumed classes), locked in overdetermined
and contradictory relations, and often engaged in class struggle (which
Marx also elaborated in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value). Likewise,
using the term ‘working class’ as a group cannot assume away its disag-
gregated presence into productive workers (a la fundamental classes) and
a diverse array of unproductive workers (a la subsumed classes and non-
classes), locked in overdetermined relations; further breakdown of these
into permanent, casual, and contractual workers will only make the idea
of working class even more disaggregated. Reduction of working class to
productive workers or an assumption of a pre-given working class unity

or of a uniform ‘class interest’ embodied in and derived from a struc-
tural location is a spurious move; to use these to jump to working class
as a social actor is equally problematical (Hindess 1986; Chakrabarti and
Cullenberg 2003). As is common knowledge, this problem of class forma-
tion was potent enough to have consumed the work of many frontline
Marxists (beginning with Lenin, Lukács, Luxemburg, Gramsci, etc.) for
over a century now. It also tells us that with time attempts to achieve even
a semblance of progress towards working class unity have to be consid-
ered as a work in process marked by contingency, fragility, impermanence
wherein the embodied contradictions in such attempted unity tend to,
like is true for any process, also undermine it, and the uncertainty that
the guarantee of progress such attempts uphold could become tenuous
with time. Our focus in this book remains on class processes and class
positions; the term capitalist class and working class would be invoked
with the caveat of being subjected to overdetermined and contradictory
pulls and pushes.
Capitalist Class Enterprise

A capitalist class enterprise is conceptually a site qua location of the
combined effects of capitalist FCP, SCP, and non-class processes that
are in overdetermined and contradictory relations with one another. One
can provisionally view the complexity of the capitalist enterprise by its
value flows in terms of three steps. First, the appropriated surplus value
(SV) would not be retained in its undifferentiated form by the produc-
tive capitalist, but will be distributed as subsumed class payments (SSCP)
to different agents/enterprises who provide a wide range of non-class
internal and external conditions of its existence. As already described,
those who are receivers of subsumed class payment (SSCP) include, to
name a few, financial capitalists, merchant capitalists, state, landlords,
managers, etc. Indeed, the enterprise can be the site to produce various
kinds of use values for its buyers and extract SV from each one of them;
for production of each one of them, it will have to make the necessary
subsumed class payments. It is not surprising to come across a conglom-
erate constitutive of a group of companies/enterprises; in India, the Tata
group is one such example of a conglomerate of twenty-nine publicly
listed independent enterprises (with their respective board of directors).
Generally,
Σ Σ
SV = SSC P
The LHS is class revenues and the RHS class expenditures.

Secondly, an enterprise is also constituted by the receipt of the
subsumed class payments in exchange for providing numerous condi-
tions of existence to FCPs—capitalists and non-capitalists—of other class
enterprises. Typically, class enterprises are interlocked and interdependent,
say through the supply chain; capitalist enterprises are no exception. For
example, a capitalist enterprise may additionally occupy the non-class posi-
tion of a lender, providing finance capital (from its retained funds) to
other class enterprises (with capitalist or non-capitalist FCP) in order
to enable them to purchase their means of production against which
they would be receiving a certain amount of subsumed class payment
from these enterprises. Such payments enter into Σ the capitalist enter-
prise’s revenue side as subsumed class revenue or SSC R. Likewise,
a capitalist enterprise may expand its operation to trading (buying low
and selling high a commodity produced by other capitalist and non-
capitalist enterprises) and therefore occupy the additional subsumed class
position of merchant capitalist. Then, again when a state enterprise disin-
vests through initial public offering, the private capitalist enterprise may
acquire ownership by buying its shares (a non-class process) against which
it will receive as dividends a portion of the surplus value from the state
capitalists of that enterprise. For securing various subsumed class posi-
tions as receivers of surplus value for providing these non-class conditions
(credit ownership, trading, etc.) to secure FCPs of other enterprises, our
referred capitalist
Σ enterprise will be incurring non-class expenditures to
the amount of X (e.g., maintaining a group of employees who deal
with finance and trading). Consequently,
Σ Σ
SSC R = X
Finally, the capitalist enterprise may be receiving non-class revenues for

providing other non-class conditions of existence as well; expenditures
in various financial assets unrelated to any FCP exemplify exposure to
such non-class processes (in the form of shares, bonds, etc.) which would
lead to a different processes of revenue return. Summing
Σ such non-class
revenues from all non-class processes would give N C R. To secure the
Σ
conditions of such revenue generation, another set of expenditures of Y
are incurred,
Σ Σ
NC R = Y
Collating the terms, we get a generalized representation of the

revenue-expenditure side of a capitalist enterprise in class-focused terms:
Σ Σ Σ Σ Σ Σ
SV + SSC R + NC R = SSC P + X + Y .......
(2.1)
This representation can help us to draw some quick observations:
(i) While we attach the name ‘capitalist’ to a class enterprise by virtue

of it satisfying the qualifier capitalist FCP, the capitalist class enter-
prise cannot be reduced to only capitalist FCP or even to class
process alone. The equation is a generalized expression of this
point. If an enterprise participates only in SV and SSCPs, then the
other components in (2.1) will drop out. The more the enterprise
expands into varied class and non-class operations, the deeper is
its decentred structure.
(ii) A logical corollary of (2.1) entails that the capitalist enterprise
cannot be reduced to a deeper essence, such as that of the non-
class process of capital accumulation, or that of capitalist ratio-
nality. Being a bundle of contradictory, albeit necessary, processes,
whose combined effects constitute it, makes such an assertion
impossible.
(iii) The equality sign in (2.1) only captures a particular case used
to illustrate the overdetermined relation between FCP, SCP,
and non-class processes and positions. Mathematically, depending
upon the combined effects of class and non-class processes, one
would expect a capitalist enterprise to swing in an uneven and
unpredictable way such that LHS could be less/equal/more than
RHS. A crisis of capitalist enterprise entails LHS < RHS. Enough
number of capitalist enterprises running into crisis may lead to an
overall crisis in the capitalist system.
(iv) As occupiers of FCP (appropriator of SV), SCP (distributer and

receiver of SV), and various non-class processes, a productive capi-
talist is not a mere profit maximizer or one who accumulates
capital as part of his innate ‘human nature’; he like the unpro-
ductive capitalists and the unproductive workers, is the combined
effect of all such class and non-class positions, being constantly
subjected to the contradictory effects their processes generate.
(v) Equation (2.1) can be used for depicting any enterprise with
value flows, whether capitalist or non-capitalist. For example,
with inputs and outputs as commodity values, a change in the
mode of appropriation from, say, capitalist to communist would
change the class nature of FCP of the class-focused enterprise from
capitalist to communist. On the other hand, a change in appro-
priation from, say, state capitalist to private capitalist (say, due
to privatization) produces only a change in the form of capitalist
FCP.
(vi) There are other ‘financial’ enterprises, such as banks, which do
not create surplus value in FCP. In that case, the bank enterprise
does not have a FCP, but rather encapsulates a non-class condi-
tion of existence—for example, loan—to the capitalist (as also
non-capitalist) enterprise against which the bank/unproductive
capitalist receives subsumed class payment. The relevant class
equation for such ‘financial’ enterprise would be:
Σ Σ Σ Σ
SSC R + NC R = X + Y
A likewise relation would hold for the merchant enterprise.

(vii) Marxian class-focused analysis points to the difficulty of
attributing a single unified meaning to profit. Indeed, the meaning
of profit would be modified depending upon the specific artic-
ulation of capitalist FCP with class and non-class processes.
Sometimes, the entire surplus value is taken as (congealed) profit.
At other times, as in the critique of the Trinity Formula by
Marx, surplus value after deduction for ground rent is defined as
profit for capital (profit of enterprise plus interest) (Chakrabarti
2021). Finally, before-tax profits are also seen as an amount left
to be distributed by productive capitalists for those chosen to be
profit seekers (say, the state, the shareholders, and top managers
for capital accumulation), after deducting for all other subsumed
payments from surplus value. In this regard, profit maximization

ascribed in the dominant literature as the rational objective/desire
of any enterprise is from a Marxist perspective simply a mecha-
nism to channelize the highest flow of residual fund in the hands
of these groups who qualify as profit claimants (see Chapter 9).
Generally, we can define
Σ
Net Profits = (SV + SC R + N C R) − Z
Σ
Z includes a myriad of expenditures required to generate these
revenues. What exactly
Σ these expenditures comprise of will depend upon
what comes under Z , which is a changing component resting upon
accounting practices, tax laws, class struggle, competition, and so on
(Resnick and Wolff 1987, Ch. 4). With these multiple meanings of net
profit, the associated profit rates can also be gleaned. Their differences
testify to the manner in which the specific class and non-class processes
constitute the class enterprise.
If we define profit in terms of SV and SSCP, then the (simple)
rate of profit is ρ = CSV + V . However, in case of (2.1), the rate of
SC R + N C R
profit is modified to the complex form of ρ̂ = CSV +V + C+V .
SCR + NCR
Because of the presence of C+V (i.e., subsumed class and non-class
processes/positions), there can be no necessary correspondence between
the simple rate of profit and the complex rate of profit and the two rates
can move in opposite directions.7 Only when the complex rate of profit
falls, the enterprise corresponding to Eq. (2.1) can get into a crisis; if
the fall in the complex rate is widespread across capitalist enterprises and
sectors, then it may be taken as an indication of a crisis for the existing
capitalist economy. Thus, what is analysed as the conditions of crisis of
enterprises and economy change depending upon the class and non-class
processes that are accounted.
7 See Resnick and Wolff (1987, Chapter IV) for a full-fledged discussion on profit.
Introducing Class Sets: The Decentred

and Disaggregated Economy
One technical issue, however, remains regarding the class matrix we have
earlier introduced: while the class matrix allows us to use the distinc-
tion between exploitative, non-exploitative and self-appropriative forms
of FCP that are classified as independent FCP (AA), communitic FCP
(AC and CA) and communist FCP (CC), it does not per se allow us
to distinguish between feudal, slave, and capitalist (all we have are AB
and CB exploitative). Having clearly specified by now the characteristic of
capitalist FCP, we now venture to present a competing analytical picture
of the class-focused economy. To this end, we introduce the method of
class sets (Cullenberg 1992; Chakrabarti and Thakur 2010; Majumdar
2021). Class sets would in ways that will become apparent throughout
the book serve to rewrite and reconfigure the ‘economic reality’ of the
capitalocentric-orientalist dual economy model; the idea and illustration
of development as a delusional veil masking class process and exploitation
in Chapter 6 and masking WOT in Chapters 8 and 9 will also become
apparent.
What are class sets? We identify class sets in terms of the (i) FCP of
performance and appropriation of surplus labour as depicted in the class
matrix, (ii) distribution of only two forms of output distribution to keep
the matter simple—commodity and non-commodity—and (iii) workers’
remuneration in its two forms—wage and non-wage. Their combina-
tion gives us 24 class sets which characterize the diverse institutional
arrangements in which the class processes may be taken as existing in
an economy.8 The table 2.2 consisting of twenty-four class sets helps
us posit an alternative snapshot analytical space that is decentred and
disaggregated, irrespective of geography or temporality.
Can this economy be reduced to capitalism? Because of its feature
of generalized commodity form in an exploitative mode of appropri-
ation, class sets {5, 17} are consistent with capitalist class process; the
combined effects of capitalist class process and non-class processes consti-
tute the capitalist enterprise and considering the totality of capitalist
enterprises will give us the capitalist economy. Other class sets indicate
8 The constitution of class set as a slice or a snapshot of economy would vary depending
upon the object of analysis [e.g. see class set in Majumdar (2021) for analysis of Indian
agriculture].
Table 2.2 Class sets
Sl. no Performance of Worker’s access to Output Worker’s

surplus labour appropriated surplus distribution remuneration
1 A A Com Wage
2 A A Non-Com Wage
3 A A Com Non-Wage
4 A A Non-Com Non-Wage
5 A B Com Wage
6 A B Non-Com Wage
7 A B Com Non-Wage
8 A B Non-Com Non-Wage
9 C A Com Wage
10 C A Non-Com Wage
11 C A Com Non-Wage
12 C A Non-Com Non-Wage
13 A C Com Wage
14 A C Non-Com Wage
15 A C Com Non-Wage
16 A C Non-Com Non-Wage
17 C B Com Wage
18 C B Non-Com Wage
19 C B Com Non-Wage
20 C B Non-Com Non-Wage
21 C C Com Wage
22 C C Non-Com Wage
23 C C Com Non-Wage
24 C C Non-Com Non-Wage
diverse kinds of class existences; for example, class sets (21–24) and (1–
4) resemble communist enterprises (since non-exploitation holds) and
independent enterprises (since self-appropriation holds), respectively; class
sets {6, 7, 8} and {18, 19, 20} resemble the feudal and slave enter-
prises (since exploitation holds), while class sets (9–16) encapsulate an
assortment of communitic enterprises (could be exploitative and non-
exploitative). Evidently, ‘economy’ exceeds ‘capitalism’ or ‘feudalism’;
it is misleading to reduce the economy to capitalism (Gibson-Graham
1996, 2006). Moreover, this decentred and disaggregated economy is
both constituted by and constitutes distinctive micro-changes taking place
on a plateau of ever-changing, uneven, and disaggregated class sets. This
is due to changes not only within and across class sets but also across
other subsumed and non-class processes that evidently, when brought into
the picture, will render the class-focused economy and its transition even
more uneven, contingent, and unpredictable (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg
2003).
How do we arrive at the dual economy from this decentred and disag-
gregated economy? Two arbitrarily posited givens can be discerned; these
then serve as the essence of the ontological world being described. The
first being the pre-determined, privileged centre of a particular economic
form of society which, in this case, is the capitalist class process or in
class set terms {5, 17}; more specifically, it will be true of the technology-
driven relative surplus value capitalist enterprise embodying class set 17.
This signifies capitalocentrism that transmutes the otherwise decentred
and disaggregated economy into two homogenous wholes—capitalism
and the Rest, capital and the remainder, capital and non-capital. The
second a priori given is orientalism which comes against the backdrop
of a (post)colonial history that first hegemonized through the trope
of colonialism and then through development. Interweaving its way
into third worldism in the postcolonial phase (Escobar 1995), orien-
talism turned the dualistic frame into one that not only differentiated
between capitalism and non-capitalism (the hallmark of capitalocentrism),
but where non-capitalism is additionally rendered pre-capitalist—hence
deformed, devalued, lacking (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009). Consequently,
the term ‘pre’ replacing ‘non’ indicates backwardness in a social and
historical sense; backwardness in a social sense is epitomized by the term
‘traditional’ seen as lagging behind the ‘modern’ and backwardness in
historical sense is symbolized by its warped image of being stuck in
an archaic time–space. These two mutually reinforcing moments have
powerful connotations and consequences in how the dual economy and
its transition are posited, as we shall illustrate in Chapter 6.
One more clarification is necessary. The class-focused analysis has
helped unpack the term ‘population’ in terms of class and non-class
positions that the subjects occupy by virtue of participating in class and
non-class processes. Classification of population in excess of the capitalist
form {5, 17} is approached differently in Marxian theory, by situating
them in terms of the rest of the 22 class sets. This is important because
one cannot enter into a discussion on postcapitalist politics or on post-

capitalist reconstruction of the subject and the social without creating
the necessary, differentiated class-focused space as a prelude to such a
transformation.
Class Struggle and Marxian Struggle

As explained earlier, class process and classes are not the same. Class
struggle is not fundamentally a struggle between two homogenous
groups; classes as such cannot struggle in unison; parties or trade unions
can act on behalf of classes, but that does not imply that classes are ex
officio historical actors, automatically (Hindess 1987; Resnick and Wolff
1987; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003). Instead, class struggle refers
fundamentally to the struggle over the performance, appropriation, distri-
bution, and receipt of surplus labour, i.e., struggle over FCP and SCP.
Being a process itself, class struggle will not only change the type and
form of FCP and SCP qualitatively and quantitatively but also induce
through its effects changes in other non-class processes. There are two
more points that need to be flagged.
The first is that the class struggle is over an object of society—here, class,
i.e., processes pertaining to surplus labour. Because exploitation is a theft
of surplus labour having wide ramifications for the distribution of income,
Marxism takes a stand in favour of appropriative justice (end of exploita-
tion) and distributive justice (end of unfair distribution) (Cullenberg
1992; DeMartino 2003; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003; Wolff 2007);
in Chapters 3 and 10, we shall discuss the third axis of justice: develop-
ment justice. Class struggle must not be conflated with other non-class
objects of struggle such as over property and power although they, being
in a constitutive relation with class process, are no less important (Resnick
and Wolff 2006); power and property remain in an intimate relation with
class process in an overdetermined site. We can extend the argument of
these non-class objects of struggle to other factors—economic (pension,
food security, taxes, interest rate, etc.), political (workplace democracy,
trade union rights, etc.), cultural (education, etc.), and natural (soil,
climate change, body, etc.)—that provide conditions of existence to FCP
and SCP. By virtue of their overdetermination, these non-class struggles
will alter the FCP and SCP. These are not strictly class struggles but
certainly carry implications regarding the Marxian objective of appropria-
tive justice (end of exploitation) and distributive justice (end of unfair
distribution); for example, non-class struggles over the right to form
trade union constitute the FCP and SCP as well and one reason as to
why capitalists generally attempt to circumvent, subvert and destroy it. In
this sense, we can say that class struggle is a subset of Marxian struggle.
Marxian struggle too is class focused but not class specific. This caveat
reminds us that it will be a misinterpretation to collapse and conflate
the ‘effects’ of class struggles on class and non-class processes with the
‘effects’ of non-class struggles on non-class and class processes.
To illustrate, changing the property structure in the erstwhile Soviet
Union did transform its society in important ways, including its class
structures, but it did not achieve its stated objective of ending exploita-
tion (as was misleadingly claimed by CPSU in the 1930s) as an automatic
fallout of the nationalization of property. What it achieved instead was
the transformation of the extant industrial FCPs in 1917–1930s from
one kind of capitalist form to another—private capitalist to state capitalist
FCP—thereby undercutting its central claim of end of class exploitation;
SV created by the productive workers was now appropriated by state capi-
talists (Resnick and Wolff 2002). Change in FCP could only have been
achieved with a fundamental change in its class structure from exploitative
towards non-exploitative ones. Reduction of the object of class struggle
to other non-class objects of struggle—say, change in property relations—
and then to make an unsubstantiated claim about the former on the basis
of the latter is faulty and counterproductive; any claimed isomorphism
between the two processes is spurious. It could and did, as the Soviet and
Chinese experience show, leave its indelible imprint on what we mean by
Marxism, socialism, and its politics.
The second point is that class struggle as the struggle over FCP and
SCP is fundamentally different from arguing that class struggle is primarily
between groups of conscious subjects who represent different classes.
Marxian theory has extracted the meaning of class from its problematic
mooring in a “noun” like setting—class as group of people—to that of
an “adjective” like setting—class as a process, likewise for class struggle.
As history shows, class struggle conceived as primarily a struggle between
people can quickly slip into a struggle against bodies—the class enemy—
and a vicious cycle of class annihilation or badla (revenge) (Chakrabarti
2012); what gets missed or buried is the necessity of badlao (transforma-

tion) pertaining to a change in class process. Other than the human and
social costs, it has also been counterproductive in terms of achieving the
goal such struggles had projected. To illustrate, elimination/annihilation
of a group of people construed as exploiting/ruling class does not guar-
antee an elimination of exploitation or even of a particular type of
exploitation; annihilation of feudality upholding French Monarchy only
changed in due course the mode of exploitation—feudal to capitalist—
while the annihilation of private capitalists around Czarist monarchy only
changed the capitalist FCP from private to state. Foregrounding the
object of struggle—over process as against between people—matters.
But, how can we have an imagination of class struggle without getting
involved into a struggle between people? We cannot, but that does not
call for conflating struggle over process with struggle between people,
especially when subjects—individual and social—occupy multiple, inter-
dependent but contradictory, class and non-class positions; they are social
beings who, being overdetermined, are simultaneously ‘subjects of’ and
‘subjected to’. Reduction of subject to any essential position deemed
more important than others is no valid understanding of subject or
interest. Inference to classes as groups of people (working class, capi-
talist class) based on the class and non-class positions they occupy, which
are diverse, does not mean that these classes will automatically become
homogenous class actors in struggle against one another. Groups with
contingently produced interest form to struggle over (class and non-class)
process, but classes do not struggle; individuals too can engage in class
struggle, say in household. Such class struggles can and do appear at the
more micro-level; they also can and historically do transpire in a societal
movement (such as over the working day) whose object of struggle is in
changing the content, structure and trajectory of FCP (like in case of the
working day) and/or SCP.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that nothing in Marxist theory
requires that the ‘effects’ of class struggle are to be considered as more
or less important than those of non-class struggles. Nevertheless, what
Marxist theory does say is that since exploitation is ethically unaccept-
able and harmful to the well-being of both human and nature, ending
exploitation by definition is a progressive goal. In this regard, class
struggle that is undertaken to overcome feudal exploitation inside the
household or to create new communist households (i.e., where adult

members collectively perform and appropriate surplus labour) is equally
important as ending capitalist exploitation inside an industrial enterprise.
Its importance is also very potent for economy-wide struggle against all
forms of exploitation, as also over the presence of exploitation as a concept
itself (just as struggle against the conception of slavery itself for centuries
ended with the legal abolishment of slave FCP/enterprise although it
does persist illegally in many modified forms). Likewise, class struggle
to change SCPs to make distribution fairer (say, by pursuing some goal
of equality or need-based distribution) in various spheres (from house-
hold to enterprise to the economy per se) and non-class struggle over
condition-providing processes to FCP and SCP are all important ingredi-
ents of Marxian struggle. Collapsing all such distinct struggles to either
an undifferentiated, all-encompassing black-box of class struggle, or some
other equally undifferentiated non-class struggle that demotes/erases
class struggle and its value only magnifies the politics of conceptual
confusion.
Conclusion
Marxist theory is unique in developing and engendering a knowledge of
the economy and society in terms of the articulation of various non-
class processes—power, property, income, capital accumulation, profit,
efficiency, competition, market, race, gender, etc.—with class process of
surplus labour. It is only in their overdetermination and contradiction—
what we call the class-focused economy—that these and their relations
acquire meaning. For example, the connection of class process with
commodity leads to a particular concept of surplus value and then to
capital and furthermore profit. Capital and profit are devoid of class rela-
tions, including of exploitation, in mainstream discourses—which is the
precise connection that the class-focused approach makes visible. Keeping
this as the backdrop, we may ask: what happens if class as process of
surplus labour is foreclosed? Answer: the repudiation of one chain of
signification in connection with class process, by another chain discon-
nected with class process, and of the experience and history from that
context. This process of foreclosure represents and resets the knowl-

edge of what reality is, which then can be claimed as the truth; the
delusional cover it provides is not just regarding what the truth of the
being is (the ontological) but also of how and by what means to arrive
at it (the epistemological). Social discourses and institutionalized prac-
tices lend political support and credence to those conditions and that
obfuscated understanding of reality, which procreate the classless order
of things.
In this context, the role of substitute signifiers like power, property,
income, capital accumulation, profit, efficiency, competition, market, etc.,
detached from class process in creating the delusional veil that obfuscates
and makes invisible the class relations of society and crypts class exploita-
tion cannot be underestimated. As we shall explicate in Chapters 4–6, one
of the fundamental propositions of this book is that capitalist hegemony is
produced through the foreclosure of class as process of surplus labour and
hence of the class-focused economy that is decentred and disaggregated.
All the more why the return of the Marxian entry point of class should
also be seen as pointing to a political standpoint and a postcapitalist praxis.
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CHAPTER 3
The Secret Abode of Need: From

Hegemonic Need to Radical Need
Introduction
In confronting capitalism as a hegemonic formation, Marxism seems to
have stumbled into two interconnected traps put in place by development,
which together has created a delusional veil; this delusional veil in turn
helps cloud the foreclosure of class and world of the third (henceforth,
WoT) and make their interrelated language inaccessible. These two traps
are (i) economic dualism and (ii) hegemonic need. The former allows
for the legitimization of the violence of original accumulation, while the
latter rationalizes benevolence (in Chapter 10 we have designated this
kind of benevolence ‘ethics to the world of the third’), all in the name
of developing the third world. An array of dispersed hegemonic opera-
tions concentrates on shaping, modifying, and solidifying the two traps.
Their combined effects produce the hegemonization of the inside and the
outside of capital. A Marxian take therefore, which this book is about,
must situate its postcapitalist imagination via a critique of these traps, to
unpack the anatomy of the hegemonic we refer to as capitalism (Chap-
ters 4 and 5). Before entering into a discussion on hegemony with its
secrets and traps, we need to, like we did for the concept of class in
Chapter 2, lay bare the complexity of the question of need from a Marxist
perspective; this in turn will reveal the difference in treating need with and
without connection to class process. As will be explicated in later chapters,
the declassed version of need becomes a nodal signifier of the hegemonic,

Switzerland AG 2023
posited by us as the hegemonic need. The Marxist ethic of need on the

other hand seeks to explore the radicalness of need from the class-need
overdetermined space that challenges the hegemonic version of need.
We initiate the discussion by pointing to two broad paths of devel-
opment, paths that are not always considered complementary to one
another but which are accommodated in the hegemonic approach to
need. Taking off from the model of economic dualism, the classical path
contemplates capital-driven economic growth as the basic indicator of
capturing the progression in standard of living (either measured as GDP
per capita or GDP per worker); thus, poor and rich countries are differ-
entiated in terms of, say, the level of GDP per capita and resultantly, the
path to development of poor countries lies in relatively expanding the
latter as fast as possible. In this vision, the other aspects such as educa-
tion and life expectancy are seen as functions of capitalist growth in the
sense that growth helps expand investments in education, health, etc.,
that further facilitate growth through productivity increase. The second
and a contesting revisionist development approach does not deny the
relationship between growth and social sector nor does it make growth
unimportant. Instead, it shifts the evaluative terrain from a growth-centric
perspective to a consideration of standard of living as comprising of
many aspects of life including GDP per capita; for example, it would,
in addition to GDP per capita, consider life expectancy, literacy, etc., as
constituents of analysing standard of living and find multidimensional
ways of measuring it. GDP per capita stands in a relation of equiva-
lence with these other elements: well-being is a result of their combined
effects. Marx referred to social investments as the common satisfaction
of needs, i.e., social needs. As we shall explore, there are other kinds of
social needs, such as poverty need, which are completely disengaged from
any income-related activities. Our understanding of need is not referring
to a naturalized space or register, consisting of some predefined objective
ends. What emerges as need and in what form is socially determined and
remains open to interpretation and change (more on this later); need is
process too, need process .
From a Marxian perspective, if we are to refer to the domain of growth,
then logically, we are focusing on the FCP and the generated surplus;
if directed at social needs then to distribution of the surplus. However,
the problem is that thus far the surplus is connected to distribution via
subsumed class payments to condition providers of FCP and not to social
needs which is, as we shall see, a different kind of non-class process
3 THE SECRET ABODE OF NEED: FROM HEGEMONIC NEED … 61
that demands a very different idea of distribution than what we have

furnished in Chapter 2. We thus need to theoretically rework the produc-
tion-distribution-redistribution space. The problem before Marxism (and
we believe that it is a very important problem) is simple but profound:
can the question of class be related to the development space of social
needs? Can distribution for social needs process be distinguished from
distribution on account of subsumed class process? Does class matter for
development-related issues such as poverty-related need? Moreover, can
we think of need in a classless scenario where the category of surplus
does not exist? How would then a Marxian ethico-political standpoint
stand up to the operations of the hegemonic which tries continuously
to implant its rendition of need as need per se? This set of questions
inspired a new area of research on ‘need’ that was pioneered by Chaud-
hury (2001) and Chakrabarti (2001) and later expanded and formalized
by Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2003).1 This chapter builds on their
work. At stake in this chapter is the relevance of Marxian theory in the
Southern context and indeed of accounting for public policy (of state,
international agencies, etc.) in general.
Class and Need: A Marxian Approach

In presenting a distinctly Marxian conception of need, two versions of
need are posed. Consider an exclusively surplus producing economy, in
which the onus of satisfaction of need is always on the surplus economy.
Call this Need I. Next, consider as its other a non-surplus economy
through which certain needs could also be accounted for. Call this Need
II. While we conceptually separate the two versions of need, they operate
in close tandem in concrete everyday reality. Our discussion on each
proceeds sequentially.
Need I: Surplus and Need

Suppose we start by asking: why can’t all payments out of surplus be
taken as subsumed? If that were to be the case then, as we depicted
in Chapter 2, every payment would have to be construed as somehow
connecting the condition providers to the FCP. After all, subsumed class
1 See Chakrabarti et al. (2008), Chakrabarti and Dhar (2013) and Chakrabarti (2013).
process (SCP) is defined as payments for securing the non-class processes

that provide conditions of existence of FCP. Let us call this class distri-
bution. The difficulty is that these payments per se does not address
the issue of maintaining what Engels (1974: 16) called the non-working
members of society or of natural conditions. Indeed, Marx (1977: 13–30)
himself pointed to the need to further divide the surplus into a distributive
component related to production and another distributive component
that had nothing to do with production, capturing, in his own words,
“the general costs of administration not belonging to production”, “that
which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools,
health services, etc.”, and “funds for those unable to work, etc., in short
for what is included under the so-called poor relief today”. From our
vantage point, while subsumed class payments may partly, but not totally,
capture the administrative expenditure and common satisfaction of needs,
it will most certainly not capture the payments on account of socially
determined needs of the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, preserva-
tion of nature, and so on, who or which may not necessarily provide
conditions of existence to any FCP. Let us call such distribution for
social needs developmental distribution. By reducing development distri-
bution to class distribution (subsumed payments), we will be obscuring
and misinterpreting the effects that meanings, struggles, and practices in
relation to the process of social needs produce. Our reframing suggests
that any possible relation between surplus distribution and social needs,
say poverty need, must follow from the conceptual premise that surplus
distributed to the point of production (FCP) and those away from it,
while not independent, are distinct. Only through this distinction can we
make sense of the relation between class and need, as also open the space
for locating and analysing public policy and developmental struggle from
a Marxian perspective.
The Idea and Importance of Social Surplus

To differentiate between these two forms of distribution, the concept of
surplus is split between production surplus and social surplus. Production
surplus (PS) consists of subsumed class payments to the point of produc-
tion, required to meet the non-class conditions of existrnce of FCP. In
contrast to class distribution (capturing the relation of FCP with SCP),
social surplus, SS, represents the socially determined needs of the people
(such as relating to poverty, environment, unemployment, children, and
the old) who provide nearly no conditions of existence to the FCP.
Put in another way, the surplus over and above the production surplus
(subsumed class payments) is social surplus. Social surplus represents the
fact that a part of the total surplus moves beyond the point of appropria-
tion to another point of social axis in order to be distributed and received
by socially determined criteria of needs that are dissimilar to the ones
which are channelled for class-related conditions of existence. Although
related, possession, distribution, and receipt of social surplus are an alto-
gether different set of processes as compared to that of class processes.
Consequently, their effects are diverse also.
The development space, as we understand, is the domain of need—
containing its meanings and associated flow of possession, distribution, and
receipt of social surplus destined for specified social needs; we designate
development distribution as referring to this flow of social surplus for
social needs. By connecting social needs with distribution and receipt of
social surplus, which in turn is related to class process, this alternative
terrain helps shape a radically different meaning of development space in
comparison with what mainstream economics, institutions, policy-makers,
and politics like to offer. Consequently, it is bound to give rise to a
different kind of interpretation, intervention, and transition politics.
Overdetermination and Contradiction of Class and Need Process

Considering only a commodity producing economy, we sum up the total
surplus value (TSV) produced by various enterprises—capitalist and non-
capitalist—to arrive at the total surplus value. TSV, as per our analysis,
is divided into two components, production surplus and social surplus.
Define SV1 as the sum total of surplus value directed towards produc-
tion surplus (subsumed class payments, SSCP) and SV2 as the remaining
surplus value directed towards social surplus.
Accordingly,

n
SV =
1
SSCPi (3.1)
i=1
where SV1 is the total appropriated surplus value and SSCPi represents
the i th payment of the ‘n’ distributions of production surplus (PS).
On the other hand,

m
SV2 = SS = SSk (3.2)
k=1
where SV2 is the sum total of surplus value distributed as social surplus
SS, and SSk represents the kth payment of the ‘m’ distributions of social
surplus. Putting (3.1) and (3.2) together,

n m
Total Surplus Value = TSV = SV1 = SSCPi + SV2 = SS = SSk
i=1 k=1
(3.3)
Recall that Eq. (3.1) accounts for the portion of surplus labour in value
form. However, we have seen that many use values may not be traded in
the market and could be, say, directly consumed. For example, the cooked
food produced inside the household is consumed directly. Because the
surplus produce materializing as food is not exchanged, but appropriated
and distributed through consumption, the surplus product equivalent of
surplus labour here is not in value form. Let SUV be the appropriated use
value and let, for such cases, the subsumed distributions be specified by
SSE.2 Accordingly, Eq. (3.3) is modified into:

n s

Surplus = SV =1
SSCPi + SUV = SSE
i=1 r =1

Production Surplus
⎧ ⎫
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎨ m g ⎪
⎬

+ SV = SS =
2
SSk + SUV = SSE (3.4)
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ k=1 z=1 ⎪
⎪
⎩
⎪ ⎭
Social Surplus
Both (3.3) and (3.4) are workable equations depending upon the type
of problem that needs to be addressed. We shall only focus on (3.3)
because the hegemonic tends to operate in the development space via
value distribution. Social surplus and the space of development it opens
up mark an operational terrain that is able to combine questions of class
2 Of course, the non-value items cannot be measured in SNALT, and therefore, the
two parts cannot be technically added. The addition sign in (3.4) is only indicative of the
relation between different FCPs and its associated various kinds of subsumed and need
distribution.
and need, creating in the process a unique plane of overdetermined and

contradictory effects to contend with.
Need-related development struggles are over the meaning of need
(what qualifies as need and why) as also over the manner, mechanism,
and form of appropriating and distributing social surplus, and who should
be considered as the rightful recipient of social surplus. The players
converging in the need space as also confronting one another over the
appropriation, distribution, and receipt of social surplus include, to name
a few, the central governments, local governments, local bodies, NGOs,
international agencies such as the World Bank, class enterprises (such as
state class enterprises, private class enterprises, and household class enter-
prises), the political parties, and the social movements. If the struggle over
class distribution (realm of production surplus) is class struggle, then the
struggle over the meaning-content of need process and over development
distribution (realm of social surplus) is need struggle. By virtue of the fact
that each affects the other, both struggles become integral components of
Marxian analysis. The development space is thus constitutionally political.
Necessary Labor Surplus Labor
(remunerated) (un-remunerated)
Production Surplus Social Surplus
Class Struggle Need Struggle
The class-focused development space that we have engendered

connects three distinct nodes of struggle: (a) over class processes
(pertaining to various aspects of FCP and SCP), (b) over need processes
(pertaining to meaning of need and struggles over the distribution of
social surplus between and within the various need components), and (c)
over non-class, non-need processes (in economic, political, cultural, and

natural registers). Struggles do take place at these different levels, and
yet due to their connectivity, each constitutes and transforms the other
in important ways. For example, class struggle, need struggle, and other
non-class, non-need struggle (especially struggle over processes that effect
the class and need processes) constitute one another in the process of
determination of the amount of social surplus to address the need for
poverty reduction; clearly, class matters for poverty need (Chakrabarti
et al. 2008). Marxian politics consequently must become complex and
attentive to multiple levels of such struggles.
By drawing attention to the unavoidable articulation of FCP, SCP and
need of FCP, SCP, and social surplus, our analytical space of production
surplus and social surplus opens the route to a unique rendition of public
policy. Any public policy pertaining to social need, say over food security,
would have to contend with the class-need space which not surprisingly,
given the nature of this space, makes its appearance, form, and continua-
tion open to various kinds of class and non-class effects, some over which
even the policy-makers would not have control over or even know of.
These effects may not appear merely from the hegemonic quarter intent
on defining and displacing social need in ways which secure the position
and power of capitalists and their cohorts. They may instead come from
various other directions and sources, not least following social movements
from below. It shows that policy formation, especially in the progressive
direction, may not be always top-down; social movements too play a role
in bringing their influence to bear on the policy menu to be considered.
This is not to suggest that these movements would get what they want
in ways they sought; this may not happen due to the other contending
positions that may have emerged to oppose the demands. Therefore, the
demand for universal coverage on account of Food Security in India could
not be met and the enacted law on it was, to the disappointment of many
activists, a watered-down version of what was sought. What emerged in
The National Food Security Act, 2013, was a re-construed social need
palatable to the hegemonic—hegemonic need.3 A specific social need is
made, remade, or unmade through the contradictory process and strug-
gles over it. This reveals the contingent nature of public policy and its
3 Chakrabarti and Sarkar (2019).

non-teleological trajectory, facets that are instilled by virtue of its loca-

tion in the class-need overdetermined and contradictory plane and the
ensuing complexity of diverse and contesting positions with respect to
class distribution and development distribution that emerge and clash in
any specific context. It is also by intervening within it that the hegemonic
tries to implant its version of social need as a natural form.
Universal Basic Income

Building on the importance of the class-need dynamic (see Chakrabarti
2022), we deconstruct the text of Universal Basic Income. Suppose in a
country all of SS distributed by the state goes to meet (a) food secu-
rity need of the poor (SSFC ) and (b) unemployment benefits (SSUB ).
Further suppose that the government is now mulling whether to intro-
duce the Universal Basic Income (UBI). By definition, UBI implies an
entitlement of the wealth of a nation for those, rich or poor, who are
its citizens; the basis of this claim is neither poverty nor unemployment
benefits. In the Indian context, debates have risen about the justification
of UBI (i.e., whether it should at all qualify as a social need in a country
with high inequality), the form it should take, the magnitude of required
redistributed value for this purpose, its possible distortionary effects on
economic activities (i.e., domain of produced value, FCP and SCP) and
budgetary pressure on the state (see the symposium in the Indian Journal
of Human Development 2017). The class-focused interpretation gives a
different angularity to this debate. Denoting social surplus for UBI by
SSUBI , the explicit form of Eq. (3.3) becomes:
SSUBI = TSV (FCP)−SSCP (SCP)−SSFC −SSUB (3.5)
The Marxist perspective to UBI brings to attention the importance

of the overdetermination and contradiction of class and need processes
and their struggles. The debate on UBI is very much a class issue (even
if the word ‘class’ is tabooed in the debate), containing the complexity
of class and development struggle, say regarding how far and how much
of the produced TSV needs to be channelled for it rather than for PS.
Moreover, it raises the vexed question of whether introducing UBI will
lead to a reduction in other kinds of programmes (here, SSFC + SSUB )

and therefore epitomizes need struggles even within the need space.4
Need II: From Class to Classlessness

Marxists have long talked about the idea of classless social arrange-
ments. What happens if class qua surplus labour as a concept disappears
from history, where the difference between necessary labour and surplus
labour in FCP no longer exists (Resnick and Wolff 1988). This non-class
scenario is what Chaudhury (2001), Chakrabarti (2001) and Chakrabarti
and Cullenberg (2003) referred to as need-based economy, as a space
of production and distribution defined from a need-based standpoint.
Need-based space looks at production from a need standpoint, where
the objective of production is not to alienate the produced use value for
sale. This is unlike the surplus-focused space that looks at the economy
from a production-based standpoint (that, in its capitalist form, tries to
relate to surplus value or profit). That is, production and consumption
are overdetermined in both types of economy, but the discursive focus of
the two is different. A need-based economy is something which even the
seemingly all-powerful surplus economy can neither discount nor dispel;
sometimes, the hegemonic refers to this segment as the non-profit sector
with survival need (Chapter 8). Need II directs us to analyse the overde-
termined moments of the need-based economy and surplus economy. As
the hegemonic faces up to WOT, surplus must face up to need, with
both social needs under Need I and social needs masquerading as survival,
subsistence need under Need II. The hegemonic encounter with WOT is
also the encounter to transform the need space to its rule and benefit that
engenders the foreclosure of WOT through the foregrounding of third
worldism (Chapters 5 and 8). That is why the hegemonic must invent its
own need discourse so as to foreclose the semantic articulation or discur-
sive inauguration of need arising from WOT space/perspective/subject
4 The class-need framework has been re-construed to analyse specific overdetermined

and contradictory relations of class with poverty (Chakrabarti et al. 2008), with reset-
tlement (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009), with social funds (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2013),
with food security (Chakrabarti and Sarkar 2019), and with public distribution system
(Sarkar and Chakrabarti 2022). These works also document the formation of and
modification in hegemonic needs in the case of the nation-state, here, India.
position. In Chapters 8 and 9, we shall illustrate in detail this process of

the hegemonization of WOT.
Let us explain why one must not read Need II as part of a teleolog-
ical journey, heading into oblivion. The distinction between necessary
labour and surplus labour, i.e., class, remains because one major goal
of society is the process of surplus appropriation. What if the goal of
surplus appropriation emerges as insignificant in a certain phase/moment
of history? But equally importantly, what if it is insignificant in a certain
space within the present? The conceptual distinction between necessary
labour and surplus labour, and that of social surplus would then not make
sense therein. Need—expressed in this case through a variant of need-
based economy—displaces class/surplus as the focal point of addressing
the economy. The social agreement, if any, among subjects-collectives
takes a different form: every subject is entitled to her need, whether it
is in individual, family, or in public/shared/collective form; the objec-
tive and purpose of production, rather than exchange value or profit, get
reoriented towards fulfilment of needs. It should be noted that we are
not talking of equal income or equal share of resources as part of fair
distribution. Here, the agreement between subjects is on a shared ethical
plane worked out by them; it has to be worked out because it always
involves accepting the possibility that someone is going to get a bigger
basket than the others. It also involves accepting the viewpoint that needs
may be different within and between groups and hence distribution may
be skewed; rather, one is aiming at ‘to each according to her need’.
Let us invoke India: The Big One ‘Mahabharat’ here to drive our point.
The mother of the Pandava: Kunti, when distributing the gathered food
among her five sons, Yudhishthir, Bhim, Arjun, Nakul and Sahadeb, would
keep aside half of the whole booty for Bhim alone, and divide the rest
among the others. It is the commonsense of the primitive—who knows
that the consumption of a big-bodied warrior like Bhim can never be equal
to the intake of semi-ascetic and intellectual Yudhishthir. (Chaudhury and
Das 1999–2000: 3)
The concept of fairness in distribution arises because there is a surplus

to be distributed. With the disappearance of the concept of surplus,
fairness becomes moot. It is in this sense that community as being-in-
common, as being-in-a-shared-yet-contingent-and-changeable-common
bears fruition (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009: 120–133). Where sharing
overflows the narrow domain of cost–benefit and homo economicus ;

where collectivity means shared vulnerability and interdependence; where
sharing is embodied in what Gibson-Graham (2003) calls respect for
difference; where sharing is marked by ethics (not morality/normativity);
as also by responsibility (not duty) towards the Other. This is again not
to say that contradictions disappear here, or that sharing may not have
its sore points (Chapter 8), but to point out that they will not appear in
the way they did in the class-need overdetermined space; the contradic-
tions within a classless social formation will have its specific forms and the
non-class conflicts too will be irreducible to the class-focused economy.
Need I and Need II, which can and do coexist, offer to Marxian theory a
paradigmatic break, since, even in the context of class analysis, it allows us
to defetishize surplus and further disaggregate and decentre the economy.
It is also critical in the unravelling of the need space from a class-focused
perspective because the hegemonic weaves its tentacles and operations by
interfering in both the forms, and that too through a need discourse of
its own: hegemonic need.
Hegemonic Need, Nodal Point

and the Delusional Veil
Modern need theories have been understood in two forms—the ‘thin
version’ and the ‘thick version’ (Fraser 1998: 14–16). In the thin version,
need as a universal principle is abstracted out of culture and subjectivity;
the World Bank discourse is an example of this approach. The thick
version, in contrast, sees need as more particularized, as arising from
cultural or individual experience, and hence is subjective. The postde-
velopmental discourse represents this perspective of need. According to
Fraser, this difference between the thick (subjective/particular) and thin
(objective/universal) approach has driven much of the current debate on
need; the two opposing tendencies of World Bank and postdevelopmental
discourses, with many others placed in between, present us a fractured
space of approaching the question of need. What is common, however, in
this diverse literature is class blindness and therefore the failure to account
for class effects on social needs. In the thin version, class blindness in
turn makes the association of capitalism with social needs a non-starter;
capitalism is accepted as given and not discussed. In the thick version,
while a general critique of capitalism is present, an absence of the perspec-
tive of class entails a lack of a rigorous theorization of both capital (the
concrete-real form) and capitalism (the hegemonic form); the alternative

to development that it proposes is likewise fragile. As opposed to these
two versions, a robust relation between rigorously theorized conceptu-
alizations of class and need, between capitalism and need is what makes
Marxian theory’s understanding of ethico-politics different from all the
above approaches. Indeed, as the subsequent chapter shows, the occlu-
sion of the language of class from discussions on need is one condition
of the foregrounding of hegemonic need; the other intersecting condition
being the foreclosure of WOT through the foregrounding of third world.
In so far as the set of social needs constitute the development space,
Marxian theory would consider the terrain of need to be flexible, contin-
gent, unstable, and open to interventions and articulations rather than
being closed off into a universal set of needs handed down from the top,
say, by the World Bank, or the state. Within a contested need space, the set
of needs epitomizing the thin version of need can be represented in terms
of what we have called ‘ethics to the world of the third’, all in the name
of civilizing, developing, and uplifting of the realvictim (see Chapter 10).
These practices of need form the compass of hegemonic need. However,
even if the varieties of hegemonic needs are posed as universal and natural,
they can only emerge and be established from within the space of devel-
opment struggle (and associated class struggle). There is no social need,
which is natural, pre-given, or obvious; it always appears in a histor-
ical context or a time–space curvature that is conflictual. Given such
a contesting need space that in turn is continually affected and trans-
formed by overdetermined class and non-class processes/struggles, it is
no surprise that what constitutes need, even hegemonic need, tends to
change over time.
The thin version of need based on universal, objective needs is not
merely that of the World Bank, but has seen it branching out into
a number of nuanced theorizations. For example, Sen’s capabilities
approach is not the same as that of Rawls’ primary goods approach,
or Dworkin and Roemer’s resource-based approach or Van Parjis’s basic
income approach. We don’t discuss the differences in these important
theorizations in this book. We just make the general point that, notwith-
standing their own theoretical positions (Sen’s capability approach for
example being a distinct and rich theorization), many of the insights these
approaches provide have been incorporated, as per the requirement, in
the broader development strategy of combining growth with the social
programme of redistributing benefits of growth to the poor and fulfilment
of other social needs; the World Bank and the nation states in general
epitomize this strategy of accommodation and appropriation (World Bank
2000, 2018). What is generally revealing about the thin version of need
is its attempt to naturalize and depoliticize the dimension of need by
subsuming differences with the realm of ‘universal common humanity’,
and, in this universal pursuit, one finds absent any consideration of class
and capitalism. For example, Martha Nussbaum uses the notion of a ‘uni-
versal common humanity’ as a basis for universal needs; “her concern
is to dispel the arguments of the cultural relativists by positing Aris-
totelian essentialist virtues of what it means to be human universally and
across cultures” (Fraser 1998: 17). In these schemas, need is objectively
determined as a universal set of requirements and is seen as intimately
connected to the achievement of their well-being.
A sense of the humanist imperative underlying the thin version of need
can be gauged from the following:
Human beings, as human beings, need these things, for that claim is not a
universal generalisation but a statement about our biological and psycho-
logical nature as human beings … It is because we are constituted as
we are, as human beings, because we function as we do, that we have
certain objective basic needs. These facts also make it possible to identify
a condition of objective well-being which is linked to the notion of objec-
tive needs… There is an obvious intuitive plausibility to the idea that if
all people have enough to eat, are housed and clothed, are healthy, and
(perhaps more problematically) have been educated up to the level neces-
sary for them to participate fully in their society, they are in these respects
in a condition of equality. A society in which this had been achieved
would, one might think, have made a substantial advance in the direction
of equality. (Norman 1992: 144)
Need is construed in terms of certain elements some humans or the

society they live in lack; needs tend to become synonymous with precon-
ceived qualities people must possess to become ‘human’. Ethics flowing
from this version of need is an ethics to the realvictim and for all its
variations that is what the thin version of need represents. Further, for
the hegemonic, this version of need is a nodal point. However, for the
hegemonized, it is a delusional veil. More on this in subsequent chapters.
The humanist universalism embedded in the thin version of need was
critiqued as a Euro-ethnocentric (sometimes referred to as Orientalist)
model of universalizing white male power, as cultural imperialism, and
as civilizational charge with no respect for the culture-nature continuum,

autonomy and democratic politics, human rights, social justice, and the
complex vicissitudes of a planetary world as a whole (Esteva 1987; Esteva
and Escobar 2019). This critique has come from those who argue for
adopting a thicker and culturally relative/subjective version of need that
the postdevelopment school, among others, has epitomized (Chakrabarti
2022). Their position is that if need is a product of culture, context, lived
experience, and subjective contingencies, then any conception of need
and its listing imposed from above is in contradiction with the particular
subject’s need and the subject’s particular needs. Such a representation
of need that comes from above is somebody else’s formulation of need
that demotes the needs of particular cultures and individual subjects,
specifically, in our terms, the needs of WOT.
One critique launched by the postdevelopmental school addresses a
particular thin version of need—‘basic needs’—that has played an impor-
tant role in World Bank’s intervention in WOT. Basic needs, as encap-
sulating the biological reproduction of the ‘victim third’ (real victim ), are
predefined, pre-given in the thinner version. Shiva (1989, 1994) considers
such an objectively defined intervention into the domain of the biological
need (or even social need) problematical. More than anything else, within
WOT, what constitutes biological need is not a metaphysical or pre-given
lexicon of necessities but instead is subjected to polymorphous modes
of articulation within WOT. Need, even if biological, is subjectively and
contingently produced and cannot be determined outside of the social
and economic effects constituting the subjects of the economy (Esteva
and Escobar 2019). Even in the domain of the biological one needs to
move from an ethics to the real victim to an ethics of the real, move from
‘ethics to’ (a top-down approach) to an ‘ethics of’ (an approach that learns
to learn from below, as also from the subjective particularities of cultures
and experiences).
As a general critique of the thinner version of need, postdevelop-
mentalists such as Illich (1992) argue that it defines need as a lack
in WOT (in)humans—the lack being objectively defined—which then
creates a differentiation between humans, between those with more capa-
bility (more humans) and others with less capability (less humans—WOT
[in]humans); in the process, it spatially-temporally bifurcates the world
and societies into two. The proposed lacks are collected and compiled
in the form of objectively defined needs of lagging/lacking societies
vis-à-vis advanced/progressive ones. In Illich’s scheme, while the liter-

ature on need took shape in the late 1960s replacing the then existing
concept of development that was premised primarily on growth, the revi-
sionist turn effectively redraws a space for economists and technocrats to
continue their social experiments through a discourse of reaching out to
the poor. By sticking to the logic of the uplifting of third world poor
victims, the World Bank’s needs-based discourse is, as if, a continua-
tion of the old Eurocentric (i.e., Orientalist) development discourse. In
their critical perspective, postdevelopmentalists depart sharply not only
from mainstream development approach typified by the World Bank, but
even from those residing in its fringes such as the human development
approach. The politics of postdevelopmentalism increasingly becomes
anti-development: getting rid of economic development understood in
a Euro-ethnocentric sense; getting rid of the Eurocentric conception
of progress, of the enumerated conception of poverty, and of the thin
version of need.
Three problems have been attributed to the thick version of need
(Fraser 1998: 15–16). The first relates to the fact that the absence of
a universal or objective criterion means that there is no way we can
compare and mediate conflicting needs between cultures. Though we
must confess that we do not know for certain whether this is at all a
problem. The second critique is more serious. The thick version holds
on to a homogenous characterization of culture in a society (emphasizing
thus pre-existing cultural difference) that, as Marglin (1990) avers, is held
together by a ‘power of belief’. To this, Amartya Sen retorts, “The norma-
tive claims by cultural relativists tend to operate with broader units, to wit,
an entire society, seen as a whole … The normative demands of cultural
relativism include deference to each society and an internal culture —an
immunity, as it were, to criticism coming from outside” (Sen 2003: 476).
For us, it would not just mean immunity from questions coming from
the outside, but immunity from an examination of differences-hierarchies
within, differences-hierarchies internal to WOT. This homogenization is
a form of cultural essentialism that reduces other aspects, governing the
forms of life, to the centrality of culture. One can’t consider cultures,
however traditional, to be a priori homogenous; the problem is theo-
retical and not empirical. Moreover, no society is determined solely by
culture; just as the economy as an independent and autonomous entity
is an impossibility, so is culture. Culture is overdetermined by non-
cultural processes, including class processes. The third problem of the
thick version of need might be related to a surreptitious universalism

(one can call it the universalism of the ‘local’) in the invocation of
cultural particularity. Marglin invokes the example of the perceived need
of circumcision of females in some African cultures. This cultural prac-
tice flows from the belief that the offspring of uncircumcised females are
inferior. This belief is imposed on particular subjects whose need in this
regard is not a matter of consideration; due to hierarchies pertaining to
seniority-gender, children in general and the girl child in particular would
not be in a position to speak against such practices (Chakrabarti and Dhar
2007). When ‘thick’ descriptions enumerate particular cultural attributes,
don’t they leave out other opposing attributes? Thus, within a particular
culture, a ‘thick’ description might actually and in the last instance be
‘thin’, in terms of how it leaves out other cultural features/subjectivities.
The cultural particular or the local thus contains a form of the surrep-
titious universal; at times, it is the universal of the male; at times, that
of the upper caste Brahmin; cultures are power-ridden; an ignorance or
demotion of the element of power in the local introduces universalism
through the backdoor; consequently, the thick version’s attempt to escape
universality fails. Having raised the question of cultural essentialism, let us
now move to the problematical understanding of the economy that afflicts
much of the postdevelopmentalist renditions of need.
To begin with, we consider Illich’s claim of need replacing growth
as the new form of colonial discourse misplaced. Need is neither
an anathema to growth nor is development and need substitute for
one another. Growth and need, in tandem, constitute the hegemonic
form of capitalist-led development (we shall show in subsequent chapters
how private capitalist surplus value appropriation, local–global market,
and hegemonic need constitute the nodal points of hegemonic capi-
talism). Given this, contesting the contending hegemonic readings of
need is an essential component of the struggle and movement towards
a reconstruction of the social. Escobar identifies the problem:
Social movements necessarily operate within dominant systems of need

interpretation and satisfaction, but they tend to politicize interpretations;
that is, they refuse to see needs as just “economic” or “domestic” … It
is a problematic “moment,” since it usually entails the involvement of the
state and the mediation by those who have expert knowledge… It is clear
that in the Third World the process of needs interpretation and satisfac-
tion is inextricably linked to the development apparatus…The challenge for
social movements—and the “experts” who work with them—is to come up

with new ways of talking about needs and of demanding their satisfaction
in ways that bypass the rationality of development with its “basic needs”
discourse. The “struggle over needs” must be practiced in a way conducive
to redefining development and the nature of the political. (Escobar 1992:
46)
It is our contention that to struggle over needs so as to redefine both

development and the political, it is not enough to be antiorientalist, one
needs to be anti-capitalocentric as well; because hegemonic need is not
just a product of orientalism, it is also a product of capitalocentrism.
As Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001) rightly argue, postdevelopmen-
talist positions often falter on the question of capitalocentrism. In post-
developmentalist renditions, there are two types of economy, which are
independent and autonomous of one another: a market/global economy
founded on the logic of capital and a traditional/local economy founded
on subsistence. The major problem in this reiteration of economic dualism
is that the economy, unlike our class-focused economic cartography, is
fixed onto capitalism, taken to be its interpellating centre. Consequently,
capitalism as an extra-discursive presence remains undertheorized; it is
also the centre, in terms of which the economy, including the existence
of traditional/local components, is represented. Even as postdevelopmen-
talists critique capitalist development, their own understanding of the
economy remains capitalocentric. Secondly, the reduction of the tradi-
tional economy to nature or culture is as monist as the reduction of
the modern economy to capitalism. In class-focused terms, the so-called
traditional economy often projected as third world is actually a complex
of both exploitative and non-exploitative processes, both fair distribution
and unfair distribution of surplus, where modern abuse [may be grafted]
onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality (Césaire 2001);
see Chapter 8.
In our framework, unlike the postdevelopmental approach, the centre a
la the circuits of global capital are constructed from within the decentred
and disaggregated class-focused economy as part of demonstrating the
operations of capitalocentrism in the hegemonic formation. The absence
of a theorization of capitalocentrism in the postdevelopment framework
would mean that they would fail to distinguish between world of the
third and third world (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, 2017; Chakrabarti
2022). Therefore, Escobar (who otherwise offers a profound critique
of development) notes that “the development discourse…has created an

extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exer-
cise of power over, the Third World” (Escobar 1995 [2012]: 9). At the
same time, he deposits faith in rescuing the ‘third world’ by arguing
that “the Third World is contested reality whose current status is up
for scrutiny and negotiation” (1995: 214–215) (also see Chakrabarti
and Dhar 2009: 96–99). The problem is that “development discourse
constructs an economic/social reality within which third world has a
particular place and there is no third world outside of that reality. Escobar
is urging us to resist the negative representation of third world without
quite realizing that one cannot but have a negative representation of third
world; third world is the representation of that which has to be projected
as negative. There is no third world except in its denigrated representa-
tion; there is nothing to salvage of third world” (Chakrabarti and Dhar
2009: 98); to criticize and defend the same third world is a logical contra-
diction. It is also a problem of theorizing the outside in the context of the
hegemonic. Interrogating and resisting development within the compass
of third worldism (i.e., as a devalued constitutive inside of the hegemonic)
are one thing, while doing the same from its constitutive outside of world
of the third is quite another. Unable to make this distinction, postdevel-
opmentalists conflate and collapse world of the third and third world into
hegemonic third worldism, which in a rather circular matter they both
criticize (because it is constructed from a Eurocentric perspective as a
lacking other) and defend (because of the resistance to capitalism from
within that space).
In our work, traditional societies—re-theorized and represented as
WOT—are understood as neither lacking nor complete. Instead, WOT
remains the space of the complex play of class–caste–gender–sexuality–
nature and other processes, we have no clue of—considerations that are at
work in an overdetermined and contradictory manner. As we shall show,
the two lips of ‘class-need’ (Irigaray 1977) operate as much in the circuits
of global capital as in WOT. WOT too is a site of class-need struggles
and of the hegemonic operations to generate consent and collaboration
within WOT. The struggle (i) against forms of hegemonic need unleashed
by the hegemonic within WOT to protect and expand the operations of
the circuits of global capital and the struggle (ii) against injustices within
WOT would have to be confronted by the complex of class and need
struggles; the invocation of radical need in this context is pivotal from a
Marxian ethico-political standpoint.
Marx on Need and the Invocation of Radical Need

The unique feature of Marx’s version of need (Heller 1988; Fraser 1998)
is its movement away from the universal-particular or the objective-
subjective dichotomy into a plane where the objective (thin) notion of
need becomes overdetermined by the subjective (thick) notion of need.
Collecting the somewhat dispersed encounter of Marx with need, Fraser
(1998) delivers a quite comprehensive and systematic study of Marx’s
rendition of need. Following Fraser, we arrive at various notions of need
in Marx—natural need, necessary need, luxury need, socially created need,
social need, and true social need. Fraser reads Marx as dividing need
between the abstract and the concrete or between need and need form.
Natural need presents the abstract form of need while the rest—neces-
sary need, luxury need, socially created need, social need, and true social
need—are all concrete forms of need. Need cannot exist without the
need forms. The need space is decentred and disaggregated into concrete
need forms. Another critical feature of Marx’s rendition of need is his
endeavour to link the conception of need with class and capital. Marx
hammered home the necessity of locating the origin of any specific need
form in the spatial–temporal context in which it arises. That is why Marx
saw the importance of understanding the workings of capital and locating
the need form in the context of a materializing capitalism. This is not to
say that all needs are reducible to the capitalist logic—that would be crass
capitalocentrism—but one must remain wary of needs that are procreated
in and through the functioning of capital and of the operations of the
hegemonic in general to secure the rule of capital. In this context, one can
ask, which form of need is a product of capitalist hegemony? Which form
of need is a critique of the capitalist hegemony? Which need threatens
capitalist hegemony? In fact, in this context, Marx poses what Fraser calls
a notion of radical needs that will encapsulate need forms and which, in
turn, will form a counter-hegemonic moment in the struggle against capi-
talism. Those need forms in Need I and Need II space are radical which
question the rule and working of capital and of hegemonic capitalism in
general; radical needs thus are in opposition to hegemonic needs. Thus,
struggles for radical need forms and struggles against exploitation (and
subjection-subjectivation of WOT) must complement and converge if we
are to contemplate a challenge to the hegemonic in favour of a postcapi-
talist social. That is how we respond to Escobar’s call (given in an earlier
quote) to politicize the notion of need.
Fraser reads capitalism as a closed entity without any cracks, ruptures,

or fissures. Within such a rendition of capitalism, Fraser offers human
need for free time as an example of radical need, a need radicalized
through absenteeism, strikes, go slows, sabotage of machinery, or say even
class struggles to reduce working time. Andre Gorz’s (1980) work epit-
omizes this impulse. In contrast, for us (global), capitalism appears from
within a space that is decentred and disaggregated, yet hegemonic. We
thus read Fraser’s radical needs as articulated, at best, from within the
circuits of global capital; hence in what sense these needs are radical is
not clear; for without an alternative economic cartography and without a
counter-hegemonic imagination, the idea of radical need as representing
a challenge to the hegemony of (global) capital remains somewhat less
groundbreaking. We further ask: what about needs and their radical
articulation outside the circuits of global capital and within WOT? The
radicalness of need arises from the need space itself that connects need
to certain counter-hegemonic ethical criteria in the realm of both Need I
and Need II. Radical need is a form of need that, by its very nature and
manner of being posed, confronts capital and the hegemonic.
The question of need cannot be divorced from the class-focused
economy where the subject-object division melts; each is overdetermined
by the other as the need form gets shaped. While need may arise, say, due
to culturally specific necessities, it cannot be posited outside the question
of distribution, and since distribution is intrinsically linked with produc-
tion, need is thus not outside of production either. Changes in need
towards radical needs would require that the process of performance,
appropriation, distribution, and receipt of surplus labour be transformed
for both the system of production and distribution to be subjected to
the concerns of radical needs. Marxian ethico-politics would thus demand
an articulated understanding of class and radical needs (hegemonic need
disarticulates the two); even our Need II space, where surplus is absent,
is specified from a class-focused perspective. Building on Marxian ethico-
politics, expanded communism entails a complex social combination of
non-exploitative class processes and fulfilment of radical needs.
Expanded Communism
In terms of the class-need overdetermined space, communism is a much
broader concept and a more expansive ethico-political view than that
circumscribed by just the communist class process. To take a minimalist
condition and perspective, we begin with Resnick and Wolff’s insight that
“Communism denotes a social formation in which communist funda-
mental class processes and classless production arrangements predominate
(in varying proportions) in the production of goods and services” (1988:
38). In the light of the discussion in Chapter 2 and here, we modify
this arrangement to include both the communist class process and the
AC communitic class process. The two qualify because both are non-
exploitative; this is in addition to the non-surplus space of classless
arrangement that we referred to as need-based economy. We rename
this complexity of arrangements as ‘expanded communism’ (Chakrabarti
2001; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003; Chakrabarti, et al. 2008). The
template of expanded communism consists of:
Expanded Communism under class process: a social arrangement

pertaining to those types of non-exploitative class processes (AC and
CC) with class sets ranging from {13–16, 21–24} producing social
surpluses that are capable, likely and striving to satisfy or meet the
contingently produced radical needs of society in whatever form and
at whatever level.
Expanded Communism as classless society: a social arrangement in the
absence of the distinction between necessary and surplus labour,
existing for satisfying the contingently produced (radical) needs
of society in whatever form and at whatever level. This form of
expanded communism is akin to the need-based economy.
The above template introduces its own complexity in our framework.

From a Marxian perspective, radical needs entail some socially determined
understanding of fair distribution. Since economic fairness is described in
the socially determined context of need, fairness like need is in a continual
state of change and annulment; what emerges as radical need too is in a
state of flux. Also, neither non-exploitation nor fair distribution are means
to an end, but are ends in themselves. The focus on ending exploita-
tion requires a movement towards a particular set of FCPs depending
upon the acceptable criteria chosen, while the focus on fair distribution
requires a specific direction of distributional change depending on the
relevant criteria of need. A Marxian point of view requires the simul-
taneous movement towards the two goals, which necessarily may not
be compatible with one another. We can imagine the case of a hideous
communist system. In that system, class processes may be communist,

but distribution highly unfair if the collective appropriators are reluctant
to share their surplus with others. In contrast, we may have a benevo-
lent capitalist system where exploitative (especially exploitative capitalist)
organizations are not questioned, but where distribution is fair (as in the
welfare states of the Nordic countries). The former celebrates the end of
exploitation but lives with the blight of an unfair society. It takes care of
the ethic of sharing in, but not that of sharing out; hardly an attractive or
a long-run option. The latter, on the other hand, celebrates the ethic of
fairness, but is governed by rules and rights that generate an exploitative
society based on wage slavery. This takes care of sharing out, but not that
of sharing in. Expanded communism must live through this tension, and
chart out its path, as will be described in Chapter 10.
One final point on expanded communism under class process needs to
be mentioned. If class-based expanded communism is to be the desired
objective and if it is achieved, then we need to explain the problem of
exclusion in it of independent class process with its class set forms {1–
4}. Self-appropriation is based on an individualistic logic and has nothing
in common with the aspect of sharing that governs the two forms of
expanded communism—the class and the classless one. While individ-
uals may show some arbitrary social commitment, there is no mechanism
to guarantee these acts and the benefits to be received from them. We
have read self-appropriation only in the light of exploitation and have
found it to be non-exploitative. However, if we read self-appropriation
as part of expanded communism or as helping in the imagination of
expanded communism, which requires the simultaneous fulfilment of the
two above-mentioned arrangements, then it turns out to have some limi-
tations. Given the ethic of sharing that binds the theme and arrangements
of expanded communism, not all non-exploitative classes are desirable as
ends-in-themselves; at best, they could be means to an end or coexist
as supplementary arrangements. Instead, CC and AC class processes
with class set forms (21–24) and (12–16), respectively, satisfy the first
arrangement of expanded communism and are also conducive to paving
the way for classless arrangements, which satisfy the second arrange-
ment of expanded communism. We do not take forward this discussion
in this chapter. Instead, we would just like to suggest that a Marxian
ethico-politics within a class-need interface would have to encounter the
template of expanded communism and confront the social justice ques-
tion pertaining to it. We will revisit the question of expanded communism
in Chapter 10 to discuss the interface of ethics, social justice, and politics

from a Marxian standpoint.
Conclusion
The hegemonic trope of developing an undeveloped third world is essen-
tially structured around and foregrounded in terms of the needs discourse
pertaining to the distribution of social surplus. Hegemonic third wordlist
operations produce a displacement of WoT into a platform that is under
the control and management of institutions including the World Bank
and the organs of themodern state. Such a set of needs—‘hegemonic
need’—is conceptualized as emanating from a universalist, rights-based
paradigm and becomes the nodal signifier of the hegemonic. However,
while for the hegemonic it is a secret nodal point, for the hegemonized
it operates as a delusional veil. The delusional veil works as a cover over
the foreclosure of the relationship between need and class. Stripped of
the language of class, third wordlist subjects become objects of develop-
mentalist benevolence. Consequently, as we shall explore in Chapter 5,
global capitalist hegemony works through three nodal signifiers—private
capitalist surplus value appropriation, local–global market, and hegemonic
need. Chapter 10 will reinvoke the question of the relationship between
hegemonic need and radical need in terms of the relationship between
class and need, and address the question of ethic-politics of world of the
third, as also trace out a possible path of Marxian transformation of the
social and the subject in directions that cater to questions of social justice.
References
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CHAPTER 4
Foreclosure, Delusional Veil,

and the Lacanian Real
Introduction
A picture held us captive.
And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language
and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
This chapter takes a close look at the picture that has held us captive,
the picture of global capitalist hegemony; how it, that is, global capitalist
hegemony, has held us captive; and how we could not get outside it;
and why we could not get outside it. Global capitalist hegemony lay in
our language, and that language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Was global capitalist hegemony then secured through a putting outside
of some other language (here the language of class; class as the primor-
dial signifier of capitalism; see Chapter 2), as also the language of the
Other (here world of the third [WoT])? Was it secured through the repu-
diation of a fundamental ‘signifier-jouissance complex’? Was our captivity
then secured through processes of repression (Verdrangung ), negation
(Verneinung ), disavowal (Verleugnung ), foreclosure (Verwerfung ), and
the missing signifier (Verworfen) (Lacan 2017: 132, 139), as we have
suggested in Chapter 1? Especially, foreclosure; foreclosure of the possible
exposition of an Other language; or language of the Other?

Switzerland AG 2023
To think the picture and the outside, to think captivity and escape,
to think captivity within a certain language and an escape from given
language, to think hegemonic language and foreclosed language, and
to think hegemony and foreclosure, this chapter works at the inter-
face of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis1 and post-Althusserian Marxism. It
asks whether there could be a relation between the two, between (post-
Lacanian) psychoanalysis and (post-Althusserian) Marxism, or for that
matter between the psychoanalytic mindset-episteme and Marxist ethico-
politics (see Dhar and Chakrabarti 2015 for the Moebius between surplus
and unconscious).
This chapter relates, in other words, to the possibility of a psychoan-
alytic Marxism, a Marxism that is overdetermined by the psychoanalytic
unconscious and the psychoanalytic subject-affects.2 Does such a possible
rubbing of shoulders, between Marx and Freud, and between Lacan
and Althusser enable us, offer us ground, to understand the workings
of the unconscious in hegemony in general, and global capitalist hege-
mony in particular, and question in turn the presuppositions of global
capitalist hegemony? Such a rubbing of shoulders, such a forging of a
relation, is perhaps made possible through a radical displacement of much
of psychoanalysis and at least some of Marxism as well, through a radical
displacement of both the picture and its outside, of both the idea of
picture and the idea of an outside.
This chapter thus works on the radical displacement of one concept in
the space of psychoanalysis—the concept that relates to the notion of an
outside—the concept of the Lacanian Real, and one concept in the space
1 The authors of this work have arrived at the understanding that psychoanalysis, as
such, would not be habitable for a class focused post-structuralist rendition of Marxism.
It is never enough to put to use Freudian or Lacanian concepts in their unaltered form,
in their original form in the space of Marxism. Psychoanalysis would have to be funda-
mentally displaced so as to make it habitable for Marxism. Psychoanalysis would have
to be turned ab-original. Ab-original psychoanalysis is to a large extent post-Freudian
and post-Lacanian. “Psychoanalysis has its metaphysics – its name is Oedipus. And that
a revolution - this time materialist - can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus,
denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal
psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence
of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1984: 75; also see Dhar 2016).
2 Spivak speaks of a deconstructive mindset. She also speaks of working at the overdeter-
mined interstices of Marxism, feminism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis (Spivak 1996:
54).
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 87
of Marxism—the concept that relates to the notion of the hegemonic—

the concept of Capital-ism (in this book, we distinguish between Marx’s
Capital—the book, capitalist class set and capitalist system—the concrete
process and capital-ism—the hegemonic formation). We also argue that
the ‘subject’ of capitalism—both the hegemonic subject and the hege-
monized subject—comes into existence through the Moebius of the play
of language/signifiers and affect/jouissance. We see the symbolic order of
capitalism as imbued with processes of power and hence as hegemonic;
we look at the possible suture of a symbolic order—even if contingent—
through crypted nodal signifiers, rather than the impossibility of suture.
We argue that capitalist hegemony is grounded on the “foreclosure of the
impossibility of totalization”—an impossibility that marks the other Four
Discourses in Lacan, as also on the delusion of “self-sufficiency, complete-
ness and vitality” (see Lacan’s Seminar XVII for a full elaboration of
the Four Discourses and the ‘impossibility of mastery’; also see Tomšič
2015: 220). Hence, one needs a dialogue between Marx and Freud to
make sense of the delusion, as also the question and “exploitation of [the]
desire” for consumption (see Tomšič 2015).
The concept of the hegemonic (here global capitalist hegemony) and
the concept of the Lacanian Real are redesigned in this chapter in terms
of two categories—‘reality’ and ‘real’. We work on the close and near
inalienable relation between reality and real. We show how a Marxist
understanding of reality comes to be related to a Freudian-Lacanian
understanding of the real—how the space of reality and the space of the
real are produced at one and the same time, in one turn. We show how
reality as both a hegemonic system (a Marxian notion) and/or a fantasy
construction (a Freudian-Lacanian notion) with libidinal investment come
to be produced through the process of foreclosure, through the produc-
tion of what we designate as the real. The process of foreclosure in turn
leads to the production of a delusional veil which would cover the tear
produced (in language) by foreclosure.
The process of foreclosure, the process of the production of the real,
does not come about as isolated but, somewhat paradoxically, in rela-
tion to processes of inclusion, inclusion of the real within the hegemonic,
within the Lacanian Symbolic, albeit in displaced forms (Dhar 2021). The
real, however, is included not as real but in a circumscribed and habit-
able form, in forms habitable for the hegemonic. The real is, as if, put
outside through the inclusion of substitute real-s. Substitute real-s come
either as the victim version of the real (we have represented the substi-
tute version, the victim version as realvictim as against the real) or the evil
version of the real (we have represented the substitute version, and the evil
version as realevil or as realdystopic as against the real). The founding as also
the foregrounding of both versions—realvictim and realevil —as the consti-
tutive inside of the hegemonic protracts further the process of foreclosure.
The somewhat paradoxical language of inclusion—the language in which
the real is assimilated—the language of the victim/evil is complicit in the
reproduction of the hegemonic. The other process that protracts further
the process of foreclosure is the process of projecting the real as the Dark
Continent, a certain primitivization of the real, a certain substitution of
the real by the real-as-utopian, by the purportedly utopian version of the
real (we have represented the substitute version, the utopian version as
realutopian or as realDark Continent ). This is the moment of further excision
of the real; this moment of excision finds fruition through a displace-
ment of the real into an impossible, unviable, unlivable, unachievable,
and distant dark utopia, displacement of the real into an absolute outside
of the hegemonic. The substitute real-s come to form a delusional veil
over the tear produced by foreclosure.
In our theorization, the received rendition of the Lacanian Real is first
split into two—the Real (the unknowable, the unspeakable remainder) and
the real (the knowable unknown, the speakable unspoken, the rem[a]inder);
the real is further disaggregated into substitute real-s (the realvictim , the
realevil , the realutopian , and so on).
Taking off from a deconstructed rendition of the outside, an outside
which is not only decentred and heterogeneous, but is accessed in
polymorphous fragments by the hegemonic, we offer a theory of the
foreclosed outside and the foregrounded form of the foreclosed outside—
where the foregrounded forms form the delusional veil—and the delu-
sional veil covers the tear produced by foreclosure. This particular theory
of hegemony through foreclosure-foregrounding and the delusional veil
(as also crypted nodal points; more on this later) will hereafter guide our
description of global capitalist hegemony and world of the third (WoT).
Our rather painstaking search for a theory of the outside was driven, on
the one hand by our desire to distance ourselves from the logic of third
wordism, as also to find, on the other hand, the real or the foreclosed
outside (which we designate in this work as WoT).
We take off from the understanding of reality as that which neces-
sarily lacks in closure/finitude and then move over to an understanding
of reality as structured through the secret or crypted work of contin-

gent nodal moments or points de capiton. Moments of contingent nodal
closure give to an otherwise open-ended, dis-aggregated reality the look
of a hegemonic system. Hegemony is seen by us as a desperate response to
the “lack of experienced inner consistency” and an attempt, however para-
doxical, of “trying to resemble an idealized version” (of say Capitalism or
the Capitalist Subject)—supported in turn by crypted nodal signifiers and
the foregrounded delusional veil. Capitalism or the Capitalist Subject is
thus not One coherent or consistent whole. “It is decomposed, in pieces.
And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving, and realized
image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image”. The work of
hegemony is to institute this “idealized version” of the Self, this “spec-
ular [self] image”, and produce a fetishistic excess out of class sets 5 and
17, primarily class set 17. The labour of analysis in this book is to “work
through” this “idealized version”, this “specular image”, this “delusional
veil”—in a word, and this “unconscious discourse” (see Lacan 2006: 569)
in the world of the hegemonized, where the “unconscious discourse” is
about not-knowing that one knows. The hegemonized hence has to work
through her own misrecognition of reality (because of the delusional veil)
as also tease out the crypted nodal signifiers. This moment of closure
through crypted nodal signifiers in an otherwise open (yet antagonistic)
field of free-floating signifiers is decoded-deciphered in this book.
We also ask in this book: if a particular reality as a hegemonic system
is produced through foreclosure, would not the perspective or perhaps
the standpoint of the foreclosed particular, if made to bear upon the
said reality, reality posing as the universal, inaugurate in turn a counter-
hegemonic moment? But to make sense of such a counter-hegemonic
moment one needs to initiate two moves:
1. First, one needs to read reality not as an insurmountable

Leviathan—but instead produce a disaggregated rendition of reality.
One needs to produce a disaggregated rendition of Capitalism.
From such a disaggregated rendition of reality surfaces the hege-
monic rendition of reality and the foreclosed real.
2. Second, one needs to produce thereafter a disaggregated rendition
of the outside of such reality. More precisely, one needs to distil out
from within the received understanding of the outside, the many
moments of the outside. In this chapter, we take a close look at the
category of the Lacanian Real. We tease out from within the given
understanding of the Lacanian Real the conceptual couple Real-real;

we produce a further breakdown of the real into substitute real-s.
On the one hand, we relate hegemony not to a seamless under-
standing of the Lacanian Real, but to the real. On the other, we
also relate the hegemonic to substitute real-s. We relate it to the
displaced renditions of the real—the realvictim , the realevil , and the
realutopian as moments within the discursive perimeter of the defined
reality. We relate counter-hegemony to the return of the real within
the discursive terrain, and not to the delusional veil of the substitute
real-s: realvictim , the realevil , and the realutopian .
Unexpected Help from Lacan

This section asks: how does one arrive at “an ethics or politics truly
contemporary with psychoanalysis”? What would such an arrival mean
for Marxian ethics and politics? Would it be to see hegemony as not just
the subaltern’s simple accrual/consent to or collaboration with the elite’s
persuasive principles (this being the classical understanding of hegemony),
but as an unconscious interpellation, and a kind of irrationally motivated
passionate attachment to the phantasmagorical (somewhat like Walter
Benjamin in The Arcades Project ), the spectral (somewhat like Derrida
in Specters of Marx), or what Marx calls the “delusional appearance of
things” in Wages, Prices, Profit that works as a cover over the tear created
due to foreclosure (Lacan 1997a: 45)? Would this take us beyond the
extant “a-psychoanalyticism” of Marxism (Dhar 2017b)? Taking off from
Lacan, one can now think of two ways of conceptualizing the hegemonic
in Marxism. On the one hand, the hegemonic can be conceptualized
in terms of what Lacan calls the neurotic phenomenon (i.e., through the
contingent suture of an incomplete and open-ended totality replete with
antagonisms). On the other, the hegemonic can be conceptualized in
terms of what Lacan calls the psychotic phenomenon (i.e., through the
production of a spectral/delusional appearance of things premised on the
lurking feeling that something is amiss and a lid or a cloud cover is what
can hide the rent in reality produced by foreclosure. Hence there are
two closures: one, foreclosure, which is not a closure but a tear, i.e., an
opening, a kind of primal/primitive opening, an opening caused before
the actual/delusional closure; two, the closure of the rent of foreclosure
through the production of a delusional cosmology). It is with respect to
the Wolf man Case (Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose; Der
Wolfsmann; 1918 [1914]) that Lacan speaks of foreclosure or primitive

Verwerfung 3 :
The progress of the analysis of the subject in question [i.e., the Wolfman]
… point to a Verwerfung , a rejection … We have been led to locate this
rejection on the level, I would say, of the non-Bejahung,4 because we
cannot, in any way, place it on the same level as negation… In a general
way, in fact, the condition such that something exists for the subject is that
there be Bejahung; this Bejahung which isn’t a negation of a negation.
What happens when this Bejahung doesn’t happen, in such a way that
nothing appears in the symbolic register? Just let’s look at the Wolf Man.
There was no Bejahung for him, no realization of the genital plane. There
is no trace of this plane in the symbolic register … it really is a psychotic
phenomenon that we are dealing with. (Lacan 1997a: 58–59)
Building on Lacan’s re-reading of the Wolfman, this book marks a few

departures from standard or classical psychoanalysis; it questions ‘original’
formulations in psychoanalysis; and in that sense it renders psychoanalysis
‘ab-original’. First, the book argues that the “psychoanalytic effects that
are determinant for the subject” are not one and not the paradigmatic
one designated repression; “effects such as foreclosure (Verwerfung ),
repression (Verdrangung ), and negation (Verneinung ) itself – and I add
with the appropriate emphasis that these effects follow the displacement
(Entstellung ) of the signifier so faithfully that imaginary factors, despite
their inertia, figure only as shadows and reflections therein” (Lacan 2006:
11) contribute in, perhaps, unequal measure, in both a diachronic and
synchronic sense, to overdetermine the subject.
3 Lacan translates Verwerfung as rejet (rejection) and retranchement (excision, suppres-

sion, subtraction, deduction, retrenchment, or entrenchment) in the initial years; then
more consistently as foreclosure. Freud’s discusses foreclosure in “The Neuro-Psychoses
of Defence”; Strachey translates the verb form verwirft as “rejects.”
4 ‘In his ‘Reply to Jean Hyppolite’s commentary on Freud’s “Negation”’
(1954), Lacan describes a primordial act of affirmation which is logically prior to
any act of negation. Lacan uses Freud’s German term, Bejahung to denote this primor-
dial affirmation. He posits a basic alternative between Bejahung and the psychotic
mechanism he later calls ‘foreclosure’. Bejahung designates a primordial inclusion of some-
thing in the symbolic, whereas foreclosure is a primordial refusal to include something…
in the symbolic’ (Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Available at: http://nosubject.
com/index.php?title=Bejahung).
Second, this book is also an attempt to move away from the paradig-
matic understanding of foreclosure—the foreclosure of the Name of
the Father or the paternal metaphor (as ground and cause of Shreber’s
psychosis) (Lacan 1997a; 1977 [1998]: 179–225) to other moments
of foreclosure, say (i) “Verwerfung [foreclosure] of castration”, (ii)
“Verwerfung, a rejection (and not Verneinung: ‘repression’)” of “as if the
genital plane” in the Wolfman, as if, “there is no trace of this plane in the
symbolic register” (Lacan 1997a: 58–59), (iii) “rejection (Verwerfung) of
the commandments of speech” (Lacan 2006: 298), etc.
It is not a question, he says, of repression (Verdrangung), for repression

cannot be distinguished from the return of the repressed in which the
subject cries out from every pore of his being what he cannot talk about.
Regarding castration, Freud tells us that this subject “did not want to know
anything about it in the sense of repression”. And to designate this process
he uses the term Verwerfung , for which, on the whole, I would propose
the term “excision” [retranckement ]. Its effect is a symbolic abolition: “one
cannot say that any judgment regarding [the] existence [of castration] was
properly made, but it was as if it had never existed.” (Lacan [1954] in
“Reply to Jean Hyppolite’s commentary on Freud’s “Negation”; see Lacan
2006: 323)
Lacan’s reading of the case of the Wolf Man in turn give way to
four readings of the ‘psychotic phenomenon’ (Lacan 1997: 85; Vanheule
2014): psychotic phenomenon understood in terms of (a) impasses
in Imaginary identification (early Lacan in the 1930s), (b) foreclo-
sure (verwerfung ) of a fundamental signifier from the Symbolic (Lacan
after the linguistic turn in the 1950s; focus on subject of the signifier),
(c) object a and jouissance (focus on subject of drive) as marking limits
to the Symbolic and the subject’s non-separation from object a (Lacan
after Seminar X [1962–1963]), and (d) the logic of the knotting of
the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real in sinthoms-psychical reality (Lacan after
Seminar XXIII [1975–1976], where the distinction between neurosis
and psychosis is problematized and is rendered Moebius-like; it is a
movement from dyadic structures to triadic structures). In this book, we
build on later Lacan’s problematization of the strict distinction between
neurosis and psychosis to make sense of hegemony in general: what is
important in Lacan’s later work is how the real, symbolic, and imagi-
nary registers are knotted via a symptom, while Lacan’s earlier work on
neurosis and psychosis holds to the “Aristotelian presumption that one is
either a member of a class or not, his later reflections demonstrate that

the boundary between neurosis and psychosis should be thought of as
fluid” (Vanheule 2014: 164; also see Brenner 2020).
Our understanding of the hegemonic, thus, has two components: One,
it is neither merely real nor unreal; it is irreal ; and it is spectral; however,
that of course does not mean that it has no subject effects (Dhar 2015b).
Two, it is delusional; it is productive of a delusion; and the delusion of
the interpellating “American Dream”, for example, however, once again,
does not mean that it has no subject effects. In fact, delusions or the
world of phantasy can have subject effects far stronger than what could
be called real perceptual–conceptual apprehensions or comprehensions of
the world. Marx called it the ‘delusional appearance of things’; the task
of the political is to work through this delusional appearance of things
in the everyday and in every pore of life (we would, however, desist
the reduction of this formulation to the appearance/reality, false/true
consciousness model so rampant in some variants of Marxism).
We, thus, move away from a realist rendition of the hegemonic to an
irreal understanding of the hegemonic, an irreal (combining real-unreal)
that has deep-seated subject effects. This is an understanding of the hege-
monic that is ‘phantomatic’ (see Marx in The German Ideology). It is, as
if, premised on the ‘mystical character of the becoming-fetish’. It is the
‘ghost [that] gives its form, that is to say, its body, to the ideologem’; it
is as if one will have to reckon with the ‘invincible force and the original
power of the “ghost” effect’ (Derrida 1994: 186). This is, however, not
to suggest that the delusion cosmology is not real or is an absolute outside
to what could be called materiality. Rather such delusions are a constitu-
tive component of a deeper and expanded understanding of materiality,
produced through practices in as much as it also produces practices. The
dream-like nature of hegemony does not make it unreal. It puts it at the
cusp of the real–unreal.
We also argue for a deeper and expanded realism by invoking fore-
closure and the Lacanian ‘real’, a notion that is placed once again at the
cusp of the real-unreal-irreal. The foreclosed is neither present (in a simple
sense in the Lacanian Symbolic), nor is it absent (in a simple sense in the
subject world). It is both absence and presence: presence in the sense that
it has real subject effects; absence in the sense that the discursive struc-
ture resists it. What one had conceived of as reality is a world of phantasy
(as in Lacan), and a delusional appearance of things (as in Marx). It is
in fact a veil or a cover for that which has been foreclosed. What is fore-
closed is real. On the one hand, what is foreclosed is a necessary fragment
of reality. Thus, its absence creates a ‘hole’ in the perception of reality,
which the world of phantasy concomitantly fills.
On the other hand, it continues to haunt, torment, and threaten the
hegemonic; the crux of the hegemonic is, thus, constitutive of, or is
premised on, the interminable ‘keeping at bay’, ‘putting to burial’, ‘ren-
dering dead’, ‘tabooing’, ‘silencing’, and ‘keeping in a secret crypt ’ the
real; in a word, the hegemonic must resist the return of the real; it must
mutate, transit, and change form in order to keep the crypt a secret,
or keep the secret of the crypt a secret; and this is where Derrida (or
the perspective of the Derridean psychoanalytic: cryptonymy) comes to
supplement Lacan. Spectrality (a la Derrida) and delusion (a la Marx-
Lacan) on the one hand, and foreclosure (a la Lacan) and secrecy (a la
Derrida) on the other, are two concept couples through which we access
the question of hegemony (see Dhar 2017b).
The thinking of the political post-psychoanalysis thus takes us beyond
the simple distinction realism/idealism. Dreams, huantologies, spectrality,
delusions, hallucinations, the Lacanian Real, fetishism, and phantasy are
all attempts at making sense of representing the cusp of the real–unreal,
or of occupying the hyphen between the two through the invocation of
the irreality of the hegemonic.
Hegemony is then about a secret script; it is also the script of a crypt;
or that which remains crypted in a script. It is, as if, a kind of scrypt —if
we can risk a neologism—bringing together the angle of the script (i.e.,
the written) and the angle of the crypt (i.e., the hidden). The angle of the
hidden or of “secrecy is essential,” to make sense of hegemony; whence
the crypt becomes, “a hidden place, a disguise hiding the traces of the act
of disguising” (Derrida, 1994: xvii); the crypt is however also and at the
same time, “a [kind of] commemorative monument”, “the [secret] vault
of a desire”; and where a “world of phantasy” or a “delusional appearance
of things” is covering, clouding the crypt.
Counter-hegemony is a politics involving an encounter with the
crypted, with the ‘tombstone of the illicit’, with that which is walled
up, or buried alive’. One could call it the politics of the living dead
(Chitranshi and Dhar 2016), or the politics of an encounter with tabooed
key words in the hegemonic’s Verbarium.
Reality as Disaggregated yet Hegemonic

In this section, we move from a rendition of Reality as Leviathan-like
to a rendition of reality as disaggregated; we thereafter move from such
a disaggregated reality to a rendition of reality as hegemonic. This begs
the further question: why and how does hegemony comes into being;
how does such a disaggregated reality become hegemonic; and how does
hegemony become operational and how does it reproduce itself?
In our work we look at the concept of hegemony not in its classical
Gramscian rendition but in the way Laclau-Mouffe (1985) formulate
the notion of hegemony. Laclau-Mouffe tries to theorize a notion
of hegemony in a conceptually post-structuralist space—a space where
both ‘subject’ and ‘structure’, both Althusserian ‘interpellation’ and the
structural closure of the social, are impossibilities. Paradoxically Laclau-
Mouffe’s notion of hegemony articulates a conceptual space beyond the
general impulse of post-structuralism (if, of course, one could talk of
such a general impulse), beyond the lack that haunts both structure and
subject.
Structuralism did away with the traditional identitarian-substantialist
metaphysics of the subject. The structuralist approach to the founding
limits of the subject was problematized by post-structuralism. Post-
structuralism did away with structure, albeit never to rehabilitate the
subject. In fact, post-structuralism carried us well beyond organizing our
allegiance around any one arm of a binary of apparent opposites—here
subject and structure. Instead, it introduced the notion of lack, of incom-
pleteness—lack and incompleteness of both subject and structure. Both
the structure and the subject were conceptualized as barred, as split, as
fundamentally and perpetually fissured—in other words, and as haunted
by a founding—a near foundational lack in being. Derrida stresses the
moment of ‘limit’5 and moves from the Order of the Symbolic to dissem-
ination that escapes from and disorganizes the very Order—from the
5 Derrida’s emphasis is on the “self-dividing action”, on the “cleavage and torment

interior to meaning in general”, on the fact that the big Other lacks, on the limits of
the big Other. Foucault’s stress is on the excluded—i.e., on the banished small ‘other’.
Derrida’s stress is on repression. Foucault focuses on the forgotten. It is difficult to choose
between Foucault and Derrida. “One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of
legitimacy. … applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend
as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them …” (Lyotard
1988: xi).
primacy of the signified or from the primacy of the signifier (Lacan’s

phallus as the signifier of lack is yet the privileged signifier) to the differ-
änce between signifier and signified—from truth to the non-truth of
truth. For Derrida, who is “at once inside and outside a certain Heideg-
gerian tradition … the authority of the text is provisional, the origin is
[always already] a trace” (Spivak 1976).
Keeping with the spirit of post-structuralism, Lacan (1977a, 1977b)
would also stress the fact that the subject lacks; the Other also lacks; there
is no Other of the Other which shears off this lack; there is no meta-
language; the letter always arrives at its destination not because of some
hidden teleology that regulates its wanderings; the arrival is “always a
retroactive construction founded upon the fortuitous erring of the letter”;
the more the Phallus shows off the more it lays bare its impotence; the
supposed consistency of the Symbolic is also a fiction, an utopia, a cover
up for the Real that forever rocks the boat; and thus the origin is always
already lacking. Thus, post-structuralism, especially, the turn in theory
provided by both Lacan and Derrida, does not simply dis-member the
subject; it dis-members the structure as well.
However, Lacan simultaneously tries to re-formulate a theory of both
structure and subject, even if both are conceptualized as barred from
their very founding. This other Lacan would simultaneously talk of
a journey from fictionality to contingent positionality—from dissemi-
nation, i.e., from the spilling of the seed of meaning to contingent
in-semination—from metonymic slides to metaphoric cuts—from an
interpretation-penetration that is perpetually deferred to a contingent
“collapse of the chora”—from trace to contingent origin(s)—from the
letter perpetually “purloined” to the Letter that provisionally “arrives at
its destination”. Here, Lacan moves, as if, from a founding lack to an
origin, even if phantasmatic—from the fiction of “The Purloined Letter”
to the truth of the letter (see Dhar 2006).
This particular impulse of Lacan makes possible a theorization of hege-
mony. It makes possible a closer look at the production of truth—at the
origin of the ‘origin’, even if phantasmatic—at the suture that gives the
subject of capitalism performative force, at hegemonic closure, at what
covers up the violence of hegemonic closure, and at what makes the
hegemonic ‘hegemonic’.
Laclau-Mouffe, in a particularly Lacanian/Derridean vein, start from
the basic proposition of an “impossibility of society”—of a society that
lacks—of the Other that lacks—of the fact that there is no Other of
the Other; there is also no meta-Other which shears off this lack. And
yet, they predicate the possibility of hegemony in an ever-open field—
hegemony as that which contingently closes society—closes society as a
totality—albeit with cracks and fissures—in order to build up a provisional
hegemonic formation. In this scheme, impossibility of society is cotermi-
nous with the impossibility of totality—and this impossibility is in tune
with the general post-structuralist impulse. Their analysis results in the
conception of a relational space (a system of differences without positivist
terms) unable to constitute itself as such. The sign is the name of a split, of
an impossible suture between the signifier and signified. The impossibility
of society/totality therefore arises from the infinitude of floating signifiers,
each one overflowing in its meaning, such that they cannot be collapsed
to a transcendental signified. The provision of closure in this ever-open
field—closure in the infinite play of floating signifiers, of proto-ideological
elements, is brought about, as if, through the intervention of a certain
“nodal point”—an anchoring signifier that sutures or quilts them—i.e.,
halts their metonymic slide and fixes their meanings. This constructed
closure is what Laclau-Mouffe define as hegemony. However, hegemony
as an articulation does not signify a closure that is complete unto itself.
Closure is contingent. Conceptually, surplus meanings disrupt the full
presence of any articulation, relation, identity, or objectivity. Thus any
objectivity such as a hegemonic formation is (un)real—an impossibility.
The contingent that will have to be secreted out for hegemony to be
operative is thus both inside and outside a hegemonic articulation. When
the contingent erupts, shows its face, and reveals —exposes the impossible
state of objectivity, we call it antagonism. For us ‘antagonism’ is akin to
the inassimilable Lacanian Real in the sense that both share the property
of exceeding, of showing up the limit of language and as such resisting any
attempt at symbolization. It is, as it were, the metaphor for a beyond—a
beyond that is never wholly hemmed in by the logic of the hegemonic.
The hegemonized on the other hand has unconscious identification
with the delusional veil. What structures the sedimentation and solidi-
fication of hegemonized identities, of subjects, and of structures? Why
does interpellation work? How does one get interpellated—unconsciously
albeit—to the crypted nodal signifiers? Does it work through the insti-
tution of guilt in the hegemonized subject, through the institution of
a guilt-ridden conscience as constitutive of our consciousness? Is the
third world subject a subject of guilt; a guilty subject; and always already
guilty—guilty for being underdeveloped, backward, and pre-capitalist? Is
the subjectivity of the hegemonized all about guilt? Or is there some-

thing more to it? How would the subject overcome guilt? What would
undermine/displace the solidifying principles of the hegemonic structure?
The hegemonized subject’s identity is also sutured—contingently albeit—
through the relegation of a certain register of existence to the domain of
the culturally impossible (in this case, non-capitalist existence). A suture
organized through the Lacanian points de capiton. But that is about the
hegemonic formation, a formation that, as it were, manages to keep secret
its fundamental lack in being in order to appear as ‘natural’. And yet a
hegemonic construction secured through reiterative performative gestures
is not just about quilting. It is also about foreclosure and the delusional
veil.
How, however, are we to understand the limits of such production,
the constraints under which such production occurs? Are there social and
political limits to such production? To think the contours of the variable
boundary set and reset by specific political investments, to think, in other
words, the operations of hegemony that set and reset such boundaries
one needs to stress simultaneously the fact that the Lacanian subject is
a barred subject, and that the structure of Althusserian interpellation is
necessarily haunted by a certain incompletion. The Lacanian ‘Real’ (not
the ‘real’) is another name for this ‘incompletion’, and that every subject
is liable to the same postulate of inconclusiveness.
However, in the Leviathan-like rendition of reality, the institution of
capitalism is so complete unto itself, so edificial that capitalism can either
collapse under its own weight or that capitalism can be aimed at only from
outside. Zizek’s understanding of capitalism is Leviathan-like; hence his
call to overthrow capitalism becomes less meaningful. As Laclau observes,
Zizek had told us that he wanted to overthrow [the Symbolic] … to be

replaced … by a thoroughly different regime which he does not have the
courtesy of letting us know anything about … with Zizek … the only
thing one gets from him are injunctions to overthrow or to abolish liberal
democracy, which have no meaning at all. (Laclau 2000: 289–290)6
6 Lacan suggests capitalism is “enough for it to run as if it were on wheels, it can’t run
better, but it actually runs too fast, it runs out, it runs out such that it burns itself out”
(Lacan 1972: 48) as translated and quoted by Vanheule (2016: 1948). Zizek’s faith in the
‘crisis of capitalism’ or ‘crisis of overproduction’ and the consequent fall of capitalism—
falling under its own (over)weight—perhaps stems from Lacan’s “burns itself out” maxim.
We however do not see capitalism as falling due just to the ‘falling rate of profit’ (a
For us, on the other hand, because of the very incompleteness of any
subject-constitution, and because of the provisional nature of the system-
aticity of any structure that poses naturally as a structure, or as the
‘natural structure’, we are able to think and conceptualize politics, poli-
tics of a counter-hegemonic re-articulation of the hegemonic. A politics
organized around a certain historicity of signs—that offers possibilities
for contestation over signifiers-significations—that can open up ever new
options for re-signification.
Such a theorization makes possible a revised rendition of the
immutable, a-historical, and apolitical Lacanian Real into what we have
conceptualized as the real. The real, which, though secreted out, though
externalized, is in a way internal to the Order and which thus encapsu-
lates within its very theorization the possibility of a return. In terms of
our narrative, this enables us to think of a politics of radical change.
The very construction of the hegemonic that we produce contains
an impulse of counter-hegemony. This hinge between hegemony and
counter-hegemony revolves around two conceptual registers—points de
capiton and delusional veil on the one hand and the foreclosed real on
the other. Points de Capiton and foreclosure are once again related to two
moments—nodal point and touchy entry point—that we arrive at through
an analysis of the space of the hegemonic (as also the counter-hegemonic
that lurks, sticking tenaciously to the hegemonic) as is described below:
1. Nodal point offers contingent suture to the hegemonic in a space

of both the ‘barred subject’ and the ‘barred Other’, where both
subject and structure are haunted by a necessary incompletion or
lack; in other words, where both subject and structure are haunted
by the Real—the Real understood as the Kantian thing-in-itself; the
Real as an impossibility that resides at the heart of the Symbolic;
and the Real as a traumatic tip, a spur that could rock perpetually
the smooth operations of the Symbolic. And yet the symbolic ensures
a certain closure/suture; reality is hegemonic. The closure/suture
is ensured through nodal point(s), or for that matter through the
crisis in capitalism does not mean it will fall; crisis could also be an opportunity for it to
reorganize) but getting micro-transformed into postcapitalist futurities because of (a) anti-
capitalist resistance within the circuits of global capital and (b) painstaking longstanding
human endeavour in world of the third contexts to conserve non-exploitative relationships
and transform exploitative ones into non-exploitative processes.
points de capiton. The nodal suture is secured through foreclo-

sure, through the production of the real as the constitutive outside
of nodal articulation. We relate foreclosure to hegemony—one is
impossible without the other. We thereafter relate the foreclosed,
the constitutive outside of nodal articulation, the real of hegemonic
reality to the touchy entry point.
2. Touchy entry point as the category that gives, however
partial/limited, an epistemic access, to the force and field of hege-
monic operations. In our work we try to relate the notion of
touchy entry point to the notion of the real—the real as the
foreclosed of nodal articulation—the real as disruptive of nodal
articulation. Consequently, the touchy entry point relates to the
counter-hegemonic moment.
Here, nodal point and touchy entry point are inalienably conjoined in
an overdetermined relation such that one hits upon 7 both at one and same
time (one is not the cause of the other) such that both surfaces together.
We have thus tried to forge a connection between a Marxist rendition
of Reality and a Freudian-Lacanian rendition of the Real. The Marxist
rendition of Reality and the Freudian-Lacanian rendition of the Real have
gone through several conceptual detours (i.e., original formulations in
both have been put to question or put under erasure; both have been
turned ab-original, in the process). In fact, such detours have enabled
us to forge the connection further. From a rendition of Reality moored
to a metaphysic of presence and from a rendition of the Real moored
equally to a metaphysic of absence, we have moved to a post-structuralist
rendition of both Reality and Real. We have thereafter forged a connec-
tion between Reality and the Real—where both Reality and the Real are
deconstructed.
Here f oreclosure is the “repudiation” (Verwerfung ) of a fundamental
signifier (Lacan 1977a), repudiation of a fundamental signifier with
7 We use the phrase hits upon in a robust sense—hitting upon signifies a chance
encounter. For Lacan, however, hitting upon is not simply a matter of chance; it is a
way in which we think of a partial and contingent taming of chance, however impossible
such a move might appear. Lacanian psychoanalysis tries to think how interpretation would
hit upon the ‘real’ and the nodal constitution of hegemonic ‘reality—how interpretation
would then hit upon the twin ‘reality’—‘real’ or for that matter nodal point-touchy entry
point at one and the same time.
respect to points de caption (or nodal signifiers ). Represented symboli-

cally foreclosure, delusional veil , and points de capiton would perhaps take
up or fall in place in Fig. 4.1.
Taking off from point de capiton as also from foreclosure, we look for
an escape from the fly-bottle; an escape from the hegemonic; and here, in
this book, an escape from global capitalist hegemony, however partial it
may be. The category we invoke in this work to conceptualize the possi-
bility of an escape is the category of the Lacanian Real. We reproduce
in this chapter an ab-original (ab-original in the sense that it is different
from the Original formulation) rendition of the category of the Lacanian
Real. This ab-original rendition constitutes our theorization of foreclosure.
In our ab-original rendition, we rewrite the category of the Laca-
nian Real as an ensemble of two overdetermined categories ‘Real-real’
(Fig. 4.2).
The real is found to be further refracted-displaced into substitute
categories:
1. the realvictim
2. the realevil
3. the realutopian …
Foreclosure: “repudiation” (Verwerfung)

of a fundamental signifier; repudiation of a
fundamental signifier with respect to
points de capiton. Points de Capiton: for Lacan signifier
do not refer to any specific signified in a
one-to-one correspondence but rather to other signifiers so as to constitute a signifying
chain. As a result, we are forced … to accept the notion of an incessant sliding [glissement]
of the signified under the signifier. But there are certain privileged moments when the
signifying chain comes to fix itself to some signified, and these are “anchoring points”
(points de capiton), points like buttons on a mattress or intersections in quilting, where
there is a ‘pinning down’ (capitonnage) of meaning, not to an object but rather by ‘reference
back’ to a symbolic function. (Lacan, 1977a (1960): 154)
Fig. 4.1 Delusional veil (Source Self-constructed)

Lacanian Real : ‘Real’ ‘real’
realvictim – realevil - realutopian
(as the displaced forms of the ‘real’)
Fig. 4.2 Real-real (Source Self-constructed)
In the literature that inhabits us, the Lacanian Real is deployed with
too many connotations, at times with contradictory connotations. In
this work, we rewrite the Lacanian Real as the conceptual couple Real-
real; the realvictim –realevil –realutopian are substitute real-s. In this book,
when we invoke ‘Lacanian Real’ we refer to its usage by other scholars
and distinguish it from the conceptual couple Real-real which would be
paradigmatic of the ab-original rendition of the Lacanian Real.
Of the two sub-categories, the Real (somewhat akin to the Lacanian
Real) is the unspeakable limit. The Real is the remainder.
The real on the other hand is the unspoken of the hegemonic. The real
is the reminder of what was put outside by the hegemonic. The conceptual
couple Real-real is akin to the conceptual couple ‘unspeakable-unspoken’.
The conceptual couple Real-real can also be represented in terms of the
couple ‘remainder-reminder’; remainder and reminder can be represented
together as the ‘rem(a)inder’.
This marks a beginning; this is perhaps the groundwork (Wolfenstein
1993) for our version of psychoanalysis as also of Marxism. This is our
version of a psychoanalysis moored to Marxism and a Marxism moored
to psychoanalysis (i.e., the Real and the real). This is possible because
a particular version of both Marxism and psychoanalysis would be self-
conscious critiques of Western metaphysics.
Marxism and psychoanalysis are this-worldly theories. For each of them,

however, there is a distinction to be drawn between the world as it appears
and the world as it really is. Appearances, moreover, conceal realities. In
each instance the analytical task is to pierce the veil of appearance and
bring the concealed reality into view. The synthetical task is to interpret,
explain, or determine the play of appearances from the perspective of the
revealed reality. (Wolfenstein 1993: 6)
The revealed or the unveiled version of reality comes with the veiled
real, the foreclosed real. Hence the invocation of the two sub-categories
of the Lacanian Real in the space of Marxism: of the two sub-categories,
the Real is our shorthand for the Kantian thing-in-itself , that is, the realm
of the unknowable.
The real is our shorthand for the outside that can never be included as
such; whose form as such haunts the hegemonic (say, Capitalism); which
is an anachronism within the hegemonic; whose presence within the four
walls of the hegemonic puts into doubt the very logic and language of
the hegemonic; and whose discursive pro-creation out of a concern for
“the more difficult task of counter-hegemonic ideological production”
(Spivak 1988) within the hegemonic dismantles the very structure of the
hegemonic. The “ego8 refuses [the real], either because it is paralyzed by
the magnitude of the demand or because it recognizes it as danger. The
former of these grounds is the more primary one; both of them amount to
the avoidance of a situation of danger” (Freud 2003 [1938]: 420). The
ego fends off the danger by the process of repression. The dangerous
impulse is in some way inhibited; its precipitating cause, with its atten-
dant perceptions and ideas, is forgotten. This, however, is not the end of
the process. The danger is retained in its forces; it collects them again; it
is reawakened by some new precipitating cause; thereupon it renews its
demand; and since the path to normal acknowledgement of the danger
(here the real) remains closed to the ego (here, the hegemonic) by what
we may call the scar of repression, somewhere at a weak spot, it opens
8 Brennan (1993) understands ‘modernity’ as the era of the ‘ego’—as that which recon-
stitutes itself infinitely through a certain foreclosure of the ‘real’. Lacan through his
critique of American ego-psychology shifts attention from the perpetual reconstitution of
the ego in modernity (as also in the clinic) to the ‘real’ (as also to the ‘Real’) that could
possibly perturb the smooth functioning of the ego—that is crucial in putting to doubt
the hegemony of that which emerges as the hegemonic.
another path for itself to what is known as substitute danger. The substi-
tute danger or the substitute real (we name it realevil ) comes to light as
a sinthome, with or without the acquiescence of the ego, and with or
without its understanding. All the phenomena of the formation of the
sinthome have at times been described as the ‘return of the repressed’.
“Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distor-
tion [the displacement of the real into the realvictim - realevil - realutopian ]
to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the
original” (Freud 2003 [1938]: 420).
The realvictim is our shorthand for the outside that the hegemonic
includes, albeit in a circumscribed form; the circumscribed form lends
weight to the organizing principle of the hegemonic. The realvictim is
hence the constitutive inside of the hegemonic.
The realutopian is our shorthand for the outside the hegemonic posits
as the dungeon of darkness—as the dark continent, such that one
cannot think of counter-hegemonic ideological production out of such
an outside, an outside that remains elusive in principle. The realutopian is
hence the absolute outside of the hegemonic.
The realvictim as the constitutive inside of the hegemonic and the
realutopian as the absolute outside of the hegemonic are foregrounded in
the same turn as the production of the real. Foreclosure is thus produced
through the process of foregrounding.
An Encounter with the real:

The real in an Encounter
… we must have [il faut ] truth. (Derrida 1987 [1972]: 105)
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to
say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through
this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real. (Lacan 1990: 4,
italics ours)
Through this very impossibility the truth holds onto the real; not that
we are surpassed eternally by an insurmountable impossibility; and not
that we do not have any access to any truth; we know something, at times
what we know we cannot explain it for sure; but we feel it. We have felt it
our entire lives. There is something wrong with the hegemonic. One does
not know for certain what it is but it’s there, like a spur, a traumatic spike
in our minds, driving us mad. It is real; one can set up an encounter with
the real. Or perhaps, one can know with some certainty—one can touch
upon—at least touch upon some enabling perspective, however partial—
even in this world and age, of, following Zizek, the ‘pragmatic-relativist
New sophists and New Age obscurantists’.
Each time philosophy faced a loss of foothold, each time there emerged
within philosophy and within thought in general, a certain sense of
sophism, someone surfaced to face up to the situation. Lacan surfaces
amidst postmodern neo-sophists—when the postmoderns went about
questioning all forms of foundationalism—when they went about ques-
tioning essence, questioning universals, questioning the subject, ques-
tioning science, and questioning truth. Lacan accepted the postmodern
motif of radical questioning; he accepted the postmodern motif of radical
contingency but in turn turned this motif against itself, using it to assert
his commitment to “truth as contingent” (Zizek 1993: 4); such that one
could ask: what happens to truth “when the metaphysical value of truth
has been put into question?” (Derrida 1987 [1972]: 105); and such that
one can ask: what happens to the political when naïve optimism (as also
debilitating fatalism) has been put into question?
In this work, we think of the political in terms of the perspective of the
real. Of the real; an ethico-politics of the real. An ethico-politics of the
real is not an ethico-politics oriented to the real; it is instead an attempt
to re-think the traditional domain of ethico-politics by recognizing and
acknowledging the dimension of the real, by setting up an encounter with
the dimension of the real. It is an attempt to try and retrieve, even to an
extent, the very thing excluded—excluded not just from the traditional
field of epistemo-ontology but from the traditional field of ethics as well,
and turn it, i.e., the hitherto excluded, instead “into the legitimate terri-
tory of ethics” (Zupancic 2000: 3). In Chapter 10, this work thus moves
away from the foreclosed to an ethics of the foreclosed (not ethics to or
for the foreclosed); it moves from the real to an ethics of the real.
Ethics of the real is an ab-original rendition of ethics flowing from
an ab-original rendition of the Lacanian Real. Unabashedly ab-original.
The book invokes ‘ab-originalization’ in a two-fold manner. The first is
about the much-critiqued history of the aboriginalization of the ‘rest of
the world’ by the West and the consequent homogenization of such life-
worlds and worldviews into the lacking other of a modern civilized West.
The first is about the hegemonization of the rest of the world into a self-
image and a self-perception of being ‘aboriginal’, especially the Southern,
colonized, and indigenous life-worlds and worldviews. This led to a degra-
dation and devaluation of the ‘know-hows’ and cultures of the rest of
the world, including (non-capitalist) economic cultures. The first is about
continuing orientalism (both white and brown). The reduction of non-
capitalist economic cultures to pre-capitalist economic cultures is a form
of aboriginalization. Third worldism is an aboriginalization of WoT, at
large. The second is about a possible post-orientalist philosophy of life,
including economic life. The first is about how third wordlist economic
cultures were made from WoT economic cultures. The second is about
what new cultures, including economic cultures can be produced. The
second is about creating new knowledge of WoT as against an extant
knowledge of third worldism. This also requires putting under erasure
(as in Derridean deconstruction) the original formulations of Marxian
and Freudian praxis. The rewriting of the Lacanian ‘inassimilable Real’ as
the ‘foreclosed real’ and the symbolic order as hegemonic are ab-original
renditions of classical psychoanalysis. The rewriting of ‘historical mate-
rialism’ as ‘class-focused Marxism’, ‘class as power-property’ with ‘class
as processes of surplus labour’, modes of production as 24 class sets,
and transition as micro-transformative postcapitalist praxis are ab-original
renditions of classical Marxism. The ab-original renditions of Marx and
Freud take us to the doorstep of WoT. Or conversely, immersion in
WoT take us to the doorstep of an ab-original rendition of Marx and
Freud (see Dhar 2015a, 2017a, 2018 for “genealogies of aboriginaliza-
tion”). Aboriginal ethics also refuses to be based and premised on what
the Master’s Discourse passes off as categorical imperative, moral law, or
the superego injunction (Zupancic 2000). Aboriginal ethics questions the
reduction of ethics to merely the personal (Zupancic 2000: 5). For us the
ethico-political question is to be articulated from the point of view of the
location of the subject in relation to the real. The question that haunts us
further: how do we set up an encounter with the real? Where do we meet
this real?
Where do we meet this real? For what we have in the discovery of psycho-
analysis is an encounter, an essential encounter – an appointment to which
we are always called with a real that eludes us. That is why I have put
on the blackboard a few words that are for us, today, a reference-point
of what we wish to propose. First, the tuche,9 which we have borrowed

from Aristotle, who uses it in his search for cause. We have translated it as
the encounter with the real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return,
the coming back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves
governed by the pleasure principle. The real is always that which lies behind
the automaton … (Lacan 1977b: 53)
Lacan translates tuche, tuche as Aristotle’s search for the cause, as an

encounter with the real in his work, an encounter in so far as it may be
missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter. How do we
search for the cause? Lacan would not search for the cause in an Aris-
totelian sense. The search for the cause would essentially mean for Lacan
an encounter with the real; this is the movement in Lacan from the ‘real
9 “The function of the tuche, of the real as encounter – the encounter in so far as it
may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter – first presented itself
in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse
our attention, that of the trauma. Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic
experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of the trauma, determining
all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? … In effect, the
trauma is conceived as having necessarily been marked by the subjectifying homeostasis
that orientates the whole functioning defined by the pleasure principle. … The trauma
reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled … if not its very face, at least the screen that shows
us that it is still there behind[.] … [T]he reality system, however far it is developed, leaves
an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle.
It is this that we have to investigate, this reality, one might say … To this requirement
correspond those radical moments in the real that I call encounters, and which enable
us to conceive of reality as unterlegt, untertragen, which, with the superb ambiguity of
the French language, appear to be translated by the same word – souffrance [In French,
the phrase ‘en souffrance’, means ‘in suspense’, ‘in abeyance’, ‘awaiting in attention’,
‘pending’. ‘Souffrance’ also means ‘pain’ – the ‘pain’ of life within the four walls of the
prison]. Reality is in abeyance there, awaiting attention. … The place of the real, which
stretches from the trauma to the phantasy – in so far as the phantasy is never anything
more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in
the function of repetition – this is what we must … examine. This, indeed, is what, for
us, explains both the ambiguity of the function of awakening and of the function of
the real in this awakening. The real may be represented by the accident, the noise, the
small element of reality, which is evidence that we are not dreaming. But, on the other
hand, this reality is not so small, for what wakes us is the other reality hidden behind
the lack of that which takes the place of representation – this, says Freud is the Trieb. …
How can we fail to see that awakening works in two directions – and that the awakening
that re-situates us in a constituted and represented reality carries out two tasks? The real
has to be sought beyond the dream – in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from
us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative” (Lacan
1977b: 55–60).
cause’ to the ‘unconscious and uncanny causality of the real’. How do we

set up an encounter with the real, an encounter in so far as it is essentially
the missed encounter? Before we try and answer such questions, before
Lacan turns ab-original, we must first go through the existing understand-
ings of the Lacanian Real—not to criticize existing readings (instead we
would honour deeply the merit of those readings)—but to mark out our
difference with the existing readings.
Real and Language

Taking off from existing readings-renditions of the Lacanian Real, one
could mark out the following positions:
1. Real as a priori—Real as existing before the process of symboliza-

tion—Real before Language.
2. Real as after Language:
2a. Real as the left over, the caput mortum of the process of symbol-
ization; Real as the remainder of the process of symbolization;
Real as also the unspeakable limit of the process of symboliza-
tion; Real as that which could not be symbolized; hence the
Real remains as the inassimilable remainder of the process of
symbolization; the Real remains as the perpetual spur that could
possibly rock the smooth operations of the Symbolic.
2b. Real as the by-product of the process of symbolization; Real as
that which is secreted out by the process of symbolization; Real
as that which is put outside by the process of symbolic; Real as
the unspoken of the Symbolic; Real as that which is repudiated in
the process of the formation of the Symbolic; Real as reminder
of repudiation.
Ragaland in “An Overview of the [Lacanian] Real” invokes Jacques-
Alain Miller’s periodization of Lacan’s teachings in three phases—the
1950s and early 1960s, 1964–1974, and 1974–1981. Miller’s periodiza-
tion establishes for us a basis from which to work with Lacan’s evolving
theory of the Real.
In the first period of his teaching Lacan described the real as concrete and
already full, a brute, pre-symbolic reality … as an intractable materiality …
a ‘primitive undifferentiated All’.
In the 1960s and the early 1970s, the second period of his teaching,
Lacan defined the real as “it” or das Ding.10 … In this second period,
Lacan described the real as the traumatic material of unassimilated memo-
ries and meanings that block the dialectical movement of symbolization
…
By the third period, as he gradually differentiated one order from
the other – “the tripartition of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real
… those elementary categories without which we would be incapable of
distinguishing anything within our experience” (Seminar I: 271) – he was
able to attribute a series of properties to the real, as well as a structural
causality. The past returns as if from the future, introducing conflict into
symbolic reality.11
Taking off from Miller’s periodization, we now distinguish among the

many renditions of the Lacanian Real.
Real Before Language

The Lacanian Real is at the beginning. It is an a priori “material” of the
world, a primordial Geist, a formless Form from which our entrance into
language has forever severed us. Only as neo-natal children, as four-legged
mammals were, we are close to this state in which there is nothing but
innocent need. This formless Form is lost through our entrance into the
logic of the Totem and the Taboo or into Law, as also through a certain
imposition of the geography of spaces and the history of time over this
inchoateness and the rewriting of pure need as desire. The Lacanian Real
hence exists before representation and discourse. Conceptual oppositions
such as inside and outside, interiority and exteriority, subject and object,
and self and Other, only come after the seamlessness of the Lacanian Real
that has been fractured. A return to this ‘real at the beginning’ is impos-
sible. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because
our very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from
the Real. Still, somewhat curiously, the Real continues to exert its influ-
ence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock, the impasse against
which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail.
10 “Lacan’s emphasis on das Ding as the excluded Other beyond mediation is Kantian
not only in the explicit replication of Kant’s own language” (Cornell 1997: 204).
11 See https://nosubject.com/Jacques_Lacan:Real; https://www.lacan.com/sympto
m14/the-experience.html.
Real as Noumena
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is similarly concerned with the limits or
impasses that haunt and traumatize perpetually the secure certainty of
knowledge—with knowledge that is beyond both human experience and
human reason. Does Kant try to point towards the contradictions that
develop, and the limits that show up, once experience or reason alone
attempts at answering questions about knowledge? Are not Kant’s writ-
ings remarkable for the way in which they systematically refute any claim
to know what the truth is, or where it lies? Kant called his philosophy the
“critical” method. His three main books, the Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of
Judgement (1790) raise three questions:
Three questions summarize for Kant (see the Canon of the First Critique)
what he calls “the interest of our reason”: “What can I know? [What I
cannot know? (theoretical)] What ought I to do? [What I ought not to
do? (ethical)] What may I hope for?” [What may I not hope for? (judicial)].
(Lacan 1990 [1974]: 35)
Of the three we focus on the first question: what are the things
that can and cannot be known. Kant thought that philosophers assume
that the objects experienced through the senses are things “in itself”.
However, Kant claimed that things-in-itself must be thinkable, but not
actually knowable.12 Kant stated that all a person can actually know are
states of his or her own mind, which he called “phenomena,” literally
meaning “things that appear.” Beyond the phenomenal, Kant described
the “noumenal” (things that are thought, “ding an sich”). The noumenal
cannot be known because humans have no way to sense it. It is merely
what produces experiences; it can never be experienced.
Noumena, as we understand it in Kant, has two senses: the positive
sense which states that any knowledge of noumena is non-sensible; a nega-
tive sense in which there cannot be any knowledge of noumena through
sensible means. Things-in-itself can be thought about as noumena in the
negative sense but have no relation to the positive sense of the word.
12 The debate about appearances and the thing-in-itself is therefore essentially this: are
appearances something in the mind that is caused by something outside the mind, the
things in itself, or are appearances and things in itself different aspects of the same thing;
one, things as they appear and the other, things as they are?
Noumena in the negative sense is akin to what we have designated as the

Real, while noumena in the positive sense is what we have designated as the
real.
While we remain sensitive to the phenomena-noumena separation
producing the noumena (or the Real) in the negative sense, we are
particularly animated by the phenomena-noumena separation producing
the noumena (or the real) in the positive sense. Understood in a posi-
tive sense, phenomena and noumena are two constitutive aspects of
the same reality. We understand appearances and things in themselves,
phenomena and noumena, delusional veil and foreclosure as aspects of the
same reality—both the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic reside (as
somewhat overdetermined) in the double reality-real.
Real After Language

The other rendition of the Lacanian Real understands the register of the
Real as that which the symbolic is unable to symbolize. The Real is thus
the residue of symbolisation—the caput mortum, as also the register of the
impossible. Impossible: because it remains impenetrable to the subject of
desire, and yet it has irreal effects on the subject of desire. The Real is the
remainder that cannot be eliminated in the complex articulations of signi-
fication, that which can be approximated, but never captured. The Real
resists the symbolic; the Real insists, en souffrance, waiting, and lurking,
to bump into the symbolic.
One can perhaps appreciate from the above that the Lacanian Real
has been conceptualized in several (un)related forms. Others have added
to existing conceptualizations. Some have understood the Lacanian Real
as that which remains unknowable to itself. Here one can ask: how is
it possible to describe our knowledge of something that is unknow-
able? Others have found a close counterpart to the Lacanian Real in
Heidegger’s understanding of the role of the Nothing in his critique
of metaphysics. Reflection on the Real has been continued further,
through another concept, “the Thing”, the Thing as the locus of non-
representability. The Thing is particularly intertwined with the use of
language: language recalls what is absent, and, in fact, allows the speaker
to glimpse that something is essentially missing. The Thing (das Ding ) is
represented in Lacan’s work as a ‘void space in being’, precisely because
it cannot be represented by anything else. It is denoted by an algebraic x,
the object petit a. Given that the object a is resistant to symbolization, it

can be discerned only through its effects:
The object a is at once impossible to possess and impossible to live without.

Object a is [thus] no being. Object a is the void presupposed by a
demand, and it is only by situating demand via metonymy … that we can
imagine a desire that is based on no being – a desire without any other
substance than that assured by knots themselves. … it is as substitutes for
the Other that these objects are laid claim to and made into the cause of
desire. (Lacan 1998 [1972–1973]: 126)
Through these concepts, Lacan (somewhat like Kant) wants to capture

an algebraic x beyond experience, speech, and language. The failure of
or the limits to symbolization is an universal experience, rather than a
product of trauma. For Lacan, the limits to symbolization is fundamental
to the experience of being human—hence, his concern with the Real , the
Thing, and object a.
The Hegemonic Symbolic

The political potential of the Lacanian Real lies in examining who is the
third who walks always beside us, beside both ‘Capitalism’ (‘p’) and the
‘third world’ (‘~p’), ‘third world’ as the lacking other of a Modern Capi-
talist Industrialized West (‘p’)? When I count, there is only Capitalism
(‘p’) and the third world (‘~p’) to be found. But down the dark alley,
there is always another one; an Other one, walking beside Capitalism (‘p’)
and the third world (‘~p’); and walking, head bent, and hooded. Some
say I can never know who this third is, who is that on the other side of
Capitalism (‘p’) and the third world (‘~p’) …
We relate our ethico-politics to this third who walks always beside us,
beside both Capitalism (‘p’) and the third world (‘~p’), who never figures
in the count, and yet on account of it who counts the most.
But to arrive at the ‘real’ one must understand the Lacanian Symbolic
as not a value-neutral battery of signifiers. It is produced and reproduced
hegemonically. It remains suffused with webs of power. A re-reading
of the Lacanian Symbolic as hegemonic, as not just operative at the
plane of signification but also as being suffused simultaneously with the
play of power, produces in our understanding a thicker and a politi-
cally more enabling engagement with the Lacanian Symbolic. In our
discussion on capitalocentrism, we have tried to demonstrate how the

Lacanian Symbolic is imagined and reproduced through a privileging of
Capital—Capital as the privileged signifier in the signifying concatena-
tion that generates and anchors further significations but is itself not
the effect of a prior signifying chain. Free from other overdetermining
effects or processes, Capital thus becomes the centre “which by defini-
tion is unique”, which while constituting (and while being constituted
by) structure escapes structurality. The centre [i.e., Capital] is, “paradox-
ically within the structure and outside it. The centre [i.e., Capital] is at
the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre [i.e., Capital] does
not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its
centre elsewhere. The centre is not the centre; the entire history of the
concept of structure must be thought as a series of substitutions of centre
for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively,
and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names
[Capital, Phallus, West, Christian, Brahmin …]. The history of meta-
physics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and
metonymies” (Derrida 1978). We do not see the process of the substi-
tutions of [one] center for [another] center as innocent. We see in them
the perpetual play of power; a particular symbolic thus emerges as the
hegemonic.
We are now in a position to put down our rendition of the Lacanian
Real. It takes off from several original renditions. It differs somewhat
from such renditions. It displaces somewhat the original renditions. It
inaugurates in the process an ab-original rendition. In the ab-original
rendition, the original rendition of the Lacanian Real is found to be split
conceptually into:
1. The more static notion of the Real: Real as the Kantian thing-in-
itself .
2. The more Freudian or (psycho)dynamic notion of the Real: real
as the effect of the hegemonic constitution of the symbolic, where
the symbolic and the real are produced simultaneously.
One could conceptually split further the Freudian or (psycho)dynamic

notion of the real—real as secreted out in the process of the hegemonic
constitution of the symbolic (here we must keep in mind that an a priori
symbolic system does not secrete out the real; the symbolic is also consti-
tuted as hegemonic in the process of the production of the real; and once
again, an uncanny redoubling brings both into existence) into a number
of substitute real-s, where substitute real-s are the displaced forms of the
real:
2(a) The realvictim as circumscribed, as retained, within the hege-
monic.
2(b) The realutopian as the Dark Continent, the unknowable, and the
unnamable. The metaphor of the dark continent becomes at times a
convenient trope for the cosy co-habitation of non-reason, of woman,
of the racial other, of blackness, of communism, of negritude, and of
the untouchable. Taking off somewhat from Cornell (1992) and from
the psychoanalytic challenge to Logocentrism and Ethnocentrism, we
would like to ask in this work: “What Takes Place in the Dark?” What
happens when some Thing is designated as dark?
2(c) The realevil
2(d) …
The static notion of the Lacanian Real—the Real as the Kantian

thing-in-itself and the dynamic notion of the Lacanian Real—the real
as foreclosed, constitutes in turn the overdetermined knot of the Real-
real. Our somewhat elaborate conceptualization of the outside is never an
absolute outside but simultaneously inside and outside, present and absent,
touchable and distant, knowable and uncanny, and limited and infinite;
it is simultaneously the Freudian fort/da of the domain of the static and
the dynamic, the structural and the historical, the domain of the episte-
mological and the political, and the domain of knowledge (savoir) and
power (puvoir).
The realvictim , the realutopian as also the realevil , gives shape and consis-
tency to the hegemonic. In other words, they constitute the hegemonic.
The realevil is in our understanding, the cause and kernel of the consti-
tutive sinthome of the hegemonic—the trauma, the wound that the
hegemonic displays, flaunts, and makes a show of—the televised spectacle
of the dis-membered twin towers, the rubble after an attack by ‘suicide
squads’, and the mutilated bodies. In contrast, the real—the real as the
foreclosed—is what the hegemonic disavows, disavows doubly.
The realvictim , the realutopian , and the realevil as constitutive of the hege-
monic and the real as disruptive of the hegemonic, constitute together
what we understand as the Lacanian symptom.
On the one hand, the real is made to look realutopian , look impossible
and distant, and look like a thing of the past; communism is made to look
primitive (primitive communism as realutopian ); matriarchy is made to look
mythical (the myth of matriarchy as realutopian ); tradition is made to look

obscurantist; and Gandhian non-violence is made to look un-natural.
Making the real look realutopian also secures the hegemonic.
On the other hand, the task of the hegemonic is to make the
real look realevil ; make communism look Stalinist; make feminism
look hysteric/bra-burning; and make Islam look terrorist. It is also to
make the real look realvictim ; make tradition look backward-superstitious-
unproductive; and make the South look third worldish, as if it is the
realvictim or the realevil that it has to contend with; the realvictim or the
realevil is that hapless or grotesque face of the real that it has to protect or
contest and conquer; and that it has to tame. The radical theorist is all
too often a prey to this trap.
The point is that if one wants to prevent the formation of an outside, one
must not, … avoid any negation for fear that it would cause a domain
to emerge that would limit power from the outside … but must rather
inscribe in the interior a negation that says “no” precisely to the possibility
of [a particular] outside.… a certain self-imposed impotence of the signifier
itself, a kind of active retardation of its own power. Far from positing the
existence of an elsewhere, the real as internal limit of the symbolic … is the
obstacle that scotches the possibility of rising out of or above the symbolic.
It is as if the symbolic increased its power [– organized its hegemony] by
checking itself, by actively holding back from positing an outside [– by
actively holding back from a positing of the ‘real’ and positing instead the
realvictim , the realutopian or the realevil ]. (Copjec 2002: 95)
To summarize, what ultimately emerges as the outside of the hege-

monic is partly inside the hegemonic as the delusional veil of the
realvictim –realutopian –realevil . It is this moment of foreclosure that makes the
closure of the hegemonic impossible.
This foregrounding of the real as realvictim at one and at the same
time, stabilizes and destabilizes the hegemonic. It stabilizes the hege-
monic because the real is now included in a deformed form, an acceptable
and habitable form; it destabilizes the hegemonic because the real, the
language of the real, or the real of language is not included, and its obdu-
rate presence as the outside is an important moment in the constitution
of the hegemonic. The production of the realvictim is, as if, an “encir-
cling of an immanent outside” (Copjec 2002: 95); the real at the heart
of the hegemonic as if forces the nodal signifiers suturing the hegemonic
to split off from and turn around on itself as the “trajectory of a folded
back force” so as to encircle an immanent outside. This encircling, this

circumscribing of the real that we have represented in terms of the fore-
grounding of the realvictim , helps the hegemonic extend itself way beyond
its concrete circuits (we explicate upon this extension in terms of the
hegemonic rendition of need [we call it ‘hegemonic need’] in Chapters 3
and 5). The hegemonic can now move on as if oblivious of that which has
been foreclosed, which has been put outside. Second, even as the hege-
monic sleeps over the real, it is at the same time haunted by a horrific
dream; the dream of the return of the real. While the hegemonic cannot
face the outside as the real, it cannot also ignore the outside. The outside
is recast as the realutopian or as realevil (Fig. 4.3).
In Fig. 4.3 the large dotted circle represents the delusional veil. The
delusional veil is constitutive of the three substitute real-s. Of the three
substitute real-s, the realvictim is the ’constitutive inside’ of the hegemonic.
The realvictim is also that register of the delusional veil that is retained
with ease within the hegemonic. The three arrows represent foreclosure.
They represent the rather (im)possible secreting out of the real—the real
that matters—that could rock the Titanic. The dense dark third circle in
Fig. 4.3, present at a distance, represents the realutopian . The hegemonic
posits the realutopian as the Distant Dark Continent. But the real is neither
Crypted Nodal Signifiers
realvictim realutopian
Constitutive Inside Absolute Outside
Fig. 4.3 The hegemonic symbolic (Source Self-constructed)

distant nor dark. It resides within the hegemonic as the foreclosed. In

Fig. 4.4 the somewhat greyish circle within the hegemonic, at the very
heart of the figure below, represents our understanding and rendition
of the real. The two arrows represent the disruptive dimension of the
real. In Fig. 4.4 even the symbolic (and not just the delusional veil) has
been represented through dotted lines so as to highlight the contingent
and crisis-ridden nature of the suture of crypted nodal signifiers.
It is only the real that makes the hegemonic susceptible to counter-
hegemonic reconstitution. Because,
[i]t is the real that permits the effective unknotting of what makes the
symptom hold together, namely a knot of signifiers. Where here knotting and
unknotting are not metaphors, but are really to be taken as those knots
that in fact are built up through developing chains of signifying material.
(Lacan 1990: 10—italics mine)
Some say one can never know the real.

For them there is no escape from the Wittgensteinian ‘fly-bottle’.
The real for them is “[n]othing perhaps ”.
Lacan, on the contrary, conceptualizes the real as “not perhaps
nothing ”, as “not nothing ” (Lacan 1977b [1964]: 64).
The real for them is “impossible” in a quasi-transcendental sense.
They conflate “impossible” in a quasi-transcendental sense with
“impossible” in and within a particular hegemonic masquerading as the
Universal.
Crypted Nodal Signifiers
real
realvictim - realutopian - realevil - …
Fig. 4.4 The counter-hegemonic real (Source Self-constructed)

The conception of politics that we defend is far from the idea that
‘everything is possible’. Like Freud we remain menaced by the Real. “For
[us, like] Lacan there is no Aufhebung, there is no utopian solution to
human suffering: ‘when one gives rise to two (quand un fait deux), there
is never a return. They don’t revert back to making one again, even if it
is a new one. The Aufhebung is one of philosophy’s pretty little dreams’
(XX: 86)” (Stavrakakis 1999: 95).
“In fact, it’s an immense task to propose a few possibles, in the plural
– a few possibilities other than what we are told is possible. It is a matter
of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are
assigned – that something else is possible, but not that everything is possi-
ble” (Badiou 2001: 115). To arrive at such a space of the possible, one
needs to move beyond
1. “the paralyzing recognition of a generalized ‘impossibility’” of

knowing and relating with WoT
2. “the whole tangled body of doctrine variously associated with the
Other” - the WoT
3. the “abject register of ‘bearing witness’, of a guilt driven empathy
or compassion ultimately indistinguishable from a distanced conde-
scension” towards WoT
4. the “anguished musings of an irreplaceable’ subject confronted with
the impossibly demanding needs of the Altogether-Other”.
It is also a matter of showing how the space of the ‘political’ is larger

than the space of ‘politics’. This is important because political reality, as all
reality, is, first, constituted at the symbolic level and, second, supported
by fantasy. But if reality in general can only make sense in its relation
to a real which is always exceeding it, what can that real associated with
political reality be? If reality cannot exhaust the real it must be also the
case that politics cannot exhaust the political; the political is not reducible
to political reality; and the institution of political reality presupposes a
certain repression of the constitutivity of the political. The political seems
to acquire a position parallel to that of the real; one cannot but be struck
by the fact that the political is revealed as a particular modality of the
real. The political becomes one of the forms in which one encounters the
real. “Lacan himself, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis uses noise and accident as metaphors … of our encounter
with the real. … Lacan’s schema of socio-political life is that of a play,

an unending circular play between possibility and impossibility, between
construction and destruction, representation and failure, articulation and
dislocation, reality and real, politics and the political ” (see Stavrakakis
1999: 71–98).
Having arrived at the real, an arrival that was never easy, the question
that haunts us further is: how can the real be turned into a legitimate
territory for Marxist ethics and Marxist politics? How can Marxist ethics
and Marxist politics be turned to the real? This turning to the real is
important because the realm of the political relates to the real; or perhaps
the real relates to the realm of the political. This arrival at the real was
crucial. It is only after having arrived at the real that psychoanalysis can
be put to use for Marxism. It is only after having turned Lacan ab-original
that psychoanalysis can be meaningfully related to Marxism.
To summarize: the field of the economy or for that matter the
social is decentred, heterogeneous, complex, and polymorphous. We have
taken care of this disaggregation in Chapter 2. But at the level of the
hegemonic, the force-field is constituted through secret nodal articula-
tions/anchors (crypted capitonnage) and politically salient repudiations
(foreclosure), as also through delusional veil(s). Further, the constitu-
tion of the hegemonic is not a process that is complete unto itself.
It cannot be since the overdetermined and contradictory processes are
always constantly rearranging the concrete in diverse ways and that in too
in quite unpredictable ways. Consequently, the process of constituting
the hegemonic must be a constant and precarious process—constant in
its reconstitution/reiteration—so as to keep the foreclosed as foreclosed.
This book is focused on the polymorphous non-capitalist class processes
and the possibilities that inhere in and inhabit reality. But then these
polymorphous possibilities (say, those in WoT)—possibilities that are not
radical in itself —lack in a fundamental sense. They lack language. Can
world of the third speak? No. Not because it cannot speak; it cannot
speak because the language that matters most for WoT is foreclosed. The
hegemonic emerges as hegemonic out of the repudiation of a funda-
mental signifier—of the signifier that matters: class. Bereft off, stripped
off crucial significatory articulation, these polymorphous possibilities are
reduced within the hegemonic to third world victims (say, third world
woman lacking in Human Development Indices) in need of First World
benevolence. They are reduced to figures—either that of the marginal
other in need of the capabilities approach, or that of the evil other in

need of International Action Against Terrorism.
View from World of the Third

Instead of a view from above, a God’s Eye View (a modernist impulse),
or a view from nowhere (presumably a postmodern impulse) can we as
WoT Marxists argue for a view from the perspective of the foreclosed
real? Instead of an aggressive totalitarianism (a modernist impulse) and
a nihilistic nothingness (presumably a postmodern impulse), instead of
a position between a grasp over everything and a clue/hint of nearly
nothing, can we still look for some meaningful invocation of late Marx’s
theorization of the Russian commune, theorizations that would in turn
be a prelude to a postcolonial reading of Capital and that would perhaps
and possibly inaugurate the humble beginnings of a postcolonial logic of
(non)capital (Dhar 2020)?
To think about a postcolonial logic of non-capital, we have tried to
forge a connection between Freud and Marx. Which Freud and which
Marx? Post-metaphysical Freud and post-metaphysical Marx. Freud and
Marx menaced by the Real; Freud and Marx menaced by the remainder,
by the unspeakable. Freud and Marx menaced by the real; Freud and Marx
menaced by the reminder, by the unspoken.
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CHAPTER 5
Global Capitalism as Hegemonic: World

of the Third as Outside
Introduction
In the previous chapter, we have tried to think through questions of hege-
mony and foreclosure in general. In this chapter, we would like to think
through the question of global capitalist hegemony and the foreclosure
of world of the third in particular. We would also like to show how the
foreclosure of world of the third (WoT) is protracted through a fore-
grounding of substitute thirds—substitutes that are representative of a
certain third worldism.
We rethink the relationship between hegemony and foreclosure
through the forging of a connection between Marx and Freud: “too
many things link them together … there must be something in common
between Marx and Freud. But what?” (Althusser 1996: 107). Marx and
Freud would be close to each other through a rigorous take on materiality
and the dialectic, more precisely through the concept of overdetermina-
tion and contradiction. Marx and Freud would be close to each other
through the invocation of a reality (material, economic/social, psychic,
etc.) that is “necessarily conflictual ”. Marx and Freud would be close
to each other through the invocation of a “conflictual science”—“the
conflictuality of Marxist [and Freudian] theory is constitutive of its scien-
tificity, its objectivity” (Althusser 1996: 10). Both introduce conflict in
received sciences—be it the science of the social, be it the science of
the psyche, be it the philosophy of classical political economy, be it the

Switzerland AG 2023
idealist tradition of a philosophy of “consciousness” (empirical or tran-

scendental), be it the idea of “homo economicus ”, and be it the “ideology
of [wo]man”. Marxian and Freudian theories are scissionist sciences (see
Dhar and Chakrabarti 2015).
Both also “take a position in the conflict” so as to show what the
hegemonic necessarily conceals: class exploitation on the one hand, and
the unconscious1 on the other. Both show what the hegemonic neces-
sarily forecloses: the language of surplus labour on the one hand and the
language of life outside the circuits of global capital on the other. Marx
and Freud would be close to each other through a theorization of the
hegemonic inside and the foreclosed outside.2
Yet their respective theorizations on the inside and the outside,
on hegemony (through the delusional veil for the hegemonized [see
Chapter 7] and secret/crypted nodal signifiers for the hegemonic [see
Chapters 7 and 8]), and the tear in the symbolic that the foreclosure of
fundamental signifiers produce, cannot be put to use without a displace-
ment of their respective theorizations, without turning both Marx and
Freud ab-original (Dhar 2018). A putting to dialogue of ab-original Marx
1 “In elaborating his theory of the unconscious, Freud in fact touched on an extraor-
dinarily sensitive point of philosophical, psychological, and moral ideology, calling into
question, through the discovery of the unconscious and its effects, a certain “natural”
and “spontaneous” idea of “man” as a “subject ” whose unity is ensured or crowned
by consciousness” (Althusser 1996: 114). Further, if Freud “broke with physiology and
medicine, it was because he was educated by his own hysterical patients, who literally
taught him and allowed him to see that there existed a language of the unconscious
inscribed in their bodies” (Althusser 1996: 119).
2 How would Marx and Freud not be close to each other? “Marx was unable to go
beyond a theory of social individuality or historical forms of individuality. … there is nothing
in Marx that can ground a theory of the psyche” (Althusser 1996: 118). Psychoanalysis
grounds a theory of the psyche; it grounds the “myriad substances of subjectivity as a
supplement to identity”. For psychoanalysis, there is a ‘subject’ and a theory of ‘sub-
jectivity’ and ‘subjection-subjectivation’ beyond the objectifying process of being spoken
and produced by discourse, beyond discursively constituted subject positions (Graham and
Amariglio 2006: 201–202).
However, for psychoanalysis, there is also a “relation between the signifier and the
subject”. Hence, in this book, we work instead on the “most radical determinants of
[wo]man’s relation to the signifier” (Lacan 2006: 449). We work on the determinants of
the subject’s relation to the nodal signifier as also to the repudiated signifier. We work on
the relation so as to think the ethico-political, so as to think what stands in the way as
also what would possibly inaugurate the subjective process of (communist) becoming, so
as to think the possibility of radically displacing our relation to the interpellating call, to
the hold of hegemonic ideology, as also to a traversing of the hegemonic fantasy.
5 GLOBAL CAPITALISM AS HEGEMONIC: WORLD … 127
and ab-original Freud would show how (hegemonic) reality and the (fore-
closed) real are produced in one turn. It also shows how if hegemonic
reality is what tries to maintain status quo, foreclosed real as touchy entry
point is what could offer a conflict, a scission in the status quo; it would
offer a meaningful and transformative conflict, a scission, if, and only if,
the imagination of the ethico-political is premised on the foreclosed real,
on the language of the repudiated signifier.
This focus on the real is important because “in a necessarily conflictual
reality … one cannot see everything from everywhere, one can discover
the essence of that conflictual reality only on the condition of occu-
pying certain positions in the conflict itself and not others, since to allow
other positions [the position of the nodal signifiers or of substitute signi-
fiers (the realvictim and/or the realdystopic/evil and/or the realutopian/Dark
Continent )]3 is to allow oneself to be led into … the dominant ideology”
(Althusser 1996: 111). The “condition of positivist objectivity”, on the

other hand, “is precisely to occupy a null position, outside of conflict ”
(Althusser 1996: 111).
Taking off from a deconstructed Marxism—Marxism sans its essen-
tialist and historicist kernel (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003; Chaud-
hury et al. 2000; Chakrabarti and Dhar 2005, 2006; Dhar 2003)—and
an ab-original rendition of the ‘Lacanian Real’ (Dhar 2002, 2006), we
ask in this chapter: what links an epistemo-ontology of the foreclosed (the
third who always walks beside you and I and yet who is never there) to an
ethico-politics of the foreclosed? This link to ethico-politics is crucial for
any counter-hegemonic imagination of the foreclosed third. Working our
way towards a counter-hegemonic imagination of the foreclosed (world
of the) third in intimate embrace with class as foreclosed, we ask:
1. What is foreclosed? Where is the tear? What covers the tear?

2. How do we know what is foreclosed? How do we work through
the delusional veil over the tear?
3 This is never to say that these three exhaust the list of substitute signifiers. There
could well be other substitute signifiers. The list is perhaps endless. New ones could crop
up. New ones could possibly be invented to protract further the process of foreclosure.
In this work, we have highlighted those substitute signifiers that have emerged as relevant
in the context of our work. Perhaps we have missed some.
3. Which signifier (with respect to the nodal signifier or points de

caption) is foreclosed, so as to engender the tear in the symbolic?
How do we know which signifier is foreclosed? How do we fore-
ground foreclosure? How would interpretation hit foreclosure?
How would interpretation hit the real?
4. This hitting the real is all the more important because the fore-
closed is perpetually amenable—vulnerable to being represented by
the delusional veil of substitute signifiers , by the realvictim and/or
the realevil and/or the realutopian/Dark Continent . Our counter-
hegemonic political praxis forever gets displaced, gets skewed by
the substitute signifiers ; enticed, ensnared, and beguiled as we are
by the substitute signifiers, our political praxis tends to go awry.
5. This is not to say that by doing away with all that perturbs
and displaces a-somewhat-secure access to the real we get to the
real in its full presence. This is never to assert that we, in the
process, get to the whole of the real—that we get to truth, that
we get to the whole truth. We understand the space of the outside
as an overdetermined knot of the Real-real—of both remainder-
reminder. Although the stress of this work has been on the aspect
of the reminder in the knot of the rem(a)inder, this is never
to deny the element of the remainder—of the Real that inheres
in the rem(a)inder. Our real—our reminder therefore remains
forever menaced by the Real—the remainder—the somewhat un-
anticipatable and elusive remainder that haunts whole truth. The
truth of the real that we arrive at by resisting the lure of the
substitute signifiers is thus always already a partial truth.
6. Yet this resisting of the lure of the substitute signifiers is something
‘one cannot not want’. In the space of this work, we would try
to resist the lure of, say, the destitute figure of the third world as
substitute for world of the third. Or, for that matter, we would
like to resist the singularly needy and poverty-ridden representa-
tion of the pre-capitalist South. We would resist the victim figure
of the ‘poor third world woman’ as the lacking underside of the
World Bank’s discourse of development; where World Bank spon-
sored ‘poverty alleviation programs’ and ‘capitalist industrialization
induced growth’ are the substitute ideals for ‘world of the third’
(WoT); and where the violence of original accumulation over WoT
is substituted by a discourse of compensation and resettlement
(more on this in Chapters 8 and 9).
7. Having resisted the lure of the substitute signifiers we would like

to think ethics.
8. How would we be ethical to/with the real?
9. Or, would we look for an ethics of the real?
10. How do we turn the recovered real into a legitimate territory not
just of and for ethics but also of and for politics?
Do we achieve this through an invocation of the language of
the real? What do we mean by an invocation of the language of
the real? Does an invocation of the language of the real mean
a radical displacement of the “relation between the signifier and
the subject”, as also desire4 ? What do we mean by a radical
displacement of the relation between the signifier and the subject?
We mean that whereas hitherto the subject was related to the
nodal signifier, whereas hitherto the subject was related to substi-
tute signifiers (say, third worldism, say the realvictim - realevil -
realutopian ), as also to the delusional veil, would the subject now
work towards a traversing of the fundamental fantasy and be
related to the repudiated signifier? It is our contention that a
shift in the subject’s relation to the signifier (as also to affect or
jouissance), a shift in the word-view (Freud calls it “word-idea”
in the “The Unconscious” [1915]), would produce a shift in the
worldview.
Substitute Signifiers: The Realm of the realvictim

- realdystopic/evil - realutopian/Dark Continent
Even before we take any particular note of world of the third, the hege-
monic asserts: the (world of the) third can never be known; the third is
too dark to be known5 ; forget the third; forget the fact that the third
4 We are hinting at an attention to the “relation between the signifier and the subject”,
to the “most radical determinant’s of [wo]man’s relation to the signifier” (Lacan 2006:
449). We are also hinting at an attention to undisclosed language, at language that is
neither known nor unknown, and at language that has been dimmed over, that has been
occluded, and that remains buried, at covered up language, as also to the language of that
which was hitherto unspoken, to repudiation, “repudiation of a fundamental signifier”.
5 To recover lost ground: the category of the realutopian was designed as a conceptual
shorthand for the outside the hegemonic posits as the dungeon of darkness—as the dark
continent; one cannot think counter-hegemonic ideological production out of such an
absolute outside; and an outside that remains elusive in principle.
was forgotten; a foreclosure of the third or the third is what is fore-

closed; and the hegemonic refuses the third, or more precisely refuses
the real of the third. For the hegemonic the realvictim (as also the realevil )
is the third; the hegemonic desires the realvictim (as also the realevil ); and
the realvictim - realdystopic/evil constitutes in turn the hegemonic. For the
hegemonic rendition of development, third world is the third. One there-
fore needs to contest third worldism; one needs to extricate the third
from the maze of substitute signifiers; and one needs to hit the real. As
if to traverse the fundamental fantasy, the fundamental fantasy of third
worldism and as if to hit the real, Chaudhury et al. (2000: 62–63) have
engaged with the question of naming. In the theoretical space available
to “an unrepentant postcolonial collaborator”, they have spoken of a
possible reinscription of the “third world” on the “margin, as a follow-
up” to the closures to the postmodern totality introduced by “somebody
in the West” (see Achuthan 2004). “Separating from traces of essentialism
and denied possibilities of political realignment on a global scale”, they
have contested the received concept of an empirical third world in order
to “build up a discursive space for the third that is neither the North nor
the South, neither the West nor the East”. As Marxists they have tried
to offer “competing perspectives” to produce a discursive space for the
world of the third (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti 2000: 80–81, italics
ours).
The hegemonic resists the production of this discursive space. The
hegemonic “is paralyzed by the magnitude of the demand [of the real]
or because it recognizes it as danger. The former of these grounds is the
more primary one; both of them amount to the avoidance of a situation of
danger” (Freud 2003 [1938]: 420). The hegemonic fends off the danger
of the real. The real is in some way inhibited; its precipitating cause, with
its attendant perceptions and ideas, is forgotten. This, however, is not the
end of the process: the real (as danger) has either retained its forces, or
collects them again, or it is reawakened by some new precipitating cause;
thereupon it renews its demand, and, since the path to normal acknowl-
edgement of the real remains closed to it by what we call foreclosure,
somewhere there opens another path for the real to what could be known
as the substitute real, that is, the realvictim and/or the realevil which comes
to light as a sinthome. All the phenomena of the formation of sinthome
may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’. “Their distin-

guishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion6 to which
the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original”
(Freud 2003 [1938]: 420; italics ours).
Too often, we fall prey to this trap; we think the realvictim and/or the
realevil to be the real. We imagine an ethics and a politics flowing from the
realvictim and/or the realevil . We think the realvictim and/or the realevil to
be disruptive of the logic and language of the hegemonic. We forget: the
hegemonic at times desires the danger (and the retaliation) flowing from
the realevil . The hegemonic desires the violent or ‘terrorist’ invocation of
the third.
Others look for a more responsible engagement with the real of the
third. Ethical responsibilities towards the third make them count their
steps more carefully. While they would never relegate the third to being
absolutely unknowable—while the third would never be an absolute
outside for them—they remain wary of both an easy knowledge of the
third or an easy delivery of justice, through liberal jurisprudence and
rights to the third; justice for them remains tied less to law and more
to ethics; and they also remain wary of an easy imagination of an ethico-
politics of the third. The third, for them, is not too easily known; the
third is not too easily represented as well. A certain radical alterity and
a radical impossibility haunt their project. They remain menaced by the
Real within the Real-real couple; they remain menaced by the remainder
within the rem(a)inder.
Remaining acutely aware of such a Levinasian leash on an easy knowl-
edge and an easy representation of the third (for that would reduce the
‘other of the other’ a la Irigaray to the categories of the ‘other of the
same’), we would still like to expand the scope of our enquiry and ask
in a somewhat obstinate activist impulse: why does the third too often
become inconsequential in our discussion? Is it because the third is absent
in representation; is it because the third does not find representation? Or
6 In this work the realvictim was designed as a conceptual shorthand for the outside
the hegemonic includes, and assimilates, and appropriates, albeit in a displaced form, in
a circumscribed form, in a form that is bracketed out to suit the hegemonic; the far-
reaching displacement and distortion to which the returning concrete has been subjected
as compared with the foreclosed form lends weight to the organizing principle of the
hegemonic.
is it also because the absent third, the third that was (in actuality) absent
happened to be present in the register of the represented?
This is somewhat akin to the case of the student who was never present
in class. But the roll-call register of the Master showed that the student
was indeed present. Somebody had answered for the absent student when
the Master called her name. Thus, she found a place in the roll-call
register of the class while she was never present in the class. Someone
else, the realvictim or the realevil , had answered the interpellating call of
the hegemonic. She found a place in the (colonial) archive. However,
she was never there. Someone else answered for her and in place of her.
The problem with the third is not just that she does not find repre-
sentation. The problem with the third (at present) is not just whether
she can get herself represented or not; the problem with the third is
not just whether she can speak or not; the problem with the third lies
also in the fact that she is sometimes present(ed) in the register of the
hegemonic; her name figures; someone else (re)presents her; and she
comes to be (mis)represented in the register of the hegemonic through
numerous ‘substitute signifiers’. The much (ab)used figure and trope of
the third world comes to represent (in a rather reductionist manner) in the
register of Development, the lived experiences of women in the informal
sector, as well as in WoT households not tied to the circuits of global
capital; NGOs funded directly by global capital come to represent the
eco-sensitive economies of the woman-nature continuum of WoT soci-
eties in environmental activism; thus the third is there as raw data in this
age of data-retrieval while all the while she was or is never there; and
someone else sees to it that she, she as the absent third, is (re)presented
in the register.
The problem is therefore threefold:
1. Who represents her; her being represented by another carries within

the very process of re-presentation, a certain mis-representation;
and how can she (however much impossible it may seem) represent
herself or get herself represented?
2. How does the hegemonic secure the presence of the absent third?
How does the hegemonic make possible this somewhat proxy
(re)presentation? Does it secure it through the substitute signifier,
the realvictim and/or the realevil that inheres in the Borromean Knot
as the constitutive inside of the hegemonic symbolic?
3. How does the hegemonic secure the absence of the third? How
does the hegemonic make possible this erasure? Does it secure it
through another substitute third—the realutopian that inheres in the
Borromean Knot as the absolute outside of the hegemonic symbolic?
Further, how would we think ethics in terms of (world of the) third?

This question is important because there is always a possibility that we
would end up thinking ethics in terms of substitute thirds that would
protract further the foreclosure of the third. Which in other words is a
giving in, a giving in to the idea(l) of ‘politics’ offered by the hegemonic.
In turn, it is a giving up of the idea of the ‘political’ in terms of the
language of the real. Thus, one could be ethical to the third world as
victim (the realvictim ). Alternatively, one could also think an ethics of the
real—think an ethics of ‘world of the third’.
The Logic of Two: The Logic

of One and the Absent Third
Why do we miss the third? Why do we remain complicit in the fore-
closure of the third? Is it because we are too accustomed to think
the two—the two of ‘p’ and ‘~p’—the two of a hegemonic ‘P’ (the
‘P’ as ideal) and a lacking ‘~p’—which in actuality is not the logic
of the two—but the logic of the One. Logic of the One: because the
second is only a dependent first —a lacking first. The second (~p) is
the displaced and substitute form of the foreclosed third. Our world
comes to be colonized by the finitude of ‘p’ and ‘~p’. We find
our thought-world breaking down into two. We find our thought-

world being circumscribed and restricted by the logic of the two—
Human/nature, Man/woman, White/native, Colonizer/colonized, Civi-
lized/savage, Developed/primitive, Normal/mad—which is never really
two, which in actuality is one and is driven by the logic of the One. This is
because one arm of the binary (nature, woman, native, colonized, savage,
primitive, mad…), is the negative, the dark, the derogatory, the lacking
underside of the other arm (Human, Man, White, Colonizer…) of the
binary. This follows from Modern forms of thought where the world is
divided into two—‘p’ and ‘~p’, where ‘p’ is valued and the other (~p) is
devalued:
(a) This p-centered account positions ~p at the periphery, as the

background. Translated into practice, p becomes a centre of power.
(b) p is the only independent description when the other is defined
as~p; there is only room for interaction between the One and the
dependent other.
(c) Since, ~p is homogenized, classical [two-valued] logic fails to make
further discriminations (in ~p).
(d) This way of defining ~p leads to radical exclusion. A maximal
distinction is maintained between p and ~p in comparison to other
systems of logic (Paraconsistent Logic for example), which speak of
weaker exclusion relationships. (Moitra 2002: 66—italics ours)
In this work we take off from the moment of radical exclusion; we ask:
radical exclusion of what in (p, ~p)? The construction of ‘~p’ leads to the
exclusion of what? From the two of modernism (p, ~p), we thus arrive at
the excluded third, at a conceptual third. We thus arrive at foreclosure, at
what the structure of the two of (p, ~p) repudiates.
Foreclosure is akin to (radical) exclusion7 and occlusion, (radical)
exclusion and forgetting, a forgetting of the already forgotten, a disavowal
of the disavowed, double disavowal to be precise. We, however, remain in
search of a possibility beyond the simple cutback of the violence of ‘p’ on
‘~p’. This is because we remain deeply aware of a conceptual space beyond
the two of ‘p’ and ‘~p’. We therefore work out a conceptual space—we
7 Derrida, while remaining visibly critical of radical exclusion, tries to show, on the
one hand, how radical exclusion never works well enough to produce a somewhat closed
system of the excluded and the included; how the apparently excluded is always already
within the text. On the other, he is also in search of weaker exclusion relationships.
call it the space of the third—the space of the third as the space beyond
the space of the first (p) and the second (~p).
To continue our discussion on substitute thirds: too often we (as
internal others, as ~p, as the lacking p of the hegemonic [P]) come
to believe that we are the third. Our communities in the womb of
the hegemonic [P]—communities marked at times by merely culturalist
moments—multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, diaspora, and so
on—constitute the third. Too often and too easily, we come to believe
that we do constitute moments of rupture within the hegemonic; we
forget the hegemonic desires our disruptive invocations; and they secure
in turn the hegemonic.
It is only with difficulty that we (as internal others of the hegemonic)
come to realize at times that we are not the third. We are only the other
the hegemonic desires, as an inalienable yet alienated constituent. It is
only with difficulty that we come to realize that the third even if it is all
over us, within us, and among us, is elsewhere; the third is elsewhere;
and that is why it is the third.
Too often, we come to believe that the realvictim is the third. The
realvictim is the fragment and figment of the third, but the third is not
just the realvictim . The third is more than the realvictim . The work of the
delusional veil is in making us believe that the realvictim is the third; that
a certain developmentalism is, as if, the necessity; that a certain aspiring
to-be-modern, to-be-industrialized, and to-be-western is, as if, the neces-
sity; and that a participation in capitalist development somewhat like the
west is, as if, the necessity. The third itself believes at times that the third
as desired, constituted, and concocted by the hegemonic, by the World
Bank, is the third. The third reflected by the desiring gaze (of the hege-
monic), by the flat Lacanian mirror, comes to believe that there it is; there
it is in the mirror; and this is the reconstituted I of the third. Too often
the third itself remains oblivious of the fundamental mis-recognition that
haunts the modicum of I the third secures, while being reflected in the
desiring gaze of the hegemonic.
From Third Worldism to World of the Third:

A Detour from the realvictim to the real
Sans a psychoanalytic perspective, sans a theory of the outside, sans an
accounting of foreclosure, the dual template (p, ~p) of {global capi-
talism, and third world} will appear somewhat like a Leviathan, as a closed
self-contained whole, a whole that purportedly subsumes the whole of

reality within its fold. In representations, in terms of the dual template
{global capitalism, third world}, third world would look like an undivided
perspective, a homogeneous Pre-Capitalist Dark Continent (realvictim –
realutopian ) waiting to be rescued and assimilated-appropriated within the
logic of global capitalism. This reminds us of the developmental exigency
of encountering the so-called excluded, an exigency we discussed in
Chapter 1. In this encounter, a progressive transition of the so-called
excluded was proposed in terms of a movement from exclusion to inclu-
sion (where the excluded is represented in terms of the attributes of third
worldism, ~p), inclusion of the third world within the norms of global
capitalism (see Chakrabarti and Dhar 2012). In {global capitalism, third
world}, the decentred and disaggregated nature of the globe is lost; the
processural nature of global entities, which are in a process of incessant
flux, is also lost. The polymorphous nature of global processes and the
contradictions within (as represented in Fig. 5.1) would thus be missed.
Or, perhaps this would not be an innocent process of forgetting; the poly-
morphous nature of the globe would be put aside so as to secure the
hegemony of global capital, so as to generate the delusion of a unified
and near homogeneous global order. How is this putting aside of the
polymorphous nature of the globe secured? It is secured through, among
many other processes, a putting outside of the language of class. Faced
with the Leviathan of {global capitalism, third world}, we are thus missing
out on two things.
One, we are missing out on the conceptual couple hegemony-
foreclosure, on the fact that the belief of the Leviathan is in actuality
built on the putting outside of two constitutive processes—the process of
hegemony and the process of foreclosure.
Two, we are missing out on the decentred and disaggregated nature of
the class-focused global and local economy. We are missing out because
the process of foreclosure (of class) ensures that the decentred and disag-
gregated nature of the global and local economy remains unsaid, and
ensures that the splitting of the globe into the circuits of global capital
and world of the third also remains unsaid. Thus, without an apprecia-
tion of hegemony and foreclosure, as also the decentring-disaggregation
flowing from the return of the foreclosed, Global Capitalism and the
New Global Order all coalesce into One, and in the womb of the One
resides the Dark Continent (realutopian ) of the third world. The ab-original
rendition of the Lacanian Real with its consequent breakdown into the
Hegemony
Foreclosure
Lacanian Symbolic Lacanian Real
Real-real
Remainder-reminder
Unspeakable-unspoken
(1) Delusional Veil Hegemonic Spaces

over rent/tear for the
hegemonized
(2) Nodal Signifiers

for the secret
operations of the
hegemonic Circuits of Global Substitute real
Capital
WoT
realvictim – Informality / Local Community /

Child Labour / Woman
(1) Private capitalist

surplus value realevil – Communism / Maoism
appropriation
real Dark Continent - Primitive communism/
(2) Local-global market Gandhian non-violent socialism/
Tagore Cooperation Principle/
(3) Hegemonic Need
THIRD WORLDISM
Fig. 5.1 The hegemonic: between the delusional veil and nodal points (Source
Self-constructed)
conceptual couple Real-real helps deconstruct the logic of the One and
explicate through deconstruction the polymorphous encounters of the
global capitalist hegemonic with its constitutive outside.
Hegemonic, Nodal Signifiers,

and Foreclosure: Global Capitalism and WoT
The summarized and schematized account of the relation between the
multi-faceted existence of the ‘Lacanian Real’/’Foreclosed Outside’ and
the ‘Lacanian Symbolic’/’Hegemonic Inside’ within a decentred and
disaggregated class-focused space is represented in the chart below. The
rest of this chapter is an explication of the chart that will unpack the
capitalist hegemonic in terms of its rather complex and dualness/twoness
of operations: (1) through the delusional veil and (2) through nodal
signifiers.
To recover lost ground: in Chapter 2 we stressed on a class-focused
decentred and disaggregated terrain, what then would be its possible point
de caption or nodal signifiers we asked. We showed that the two nodal
signifiers that anchor capitalism and the capitalist class enterprise are capi-
talist surplus value appropriation and capitalist commodity. In the context
of the global capitalist enterprise and global capitalism, the two nodal
signifiers get modified into private capitalist surplus value appropriation
(we are emphasizing the centrality-nodality of the private form of capi-
talist appropriation) and local–global market (where capitalist commodity
is nodal as a form but which also incorporates other commodity forms as
well through a chain of local–global markets). A host of other floating
signifiers—individualism, private property, capital accumulation, profit,
efficiency, competition, and so on—prop up further the two nodal signi-
fiers. For (global) capitalist class process or, for (global) capital to occupy
the centre/hub within a decentred and disaggregated field, the two
defining signifiers of private capitalist surplus value appropriation and
local–global market must be transmuted into nodal signifiers.
How do the above-mentioned signifiers emerge as nodal signifiers,
that is, in turn, a fundamental condition for the emergence of the hege-
mony of global capital? First, global capitalist hegemony that produces the
circuits of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class; the fore-
closure of class is representative of the occulting of the language (not an
occulting of the concrete process, because the concrete process continues
unabated; in fact, capitalism depends on the continued procreation of the
concrete process) of performance, appropriation, distribution, and receipt

of surplus labour. Foreclosure of class also perpetuates the occulting of
non-capitalist class practices from the realm of language. The only rele-
vant economic practice—that could be articulated and discussed—are,
de-facto, those of the capitalist form, while the rest have no signifi-
cance; even if they have, they have it only in relation to the centrality
of capitalism, that is, as part of the global hegemony of capitalism.
In the capitalocentric reconfiguration of an otherwise decentred and
disaggregated economy, processes pertaining to the real are inside the
terrain of practices but the language of the real is put outside; the foreclo-
sure of the language of the real is founded-foregrounded on the turning of
the real into substitute real-s—into the realvictim , the realdystopic/evil , and
the realutopian/Dark Continent (see Dolar 1998: 36).
The hegemonized is interpellated into consent-collaboration by the
delusional veil of the substitute real-s, in a word, by third worldism. The
hegemonic on the other hand negotiates through its instabilities, through
contingent suturing through nodal signifiers. The mutual constitutivity of
both the delusional veil and contingent suturing through nodal signifiers
constitutes the hegemonic.
This naturalized ‘body’ of the capitalocentric economy is, as if, an
objectified body of medical science that can be experimented with
through policies, experimented with in an effort to guide it ‘properly’
and in directions considered ‘desirable’. Given this natural-scientific body
of the economy, there is an element of certainty, which guides extant
policy-making, and the attempted process of transition of this economy.
In Chapter 7, we name the materializing circuits viewed and produced in
terms of such a process of homogenization-hegemonization, ‘circuits of
global capital’.
Global capitalist hegemony, even as it produces the circuits of global
capital through a foreclosure of class, forecloses at the same time, another
space—WoT. At an abstract level, the whole of the hegemonic is thus split
into the circuits of global capital and WoT. One would manage to locate
the WoT only in the event of a return of the class-focused terrain, not
otherwise. Foreclosure of class helps displace the WoT economy through a
repudiation of any possible value that could be conferred to non-capitalist
practices into the realm of the “traditional,” as a relic of stagnation and
poverty; its associated forms of life are consequently deemed and doomed
to be archaic, uncivil, and bordering on lifelessness with no future; and
in a word, non-capitalist praxis is represented as pre-capitalist—i.e., as a

prior stage of capital.
A note of caution: one must not reduce our produced two-ness—the
two of the circuits of global capital and the WoT—to something similar to
the centre-periphery model. Both circuits of global capital and WoT are
decentred and disaggregated, and pulled and pushed through contradic-
tory class and non-class effects formed not only from within but through
the effects of one on the other. Moreover, the above-mentioned circuits
of global capital and WoT can be broken down further into an origi-
nary multiplicity, which is dealt with only partially in this book. However,
given our endeavour at hitting the real of global capitalism, the model of
circuits of global capital and WoT is perhaps a beginning. This is never to
deny that the (b)order of the two is in a state of flux, who is within which
of the two changes constantly.
Thus, due to the repudiation of fundamental signifiers, the “relation
between the signifier and the subject” is fundamentally skewed. Further,
through this repudiation, the repudiation of both the language of class
and the language of WoT, what is achieved is the hegemony of global
capital and the subjugation, management, and control of the space of
WoT. The hegemonic engages with WoT not as WoT but as the third
world—as either the realvictim or the Dark Continent (the realutopian ) or
the face (the realevil ); though it must be said that, in recent times, the
importance of realvictim as the substitute signifier has only been increasing.
However, one must not underestimate the importance of the overdeter-
mined existence of realvictim , the realevil and the realutopian/Dark Continent
especially when it comes to the sovereign interventions in which case the
metaphor of evil or of a Dark Continent—the realm of the uncivilized, of
the barbarians, is particularly effective (as in Communism, Maoism and
so on). Since the circuits of global capital and WoT are overdetermined
principally through the interventions within WoT, what the production of
a single, unified globe fundamentally masks, masks through foreclosures,
is the imperial encounter, the encounter of WoT with the organs of the
hegemonic, including the mechanisms of global capital that produces in
turn the plunder, marginalization, and colonization of WoT. Thus, in the
end, it is the logic of the One that sustains the circuits of global capital.
The rest of the chapter focuses just one more time on the foreclosure
of class and on the foreclosure of WoT which will be the subject for the
rest of the book.
Foreclosure of Class
… Marx replaces the object that political economy was alleged to be

with an entirely different reality that becomes intelligible through entirely
different principles … in which class struggle becomes determinant for
understanding so-called economic phenomena. (Althusser 1996: 113)
We have highlighted the importance of the foreclosure of class in the

process of turning an otherwise decentred and disaggregated economy
into a naturalized Leviathan. However, the foreclosure of class serves
another purpose. It helps global capitalism thrive on the perpetuation
of ever-increasing inequality, marginalization, plunder, and coloniza-
tion/imperialism.
This banishing of the language of exploitation sets up a different rela-
tion between the signifier and the subject. Sans class, the setting up of a
skewed relation between the signifier and the subject, makes one believe
that forms of life outside of the circuits of global capital are an impossi-
bility. Life outside of the circuits of global capital—life premised in and
around non-capitalist class processes—are made to go through a series
of displacements, and the non-capitalist economic form emerges as in
terms of substitute signifiers of ‘small scale’, ‘informal sector’, or ‘social
sector’. The non-capitalist economic is now understood as backward,
holding value only as an employment safety valve, as non-progressive
and sometimes, more importantly, as being on the ‘life support’ of capi-
talist benevolence, as its metaphoric surplus, which is what the trope of
‘third worldism’ does. Through the foreclosure of class, first, the decen-
tred and heterogeneous space of non-capitalist class processes is displaced
and turned into a quite different homogenous whole (~p); second, this
homogeneous non-capitalist space is policed in terms of the centricity of
(global) capital, in terms of signifiers pertaining to the circuits of global
capital. What we see in the process is a skewing of the relation between the
signifier and the subject. It is in terms of this idea(l) of capitalocentrism
that capital’s hegemony over non-capital is mapped. In that hegemonic
plane, even as non-capitalist class processes exist, they cannot speak; they
cannot speak as non-capitalist class processes (see Chapter 6). Their voice
is either turned into the cry of the victim, into the language of the
realvictim , or into the shriek of the violent, into the language of the realevil .
Having thus displaced the non-capitalist into an aberration that needs to
be included within the ‘normal’ economic realm, the foreclosure of class

reduces the economy into a naturalized a-social field that, in turn, secures
‘capitalism’, as a natural preordained order—a unified One.
Let us take note of a paradoxical moment. Capitalism is founded on
class processes, at a concrete level. At the same time, somewhat para-
doxically, capitalism is also founded on the foreclosure of class, on the
repudiation of the language of class, on the occulting of the language
of surplus labour, on the occluding of the language of exploitation. The
loss of language is a fundamental loss for the exploited; it is loss of the
fundamental language of labour, the language of exploitation.
If the repudiation of the language of class/exploitation from
the realm of the hegemonic sustains the widening and deepening
patterns of capitalist exploitation, plunder, marginalization, and colo-
nization/imperialism, the repudiation might also leave somewhere a
reminder, a reminder that is so displaced that one can only look up
at it in horror. Even as the hegemonic forecloses class, and makes it
look impossible, it engages with the despicable real of class—commu-
nism. Communism, in its more evil rendition (or for that matter Stalinist
‘socialism’), is the fundamentally displaced-distorted face of the real
qua class. Through the production of the substitute signifiers (here
communism as evil), the hegemonic is able to transmute the politics of
class—the politics of the real—into communism as the realevil —as either
a distant utopia or a dystopia. With communism stripped off its ethico-
political language, with communism turned into the realevil , it is made
to lose much of its ethical charge. “Failed” Marx, “Evil” North Korea,
“totalitarian” Fidel, “coup” leader Lenin, “brutal” Stalin, “rustic” and
“unpredictable” peasant leaders (Mao and Uncle Ho), and ultimately the
“anti-developmentalists” and “anti-globalization brigade” are all caught
in a chain of equivalence. The language of class, the language of exploita-
tion, of the moments of private capitalist surplus value appropriation,
and all the altered meanings harboured in the social terrain, and of the
still other occlusions that the foreclosure of class masks, is wrenched
out of the analytical terrain, leaving it only with the shrivelled utopic or
dystopic image of communism. Utopia dystopia Communism without the
language of surplus labour is thus a grossly displaced-distorted face of the
real; it is the product of an engagement bordering on scandal, vilification,
half-truths, outright lies, and deceit—but effective nevertheless. Such a
face of communism (the face of the realevil ) protracts further the foreclo-
sure of class. It also sets up a skewed relation between the signifier and the
subject; instead of the subject’s relation to the real, it sets up a relation

with the realevil .
We have been held witness to so much debate over the death of
Marx(ism) and the demise of communism. We find this debate meaning-
less. Communism cannot die; it shall never be allowed to die. For class
to be foreclosed, to be kept as foreclosed, communism as evil (realevil ), at
times as utopian (realutopian ), must be kept alive.
Foreclosure of World of the Third (WoT)

While WoT is present at the level of experience, it is absent at the
level of the language. Its place is taken, on the one hand, by third
worldism as a discourse of victimhood (the realm of the realvictim ) and,
on the other hand, by a discourse of evil (the realm of the realevil ).
The repudiation of the language of class lends further weight to the
erasure of the language of forms of life in WoT; it lends weight to
the erasure of the knowledge of activities, practices, and relationships
fundamentally different from those celebrated by the hegemonic and that
which procreates within the circuits of global capital. Instead, the very
erasure of the language of class with the subsequent reduction of WoT
economy into a certain third worldism, in turn, symbolizes an orientalist
moment.8 Because of the occlusion of the vast space of non-capitalist
activities, practices, and relationships, including that in WoT, this space by
default is not given any economic value and is simply clubbed, depending
upon convenience, into the traditional, informal, arcane, and so on. This
displacement-cum-deformation connects immediately to WoT economic
practices procreating in a space governed by the absence of global capital
or its variegated circuits.
Even if WoT is not sensitive to the internal principles of the circuits
of global capital, including its points de capiton, it cannot be left alone.
It cannot be left alone because the Ego/hegemonic “is paralysed by the
magnitude of the demand” of the real, or perhaps because it recognizes
the real as danger. To prevent the impending danger, to prevent even the
possibility of this impending danger, the hegemonic intervenes at the level
of realevil and realutopian .
8 Postcolonial theorists, who occupy the realm of third worldism in fashioning their
theory even as they ignore or deride Marxism, are very much complicit in this orientalist
turn.
The realevil threatens the stability, security, and progress of ordinary

people—the victims—of its own citizens within the WoT and those within
the circuits of global capital.
Gandhism, on the other hand, is an example of the realutopian (of the
real turned utopian). However much Gandhi is revered, the unalienated
life he proposed (Bilgrami 2009) is turned into an object of ridicule, as
something impossible to achieve. Even though Gandhian forms of life can
be re-read as signalling certain WoT-ist procreation of social life, the hege-
monic rejects it at two levels: first, by clubbing it as utopian, as the realDark
Continent , as simply unachievable, or as impossible; second, by turning the
Gandhian way of life into the category of tradition, into victimhood, and
into the realvictim waiting to be uplifted by the hegemonic and its organs.
Both the realvictim and the realDark Continent contribute to the repudia-
tion of fundamental signifiers of Gandhism, a perspectival loss for the
WoT so profound, that even in the midst of global reverence, Gandhism
as an alternative standpoint of Non-violent Socialism seems to have been
erased (see Chakrabarti and Dhar 2019). A similar erasure awaits Tagore’s
vision of postcapitalist forms of rural reconstruction and the Cooperative
Principle (samavaya) Dhar and Chakrabarti 2021).
To invoke victimhood (realvictim ), several tropes are put to work under
the broader category third world (see Chapters 5, 8 and 9).
The development sector practitioners and the Left radicals, more often
than not, end up working in the domain of the realvictim. The proliferation
of the discussion on marginalization is a testimony to this incitement to
discourses on victims. Once one enters into the realm of realvictim and
accepts it as the domain of analysis, one ends up virtually accepting the
categories of victimhood (as also evil). Thus, both development practice
and Left radicalism end up working within the realm of the realvictim .
Differänce: From Limits to Delusion

In our imagination of expanded communism, WoT emerges as the
wor(l)d of differance (Derrida 1986: 9), differance with respect to the
circuits of global capital. Our class-focused decentring of (economic)
reality puts under erasure the metaphysic of One Globe. It also inau-
gurates the thinking of a wor(l)d of differance. Differance represents in
one turn the moment of difference-differing-deferring. Differance is not
“conceived on the basis of opposition presence/absence. Differance is the
systematic play of differences, the traces of differences, of the spacing by
which elements relate to one another” (Derrida 1981: 27). It represents

a passive difference already in place as the condition of signification, and
an active act of differing, which produces-introduces differences as also
deferral as silent, secret, and discreet suspension. The metaphysic of full
presence qua closed identity/reality is menaced by difference and deferral,
is menaced by the remainder, by that it resists from being said. “The
sign … is deferred presence … the classically determined structure of the
sign … presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable
only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the
deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate” (Derrida 1982: 9). In this
respect, global capitalism is provisional, contingent, always already lacking
through its constitution by the triad difference-differing-deferring with
reference to WoT that it seeks to reappropriate through the discourse of
third worldism.
While Derrida focuses on the limits of full presence, an impulse we
put to use in our class-focused decentring of the economy (class-focused
decentring shows the limits of the Leviathan ‘global capitalism’), we have,
in this work focused somewhat paradoxically on the delusion of full pres-
ence, on how global capitalism emerges as hegemonic, and on how it
masks differance. We have thus looked at both limits as well as delu-
sional possibilities, about how delusional possibilities put under wraps the
limits. We have looked at decentring as also delusional centrisms; how
delusional centrisms work; how delusional centrisms mask decentring;
and how delusional centrisms are produced. Are they produced through
the repudiation of fundamental signifiers? Does such repudiation mask
differance? We have thus worked at the interface decentring-centrisms
or perhaps disaggregation-hegemonic. We have worked at the interface
‘Derrida-Lacan’, Derrida-Lacan as the two lips of the impulse that informs
this work “disaggregated yet hegemonic”. Through our focus on not
just decentring-disaggregation but also on centrisms-hegemonic, we have
moved from the Lacanian Imaginary to the Lacanian Symbolic. We have
shown how the hegemonic symbolic is secured through foreclosure. We
have thus moved to the Lacanian Real in general; more particularly to
the real; and through the reverse gaze of the real we impute perhaps
an ab-original turn to Derrida. Derrida is displaced from the original,
from the focus on decentring to centrism, to homo-hegemonization, and
to hegemony through foregrounding (Derrida calls it “reappropriation”)
and foreclosure. Derrida is further displaced to an active act of differing-
deferral, to the moment when the reverse gaze of the real, when the
language of WoT marks its difference-differing-deferral with respect to

the circuits of global capital. Through this return of the repressed, return
of repressed language, and return of the unspoken, the wor(l)d of the
third marks difference.
Further, from a WoT position, how will WoT view the circuits of
global capital? What sense will it make of its “reappropriative” moves
that attempts to usurp the language of WoT to a form of de-classed
third worldism? The next chapter demonstrates the process of reappropri-
ation in the hegemonic development theories. The following chapters 7–9
explicate upon the nature of the hegemonic as constitutive of two
concrete moments—the circuits of global capital and WoT—as unveiled
from within a deconstructed WoT Marxian field. It also explicates upon
processes of reappropriation as also upon moments of marking differance.
The final chapter shows how taking off from the wor(l)d of differance that
the WoT is, differance with respect to the circuits of global capital, one
can think the ethico-political of expanded communism.
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tivity. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
CHAPTER 6
Political Economy of Development: From

Critique to Reconstruction
Introduction
In the annals of the dominant theories of the twentieth century, whether
of the mainstream development economics or the variants of classical
Marxism, ‘agriculture’ and ‘rural’ came to be construed as the lacking
and devalued other of the modern, industrial, capitalist economy, and
urban society, respectively. In such dyadic representations, the peasantry
personifying the rural came to be considered as backward and regressive
in comparison to modern social actors such as the industrial working class
and the bourgeoisie. This representation of peasantry as a devalued figure
helps justify and facilitate the discourse of development as a movement
from the rural-dominated economy to an industrial service-dominated
economy.1 In such a scenario, even the disintegration of the rural and
peasantry, through the use of violence, force, and submission, was consid-
ered to be a justifiable cost for the pursuit of progress, high growth rate,
1 Primary (agriculture, mining), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services, retail)

are the three sectors; a linear sectoral ladder of development often gets adjudged as a
transition from predominantly primary to industrial and then to service though, as in case
of growing India where service is large segment, this linearity by no means is always true.
The crucial jump in the development ladder seems to be a movement from predominantly
agrarian to substantially large industrial sector, and that is where the development discourse
concentrates. As noted in Chapter 2, in Marxian theory, class process of surplus labour
operational in industry, agriculture, or service is the entry point to be used for reclassifying
composition and analysis of data in mainstream discourses.

Switzerland AG 2023
and poverty reduction. On this count, alongside well-established capi-

talist societies, even socialist societies like the erstwhile Soviet Union or
post-Mao China are touted as success stories. The predestined, inexorable
arrow-like movement of history from ‘agrarian rural’ to ‘industrializing
urban’ symbolizing the disintegration of peasantry (and of indigenous
subjects) was held to be a necessary step in the progressive transition of
economy and society. Even as there were critical engagements, such as
over the manner of disintegration of peasantry (say, through the violence
of original accumulation), over the role of the capitalists in facilitating the
historical transition (as depicted in the underdevelopment thesis or the
centre-periphery theories), or over the failure to absorb the migrating,
rural population into the formal industrial sector, they generally did not
question the ultimate fate of the peasantry in the transition process.
In the field of development economics, taking off from Classical Polit-
ical Economy (CPE), the script of the conceptual location and fate of the
rural was theorized by the Lewis and Ranis-Fei models (1954, 1963), and
followed thereafter by the Harris-Todaro model (1970). With its ‘unlim-
ited labour supply’ theory based on the marginal productivity principle, it
initially rationalized in its transitional logic the worthlessness of the excess
labour force in relation to the industrialized worker, lending legitimacy to
the representation of the rural, especially rural and forest societies inhab-
ited by indigenous and Dalit communities as the register of the “living
dead”; Adivasi and Dalit worlds had thus become the “tombstone of the
illicit” in development (Chitranshi and Dhar 2016; Dhar 2020). The a
priori logic of transition to an industrialized capitalist society personi-
fied by the capitalist class (bearer of, according to Lewis, the ‘passion
of capital accumulation’) and the working class, became the prototypical
representation of an advanced society completing the utopian process of
development. But then, moving on, development economics soon discov-
ered that the transitional economies undergoing rural to urban migration
faced the problem of absorption of the migrating ‘peasantry’ within the
industrial workforce (the Harris-Todaro problem), which in turn is said
to have accentuated the problem of ‘informalized’ workforce within an
industrializing, urbanizing, and modernizing society. The informalized
workforce is not so homogenous or even engaged in industrial activi-
ties; a large number of them tend to procreate in the distant end of a
value chain whose centre is (global) capital and, even larger numbers,
outside of that circuit. As if, by a historically exceptional act/event of
social engineering, the erstwhile body of peasantry in the rural has being
6 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: FROM … 151
transmogrified into a body of informalized workers, populating the urban

world of the third that multiplies outside the circuits of (global) capital,
and acquires a socialized life-form of their own.
From the categorizations of world organizations like the Interna-
tional Labor Organization (ILO), to almost all mainstream discourses,
Right and Left, the category of the ‘informal’, like that of the ‘peasant’,
symbolizes the existence of an unproductive population. The consensus
among both Right and Left: ‘informal’ is a historical problem in need
of rectification, leading to an aligned historical project of facilitating its
formalization within the circuits of (global) capital. ILO has been an
advocate of this position, and nation states have subsequently followed
it. In this context, the strategy of formalization of the informal is indis-
pensable for completing the developmental utopia of absorbing the
agricultural/rural workforce within the industrial/urban space. Resul-
tantly, the twin logic of transition, from the agricultural to the industrial
and from the informal to the formal, has got telescoped into a singular
rationale in the contemporary development utopia.
Squeezed between the developmental utopia driven by the inex-
orable advancement of capital accumulation and the ‘surplus popula-
tion’ that transpired, the literary class of the world for nearly a century
has been struggling to account for and resolve the historical impasse in
this transitional crisis of capitalism. It is not that the historical problem
of surplus population in the form of this peasant-informal group was first
discovered by the discourse of development. Marx theorized the same
in terms of relative surplus population (latent, stagnating, and floating)
and reserve army of unemployed in relation to capitalist mode of produc-
tion (Marx 1990: 781–802; Bhattacharya 2019).2 Other contemporary
2 Following Sanyal (2007) and Bhattacharya (2019) argue that ‘surplus population’
should be emphatically distinguished from the ‘reserve army of labour’ which is a condi-
tion of existence of what is usually known as the capitalist mode of production; we agree
with Bhattacharya. Indeed, the clubbing or collapsing of surplus population and reserve
army of labour problematically subsumes the ‘outside’ consisting of other non-capitalist
class structures (which Sanyal takes as geared towards need economy [this idea of need
economy is however radically different from the idea of need economy we develop in
Chapter 3 of this book]) to capital and its accumulative logic. From a class-focused
perspective, this capitalocentric subsuming of surplus population into the logic of capital
reduces what is otherwise a complex, disaggregated, and de-centred class-focused rendi-
tion of the economy to the language and logic of capital. However, any notion of the
outside does not take us outside the language and logic of capital. There are outsides that
are to the liking of capital. There are outsides that justify and legitimise the rule of capital.
dissenting voices like Mahatma Gandhi in India and Mao Tse-Tung in

China had, to no avail, flagged the problem of unemployment, and of
the precarity and inequality produced on account of unbridled, capital-
intensive industrialization, as an unsolvable, immoral, and destructive
recipe for the future.3 Despite a century of capitalist development-
induced transition, increased rate of mechanisation (handloom to manu-
facturing to industrialisation to automation to AI), high-income growth,
natural population growth, and unprecedented urbanization accompanied
by many rounds of continual original accumulation and wanton destruc-
tion of the individual, social and ecological life, the problem still persists,
so, do the warnings of Marx, Gandhi and Mao in our contemporary times.
The recalcitrant existence of the ‘peasant-informal’ despite the long-swing
towards capitalism, becomes even more solidified during economic and
financial shocks.
Let us give two examples of such adverse effects. A long-drawn and
irreversible shock whose future effects are not all known, comes in the
form of climate change that displaces the central question of sustain-
ability, from that of for-profit-driven sustainable growth towards that of
the preservation of human existence i.e., sustainable life. What happens if
sustainable life becomes the defining question and a constraint based on
it becomes the baseline on which institutions, technologies, practices, and
ethics would have to be reshaped? Merely including the natural process as
one variable in the growth-driven objective function in order to achieve
the developmental goal of sustainable growth becomes challenging since
the epistemology, logic, and practice of economic development-driven
growth propels, rather than impedes, the collective human extinction
(see Chapter 9). Another example is the transitory shock, from a histor-
ical point of view, in the form of the present pandemic that we are
living through. It has showcased the destructive effect of living through
Our effort in this book has been to look for that outside that is anathema to capital logic.
That makes capital anxious. An outside that opens space for political resistance and polit-
ical reconstruction of life. We were guided by the perspective of the political in our search
for the outside. The political and the outside are related in our work. It is an outside
that puts to question the hegemonic and its nodal signifiers. It is an outside that offers
a glimpse of liberation to the hitherto hegemonized. In our framework, the population
thus is, to begin with, disaggregated into various class and non-class processes (including
need related ones), positions, and relations (even intersecting and reinforcing ones) that
they may occupy.
3 For a possible counter hegemonic future of the rural see Chitranshi and Dhar (2021).
the developmental imagination in quite a number of ways. One such

consequence, transpiring in some countries like India, can be gleaned
through the reverse migration (during the initial lockdown period) back
to the villages, of tens of millions of informal-peasant workers, that is
indicative of the inhumane character of the rural to urban migration,
though such migration is projected in these transitional economies as
proof of development (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2020). It also shows that for
mainstream development economics, the peasants and informal workers
are not subjects but objects of development; in its analytical space,
the subjects—facing exploitation, force, violence, state-capital subterfuge,
utter disregard for life, humiliation, unemployment and underemploy-
ment, precarity at or below poverty line, and what not—get reified into
pawn-like objects in a top-down logic, that works inexorably and with
breathtaking speed towards ‘liberating’ these subjects from the curse of
the backward past. These two instances only exemplify the consequence
of economic development, and the contradictions it has ushered in, as
also that of its incapacity to resolve them.
Marx referred to capitalism as a delusional veil. The deconstruction
of the delusion was the objective of Capital —the book. Such a decon-
structive critique could lay the ground for postcapitalist politics and
reconstruction of the social. Post the history of orientalism (whatever its
form, white, brown, black, yellow), one needs to further deconstruct the
delusional veil of development. Confronting both capitalocentrism and
orientalism is hence the essential condition for the Marxian politics
of resistance-reconstruction-transformation: anti-capitalist resistance to
the circuits of global capital, postcapitalist reconstruction of subaltern
life-worlds and worldviews, and transformation of subjects towards post-
capitalist futurities.
The Epistemology of Economic Dualism

Economic dualism follows from an apparent structure of two (p
and ~p); but which on a deeper examination looks to be the
logic of One; One because the second (~p) is only a depen-
dent second, a lacking-lagging second, defined in terms of the first
(p). Our thought-world breaks down into the structure of p/~p,
Human/inhuman, Man/woman, Colonizer/colonized, White/native,
Developed/underdeveloped, Normal/abnormal, etc.—which is never
really two, and in actuality is the logic of the One. When the structure is
produced through ‘Capital’ as ‘p’, as a centre or as nodal signifier, it births

capitalocentrism or capital-centric epistemologies and ontologies (as also
capital-centric paths to ethics, justice, and politics) (Gibson-Graham
1996; Ruccio and Gibson-Graham 2001); when it is constructed with
(western) ‘Europe or West as centre’, it is generative of Euro-centrism
or orientalism (Hall 1992; Chaudhury 1994; Escobar 1995).4 We have
argued that this economic dualism and the development discourse
such dualism produces, is the outcome of capitalocentric-orientalism
(see Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, Chapter II; 2017). Capitalocentric-
orientalism entails that the already homogenised register non-capitalism
(courtesy, capitalocentrism) is further displaced into the derogatory rendi-
tion pre-capitalist where pre-capitalist is not simply a subordinate space in
relation to the capitalist space but is also viewed as abnormal, reflective
of, and in turn reflecting, the abnormality of what is known as the ‘third
world’. In this way, the “battery of signifiers” ‘Traditional-pre-Capitalist-
Third World’ forms a chain of equivalence which come to symbolize
economic backwardness; agriculture, the informal, and the household
sector, the indigenous subjects, peasant families, informal sector workers,
the poor, the poor women, and the poor children then emerge as
harbingers of pathology, as victims of a so-called traditional structure, as
figures of a ‘third worldliness’ as a whole, and as subjects for external
interventions, or for civilizing missions.
In mainstream development discourse, such economic dualism is ubiq-
uitous and tends to become the main point of reference and departure
for everything that materializes—the economic models, the modes of
philosophical reasoning, insights, policy menu, and the institutions engen-
dered. By the very process of reducing the otherwise de-centred and
disaggregated class economy into the logic of One, capitalocentric-
orientalism engenders a monism and a monotheism of capital, following
which the transition of the economy in the image and telos of capital
is justified and normalized. In the words of a leading development
economist,
4 The West is not a geographical but a historical construct. In its historical dimension,
the globe is a sphere in rotation—there is no east and no West to the globe. They
are historical constructions imputed, imparted to a geo-sphere in uninterrupted rotation.
Chaudhury (1994) foregrounds the importance of ‘Brown Orientalism’ in this context.
The postdevelopment approach refer to this as Euro-ethnocentrism.
The assumption of duality is merely for analytical convenience. If frag-

mentation – irrespective of the number of parts – in itself causes some
problems and we wish to examine these, then the simplest assumption to
make is that of dualism. There is nothing methodologically disturbing in
that. And anyway, beginning with a dual labor market assumption, many
economists have gone onto explore the problems raised by existence of
submarkets. The increasing attention which the urban informal sector is
receiving is an example of this. (Basu 1997: 152)
The “simplest assumption” to make is that of “dualism”, and there is

“nothing methodologically disturbing” in that. Economic dualism gets
normalized in the process as an approximation of reality; heterogeneity
then comes to be erased or accommodated from within the dual frame.
However, the vexed point is that, unlike what Basu suggests in the above
quote, there is nothing innocent or benign about the assumption of
dualism.
Disinterring the Lewis Model

Let us begin with the archetypical delusional veil in the global South
that covers the rent/tear in the symbolic produced by the foreclosure
of class: Lewis Model (1954) developed further by Ranis-Fei (1963)
(henceforth, LRF model). In this ‘model’, the economy is archetypically
reduced to two watertight compartments—agriculture symbolizing the
traditional/subsistence economy and industry symbolizing the modern
economy. The stereotypical ‘third world’ economy/country gets identi-
fied by the presence of a predominantly traditional sector comprising of
agriculture and a small modern industrial sector; the artisanal, small-scale
industrial economy that exist alongside these may be ignored to focus
on conventional economic dualism. Our questions: how does this repre-
sentation and its effect appear, and what do they produce? Is there an
underlying epistemology, and if so, is it political? Our analysis assumes
the knowledge of Chapter 2, particularly the understanding of class sets .
The following table condenses the set of images which strikingly stand
against one another in a relation of opposition, such that one side gets
portrayed as being devalued (Chakrabarti 2013). Through this hierar-
chical and discriminatory differentiation, the meaning of the modern
economy and its Other, the traditional economy get conceptually placed
(Table 6.1).
Table 6.1 The traditional/pre-capitalist and modern/capitalist dual frame
Characteristics Traditional/pre-capitalism Modern/capitalism
Production Agricultural output Industrial output

Input Labour and land Labour and capital
Technique Labour-intensive Capital-intensive
Form of labour Family labour Wage labour
Motive Non-profit such as need Profit-maximization where all
profit is reinvested
Distribution Output distributed as equal Distribution to workers through
shares—wage—to the members the market which means that real
of the family which implies the wage, while constant, is higher
average product of labour than in the traditional sector
Source Chakrabarti (2013)
Aspects like the ‘irrational’ non-profit motive, the production of tradi-

tional output such as staple food (and not, say, cash crops), the use of
family labour, labour-intensive method of production, and non-market
allocation of resources helps produce a stereotypical set of images through
which agriculture/rural comes to be defined and depicted as a lacking
space, as a marker of subsistence living and a repository of the poor
in the classical economics sense of mass structural poverty. Agricul-
ture/tradition lacks self-definition; its features are defined by what it lacks
of industry/modern, which now constitute the norm(al), the more valued
space.
In this model, the images that processed the above-mentioned
moments of stereotyping were fixed vis-à-vis their association with capi-
talism and pre-capitalism. Thus, the dual economy—consisting of the
modern and the traditional sectors—is also simultaneously dual in another
respect—modernity wrapped in capitalism, and tradition rolled over into
pre-capitalism. Given that modern capitalism epitomized by industry
has come to represent the higher economic form and the pursuit of
profit making rather than subsistence becomes the dominant disposi-
tion, the fate of tradition became pre-determined and with it, the place
of agriculture/rural within the overall logic of development. The influ-
ence of this representation on the policy paradigm, and over institutions
and practices, has played a seminal role in organizing and justifying an
extraordinary social transformation exercise on a global scale, which is
sometimes explicitly violent, in the name of uplifting/developing the
third world (something that Lewis himself recognizes). At this point, two
issues need further elaboration. First, how is this delusional veil produced?
To cover what? Is it the rent/tear engendered by the foreclosure of class?
Put bluntly, the Lewisian-type categorization of capitalism and pre-
capitalism have foreclosed the class process of surplus labour; sans surplus
labour, the capitalist class is only recognized as “a group of men who
think in terms of investing productively” (Lewis 1954: 159–160) i.e., as
accumulator of capital. Not only does Lewis treat class as noun but he
confuses between capitalist class as appropriators of surplus value with its
being an accumulator of capital (Norton 2001, 2017). What would the
return of the foreclosed language of class entail? How would it rewrite
and reconfigure the delusional veil that the Lewisian Model engenders?
In class-focused terms elaborated in Chapter 2, the R.H.S of the
Lewisian framework should represent class sets {5, 17}, particularly the
relatively surplus value production form. Let us demonstrate. The modern
side of this dual model making up the wage form of labour, the market
form of final produce, coupled with the objective of profit maximiza-
tion, points to a money-wage contract economy. From the perspective
of class-focused theory, the wage form signifies the value of labour-power
(variable capital) and the price of constant capital that of the value of
means of production. Together, they comprise the cost of production
(CC + V); the marketed produce signifies the value of the commodity
(W). The difference in the value of the commodity from its cost is the
surplus value or SV (the value form of surplus labour), which, in the
Lewis model, is absent. ‘Profit’ replaces surplus labour as a substitute
signifier, rendering the latter invisible; capital accumulation appears only
as distributed portion of profit (and bank credit), a somewhat superficial
reading of Marx. Recall, in Marx, it is surplus labour which, in the form
of surplus value, is the principal register from which profit is derived as
one of the many distributive components, so is capital accumulation. In
the Lewisian-type epistemological construct of a dual economy and its
inherent language game, the presence of surplus labour/value is made
inoperative by the de-classed foregrounding of ‘market’, ‘profit’, ‘wage’,
‘capital accumulation’, and other associated signifiers.
However, the process of making class inoperative has a deeper connota-
tion. This is because what is disabled must also be foreclosed. Foreclosure
is more than just the disabling of a signifier; it is the process of occulting
the concept and the language of class itself. It is not a mere exclu-
sion. Even as class as process of surplus labour and the associated
organization of exploitation is a definitional component of capitalism,

its foreclosure is essential for the representation of capitalism à la the
Lewisian dual economy. It is essential because if class is acknowledged,
it will be impossible to reduce the economy to such a homogenous
and mutually exclusive dyad; recall from Chapter 2, the class-focused
economy entailed a de-centred and disaggregated economy, which ruled
out capitalocentrism.
The implication of foreclosure of class is true for non-/pre-capitalism
as well. In the class-focused Marxian approach, via a de-centring of
the economy, difference is traced not simply between capitalism and
non-capitalism, but in the further dis-aggregation of non-capitalism
into various non-capitalist class processes—both exploitative and non-
exploitative. Class analysis reveals how a multi-layered horizontality
of differences—between capitalist and ‘what are not capitalist’ class
processes—comes to occupy the economic landscape. Foreclosure of class
banishes ‘what are not capitalist’ class processes, as also class politics and
the possibility of the reorganization of the economy and society in terms
of ‘what are not capitalist’ class processes. This also renders impossible
both a pluriverse world (Kothari et al. 2019) and a postcapitalist politics
within it (Gibson-Graham 2006).
The displacement of an otherwise de-centred and disaggregated
economy deepens further when an already homogeneous ‘non-capitalism’
is turned into an equally homogeneous ‘pre-capitalism’ through a
displacement of the world of the third (Other) into the third world
(other), which involves an Orientalist moment. The heterogeneous space
of ‘what are not capitalist’ (existing in overdetermined relation with non-
class processes)—the Other—in effect is translated into a lacking, under-
developed other, further translated into the ‘victim other’ (poor, marginal-
ized, excluded, ignorant, etc.), the ‘evil other’ (hysterical, irrational,
archaic, etc.) and the ‘utopian other’ (projects of Gandhism, postcapi-
talism, postdevelopment, socialism/communism, etc.). This conceptual
violence in turn renders absent/absurd the language-logic-knowledge-
ethos-experience of the Other propping up instead a representation-
rendition of other that is produced from the perspective of the centres—
here, capitalism and modernity; the ~p (other-third world) is fore-
grounded in relation to p (capital, west) by foreclosing the Other (world
of the third) (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, 2012). The de-centred
and disaggregated economy now reconfigured into two homogenous
complexes of {capitalism, pre-/non-capitalism; modern, tradition} and
constituted by, as explained, the foreclosures of class and world of the

third, exorcise any alternative space from where a different viewing of the
economy and its transition could be possible. Theoretical epistemology
transmogrifies into a deterministic political epistemology, even before we
start to speak of transition and development.
Given this dualism, development embodies an inexorable logic of
progress achievable through the big bang transition of a predominantly
traditional agricultural pre-capitalist economy, towards one dominated
by continually modernizing industrial capitalism. Development discourse
boils down to a set of arguments that try to:
● bolster this form of dualism and

● let loose mechanisms that make the transition or ‘progress’ possible.
Take an example crucial to the justification of transition. The dual

economic model pointed out that the transition from traditional agrarian
society to a modern industrial society would require a transfer of people
from villages/agriculture to the cities/industry. Asked why this transfer
is necessary, the Lewisian model invokes another idea of surplus labour
comprising of those labourers who are in excess of what is required
in the agricultural sector (notably, this is not Marx’s surplus labour).
Identification of excess labourers is based on the principle of marginal
productivity—i.e., increment in output by the addition of one unit of
labour. Following the Lewisian model, it is assumed that a large segment
of the traditional agricultural sector, dominated by labour-intensive family
farming, is facing, at worst, a zero marginal productivity or, as others
argued, a marginal productivity lower than in the modern industrial
sector. Taking zero marginal productivity is sufficient for making our case.
By the criteria of efficiency, these labourers by virtue of adding nothing
to output are useless; these surplus labourers are as good as unemployed,
an instance of ‘disguised unemployment’. This is because employment
makes sense only in the ‘productive’ and ‘efficient’ sense; it implies
that the presence of disguised unemployment is hampering growth and
poverty reduction as well. An ensemble of signifiers such as produc-
tivity, efficiency, employment, and growth get tangled in a chain of
relations producing a representation in which a large segment of farmers
and labourers in agriculture is now deemed as dispensable. The term
‘tradition/pre-capitalism/agriculture’ by itself sparks the imagery of ‘sur-

plus labour’ and ‘disguised’ unemployment, as no labour at all; nowhere
is the vigour of this imagery better portrayed than in the defense of land
acquisition (and some such instance such as privatization) where the argu-
ment of disguised unemployment is advanced as a justifiable rationale for
the dismantling of rural forms of life.
Finally, the markers deployed to pass judgement on labour in the tradi-
tional sector belong to the modern/industrial/capitalist sector. How can
labour in the traditional sector be judged in terms of attributes of the
modern sector is a question addressed neither by Lewis nor the thousand
variants of the dual economy model that followed it. How can one side
be valued in terms of characteristics of another side except by a naturaliza-
tion of the capitalocentric-orientalist epistemology (this is like assessing a
camel in terms of the attributes of a horse; see Dhar and Chakrabarti
2022)? Suppose, the ‘traditional’ sector values sharing, harmony, and
cooperation over self-seeking behaviour, efficiency, and competitiveness;
indeed, there has to be some other organizing rationale for such an
economic life to make sense to itself. It is of course another matter
that the aspect of rationalization of the so-called traditional sector—its
language-logic-knowledge-ethos-experience—has no analytical value or
role in how the development experience comes to be located in a dualistic
frame. In contrast, it is productivity and efficiency that not only dominates
the representation of the modern capitalist sector, but the consequent
dynamics in the dual economy. To claim that these are value-neutral
‘economic tools’ misses its politics in both the structuring of economic
dualism and the rationalization of economic transition in the p-centric
logic.
The Unmaking of the (In)Formal Sector

Voyager’s perception matters in economics just as it did in the formation
of the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ (Hall 1992). During his work carried out
in the 1960s, anthropologist Keith Hart stumbled into a large sector in
Ghana which he called ‘informal,’ to differentiate it from what is ‘for-
mal’. In a paper in 1973, characterizing the informal sector as containing
the ‘survival activities of the poor’ he suggested that poor people join
the informal sector not to reap profit, but to survive with the goods
and services produced therein. Informality was a matter of bare subsis-
tence and hence may be construed as abnormal, if the profit motive is
the norm. At about the same time, the International Labor Organiza-
tion sanctified the term and its meaning with respect to a study in Kenya.
Since then, alongside the economic dualism of industry-agriculture, the
discourse of formal-informal became common in academic and policy
circles as representative of third wordlist existence. It has served as a
signpost of backwardness and fettering; it has also helped justify and
shape extraordinary modernization exercises and top-down experiments
of social engineering across the emerging economies. Our focus in this
section is on the making and unmaking of the informal sector within the
development discourse (Chakrabarti and Thakur 2010).
Take ‘p’ to be One criterion representing the formal sector. Then not
having ‘p’, let’s call it ‘−p’, represents informality. Now ‘−p’ can be
expressed in a number of ways: ‘−p1’, ‘−p2’, ‘−p3’, up to infinity. In
this structure of representation, ‘p’ acts as the centre and ‘−p1’, ‘−p2’ up
to infinity act as the lacking face(t) of ‘p’; here ‘−p1’, ‘−p2’ are reducible,
albeit negatively, albeit as lack, to ‘p’. For a specific example, take the case
of ‘wage’, fixed wage as the defining criterion for formal sector stand for
‘security’. The lack of fixed wage is, in turn, treated as the defining charac-
teristic of informal sector. Now there exists many types of wage systems,
like wage in kind, subsistence wage, and contractual wage, all of which can
be treated as forms of the lack of fixed wage. In true sense, the informal
sector has no criteria of its own; the criteria of the formal sector are used
as the defining characteristics of the informal sector. Consequently, the
purportedly dualistic structure (the structure of ‘p’ and ‘−p’) is in fact the
logic of One, the logic of ‘p’. The numerous definitions of the informal
sector are all hostage to this logic of One (‘p’) (Harding and Jenkins
1989; De Soto 1989; Majumder 1976; Papola 1981; Sethuraman 1976
[1981]; Tokman 1978, Bienefeld 1975, Moser 1978; Breman 1976).
Papola, however, has expressed a certain discomfort regarding the
homogeneity of the category ‘informal sector’. He has stressed the need
to take into account the phenomenon of heterogeneity within what has
come to be known as the informal sector; he has also stressed the need
to appreciate the blurring of certain activities that seem to be present
in both the formal and informal sectors (see the above references of
Harding and Jenkins; Sethuraman; Tokman). Though the critiques of
the homogeneity of the informal sector and the need to consider its
heterogeneity have raised some valid questions regarding the formal-
centric (‘p’-centric) definition of informal sector, the problem is that such
approaches are not free of formal centrism either. Rather the tendency
is to work with the given definition of the informal sector, considered

as a homogenous whole centred on the formal sector, and then think
about heterogeneity within such a pre-constituted homogeneity. This
means that the thinking behind heterogeneity remains incapable of prob-
lematizing the formal-centric structure that shapes the very meaning and
perception of informality in the first place.
The mainstream literature on the informal sector gives a positive value
to the ‘formal’ which, in its representation, is taken to be the capitalist
class process, either singularly or as the central hub of a circuit; at the
same time, what gets enacted is first the devaluation of the other non-
capitalist class processes and, second, positioning of the devalued class
processes in relation to capitalist class processes. This way the otherwise
diverse non-capitalist class processes (22 class sets other than {5, 17})
are homogenized into ‘pre-capitalism’ or by its substitute category of
informal sector. Not only is the heterogeneous economy reduced to two
homogenous wholes, the de-centred economy in turn is now posited
in terms of the privileged centre of the formal sector à la the capitalist
sector. Once this capitalocentric-orientalist view is accepted, it becomes
all but impossible to deviate from the picture of an economy in which the
formal sector (qua capitalism) is presumed as the norm(al). The produc-
tion of such a norm is accelerated further through subjective evaluations
(like decent work, protection, security, etc.) that refer to the process of
normalization based on the orientalist impulse.
While the ILO discourse brings into contention the lack of formal-
centric aspects of rights and law, recognition, decency, security, and so
on, in its characterization of the category of informal, other important
economic distinctions considered particularly important are made with
respect to productivity (value added) and competitiveness. Once this view
is accepted, the logic of transition with respect to the formal-informal dual
model is laid bare as an attempt to govern the relocation and reconstruc-
tion of the socio-economic contours of informality, through the lens of,
and in favour of, privileged entities of the capitalist and the modern. The
arguments forwarded by La Porta and Shleifer (2014) entailing that those
informal enterprises are tout court unproductive and stagnant exemplifies
this position. For a medium sample country, informal enterprises add 15%
of value per employee of formal enterprises. This means that the informal
sector is overwhelmingly clogged by non-capitalist enterprises and simple
capitalist reproduction enterprises unable to generate substantial surplus
value for reinvestment in capital accumulation, which makes them inca-

pable of growing and competing. This difference in productivity reflects
in differences in income, quality of product, and competition, making
them conclude the following for informal sector enterprises: “Far from
being reservoirs of entrepreneurial energy, they are swamps of backward-
ness. They allow their owners and employees to survive, but not much
more” (La Porta and Shleifer 2014: 118). Attempts to valorize informal
sector or to rethink long-run development by building on it are futile
and counterproductive, a position that is widely shared by policy-makers
across the world and India. In addition to being seen as a victim of its
own structural deficiencies that needs overcoming (as the ILO and World
Bank claims), the recalcitrant presence of informality amidst industrializa-
tion also emerge as a fetter to the transition of underdeveloped economies
towards a modern capitalist one. The ‘informal’ represents a historical
impasse in the march of capitalist led development. The logic of transi-
tion stemming from the delusion of development entails that the informal
sector must (be made to) wither away.
Having disputed the privileged position ascribed to the formal sector,
let us now with the help of the ILO definition of the informal sector,
exemplify two more effects of the class-focused analysis: (i) why the
secured theoretical position of formal and informal sector as capitalist
and non-/pre-capitalist, respectively, tends to get disturbed, and (ii)
why any form of conceptual division of formal and informal becomes
moot. The international symposium on the informal sector organised
by ILO/ICFTU in 1999 classifies the informal sector workforce into
three major groups: (a) owner-employers of micro-enterprises employing
a few paid workers, with or without apprentices; (b) own-account workers
owning and operating one-person businesses, who work alone or with
the help of unpaid workers, generally family members and apprentices;
and (c) dependent workers, paid or unpaid, including wage workers in
micro-enterprises, unpaid family workers, apprentices, contract labour,
home workers, and paid domestic workers. Evidently, the different social
settings named by the ILO could potentially map out into the 24 class
sets, from exploitative class sets of capitalist, feudal, slave, and CA commu-
nistic types, respectively (5–12, 17–20), to independent class sets (1–4)
and non-exploitative class sets of AC communistic and communist type
(13–16, 21–24). Similarly, whatever be its specified features, the formal
sector would typically map out into various kinds of class sets. Suppose we
rule out from the definition of formal sector the possibilities: (i) unpaid
labour and labour payment in kind, and (ii) non-commodity form of use
value. In that case, then, the formal sector could potentially be comprised
of class sets (5, 9, 13, 17, and 21), wherein capitalist class set is only
one type among many. This follows from our theoretical framework in
which varied kinds of modes of appropriation (and not exclusively capi-
talist) can exist closely with market forms of distribution. This implies that
any reduction of the formal sector to the capitalist sector and the informal
sector to the non/pre-capitalist sector is immediately displaced; even if,
for argument’s sake, the category of formal sector is reformed to broaden
to the circuits of (global) capital that may include non-capitalist class sets
at the margins, it still, in a class-focused economy, cannot serve as the
centre. Moreover, it is equally possible that many of these class sets could
be within the informal sector as well (in terms of characteristics defined
by ILO). For example, with similar cultural and political conditions of
existence, class set 9 can belong to both the formal and informal sector;
with dissimilar conditions of existence, the problem of a secure concep-
tual division can only aggravate. The possibility of similar kinds of class
sets being in both formal and informal sector make the division between
formal and informal, at best hazy and, at worst, impossible.
With formal sector losing its privileged position, with the associa-
tion of formal sector with capitalist class set getting dislocated, and with
similar class sets possible for both formal and informal enterprises, what
cannot be sustained any longer is the secured division between ‘formal’
and ‘informal’ sector or the connotation of the informal sector as the
devalued other of the formal sector, or of its teleological fate in terms
of the formal sector. Once unmoored from capitalocentric-orientalism,
the received terms ‘formal sector’ and ‘informal sector’ dissolve into the
irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity of the class-focused economy.
Insistence on using the terms ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ can only be justi-
fied in the context of the de-centred economy that paves the way for a
radically different idea of transition and development.
Faced with the teleological idea of ‘progress’ telescoped in the formal-
centric logic that proposes a unidirectional process of formalization of the
economy (ILO 2016),5 the class-focused Marxist approach would render
5 ILO. 2016. R204—Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recom-
mendation, 2015 (No. 204). January. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/employment/
units/emp-invest/informal-economy/WCMS_443501/lang--en/index.htm (accessed on
January 20, 2021).
such a process of development incapacitating and illogical. Since it is not

possible to either pose homogeneity or centricity, any purported logic of
transition built on either can only be considered as an ideological trope
to reconstruct the social contour in favour of a privileged centre—capi-
talist or formal. In terms of our class-focused frame, the formation of
the categories of formal and informal sector makes possible the gover-
nance of an otherwise de-centred and heterogeneous economy from the
centricities of capital and modernity. Challenging the dualistic structure
of formal/informal, our class-focused approach unlocks a different way
to posit and describe the economy and its transition. As we argue, at the
least, it is possible to have all 24 class sets co-existing within an economy.
Given the features of de-centring and heterogeneity, the transition of
this economy is uneven and contingent, signifying not only a movement
across the types of various class sets (say, from feudal to capitalist), but also
in the form of the class sets (say, a movement from state capitalist form to
private capitalist). One cannot predict or claim a teleological movement
of the de-centred and disaggregated economy towards a specific type of
class set. To struggle, in terms of the Marxian ethico-political standpoint
of expanded communism (or any other competing standpoint), becomes
interminable.
Development in Transitional Crisis

The logic of {p, ~p} propels a narrative of transition in which the disso-
lution of informal becomes logical and complementary to the Lewisian
transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. East Asia coun-
tries in the 1960–1980s are often upheld as successful examples of such
a kind of transition to an urbanized, industralized society; that are show-
cased as having bypassed the informalization scenario; though recent
studies have shown that their economic structures following neolib-
eral globalization have dramatically reversed in the opposite direction
with rapidly increasing insecure, irregular and self-employed employ-
ment in East Asia and South East Asia (Lee 2015, Kalleberg, Hewison
and Shin 2021). While the so-called ’developing’ nations like India
have stumbled into the initial impasse of formalizing the vast informal
sector, the workforce of the so-called ’developed’ nations like South
Korea, Japan and Taiwan saw the unravelling of much of the formal
sector into informal employment and precarious work conditions; Post-
Mao China after the rapid dimantling of the state sponsored urban
Danweis with their ’iron rice bowl’ and job security guarantee regime
from the 1997 onwards saw a massive rise in informal employment
in the industrial sector and then from the mid 2000 onwards a slow
reversal towards more formal employment with real wage rise (Sheenan
2011, Chen and Xu 2017). Despite their different contexts, condi-
tions and histories, capitalist reorganization of production process
under neoliberal globalization seems to have generated two effects: (i)
unleash a wave of mechanisation by allowing the capitalists to adopt
new competitive technology and restructure the labour process and (ii)
flatten the labor market to enable a relative low wage regime and precar-
ious work condition regime (alongside ever growing body of surplus
population). These structural changes in labour market and labour process
clearly helped maintain the competitive condition of generating higher
surplus value appropriation for the global capitalists (more on this in
the next chapter). This overdetermined relation between class, capital,
labour, technology and market is also perhaps why, notwithstanding the
consternation of ILO and other conscience keepers in the West protesting
against the perilous condition of the workers, the epicentre of global capi-
talism, certainly its industrial form, has tended to shift to Asia in the last
three decades, to old East Asian industrialized areas and newer ones like
China, India and South East Asia.
Taking stock of this scenario that is repeated, with local variances,
elsewhere in the world, it will not be farfetched to conclude that the
Lewisian transitional logic has run into problem in many parts of the
world. Acknowledgment of the historical impasse of ’informal’ by official
discourses have led to a call to modify the development strategy accord-
ingly. Take the case of India itself. The fact that people are leaving the
rural economy en masse is considered an opportunity in the develop-
ment discourse. This is despite the fact that, even with high economic
growth in the last two decades, those same people are not able to find jobs
in an apparently labour-absorbing formal sector (resulting in the rapidly
burgeoning informal sector). This is said to present a scenario of jobless
growth or job deficit which signals a transition crisis (World Bank 2018;
CSE, Azim Premji University 2019; Chakrabarti and Saha 2019). There-
fore, Raghuram G. Rajan, former Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of
Finance, summed up the problem for India, which we believe depicts the
general and recurring problem of development for a century, thus:
More than half our population depends on agriculture, but the experi-
ence of other countries suggests that the number of people dependent on
agriculture will have to shrink if per capita incomes in agriculture are to
go up substantially. While industry is creating jobs, too many such jobs
are low-productivity informal and non-regular jobs in the unorganized
sector, offering low incomes, little protection or benefits. Services jobs
are relatively high productivity, but employment growth in services has
been slow in recent years. India’s challenge is to create the conditions for
faster growth of productive jobs outside of agriculture, especially in orga-
nized manufacturing and in services, even while improving productivity in
agriculture. (Economic Survey 2012–2013: 2)
Driven by the telos encased in the capitalocentric-orientalist logic of {p,

~p}, the formalization of informal sector is indispensable for completing
the development utopia. Resultantly, the two big bang logics of transi-
tion, from agricultural to industrial economy and from informal to formal
economy, get telescoped into a singular rationale of transition in the
contemporary development paradigm. What though is missed in all of
these templates, analyses and observations is the acknowledgment that
any adopted development strategy to this end will induce contradictory
effects on class and non-class processes that will simultaneously bolster
and undermine the capitalist system (example, facilitating new technology
may generate greater job insecurity and surplus population in one turn)
thereby undercutting the objective of ending the historical impasse of
informality.
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CHAPTER 7
Global Capital and Its Circuits
Introduction: Global Capitalist Hegemony

Global capitalist hegemony is premised on twin foreclosures, that of class
and that of world of the third (WOT). It is produced in our work out
of a disaggregated rendition of the class-focused economy; for us the
economy is disaggregated yet hegemonic. In producing the hegemonic out
of a class-focused disaggregated rendition of the economy, we explicate in
this chapter ‘global capital’ and ‘circuits of global capital’; we also iden-
tify the outside of the circuits of global capital; we define the WOT as the
outside, whose elaboration we will go into in the next chapter. In other
words, we displace the given and received rendition of the economy into
the hegemonic inside and the foreclosed outside. The return of the fore-
closed (here the language of class) further shows the disaggregated nature
of the economy. It also shows how the language of class could serve as a
language for questioning and critiquing global capitalist hegemony. But
first, let us tease out further the class-focused conception of the economy
and its relation to global capital.1
1 A note of clarification regarding the ongoing changes in the geopolitical structure, the
redrawing of the relation of global capital with the state, and whether that will affect our
analysis of the circuits of global capital. The answer is both yes and no. It won’t change
the importance of circuits of global capital which have always been a part of capitalism
since its inception; nevertheless, contradictory effects emanating from the more assertive
state based on nationalist upsurge will certainly change the structure of the circuits of

Switzerland AG 2023
Global Capitalist Enterprise

Expanding on the discussion on enterprise forwarded in Chapter 2, we
begin by defining the global capitalist enterprise as a complex body that
encompasses FCP, SCP, and non-class processes under the two headings,
revenue and expenditure (Resnick and Wolff 2001). This global enterprise
can be either state or private. A global capitalist enterprise in India (IN),
for example, can be construed in terms of the following value equation:

SViI N + SSCRiIN + NCRiIN = SSCPkIN + k
X IN + k
YIN
(7.1)
where, SV = Surplus value produced and appropriated within the enter-

prise,
specific to capitalist FCP; and,
SSCR = Subsumed class revenue;
NCR = Non-class revenue;
SSC P = Sum of subsumed class payments;
X = Sum of payments made to secure SSCR;
Y = Sum of payments made to secure NCR.
This class-focused classification in value terms is one way of representing
the overdetermined and contradictory class and non-class processes
subsumed under the enterprises’ balance sheet of revenue and expen-
diture. We designate an enterprise ‘capitalist’ if productive capitalists
appropriate the surplus value of productive labourers in the M-C-P-C/ -
M/ process. In order to bring out the global dimension of a capitalist
enterprise, we use the subscript i in the left-hand side to index the various
global locations from where the revenues are drawn, and the superscript
k in the right-hand side to capture the global locations of its expenditure.
As an institution, such kinds of enterprises then are truly ‘globally and
functionally decentred capitalist corporations’ (Resnick and Wolff 2001:
67). Needless to say, to systematically reproduce (7.1) across the economy
global capital. Post-Trump, post-pandemic, and post-Ukraine war, while global capitalism
in the context of a stable and unified neoliberal global economic order as we knew it
may be over, the template of commodity and money chain structuring the circuits of
global capital and the value chain in connection to it would continue to function. That
would not make capitalism any less global. It can, at most, make it differently global. The
methodology we are presenting here to study the larger structure of capital—at concrete-
real and hegemonic-delusional levels—at immanent and phantasmatic planes—would retain
its significance in whatever new world order that is presently taking form.
7 GLOBAL CAPITAL AND ITS CIRCUITS 173
would require an international division of labour, a condition which the

new global order intended to secure.
If the global locations i and k are circumscribed to one specific country
or region (that is, i = k), then that enterprise is a local/national enterprise
and not a global enterprise. In case if any of the elements of the equa-
tion are not applicable for a specific enterprise, it will simply drop out. If,
suppose, an enterprise is not involved in processes pertaining to SSCR,
NCR, Y , and X, its relevant class enterprise equation would be solely
constituted by SV and SSCP. Depending upon the site of the FCP, global
capitalist enterprises would take on the adjective of industrial, agricultural,
health, education, technology, entertainment, real estate, digital, sports,
etc.; these may be large, mid-size, or small.2 Also, if the mode of appro-
priation turns out to be different, then the enterprise would undergo a
change in class character. The appropriation, for example, could be of
communist type and the enterprise would then be called a global commu-
nist enterprise, and so on. However, as per our objective in this chapter,
the focus is on the global capitalist enterprise.
As a preliminary step of analysis, assume a global capitalist enterprise
restricted to SV and SSCP. In this instance, the performance of surplus
labour takes place in different countries even as appropriation transpires
in a city where the headquarter of the enterprise is located. Indeed, some
global behemoths (such as Apple, Toyota Motor Corporation or family
owned Chaebols like Samsung) are focused on generating revenues from
spatially dispersed capitalist FCP out of the specialized use values that they
produce. The appropriated surplus value could as well be distributed to
various global locations, especially when the internal and external condi-
tions of existence of FCP are globally disarticulated (facilitated by, among
others, subcontracting, outsourcing, offshoring, body shopping, as also
by changes in composition, quality, and quantity of means of produc-
tion in the form of new modes of telecommunication, digitalization,
robotics, artificial intelligence, and so on). Capital’s ‘global-ness’
is thus
a feature of spatial disarticulation materializing across SV = SSCP.
Capital’s global-ness is however not about spatial disarticulation. It is
2 While analysis of industrial, agricultural, minerals, technology, and entertainment capi-

talist enterprises are well known, the recent class analysis of digital space and pay per click
business models has highlighted the fast-paced entry of capitalist enterprise within that
segment in the last two decades (Azhar, 2021).
about the self-expansion of value (Verwertung )—i.e., about the facilita-

tion of the intensification and expansion of surplus value appropriation
through spatial disarticulation into multiple global locations/sites. Capital
has no obligation to be either global or local. Capital only begets capital;
capital is value in motion, as Marx puts it. While mostly private corpo-
rations, the capitalist form nevertheless does not exclude the existence of
giant state corporations such as China Mobile, ONGC in India, PJSC
Gazprom in Russia, and Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia.
However, global capital can acquire a much wider scope for such enter-
prises. We would also include all kinds of value (money) flows achieved
from taking spatially disarticulated class and non-class positions, which
fetch the global capitalist enterprise subsumed class revenues (SSCR) and
non-class revenues (NCR); against it the enterprise incurs expenditures (X
and Y ) accordingly. Reliance Industries Limited, the first Indian multi-
national conglomerate company to cross $100 billion in revenues, is
engaged in operations across a variety of sectors, including energy, petro-
chemicals, natural gas, telecommunications, mass media, textiles, and
retail. Its aggressive acquisition and partnership in different M-C-P-C/ -
M/ processes, and its fierce competitive and legal conflicts with Amazon
over the retail market in India to dominate the M-CP -M/ trading process,
stand testimony to the importance that its capitalists qua board of direc-
tors attach to its subsumed revenue position as a merchant capitalist,
alongside that of its fundamental class position as an industrial capitalist.
These aspects are only an extension of our discussion in Chapter 2, which
reveal that the subject, including the capitalist subject, can, and often
does, occupy multiple class and non-class positions (be it, the combina-
tion of productive and unproductive capitalists) in a single site (say, an
enterprise), or across multiple sites (say, across various enterprises). More
on this will follow later.
To further illustrate, the so-called India Inc. is now mostly global in
character,3 a transmogrification as a result of neoliberal globalization; Tata
group, Reliance Industries Limited, Infosys, Cognizant, and JSW Group
are only some of the known names of giant Indian global capitalist enter-
prises. For example, the Tata group in 2020–2021, operated in more
3 For details of the meaning of neoliberalism, of India’s adoption of neoliberal global-

ization and of global capitalism respectively, see Chakrabarti et al. (2015 Chapters V, VII,
and VIII).
than 100 countries across six continents, employing 800,000 people4 ;

as of 2015–2016, its international revenues were at around $70 billion
which constituted nearly 69% of the group’s revenues.5 These global
private capitalist enterprises are complemented by a few global state capi-
talist enterprises (such as IOC and ONGC). In China, along with private
global capitalist enterprises, some of the biggest global enterprises are
state-owned and party-directed.
There are other exclusively unproductive global capitalist enterprises
which do not create value through the FCP. Since such enterprises are
in the business of generating surplus value through (M - M/ ) and (M-
CP -M/) we name them, depending upon their specific activities, as global
‘financial’ capitalist enterprise (banking, insurance, brokerage, etc.) and
global merchant capitalist enterprise. These are varied kinds of unproduc-
tive global capitalist enterprises, albeit connected in overdetermined and
contradictory relations with productive capitalist enterprises (Chapter 2).
For such global capitalist enterprises, the value equation gets modified
into:

SSCRiIN + NCRiIN = k
X IN + k
YIN (7.2)
where, the terms carry their usual connotations. Industrial and Commer-
cial Bank of China, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Bridgewater Associates, Citi
Bank, Japan Post Holdings Co. Ltd., HSBC, State Bank of India, etc., are
examples of global financial enterprises, which again could be both private
and state. Here, the board of directors will receive as revenue a portion
of the surplus value from productive capitalists (SSCR) of other enter-
prises; they will also receive non-class value from unproductive sources
or NCR (such as interest payment and commission fees from loans on
account of purchase of housing, automobiles, education, and so on, or
interest return or commission fee from arranging credit or transactions in
currency, stocks, bonds, derivatives, insurance, etc., for other banks and
financial enterprises). While receiving this revenue to the equivalent of
M-M/ from these varied sources, the board of directors will also take the
4 Available at: https://www.tata.com/business/overview (accessed on 20 May 2022).

5 Zee Business, July 30, 2016. Available at: https://www.zeebiz.com/companies/news-
70-revenues-of-tata-group-came-from-overseas-in-fy16-4329#:~:text=International%20reve
nues%20at%20around%20%2470,%25%20of%20the%20group’s%20revenues.%E2%80%9D
(accessed on 20 May 2022).
decision to distribute the revenue (as its own expenditures) for activating
the conditions of existence for its revenue generation. These will include
not only the internal condition providers such as managers and accoun-
tants of the financial enterprises, but also to external condition providers
such as creditors, stockholders, landlords, security agencies, the state, and
so on. Payments will also be incurred for further expansion of constant
capital and variable capital they employ. On all these counts, the board
makes the decision of allocating non-class expenditures between X and Y.
Likewise, the merchant capitalist enterprises like Amazon, Walmart,
Aldi, Future group, JD com, etc., too would fit Eq. (7.2) although their
core process of generating revenue and expenditure by buying use values
low and selling them high (M-CP -M/ ) would differ from that of the
financial enterprises.
Bringing our arguments together, we refer to global capital as the
globally articulated self-expansion of value through M-C-P-C/ -M/ , M-
CP -M/ , and M-M/ in the above-described sense, not necessarily as
disjointed but in mutual constitution with one another; these values and
their flows combine through FCP, SCP, and non-class processes. Central
and commercial banks, money market (short-term lending or borrowing),
capital market (medium and long-run lending and borrowing through
public equity markets), currency market (foreign exchange trading) and
international reserves, debt, and trade are some of the major finan-
cial and commercial conduits, i.e., conditions of existence of productive
capital and also unproductive capital; because all capitalist enterprises are
linked to one another through money and commodity markets, disrup-
tion following private actions by one or some will reverberate across the
three circuits of capital and global capital as such.6
In exploring global capital and its circuits, it is important to empha-
size the contribution of the position from where one views and speaks.
Ours is not a view from nowhere in three senses. First, we consider
any approach that bifurcates productive from unproductive capital as
misplaced. Perhaps, the money power of financial and trading capital
from parts of the North looks overwhelming to some Marxists and other
6 For a non-class historical account of complexities within capitalism in the last 500 years
and the rise, fall and rise of Empires in the changing world order—Dutch, British, USA,
and China—see Dalio (2021: 242–422). Colonialism, imperialism, and wars can be iden-
tified as constant instruments of settling both the presence and transition of capitalism
and of determining which nations would dominate.
heterodox scholars, but this representation of the disjointed existence of

the three circuits of capital (productive, financial, and merchant) is miles
away from Marx’s insight of their overdetermined and contradictory rela-
tions that is an integral part of any class-focused analysis of the capitalist
form (Resnick and Wolff, 1987; Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry 2017;
Roy 2020). The question of dominance of one relative to the other circuit
cannot and should not subsume the question of the overdetermined rela-
tion between the three circuits that the class perspective delivers.7 Lest
it be forgotten, the capitalists from the three circuits are brothers but,
like in the series Animal Kingdom, hostile brothers locked in the same
house. Despite much squabbling with one another, what they have in
common is that the income and wealth they get is largely a portion of the
total surplus of living labour, whether they get it through its appropria-
tion, distribution, or further redistribution of values through circulation.
On this ‘right and might’, the classes of capitalists unitedly and fiercely
defend capital. Secondly, we remain firmly grounded in the Southern
context/question and ultimately to the WOT perspective that we are
developing in this book. That context and perspective makes us acknowl-
edge in the Southern countries the presence of M-C-P-C/ -M/ within the
global structure of commodities and value flows containing the overde-
termined triad of M-C-P-C/ -M/ , M-CP -M/ , and M-M/ . Finally, from
the same location, the importance of M-C-P-C/ -M/ in the formation
of global capital and of state policy surrounding it in these countries
cannot be underestimated. A cursory look at the billionaires list in Forbes
for India and China reveals the overwhelming presence of productive
capitalists and/or capitalists who are a combination of productive and
unproductive capital. Unravelling the biograph of capital from the South
is perhaps a different experience. Looked at from above—by a six-foot-tall
man—a table is a top on four legs. Looked at from below—by an infant,
barely two feet in height—the same table is a roof on four pillars.
7 In fact, even in the so-called high noon of financialization, in some productive indus-
tries such as oil and gas, state enterprises like Saudi Aramco and PJSC Gazprom in Russia
as also the state-sponsored cartel of OPEC have retained enormous power over energy
price and supply; through such control, in the past and in the very present, they have
shown their ability to influence and generate effects to bring even the so-called powerful
financial markets (stock, currency, etc.), not to speak of the rest of the productive sector
of the economy, to their knees.
Global Capital and the Hegemonic

From a class-focused perspective, global capital emerges as the centre of
the hegemonic structure that paradoxically escapes structurality, as if, it is
located outside the structure, appearing as being structure-transcendent.
The ‘hub’ of global capital signifies the fortress consisting of the various
conditions of existence that immediately, and directly, surround and
secure global capital. We have argued elsewhere that the hegemonic, as
part of neoliberal globalization, has attempted to mould the form of
global enterprise to that of a private capitalist class set, that is, one where
the right of appropriation will reside with private productive capitalists
(Chakrabarti, et al. 2015, Chapter 4); here, we are particularly pointing to
the capitalist class 17 set with expanded reproduction type, with its history
of mechanization right down to the phase of automation. While the nodal
signifiers of capitalist existence are capitalist surplus value appropriation
and market capitalist commodity, for the capitalist enterprise to acquire
a global form in the era of globalization, the nodal signifiers modifies to
private capitalist surplus value appropriation and the local-global market
form of commodity. They in turn structure the hub of global capital.
Other floating signifiers (private property, power, profit, capital accumula-
tion, efficiency, competition, individualism, etc.) work to provide further
anchorage to these nodal signifiers of global capital; this is the first step
in the creation of the circuits of global capital. Let us start by discussing
who the ‘global capitalist’ is.
Productive and Unproductive

Capitalist: What Is Global Capitalist?
Depending upon the context of possession of surplus value, the produc-
tive and unproductive capitalist subject-positions typically materialize
through legal forms in the enterprise, such as through sole proprietorship,
partnership, and the corporation (involving board of directors). Global
capitalists are extensions of this basic idea of capitalists being the direct
possessors of surplus value (through production or circulation) in a glob-
ally differentiated space. As explained, they could personify productive
and unproductive global capital separately, or through the combination
of both.
To illustrate, Indian billionaires and centimillionaires (net worth of
over hundred million units of a currency) today are commonly called
global capitalists. These global capitalists are spread across various indus-
tries, to name a few, Petroleum, Pharmaceuticals, Real Estate, FMCG, IT
and ITeS, Jewellery, Media, and Steel. Even amidst the pandemic and a
weakening economy, India’s number of billionaires increased from 140 in
2021, to 166 in 2022,8 numbering only behind USA and China. The
combined net worth of India’s billionaires comes to a staggering net
worth of $750 billion; the same net worth of Indian billionaires in 2021–
2022 when expressed as a percentage of India’s GDP comes to an equally
staggering 28.19%.9 However, even many mid-level and small capitalists
are global capitalists by virtue of personifying global capital. The system
facilitating the expansion of value in favour of global capitalists has an
important bearing on the quite dramatic income and wealth inequality in
the globe, not only between the circuits of the global capital and WOT,
but also within the circuits of global capital.
In case of corporations, the processes of appropriation, distribution,
and receipt of surplus value by global capitalists (board of directors)
occur in their respective headquarters. These global capitalists would
typically congregate in certain cities (London, New York, Frankfurt,
Shanghai, Singapore, Dubai, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and
so on). These global cities are not necessarily the hub of production
(where the performance of surplus value is transpiring—those are indus-
trial cities, clusters, SEZs, etc.) but definitely the hub of the concentration
of values. Courtesy the transportation (especially colossal growth of
maritime and air traffic connected by logistics cities), communication,
and informal technology revolution (from mechanization to automation),
colossal amount of values created all over the world are congregating in
such cities at a breathtaking pace and are getting further distributed from
there to the other immediate condition providers in those cities or to
other condition providers in different parts of the globe.
8 Forbes, April 5, 2022. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/naazneenkarm

ali/2022/04/05/indias-10-richest-billionaires-2022/?sh=575484b17617 (accessed on 20
April 2022).
9 Ibid.
Circuits of Global Capital

The global economy comprises of a complex configuration of global
capitalist enterprises and other forms of enterprises, capitalist and non-
capitalist, that are ‘local’. Does it mean that these ‘local’ enterprises are
necessarily outside the circuits of global capital ? The answer is no.
In this sense, global capital is inclusive; it includes local enterprises,
capitalist and non-capitalist alike within its fold. In another sense, global
capital is exclusive; it does not include, it cannot include the language of
class and non-capital within its fold. Global capital includes the capitalist
and the non-capitalist local in terms of the logos and principles of capital,
in terms of a privileging of its nodal signifiers (Chakrabarti et al. 2009).
In the hegemonic construction, the capitalist and non-capitalist local is
considered as subsumed under the material substratum of capital’s theo-
ries, capital’s language, capital’s transactions, and capital’s philosophy of
life. It is never the ground or language for an alternative rethinking of the
economy.
To see how global capital is inclusive as also expansive, we take off
from the definition of global capitalist enterprise in order to flesh out
our understanding of the circuits of global capital, and differentiate the
circuits of global capital from global capital itself.
To begin with, the value flows stemming from the global capitalist
enterprise are the centrifugal force of the circuits of global capital. Sans
global capital, the circuits of global capital cannot be defined. Moreover,
the processes that form the conditions of existence of global capitalist
enterprise constitute a critical node in the circuits of global capital. For
one, non-capitalist enterprises and local capitalist enterprises that are inter-
twined within the global production system (for example, by supplying
the global capitalist enterprises with intermediate means of production)
constitute the processes of global capital. Reversibly, these non-capitalist
and local capitalist enterprises can be affected by global capitalist enter-
prises as well (say, through the supply of credit to the non-capitalist or
local capitalist enterprises to produce the required goods or services).
Moreover, merchant enterprises buy cheap and sell high finished global
commodities to consumers or semi-finished goods as input to other enter-
prises. Against this, they receive a portion of surplus value as merchant
fees or commission fees. By virtue of this linkage, such enterprises are also
a part of the circuits of global capital. The merchant enterprises may also
be engaging in financial market activities likestocks, insurance, currency
and commodity swaps, etc., against which they will receive non-class
revenue or payment. Likewise, against providing credit for the produc-
tion of the commodity, the financial enterprises receive interest payment.
Financial enterprises might also invest and take part in activities, prac-
tices, and relationships pertaining to non-class process of stocks, bonds,
insurance, currency, and commodity swaps, etc. Even the corporations
with M-C-P-C/ -M/ may be involved in all these non-productive activities
through managed disbursement of the retained surplus value as ‘financial’
capital in non-class directions.
Financing of the circuits of global capital might not just pertain to
capitalist enterprises, but also to a vast array of non-capitalist enterprises
connected to the circuits of global capital (Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry
2017; Roy 2020); that is, once we conceive of the circuits of global
capital, it becomes clear that finance capital operates way beyond the
shores of global capitalist enterprises into the very heart of a variety of
non-capitalist enterprises. This is especially true for global financial enter-
prises operating in newly industrializing areas in the South. Without such
services, and the processes they activate, the production, appropriation,
and distribution of surplus value in the global terrain will not materialize,
nor will other forms of revenue and expenditure flows that make up global
capital transpire. Sans class, any “fetishization of financial capital renders
invisible living labor as the source of surplus value” (Bhattacharya and
Seda-Irizarry 2017: 330) and therefore forecloses the class effects.
Apart from the three circuits of capital that co-constitute global capital
and its circuits, the landlords too play an important role by monopolizing
land, intangible knowledge-capital (like Monsanto seeds), patent, brand,
etc., against which they receive a portion of surplus value as rent (more on
this later); this rent-bearing capital is a crucial condition of existence for
the circuits of global capital, the protection of which is the responsibility
of the state and the international institutions (like WTO).
Finally, few reflections on the state. In providing security to income,
wealth, and property in general, creating legal frameworks, maintaining
money supply, markets (debt and currency), degree of competition and
trade, and delivering financial benefits (interest subsidies or write offs, tax
cuts, etc.), the state has always been considered an indispensable condi-
tion of existence for capitalist enterprises. In addition to these, its strategy
in charting out policies and modifying them has also been crucial for
facilitating the direction of capitalist development. Globally, the last four
decades, save a few exceptions, have seen the role of state shift from state
to private capitalism, from planning to market, in so far as the degree of

importance in shaping the national economy is concerned. The role of the
state was crucial in planting global capital, especially its private form, at
the centre of the economy and to adopt neoliberal reforms to ensure the
creation and expansion of the present form of the circuits of global capital;
it was instrumental in putting into operation the competitive market
conditions under the free trade regime (backed up by the institution of
WTO). The change in these and other conditions transformed the state
in turn; the state now saw itself in partnership with global capital rather
than with national capital (whose state form has been privatized to a great
degree, and which the state now wants to be global competitors). One has
resultantly witnessed a systemic transition in which global capitalists have
come to be perceived as pioneers of economic growth and higher stan-
dard of living, and hence been catapulted as societal leaders. Other than
the usual ‘reforms’, any tangible or intangible benefits (access to land,
forest and minerals, land subsidies, cheap credit and credit restructuring,
tax cut on corporate profit, deregulation, etc.) provided by the state to
global capitalist enterprises are rationalized in terms of this overall require-
ment of facilitating economic growth for society, which it is claimed can
only be achieved through the stability and expansion of the circuits of
global capital. The relation that emerged between the state, neoliberal
globalization, and global capitalism, is then systemic rather than ad hoc.
Other roles of state will be indicated in due course.
We define the “circuits of global capital ” as comprising of all those
processes and relations that are directly or indirectly connected with
the global capitalist enterprises, particularly class set 17; these include
class and non-class, capitalist and non-capitalist processes linked in one
way or another to global capital. Rather than being reduced to transna-
tional/MNCs/corporations/global capitalist enterprises, the circuits of
global capital thus have a much wider scope than that specified by the
physical reach of all the global capitalist enterprises combined. This over-
flow is crucial for the existence of global capitalist enterprises or, for that
matter, for global capital itself. This is then a curious stage of capitalism—
where it is the adulteration, the blemish, the defilement of the global
capitalist enterprise by non-capitalist enterprises, or by local capitalist
enterprises, that provide crucial conditions of existence to help secure
global capital.
We are now in a position, perhaps, to look at the circuits of global
capital in terms of the centricity of global capital 7.1.
Fig. 7.1 Circuits of global capital. Source Chakrabarti and Dhar (2012)
The ‘hub’ of global capital—the circular dotted line—is constituted

by processes flowing from the global capitalist enterprises, as also by
processes directly related to enterprises that constitute global capital.
Institutions, which are within the hub of global capital, are said to be
‘distance close’ to global capital. The rest are considered a ‘distance away’
from global capital, including the vast array of non-capitalist enterprises.
To illustrate the relations of overdetermination among those processes
involved in the chain that form the circuits, consider Kolkata Leather
Complex (KLC) which is a leather-based cluster of tanning enterprises
near Kolkata in West Bengal. Global capitalist enterprises like Gucci,
Pierre Cardin, Coach, Guy Lorche, La Martina, Le Tanneur, Radley,
Prada, Delsy, Armani, Samsonite, and Marks & Spencer procure finished
leather as well as products (bags, wallets, footwear, industrial gloves,
saddle, and harness) from these tanneries which are mostly capitalist enter-
prises. These capitalist enterprises, primarily medium-size enterprises, in
turn depend upon a host of micro, small, and medium-size enterprises10
(capitalist as also non-capitalist) spread in KLC, parts of Kolkata, and its
10 By Government of India classification, micro-enterprises consist of those having

investment below one crore and turnover of less than five crores, small enterprise of
investment below ten crores and turnover of less than fifty crores, and medium enter-
prise of investment below fifty crores and turnover of less than two hundred and fifty
surrounding towns, and even outside West Bengal for a variety of oper-
ations for each such produce.11 The leather and accessory industry as a
whole employs 2.5 million people as direct producers of surplus or as
condition providers, and a large part (nearly 60–65%) of the labour force
is in the small/micro sector.12 These operations carried out by the capi-
talist and non-capitalist enterprises right down to finished product sold
to global manufacturing capitalist enterprises or to the foreign costumers
(global merchants or directly the consumers) form the circuits of global
capital. An example of the value chain in terms of value added in each
stage of operation for a use value may proceed from raw hide and skin, to
finished leather, to design, sampling, and approval of foreign buyers, to
cutting of leather and lining as per design, to skiving of leather, to assem-
bling and stitching, to checking and packing, and finally to finishing, and
making the product ready for despatch.13 From its vantage point, Gucci
measures its Digital EP&L (Environmental Profit and Loss account) by
considering four tiers in its entire circuits of commodity production: “Tier
0 (our direct operations of stores, offices and warehouses) and Tier 1 (our
final product manufacturing and assembly); to Tier 2 (our manufacturing
and preparation of subcomponents like cutting, knitting, …) and Tier
3 (raw material processing); all the way to Tier 4 (the production and
extraction of raw materials)”.14 The role of the state, both central and
particularly state government, in creating the Leather complex and the
industry, proved to be crucial; it provided credit access, reduced import
duties (like wet blue, crust leather, etc.), helped in design, and created
crores. Available at: https://msme.gov.in/sites/default/files/MSME_gazette_of_india.pdf

(accessed on 15 February, 2022).
11 Sanjay Pal and Rohita Kumar Mishra. 2015. Internationalization of Kolkata Leather
Cluster: A Case Study. Conference paper. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/
publication/278961873_Internationalization_of_Kolkata_Leather_Cluster_A_Case_Study
(accessed on 18 June 2022).
12 The Times of India, February 2, 2021. Available at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.
com/articleshow/80639229.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&
utm_campaign=cppst (accessed on 14 June 2022).
13 Diagnostic Study Report of Kolkata Leather Cluster. 2014. Implementing BDS in the
Kolkata Leather Cluster. Available at: http://www.kolkataleatherbds.com/Final%20DSR-
Leather%20Cluster,%20Kolkata.pdf (accessed on 12 June 2022).
14 Gucci Equilibrium, 13 July, 2021. Available at: https://equilibrium.gucci.com/res
ponsible-supply-chain/ (accessed on 12 June 2022).
the centralized effluent treatment plant to meet necessary environmental

standards for the complex.
The enterprises that are distance away from the hub of the circuits may
take credit (M) from financial enterprises (could be global financiers, local
moneylender, or even state-run banks as part of government schemes)
to purchase the needed means of production (hide, cutting machines,
chemicals, and so on). Assuming that labour-power recruitment could
be family-based, wage labour, or apprentice, the labour-power (L) is
deployed over the means of production (MOP) in a labour process ‘P’
that produce the commodity C/ which is then sold (through the local
merchant) as intermediate goods to the Indian global capitalist enterprises
as per specification; the latter then produce the goods, as per specification
and design, and sell it, again possibly via the merchants, to the foreign
global capitalist enterprises. A foreign global capitalist, say G, occupies a
non-class position by purchasing the produce (leather or finished product)
from the Indian global capitalist enterprise (via the merchant) which it
then uses to advance the manufacturing process to impose its patent
right to sell the branded produce. It is of course a different question
to inquire about the mechanism of the distribution of the share of total
surplus value among the appropriators of the value chain (more on this
later). At each stage of production of any C, the appropriator of surplus
value (whoever it is) distributes a portion of it to the merchant and
financier for providing critical conditions of existence for their respec-
tive FCPs. As such, the moneylender and merchant occupy subsumed
class positions, receiving a distributed amount of surplus labour. If the
financier and merchant are the same entity, then that entity occupies
two subsumed class positions. There could be possibly other subsumed
class position holders—designers, merchandisers, CAD/CAM operators,
quality control supervisor, managers, accountants, etc.—who, depending
upon the requirement at each stage of FCP, either directly (in the work-
place) or indirectly (through outsourcing or subcontracting) provide
other conditions of existence; against that they receive a cut as payment
from the surplus value from the respective appropriators. When defining
the circuits of global capital, we identify the various processes that allow
such a global chain to take place; those who personify processes that
are part of this circuit are subjects operating within it. In our example,
the merchants, financiers, the global capitalists, the local capitalist and
non-capitalist appropriators, the performers of surplus labour, and the
various condition providers including the state, participate and help to

make possible the formation of the circuits of global capital.
Coming back to our general discussion, the overdetermined processes
within the circuits of global capital embody contradictory effects, which
could result in various types of conflicts. For example, conflicts may break
out between capitalists within the ambit of global capital—pitting say,
the financial capitalists (who want the world to be rid of any protection
against movement of capital) against a section of productive capitalists
(who may want some protection from foreign competition) (see Soros
2004). Marx’s disaggregation of capitalists into productive and unproduc-
tive is enormously helpful in understanding and describing such conflicts
from a class standpoint. Similarly, intense contradictions and conflicts
may exist between capitalist appropriators and non-capitalist appropria-
tors regarding the total share of the surplus value or between capitalist
appropriators and the performers of surplus labour inside the global
capitalist enterprise. Or, we may have a conflict-like situation between
the direct performers of surplus labour and their appropriators in those
non-capitalist enterprises which operate within the circuits of global
capital. We can even think of conflict between labourers—productive and
unproductive—in the global capitalist enterprise, and labourers in other
equally exploitative non-capitalist enterprises where the former could be
perceived as occupying a privileged position (income-wise) compared to
the latter. Class and class-related processes are in a state of endless tran-
sition brought about by, among others, class struggle and struggle over
non-class processes that effect the circuits of global capital.
Circuits of Global Capital and Markets

We have seen that the functioning of global capital and its circuits require
a special connection of class enterprise with that of the market. Indeed,
global flexibility and mobility of capital demands a semblance of inter-
nationally supervised impersonal system of commodity market through
which capital can function globally. Consequently, establishing an imper-
sonal system of market that is tuned to the global movement of capital,
becomes an important task to be fulfilled by such international agencies
like the IMF, the WTO, or the World Bank and the various regional blocs
that get formed. This market is designated local-global market.15
Let us begin by defining the local-global market and contrasting it
with what we designate as WOT market. We start with the importance of
market in its global form vis-à-vis market in its local form. Suppose one
enterprise interacts with another enterprise where none fulfil Eq. (7.1) in
their global form, that is, their i and k’s are identical. This exchange is
then a local market exchange. When exchange takes place in a setting
where one or both of the enterprises are global enterprises, then the
market as a site of trading comes to constitute a global market. Market
exchanges of local and global nature have been there for a long time in
history and there is nothing innovative in saying that globalization cele-
brates the principle of market or, say, that of global market. What made
contemporary globalization special is the particular way in which the local
market gets hooked to the global market, forming what we define as local-
global market, and how this in turn makes possible the circuits of global
capital and its mutations.
(i) Local-Global Market and WOT Market
Let us start with an example. Tata Steel Limited’s interaction with the
outside world (say, the selling of steel to China) is a transaction that is
part of the global market. In contrast, ancillary enterprises (capitalist and
non-capitalist) interacting with Tata Steel Limited are strictly speaking
local market interactions, that is, they are interactions materializing within
the national border. However, since Tata Steel Limited is a global capi-
talist enterprise, its interaction with ancillary enterprises through the local
market represents an ingredient of the circuits of global capital. Local
markets and global markets are part of the same market chain—local-
local….global-global—as long as they connect to the circuits of global
capital. Markets that connect to the circuits of global capital are named
local-global market because the exchanges, whether in local or global
settings, constitute the circuits of global capital. Markets of both local and
global type enable the circuits of global capital to materialize, and their
contradictory effects render the circuits of global capital dynamic and in
15 As the geopolitical structure change, so too will the structure of internationally super-
vised systems change; it will be associated with a concomitant alteration, not dissolution,
in the structure of local-global markets.
flux; competition based on economic parameters (price, quality, produc-

tivity, etc.) becomes the norm through which winners and losers from the
beginning to the end point are sorted out; at times, state regulations (say,
state or internationally imposed banning of sourcing of intermediate or
final products from certain regions) effect the circuits of global capital but
by only modifying the chain of local-global market without dismantling
it. In contrast, there are local markets that do not form part of the circuits
of global capital in the sense that none of the exchanges are connected
to the circuits of global capital. Such markets are defined as world of the
third markets (WOT markets).
One can likewise go back to our earlier example of the leather industry
to highlight another example of local-global market. A host of markets,
from local-local to global-global (depending upon the stages in the value
chain) allow for the creation of the circuits of global capital. This happens
if, say, a distant family-based non-capitalist enterprise producing compo-
nents of a leather bag is connected through the value chain to the shops
and stores of a global capitalist enterprise in the making of the local-
global market of leather bag; so do all processes, enterprises, and agents
connected to this chain. However, a large portion of Indian leather and
accessory commodities are for the domestic market; to illustrate, when
the same family-based non-capitalist enterprise produces a leather bag
that is sold by the local merchant in the domestic market, the local-local
exchange falls under the purview of WOT market because this exchange
does not connect to the circuits of global capital.
The contradictions that can appear at any stage of the produc-
tion process can have far-reaching consequences on the local-global
market and indeed render the circuits of global capital unstable.
For instance, the shutdowns, accumulating debt and falling demand,
following the COVID-19 pandemic (a natural process) had a devas-
tating impact on the chain of leather-related enterprises (capitalists and
non-capitalists) in India.16 Then again, the ban on slaughtering old or
unproductive cattle by the Indian government (legal process based on a
cultural process of protecting the ‘sacred’ cow) that was implemented by
twenty regional states has had a devastating impact on India’s domestic
hide supply, not only in the states like Uttar Pradesh which saw the
16 The Print, October 15, 2021. Available at: https://theprint.in/economy/shutdo

wns-debts-layoffs-bengal-tanners-pushed-to-the-edge-say-3rd-covid-wave-will-finish-us/
749477/ (accessed on 12 June 2022).
tanneries close down, but also in other leather clusters like in Kolkata
which previously procured a large portion of its hide as input from such
regional states.17 It had a deleterious effect on the WOT circuits of leather
industry that were mostly small and micro (many were home sector
units; see Chapter 8) as also on the global capitalist enterprises located
in Kolkata Leather Complex including those connected to the circuits of
global capital. The latter, to survive, had to import the costlier hides from
other countries that in turn made their products relatively less competi-
tive in the global market for their respective produce. Thus, while the
Indian state seeks to increase leather exports by supporting the industry
through various measures that we have earlier discussed, certain policies
of the same state impart contradictory effects.
(ii) Capitalist Commodity versus Non-Capitalist Commodity
We have already described in Chapter 2, that Marxist theory defines

market capitalist commodity in terms of the relation of commodity
values to market exchange (involving labour-power, means of produc-
tion, and final produce) and the capitalist appropriation of surplus value.
Depending upon the connection of the type of FCP with commodity, we
have the class-focused nosology of various kinds of commodity—feudal
commodity, slave commodity, communist commodity, and so on.
Local-global market is constitutive of exchanges involving global capi-
talist enterprise, local capitalist enterprise of expanded type, and local
capitalist enterprise of simple reproduction type, as well as a vast array
of non-capitalist enterprises; local-global market institutionalizes their
overdetermination through the circuits of global capital and holds it
together. Moreover, exchanges involving banking and merchant enter-
prises, the state, and other agencies that help to reproduce the web of
this circuit, are also part of the local-global market. Put in another way,
the threads and the overall matrix of the different types of market, capi-
talist and non-capitalist, that nourish the circuits of global capital, make
up the local-global market.
Just as without capitalist commodity there cannot be any capitalist
FCP and vice versa, without the local-global market there cannot be any
17 https://www.leathermag.com/features/featuresacred-cows-6708073/ (accessed on
18 June 2022).
circuits of global capital either. Local-global market and circuits of global

capital literally bring one another into existence.
WOT market remains outside the circuits of global capital. In this case,
we consider all those market transactions that are in no way connected,
directly or indirectly, to it as a component of WOT market. Other than
non-capitalist enterprises, there are local capitalist enterprises that are
involved in such WOT exchanges. That is, local capitalist enterprise could
be involved in either the local-global market or WOT market depending
on its location within, or outside the circuits of global capital. Of course,
within WOT, the aspect of distribution and the relation between buyers
and sellers are not simply of a market form. Non-market exchanges too
play a significant role in forming the circuits within WOT.
Circuits of Local Capital

We have defined the outside of the circuits of global capital as WOT.
WOT contains not just non-capitalist enterprises but also capitalist enter-
prises. While leaving the detailed discussion of WOT to the next chapter,
we focus here only on the capitalist enterprise and the circuits it can
form within WOT; the objective is to highlight its tense relation with
the circuits of global capital and the effect of hegemonization it often
encounters.
We start with the local capitalist enterprise (where i and k in [7.1]
drop out). In that case, the value equation of a local capitalist enterprise
becomes:

SV + SSCR + NCR = SSCP + X+ Y (7.3)
The capitalist enterprise could be of two types: expanded reproduc-

tion (which accumulates capital) and simple reproduction (which does
not accumulate capital). Indeed, a large number of capitalist enterprises
would fall within the spectrum of this rather strictly defined end, some
tilted more towards simple reproduction and others towards expanded
reproduction. Thus, there are three types of capitalist enterprise: global
capitalist enterprise (which is of expanded reproduction type), local
capitalist enterprise of expanded reproduction type, and local capitalist
enterprise of simple reproduction type. These can be further subdi-
vided into state and private forms depending upon the connection or
non-connection of their mode of appropriation with the state.
We now know that local capitalist enterprises whether of simple or

expanded variety (say, the ancillary enterprise for Tata Steel), could very
well be connected to the hub of global capital. If we leave out such
local capitalist enterprises, the rest of local capitalist enterprises outside
the circuits of global capital, populate the WOT.
Now consider local capitalist enterprises of the expanded type. We
define local capital as comprising of revenue and expenditure flows from
such local capitalist enterprises. Just as global capitalist enterprises have
circuits, so does local capital. The circuits of local capital encompass
all those processes that, directly or indirectly, make such local capitalist
enterprises of expanded type function. Accordingly, non-capitalist enter-
prises and local capitalist enterprise of simple reproduction type that
supports the local capitalist enterprise of expanded type are part of the
circuits of local capital. Similarly, financiers, merchants, and so on, also
provide important constituting conditions of existence to the expanded
reproduction type of local capitalist enterprise.
The proponents of self-reliance who are always a major force in the
Southern countries (and now perhaps in the North too) often defend such
a notion of local capital and its circuits in the name of nation-building
project. Indeed, for a long time, policies in many Southern countries and
even in some Northern countries focused on laying down conditions that
would ensure the creation and expansion of the circuits of local capital.
That was particularly true during the planning and welfare state regime
of the Cold War era, of what we may call nation-centric capitalism. As
should be clear by now, self-reliance is not a defence against capitalism,
but an argument against a specific form of capitalism—that is against the
hegemony of global capital and its circuits, and in favour of local capital
and its circuits. The pre-globalization debate between import-substitution
(say, epitomized by India and many Latin American countries) and export
promotion (epitomized by East Asian countries) highlighted this division.
The struggle between local capitalists and global capitalists, as well as
between other constituents (that includes the workforce) making up the
various circuits of capital (local and global) ought not to be underesti-
mated. However, we believe that globalization has shifted the balance in
favour of global capital; that was the clear intent of the neoliberal global
architecture. Whether by considerations of wealth, scale, and scope of
operation, access to resources including raw materials, technology, and
labour-power at a competitive rate, and to the proximity to power centres
within the national and international agencies, the wheels and spokes of
global capital have acquired a definite advantage over local capital. This
in turn had a telling effect on the struggle between those who defend
and forward self-reliance of local capital and its circuits, and those who
argue for the unfettered flourish and blossoming of global capital and its
circuits. Let us take a closer look at this shifting balance.
With the slow but sure modification of economic boundaries that
has been actively encouraged by the state and the post-1980s interna-
tional order, the local capitalist enterprises can no longer be protected
from raids by their global counterparts, whether in terms of takeover or
competition (in price, quality, or simply market power). We have seen
global capitalist enterprises entering the South by simply buying the local
capitalist enterprises (say, Coca Cola, Pepsico for the local soft drinks
industry, or UniLever in the case of the local ice-cream industry in India).
At other times, they take recourse to a short-term strategy of incurring
losses in order to expand the market for themselves (this could take place
through different means such as limit/predatory pricing or dumping)
and, in doing so, drive out the local capitalist enterprises in the long
run. At times, the state encourages through its policies the creation of
joint ventures of local capitalist enterprises with global capitalist enter-
prises or to become the latter’s subsidiaries or simply to relocate the
formers’ manufacturing or service position within the circuits of global
capital. Even in areas in which global capital has not yet arrived within
the national border, the local capitalist enterprises remain subjected to
the constant threat of its global competitors.
Further, because of the hooking of numerous sectors, say, the banking
sector into circuits of global capital, these local capitalist enterprises who
also take loans from these banks, face the overpowering influence of the
principles of global capital on whose basis the banks now function (Basel
norms forming the present basis of banking and financial system). These
banks are, at one and the same time, occupying the local circuits of capital
as provider of loan capital to local capitalist enterprises; and occupying
the circuits of global capital by providing the same to global capitalist
enterprises. The terms by which these banks operate are more often not
discriminatory vis-à-vis the local and global capitalist enterprise, unless
the state adopts discretionary policy favouring the local capitalist enter-
prises in certain sectors (such as with priority sector lending, to protect
it from global competition or to promote it for export promotion) to
reposition them. An analogous argument can also be directed at global
merchant enterprises (we shall exemplify later with respect to agriculture).
This means that the circuits of local capital are, in this case, more often
than not, under the scrutiny of the circuits of global capital; even if they
function locally, the local capitalist enterprises are often forced to adjust
and succumb to the ‘discipline’ of the nodal signifiers of global capital.18
Given that local expanded reproduction capitalist enterprise is part of
the complex space of WOT, there is not only a tension and struggle,
potentially and actually, between the circuits of global capital and the
circuits of local capital but also within the WOT itself, a matter we don’t
take up in this chapter.
Nodal Signifiers of Global Capital

We discussed earlier the question of the ‘button tie’ or point de capiton
(Lacan 2006: 681), or for that matter, the question of the nodal signi-
fiers of ‘private capitalist surplus value appropriation’ and ‘local-global
markets’. It is obvious that these nodal signifiers of private capitalist
surplus value appropriation and local-global market are further anchored
through a number of floating signifiers (efficiency, competitiveness, profit,
private property, individualism, etc.). These floating signifiers serve at
times as the substitute signifiers of nodal signifiers; these substitute signi-
fiers provide further anchorage to nodal signifiers. Thus, these floating
signifiers provide a critical closure—closure in the form of a structured
chain of signification to the circuits of global capital. The complex of
circuits, disaggregated, and polymorphous as they are in character, start
to acquire the presence of a hegemonic order, through a putting to a
contingent halt “the otherwise indefinite sliding of signification” (Lacan
2006: 681). It is only with the return of the language of class that
the nodal signifiers on which the hegemonic order rests become visible.
Our class-focused analysis has revealed that market is disaggregated into
local-global market connected to the circuits of global capital and WOT
market decoupled from the circuits of global capital. How the process of
18 The present disarticulation of the erstwhile global order has been accompanied by
ongoing attempts by nation-state to carve our favoured groups and regional bloc for
global capital to readjust and in some cases for the circuits of local capital to gain relative
prominence. Popularity of terms such as decoupling in Europe, Aatmanirbharta in India
(roughly translated as “self-reliance”), Make America Great Again in USA, etc., stand
testimony to capitalism’s ongoing attempt to readjust and reshape itself. Whatever form
emerges from it, the capitalist circuits and its outside qua world of the third will continue
to procreate as long as capital occupies the centre stage.
hegemonization of the circuits of local capital, particularly of expanded

reproduction form capitalist enterprise, within WOT is procured through
an array of substitute signifiers (discussed in the previous section) and
that of the hegemonization of WOT per se is secured through an array of
substitute signifiers of third wordism and marginalization (to be discussed
in Chapter 8) needs to be carefully delineated.
What about the local-global market? This question acquires signifi-
cance if we remember that while the category of surplus labour or class is
foreclosed, the discourse on market or commodity exchange has acquired,
as in the past, extraordinary importance in neoliberal discourses. This
global role of market also makes Hardt and Negri announce, “…there
is no outside to the world market; the entire globe is its domain” (2000:
190). Neither Hardt and Negri, nor the mainstream discourses seem to
disaggregate market in class terms, thus ending up subsuming all market-
related class relations to its global form, not to speak of the suppression
of non-market-related class forms. But, the hegemonic cannot but have
an outside; it is through a putting outside of the inhospitable and the
inhabitable that it emerges as an universal reality.
The presence of local-global market too masks the centrality of ‘capi-
talist commodity’ that underlies the connection of commodity exchange
with the capitalist organizations of surplus labour. Thus, the local-global
market which represents relationships among various kinds of commodi-
ties—capitalist and non-capitalist—is structured around the primacy of
the capitalist commodity form through which capital acquires its global
form. Through that, the local-global market helps to secure the primacy
of private capitalist surplus value appropriation and the primacy of global
capital.
It is interesting how the mainstream (hegemonic) discourses, including
the neoliberal variant, discuss market without referring to its connection
with class. What such discourses produce is a meaning of market radi-
cally different from the one that we produce in the form of local-global
market that is based on the centricity of capitalist commodity exchange.
These renditions of global capital disavow their roots; they disavow an
encounter with the definitional kernel—private capitalist surplus value
appropriation. Just like in the case of the deployment of (substitute
signifiers of) profit, capital accumulation, competition, efficiency, and
so on, the foregrounding of the mainstream discourse of market away
from its class-focused rendition, helps to secure the foreclosure of class.
While market continues to have a hallowed presence in its representa-

tion, the existence of capitalist FCP remains repudiated; it is an extension
of the repudiation of even its primary moment, the conception of FCP
itself. This is akin to Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism where the
hegemony of the money-form displaced and indeed masked the class rela-
tionships associated with commodity exchanges. Unravelling market in
terms of class relations, allows us to see how the disengagement with
class alters the meaning of market, whereby we end up legitimizing
global capitalist hegemony. With the foreclosure of class, with the putting
outside of something primordial regarding the subject’s being, with the
inauguration of the possibility that in the subject’s relationship to the
symbolic there is a primitive verwerfung (that something would not
be symbolized and would appear in the real—here class understood in
terms of surplus labour), private capitalist surplus value appropriation and
local-global market emerge as the undisputed/unquestioned centre or
nodal point. Embodying the nodal signifiers of private capitalist surplus
value appropriation and local-global market, the hegemonic discourse of
commodity/market ends up espousing a de-classed notion of circuits of
global capital.
Let us give an example. With the hegemonic celebrating the idea
of well-being in terms of income generation, production is preferred if
tuned more towards profit in contrast to what is often depicted as, say,
need which could be the organizing signifier for many non-capitalist class
enterprises. Such ‘abnormal’ economies thus get translated and displaced
into shades of agriculture or informality, into social sector malaise,
into retained and obdurate traditionality. The non-capitalist enterprises
working within the circuits of global capital are called on to abandon their
moorings in such abnormal economies and embrace instead the signifiers
of profit, efficiency, competition, and so on (Chapters 8 and 9). At the
least, even if they are unable to shed their “abnormal” economic beliefs
and practices, they should end up acknowledging the superiority of these
floating signifiers—signifiers that help to secure both the nodal signifiers
and foreclosure at one and the same time.
Agriculture and Informal Sector, Encore

Given the centricity of global capital, and its circuits from within a
decentred and disaggregated class-focused economy, the devalued status
of the agricultural-informal sector in the context of third worldism
that we explored in Chapter 6, passes through a displacement in our

representation. Both can now be further split into two components:
(i) part of the agricultural-informal sector I connected to the circuits

of global capital through the local-global market and,
(ii) part of the agricultural-informal sector II languishing in the world
of the third (WOT).
In the aftermath of globalization, the informal sector II (in both rural

and urban) consisting of diverse, interdependent class sets including capi-
talist ones, is represented as ‘abnormal’, as ‘indecent’ (ILO 2002: 8–9), as
‘unproductive’, and as a swamp of ‘backwardness’ (La Porta and Shleifer
2014); such a sector is hierarchically situated with respect to informal
sector I; informal sector I (both in rural and urban) is, in turn, rendered
backward with respect to the global capitalist (formal) sector breeding
within the hub of global capital. A transition of informal sector II to
informal sector I, and further to the hub of global capital, is a sequen-
tially ordered journey, a linear journey to progress (ILO 2002: 8–9). In
this regard, the later phase of the so-called informalization of formal
sector jobs with casual and contractual labour replacing permanent labour,
would be looked upon by the ILO as a progressive movement along
the chain of the job continuum. From today’s vantage point, the state
management of Informal Sector I turns out to be, as if, an ‘economic’
problem encouraging its placement under the purview of the nodal signi-
fiers of global capital and for that sector to be attached to the global
capitalist enterprise through the local-global market; the objective of state
policy (as has been the case in India and elsewhere) has been to enact
this structure (Chakrabarti et al. 2009). In contrast, the management of
Informal Sector II, the component outside the circuits of global capital,
has essentially been about addressing a ‘social’ malaise to be taken care
of by the state, international agencies (like the World Bank), Microfi-
nance NGOs, and so on, through programs of credit subsidies and grants,
human capital development and social protection (more in Chapter 8).
Combining both, informal sector per se thus becomes part of the hege-
monic articulation that leaves unchallenged the centricity of the signifiers
of private capitalist surplus value appropriation and local-global market.
In the case of agriculture, it is not just a matter of ‘economization’

of the rural social, of ‘industrialization’ of agriculture through mecha-
nization, but of the ‘commodification’ (some say colonisation) of food
cultures through ongoing attempts at shifting land use to agribusi-
ness and in the pattern of cropping from food grains to cash crops.
To illustrate, corporatization of a segment of Indian agriculture has
emerged through the circuits of global capital that require the presence of
local-global markets connecting capitalist and non-capitalist agricultural
enterprises with the foreign-based global capitalist enterprises, such as,
Pepsico, Cargill, etc., as well as India-based global capitalist enterprises,
such as, Reliance and ITC. Needless to say, such global enterprises have
considerable organizational, technological, and financial power as well
as market reach, creating both output (for food grains, cash crops, and
food processing) and input (such as seeds, fertilizers, farm machineries,
bio-technologies, agro-chemicals through integrated nutrients and pest
management) linkages between industrial and agricultural sector, link-
ages that expand the scope within and between the circuits of global
capital; global capitalist enterprises, such as, Hindustan Lever, Cargill,
Seedtech International, HI-Bred International, Sandoz, Monsanto, etc.
have already entered the seed market (which normally involves a package
of seeds with fertilizers and pesticides). Another important route to create
this linkage has been through single brand product retail trading (SBPRT)
and multi brand retail trading (MBRT) in wholesale and retail markets,
not all without controversy and conflicts. The rapid rise of derivative
markets in agricultural products stands testimony to the penetration of
financial capitalists in the agrarian circuits of global capital. As a whole,
the global industrial, financial, and merchant capitalists (capitalists in all
the above corporations personify one or a blend of those positions) are
combining to try to reshape the human being’s relationship with food
(both in production and consumption sphere as also the distributional
channels) through the circuits of global capital. Beyond the agrarian
circuits of global capital lies of course the vast span of WOT agriculture,
including the local capitalist ones, populated by mostly rural and forest
societies. Agrarian transition, driven by capitalocentric-orientalist policy,
is therefore uneven and multidirectional.
Value Chain in the Circuits

of Global Capital and Value Capture
Taking off from class-focused reality, we needed to define the circuits
of global capital through the local-global market in order to theorize
the outside, the space of WOT. One of the questions aligned to the
hegemonic is that of value capture from the value chain embodying
the circuits. The contrast in our point of inquiry to what is discussed
in mainstream discourse must be drawn first. The mainstream study of
capitalism has moved from centre-periphery models to global commodity
chains (GCC), to global value chains (GVC) (Gereffi 2018). Despite its
theoretical richness and its empirical, evidence-based detailing in terms
of macro (global), meso (country and industry), and micro (firm and
community) level studies, as also the issues of value added and governance
structure, what this literature lacks is its inability to draw a relation-
ship between the class process (capitalist and non-capitalist) with GCC
and GVC (Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry 2017; Roy 2020). Rather than
distil out the difference and connection between value added and value
capture within the commodity chains, the literature tends to conflate it
by reducing the problem to value added (Smith 2016). To rectify that
deficit, one group of Marxist scholars, by no means uniform in their
approach, have stressed on the importance of Marxian value theory in
order to distil out the connection of class with value added and value
capture embodied in the governance structure of the value chain. We only
flag some of the explanations: value capture by global capitalists in the
North through super-exploitation of Southern low-wage workers (wage
or piece rate payment below the value of labour-power) (Smith 2016);
value capture in the form of ground rent by global capitalists, principally
located in the North, through monopolizing certain conditions of exis-
tence of surplus value commodity production (Basu 2008; Bhattacharya
and Seda-Irizarry 2017); value capture based on the power hierarchies of
capital within the global value chain which, depending upon the contri-
bution of individual capitalists (as also non-capitalists) to the total pool
of capital, constitutes the magnitude of value capture from living labour
for each appropriators in the chain (Roy 2020). Perhaps, all three mech-
anisms of value capture are working, in conjunction or separately as the
case may be but what remains common is their attempt to relate the ques-
tion of GCC and GVC to its embodied class structure of surplus labour.
Let us briefly sum up the last two arguments which explicitly adopt a
variant of the class-focused approach of the kind followed in this book

but give divergent explanations in their favour.
In addition to the usual interest-bearing capital, Bhattacharya and
Seda-Irizarry (2017) refers to the monopolization of specialized oper-
ations (patented design, logistics, branding, knowledge-capital, etc.) in
certain locations of the value chain of commodity production embodied
in the circuits of global capital that serves as an instrument of extracting
rent (logic being the same as proposed by Marx for ground rent from
monopolizing land access); their argument being that the final price of
commodity in M-C-P-C/ -M/ (containing all the intermediate stages)
contains a disproportionate portion of produced surplus value distributed
as rent on these account (also see Basu 2008). The role of financial and
merchant capital in investment, in generating this rent-bearing capital
as an instrument of value capture of the larger portion of surplus value
produced by living labour, including in the intermediate stages by non-
capitalist enterprises, is not insignificant. The repositioning of financial
and merchant capital in the productive sector can be discerned in the
change in the tagline of Walmart, one of the biggest merchant capi-
talist corporation in the world, from its “Buy American” program till the
1980s to the post-globalization “Low prices. Every day. On everything”
as it radically shifted its investment and mode of operation to purchase
(low-priced) commodities from low-wage labour regions elsewhere in the
world for retail sales (high-priced) in USA and other developed nations.
The massive profit from the final price that followed can be construed as
a result arising from, in addition to its usual merchant fee of M-CP -M/ ,
a portion of surplus value extracted as ground rent (on account of its
monopoly in logistics, sales destination, branding, etc.).
Roy (2020) highlights the element of power in the form of structural
hierarchies of capital within the global value chain. Who will get what in
terms of the share of surplus within this global circuit of capital—value
capture—would depend on the contribution of individual capitalists to
the total pool of advanced capital, which favors the global capitalists in
the North. Despite the manufacturing base shifting to the South, this
hierarchy of capital in the value chain ensures that the share of value added
(the golden goose from labour-power) appearing as surplus in the value
chain continues to be captured in greater proportion by capitalists and
their immediate cohorts in the North than those in the South. Global
dispersion of production and centralization of capital have gone hand in
hand. To be careful, it is not unequal exchange that Roy is emphasizing,
but the unequal share of capital, that in turn will determine who gets
what portion of the produced surplus value, no matter where they are
produced.
Like Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry, Roy too is sceptical of the
financializaton thesis which, according to him, makes it sound like
capitalists’ profit-making process is independent from the process of
exploiting labour in the production sector. On the contrary, financial
capitalists too obtain a share of the captured value from the exploitative
organization of production. Financialization includes the integration of
exploitation in the sphere of production; it contains the global process
of financial accumulation, involving credit to enterprises (capitalist and
non-capitalist) in the distant end of the value chain; any attempt to posit
finance capital per se as more or less delinked from the process of exploita-
tion is misplaced. Both these theories of value chain in their respective
way reiterate Marx’s framework by emphasizing the mutual interaction of
productive and unproductive capital.
In its unencumbered pursuit of surplus value and of any benefit from
its further redistribution, capital—productive and unproductive—shows
no loyalty to nations; such is the history of capitalism; when the nation-
state join hands with this pursuit the extant international laws are shred
and the order of things get recast to its advantage, as the history of explo-
ration, trade, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization shows. Unless
restricted by external forces (by the state or by struggles, class and non-
class), capital follows the logic of profit from the self-expansion of value in
ways (however insidious and destructive), in processes (however exploita-
tive, unfair, abusive, and speculative that may be), and in places (across
continents), wherever it finds an opportunity, by its own making or by
the fortuitous turn of events. That is in essence its dharma.
Despite a growing Marxian literature on value chain and value capture,
what remains to be answered satisfactorily is the question of the fast-paced
rise of home-grown global capitalist enterprises and capitalists (productive
and unproductive) in the countries of the South such as China, India,
Southeast Asia, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere. After all, as history
shows, competing countries do change their relative economic rankings.
We however don’t pursue the problem any further in this book.
Global Capital and Reconfiguration of Space

The global capitalist enterprise depicted in Eqs. (7.1) and (7.2), shows
the creation and movement of values across the globe through a
continual, albeit uneven, wave of reterritorialization (with new spaces
being conquered), and de-territorialization (with old spaces being aban-
doned). Intrusion of capital into hitherto untouched spaces “make it
increasingly murky to seek to demarcate large geographical zones as
center and periphery” (Resnick and Wolff 2001: 65). All countries passing
through capitalist development under neoliberal globalization have seen
their economic map and social milieu redrawn in fundamental ways, as
a result of the combined effects of these processes, relationships, and
value flows. New economic regions were restructured and re-signified,
as global and potentially global, breeding alterations in both the idea and
texture of cities, cultures, and political morphologies; recasting of forms
of life followed suit. New waves of migration of population, domestic and
international, hitherto residing in villages, towns, and small cities into
these places of opportunities also transformed the idea and content of
urban space; not surprisingly, urbanization (and urban planning) then has
become one of the key goals, as also a challenge, facing policy-makers all
over the world.
Beyond the state-sponsored development paradigm that is focused
on comparing and promoting inter-regional performance (among
regional states) based on development indicators, such as income,
mortality/morbidity, literacy, etc., the lure of global capital generates a
different conception of spatiality with its own associated set of indicators;
political and industrial peace, subsidies and support of the state to capital,
labour costs, creation and presence of clustering with externality bene-
fits, transportation facilities and costs, availability of quality human capital,
health care, etc., are some such factors. Alongside industrial cities, a few
global ‘financial’ cities (say, Mumbai in India) have emerged as a cluster
of corporate headquarters, where the board of directors (personifying the
capitalists) would literally meet to appropriate and distribute the revenues
including surplus value; the distributed portions are received in different
globally dispersed spaces where the conditions of existence of these capi-
talist enterprises are secured. While Mumbai has emerged as one of the
fastest growing global cities, as one of the most expensive office markets,
home to most billionaires in India, over half of its population are still
slum dwellers; that speaks of the procreation of the WOT space besides
that being shaped by the circuits of global capital. Such transformation of

regions and cities following the reorganization of space by global capital
perhaps inadvertently also opens in WOT, new processes and possibili-
ties of further rethinking and recasting of the idea of the urban and the
city, through alternative perspectives, and grassroots resistance against the
power and reach of global capital; struggles for commons, shared envi-
ronment, and for new composition of urban reconstruction as against
enclosure, private property, unemployment, and precarious living, may be
construed as representing such kinds of contesting fields (Harvey 2013).
Hegemonization: Unconscious
Interpellation to Global Capital
Social life gets procreated through an array of activities, practices, and
relationships surrounding the circuits of global capital. Spaces which were
once tuned to self-reliance including that of preserving national capital,
got reconfigured to suit and facilitate the procreation of global capital
and its circuits. This reconfiguration encompassed the entire gamut of
the social terrain—from the legal structure included labour-laws, state
apparatuses, educational institutions, body and health, modes of commu-
nications, notions of entrepreneurship and consumerism, sexual and
gender relations, food habits, customs and mores, etc. These are typically
backed up by state support, with additional investment (state and private)
in smart cities, super highways, gated housing complexes, wide pathways,
golf courses, huge shopping malls, seven-star hotels, educational insti-
tutions, hospitals, entertainment including gambling and sleaze, natural
wilderness without the peeking and probing life of WOT in it, and so
on. Existing signifiers pertaining to the cultural, political, and natural
processes undergo a change and new processes with their specific signi-
fying effects are put in place. These signifiers work in tandem with the
economic signifiers such as individualism, private property, efficiency,
profit, competition, market, etc., which function within the circuits of
global capital, to protract and render further anchorage to the nodal signi-
fiers of private capitalist appropriated surplus value and the local-global
market, that secure the sanctity of the hub of global capital. As global
capital gets formed through the (overdetermined) working of (nodal and)
floating signifiers, the social complex sustaining it, materializes. For the
hegemonic to succeed, capital must be assimilated into the production
of social life, subduing political differences, and integrating itself into
the everyday language that we (mis)recognize as our own. The hege-

monic interpellation of the group/social unconscious to such a language
of capital is however never complete. It’s never complete because overde-
termined effects generate contradictions that undermine the process of
unconscious accrual to the nodal signifiers (class struggle being one such
enactment).
The seemingly de-centred, heterogeneous and overlapping cultural,
political, economic, and natural registers pertaining to the diverse appa-
ratuses/institutions play important roles in defining the subject of the
unconscious, especially, hegemonized subjects. In as much as the ‘cir-
cuits’ of global capital get interiorized in us, the hegemonized subjects
also internalize the language-logic of capital. The hegemonized subjects
live and reproduce the fantasy of what the hegemonic (here global capi-
talist hegemony) is and wishes to be; through consent-collaboration. This
participation (through our various beings-doings ) sustains the secret oper-
ations of the nodal signifiers and helps to procreate the circuits of global
capital. It is as if a “freedom enmeshed in servitude”; to come out of
such servitude, one needs to traverse the fundamental fantasy that global
capitalist hegemony is.
Conclusion
Taking off from the class-focused approach, we have proceeded to theo-
rize the circuits of global capital which is structured by the nodal signifiers
of private capitalist appropriated surplus value and the local-global market.
The secret operation of the nodal signifiers are precisely what would be
shrouded and cloaked by the delusional veil of substitute signifiers dished
out by a plethora of theories, discourses, and constructed facts, often at
work in opposition to one another. Despite some disagreements, they
serve the common purpose of the production of the delusional veil (of
the Leviathan of capitalism, of developmentalism, of third worldism) so
as to secure the foreclosure of the real of class as processes of surplus
labour. Working through the delusional veil, one arrives at the return of
the lost object: the real of class. The return of the real: class, open up
space for the rewriting of what has hitherto been known and naturalized
as (global) capitalism, as (global) capitalist hegemony, i.e., as the hege-
mony of class sets 5 and 17, largely 17. We have shown in this chapter
how two nodal signifiers of private capitalist appropriated surplus value
and local-global market constitutes global capitalist hegemony. The next
chapter is on the outside to the circuits of global capital: WOT and how
the third nodal signifier, hegemonic need, operates in WOT.
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CHAPTER 8
World of the Third as Foreclosed: Third

Worldism as Delusional Veil
Introduction
Having worked at the interface of hegemony and foreclosure, we have
arrived, on the one hand, at the circuits of global capital; we have arrived
in the process at the doorstep of world of the third (WoT). The ingress of
arriving at WoT by deploying the perspective of the local–global market is
one thing; to theorize it from a class-focused perspective is quite another.
Procreating outside the circuits of global capital, we unpack WoT as a
decentred and disaggregated totality of varied capitalist class processes (of
both the expanded and simple reproduction type) and non-capitalist class
processes occurring in overdetermined and contradictory relations with
all the non-class processes (Dhar and Chakrabarti 2019; Chakrabarti and
Dhar 2022).
The circuits of global capital are secured through the foreclosure of
WoT. The process of foreclosure is secured through a foregrounding
of WoT in a substitute language—the language of third worldism.
Third worldism is the delusional veil that covers the tear produced by
the foreclosure of WoT. The foregrounding of WoT in the language
of third worldism (social capital, community, marginalization, poverty,
social protection, etc.) protracts further the foreclosure of WoT. The
realm of the foreclosed (the real), the foregrounded delusional veil
(the realvictim –realevil -realdystopic –realutopian -realDarkContinent ) and the hege-
monic, are produced in one turn, and not sequentially.

Switzerland AG 2023
WoT is in that sense a concept-metaphor that resists the collapse of

varied, interdependent class processes and the associated forms of life into
a pre-given category, the third world; and, in the process, enables a clearer
look at the somewhat muted presence of the underlying centrality of
global capital in the hegemonization of WoT. We shall explore the World
Bank-led development discourse as an attempt to enact a displacement of
WoT into a certain third worldism.
The Being of World of the Third

Let us take off from the 24 class sets laid down in Chapter 2 and recast it
in the context of our analysis of the circuits of global capital to demarcate
clearly the space, perspective and subject position designated world of
the third (WoT). Table 8.1 presents a still photograph of an otherwise
dynamic and ever-changing economy. The still photograph helps us to
locate with precision WoT as the outside to the circuits of global capital.
We expand upon earlier discussion on class sets to include the axis of
two kind of markets—local–global and local—in two additional columns
(columns 6 and 7). The three possible modes of appropriation are accord-
ingly laid down in the last column (column 9). Building on additional
information, we can mark the outside to the circuits of global capital—the
WoT (column 8).
From the FCPs (columns 2 and 3), class sets 5 and 17 designate
capitalist class sets (both are exploitative; and in both labour-power and
output distribution are in the commodity form meaning that surplus
value is appropriated by productive capitalists). Nevertheless, it is highly
improbable that class set 5, given its limited size and reach, would consti-
tute the hub of the circuits of global capital. Rather, the hub would in all
likelihood be populated by forms of capitalist class set {17}—both private
and state.
Recall that one at least needs the presence of local–global market to be
part of the circuits of global capital; this means that the circuits must have
the minimum condition of harbouring a commodity form. Now observe
that the rest (i.e., the twenty-two class sets from 1–4, 6–16, and 18–24)
are multi-varied non-capitalist class sets by virtue of either their output
or input being in the non-commodity form. Of the 22 “what are not
capitalist class sets”, at least twelve (i.e., class sets 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14,
16, 18, 20, 22, and 24) are necessarily outside the circuits of global capital
by virtue of their output distribution being in the non-commodity form;
Table 8.1 Class sets and World of the Third
No Performance of Appropriation Distribution Worker’s Local–Global Local markets World of the Modes of
surplus labour of surplus remuneration Markets Third (WOT) appropriation
labour
1 A A COM WAGE Possible Possible Non-E

2 A A NON-COM WAGE WoT Non-E
3 A A COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible Non-E
8
4 A A NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT Non-E

5 A B COM WAGE Possible Possible E
6 A B NON-COM WAGE WoT E
7 A B COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible E
8 A B NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT E
9 C A COM WAGE Possible Possible E
10 C A NON-COM WAGE WoT E
11 C A COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible E
12 C A NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT E
13 A C COM WAGE Possible Possible Non-E
14 A C NON-COM WAGE WoT Non-E
15 A C COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible Non-E
16 A C NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT Non-E
17 C B COM WAGE Possible Possible E
18 C B NON-COM WAGE WoT E
19 C B COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible E
20 C B NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT E
21 C C COM WAGE Possible Possible Non-E
22 C C NON-COM WAGE WoT Non-E
WORLD OF THE THIRD AS FORECLOSED: THIRD …
23 C C COM NON-WAGE Possible Possible Non-E

24 C C NON-COM NON-WAGE WoT Non-E
209
(continued)
Table 8.1 (continued)
210
No Performance of Appropriation Distribution Worker’s Local–Global Local markets World of the Modes of
surplus labour of surplus remuneration Markets Third (WOT) appropriation
labour
A= Produce Sold in Produce Not

individual, B= Local–Global Sold in
none, C = Markets—Hence Market—Hence
collective, com: Class Set Class Sets is
commodity, Hooked to outside Circuits
non-com: Circuits of of Global
non-commodity Global Capital Capital
E: Exploitation;
Non-E: Non
exploitation
Source Dhar and Chakrabarti (2019: 94–95)

8 WORLD OF THE THIRD AS FORECLOSED: THIRD … 211
they cannot be linked to the local–global markets. By default, they are

part of the WoT.
The other ten non-capitalist class sets—even if they are non-capitalist,
could be either inside (i.e., fastened to) or outside the circuits of global
capital, depending on whether their produce is hooked to global capital
via exchange in the local–global market (see column 6 above), local
market (see column 7 above), or non-market (implied in column 8 above)
site. Interestingly, class sets 5 and 17, if they are not global capitalist
enterprises, could also be inside (i.e., hooked to) or outside the circuits
of global capital. When such class sets are outside the circuits of global
capital, they are part of WoT.
Thus, depending on the concrete context, the odd-numbered class sets
in the above matrix can be outside or inside the circuits of global capital.
However, with output distribution not in commodity form, the even-
numbered ones are outside. Thus, an outside to the circuits of global
capital, marked by the even-numbered class sets and a few of the odd-
numbered class sets, including (interestingly) even capitalist class sets, can
be conceptualized as ‘world of the third as space’. It is evident that all
the possible varieties of FCPs, capitalist and non-capitalist, with exploita-
tive, non-exploitative, and self-appropriative modes of appropriation are
procreating in WoT. Putting the same slightly differently, the above table
also reveals the overdetermined and contradictory nature of WoT as in
it varied FCPs (columns 2 and 3) can, possibly and actually, co-exist
and combine with diverse non-class conditions of existence (indicated by
the rest of the columns). Once one brings in other SCPs and non-class
processes, the larger societal form of WoT can be discerned.
World of the third can be located in the rural and the urban; it
can span across sectors, regions, and nations. World of the third is
not located in just the South; even the North is studded with large
pockets of world of the third, including in the metropolis and town-
ships. Classification of the extant North–South, Centre-Periphery divide,
as also the West–East divide is hereby rewritten as the overdetermined
and contradictory dynamic between the circuits of global capital and
world of the third. WoT subjects no longer see the North as neces-
sarily a foreign entity, but rather as an everyday presence mutating at
its doorstep, confronting it, tailing it, and intruding into it; and that
too, as part of what is often claimed as nation-building project. This
gives a further push to our argument that one needs to rethink the idea
of WoT and its politics in the context of a terrain that is not circum-
scribed by the geographically driven North–South/East–West/Centre-
periphery/Global–local division. No kind of a priorivalue can, however,
be imputed to world of the third as space (ethical or nonethical, compet-
itive or shared, violent or tolerant, rich or poor). Indeed, lest we forget,
alongside non-exploitative and self-appropriative class sets, WoT space is
also replete with repositories of exploitation (at least, non-capitalist class
sets 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20); it is appropriate to conceptually treat WoT as
a space that, through the mutually constitutive effects of class sets and
other socio-economic processes, takes varied shapes in concrete scenarios.
The subjects within the circuits of global capital and WoT are
however in a dynamic relationship. They form a kind of a Möbius strip.
There is a continuous process of turning into the other. The WoT
subject can enter the circuits of global capital. Subjects within the circuits
of global capital could land in WoT. The same subject may be within WoT
at a particular moment and be hooked to the circuits of global capital at
the next moment.
However, what we would like to stress in this chapter is that this spatial
outside to the circuits of global capital does not appear as a space of
differänce; instead, depending on how one is (inter)subjectivized in the
economy, it emerges paradoxically as a lacking and devalued other. World
of the third as the outside of circuits of global capital thus slides down
the stepladder of progress and emerges as its lacking underside qua “third
world”. This slide in effect legitimizes the project of management and
social engineering in WoT space, all in the name of the development of
third world; it also legitimizes violence against WoT via original accumu-
lation, as a necessary ingress for the liberation of the third world from its
decrepitude state (see Chapter 9). One needs to be mindful of the fact
that attention to the markers of exploitation, oppression, or marginaliza-
tion within WoT is an argument of a different logical order than that of
the co-option, manipulation, and violence that WoT is subjected to by
the hegemonic.
The Home Sector In-Between Circuits

of Global Capital and World of the Third
In class-focused Marxian theory, household is a site of the production
of use values for domestic consumption that captures the manner in
which FCP, SCP, and non-class processes combine in different config-

urations (Fraad et al. 1994; Cassano 2009). All kinds of class sets (with
slave, feudal, communist, independent, and communitic FCP) may exist
although, sans absence of wage labour and/or commodity production,
a capitalist household FCP is a remote possibility (Dhar and Dasgupta
2013). However, conceptually distinct from household class set, another
set of production process of use values destined for non-household
consumers could occur simultaneously in the perimeter of home. To avoid
any confusion, we name the latter as home-based class process . From a class-
focused perspective, the home sector then is a site where household class
process and home-based class process would occur simultaneously. With
this classification, we argue that it is very difficult to imagine the house-
hold class process to be part of the circuits of global capital although,
as we shall explain now, the home-based class process sector within the
home sector could certainly be a part of it.
Pataka Industries Private Limited is one of the largest producers of
Bidi (a type of tobacco product) located in the district of Murshidabad
in the Indian state of West Bengal (Sen and Dasgupta 2009; Dhar and
Dasgupta 2013). Given its expansion into international markets (partic-
ularly in South Asia), Pataka Industries Private Limited has tended to
morph into a global capitalist enterprise. However, much of the Bidi is
produced within thousands of homes, in that district (employing close to
1.7 million people; in India the employment is close to 7 million people).
To avoid any formal contact with bidi workers, the industrial capital-
ists of Pataka Industry initiate an agreement with middlemen (known
as the Munshi) to get the following service against a promised commis-
sion. The Munshis are provided with raw materials (say, non-timber forest
produce like Tendu leaves which in turn is procured from elsewhere with
a different production structure) who in turn forward them to the home-
based direct producers (principally women, daughters and nieces often
working 12 hours daily, seven days a week) against a predetermined piece
rate for a produced bundle of 1000 rolled bidis or in whatever form
it may be sought; without a wage structure, these home-based produc-
tion systems in the household are almost overwhelmingly non-capitalist
in form. Once procured, the Munshis would then forward the produce
to the industrial capitalists of Pataka Bidi (as its constant capital) which in
turn employ workers to do the checking, final packaging, and branding
over the wrapped rolls (note: the branded bidis are diverse). The differ-
ence between the unit price of branded Bidi sold to consumers and
what the home-based producers get from Munshis is huge. On top of

the massive appropriation of surplus value by industrial capitalists, the
Munshis find ways to not even pay (by simply declaring a portion, say 50
bidis, of the 1000 bidis as spoilt) the contracted price to the home-based
producers; by selling these 50 bidis in the open market, i.e, through this
theft, Munshis earn a non-class income in addition to the usual commis-
sion from Pataka Biri. Surmising, what is true for Pataka Bidi is true in
general for the other capitalist Bidi enterprises as well. The Bidi industry
implodes right into the perimeter of the Southern homes, and both into
the circuits of global capital. The circuits of global capital grows within
the home.
The nature of home-based class set would depend greatly on the frame-
work by which the household class set is organized. For example, not too
uncommon, a feudal household class set would imply a male member
as the head of home who would be appropriating the surplus labour of
others within the household production process. This may have a signif-
icant effect on the mode of appropriation of the home-based Bidi class
set—which could be of CA type communitic class set when all or some
members of the family perform surplus labour while, due to the socially
determined right to appropriation, the male head of the home would
solely appropriate the surplus labour as well as distribute it. The class set
could alternatively be of AB feudal class type where the female member
alone performs surplus labour and the non-performing male member
appropriates it; CB feudal class set if all female members perform surplus
labour while the male appropriates the surplus. It is also not too common
to find families where the female would be in charge of Bidi produc-
tion while the male member would be a migrant wage labourer working
elsewhere. Many among these migrants, and this is true for migrants in
general, end up within the urban circuits of WoT, getting themselves
employed as casual or contract workers in the circuits of global capital,
some into local capitalists enterprises; others even working within the
home sector in the cities, to be employed as wage labourer in various
capacities (in household class set or home-based class set). This ever-
growing reservoir of immigrant labour force at the disposal of the home
sector is all too welcome to the hegemonic, to keep the wage rate in
the productive sector down and facilitate the reproduction of the home
sector.
Besides being integrated within the circuits of global capital, the home
could often be the site of producing goods and services that have no
connection with the circuits of global capital. Indeed, the Indian market
for Bidis is huge, and a large number of capitalist enterprises in this
industry cater to exclusively local markets. Therefore, the circuits of global
and local capital would often compete for the market as also over the
highest return from their respective value chain. It also tells us much
about the journey of ‘indigenous capital’ in India and the appearance
of new cast of historical characters (capitalists—global and local—and
their employed workers, home-based direct producers mainly women
and girl, migrant male workers and their employers and the middle men
Munshis).
Starting in the 1930s (Pataka Bidi itself started in the 1950s), the
home-grown capitalists of the Bidi industry have been generating massive
profit from the circuits of local capital; the successful and growing ones
in turn used the ever-increasing funds to diversify into other indus-
tries, some even becoming global capitalist enterprises. For example, with
diversification into tobacco, tea, biscuits, silk fabric, health care, and
infrastructure, Pataka Bidi was transformed into an incorporated Pataka
Industries Private Limited in 1986.
Finally, not only does WoT markets continue to operate in the form of
circuits of local capital held together by the hub of expanded type local
capitalist enterprises, but much of the Bidi produced in the home sector,
instead of going to the large industrial enterprises, in fact flows directly
or indirectly through small/medium enterprises into other condtuits of
WoT markets.
The above-mentioned capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises in
the home-based sector are also common in other industries such as digital,
IT-related knowledge economy, education (say, the booming private
tuition), food (say, home cooked meals for working people), and part
of what has come to known as the gig economy; these could be part
of the circuits of global capital or WoT. Finally, homes could also serve
as an extension of the disaggregated production process of an enter-
prise. Suppose an individual at home is not an independent producer
of a good or service but is an employee of the IT-related global enter-
prise, she helps to create surplus value for the enterprise (therefore,
occupying a fundamental class position) or provide a variety of non-class
conditions of existence (occupying subsumed class positions). In addi-
tion to wage payment or commission to the worker for these roles, a
part of the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist may be disbursed
as subsumed class payment as rent and compensation to the employee for
using domestic space and infrastructure (furniture, electricity, etc.) needed

for the concerned labour process and class process. In this case, alongside
the non-class processes, home becomes a site which harbours simultane-
ously, say, a household FCP (could be of any variant), capitalist FCP and,
diverse SCPs needed to sustain both FCPs.
We conclude with two observations on home sector, the first regarding
the site of the complexity of capital and non-capital. The cheap reservoir
of labour and cheaper-shared environment (that bundle many economic
activities in a non-monetized plane) have historically made home sector
attractive to local capitalist enterprises and susbequently global capitalist
ones. However, from the perspective of home sector, the difference
between the circuits of global capital and that of local capital may not be
so material since the rules of capital would seem to be somewhat similar
in both cases; both systematically secure higher rates of profit through
a higher rate of exploitation and exercise considerable control over the
labour process and its conditions of existence. Secondly, the home sector
discussed above represents a thick (spatial) line between the border of the
circuits of global capital and WoT. It is as if representative of a certain in-
between-ness, of an apparent hybridity as also contradictions of (b)orders,
that helps to mark out and secure somewhat paradoxically the circuits of
global capital and the circuits of WoT. Sometimes, these homes would be
serving the circuits of global capital and at other times these would be
outside the circuits of global capital and hence serving the vast economy
of WoT; even within WoT, they would take diverse forms. Consequently,
the signifiers of capital and non-capital, WoT and global capital often work
in tandem in these settings. As the circuits of global capital and WoT are
materializing, so is the borderline, the space of the in-between. This then
is very different from the discourse of another age that called for the
destruction of such a repository of backwardness.
Contradictions in WoT and the Hegemonic

This section is focused on the hegemonic reconstitution of WoT.
Depending upon the specific combination of class and non-class
processes, WoT societies will also be composed of familiar-familial recog-
nition and reach of “concepts,” “events”, “mental states”, and “identi-
ties” (Lear 2007), with perhaps its own worldview and its own lokavidya/
‘know-how’ (Basole 2015; Dhar 2018). It points to the presence, for
absence of a better description, a kind of shared environment.
What constitutes a shared environment? The river offering water, the

air one breathes, the land one tills, the birds, the animals, the insects,
the vegetation, the forest nearby, the (kinship) relationships, know-hows,
extant institutions, shared identities, habits-habitats, totems, taboos,
affective continuums—all these and much more, together, through their
combined effects constitute a shared environment. This environment is
shared because members can draw upon this configuration of natural and
social networks without ‘excluding’ any member in order to reproduce
their own life, including the reproduction of their economic livelihood.
In sharp contradistinction to third worldism, we invoke the term shared
environment to posit the distinct set of conditions of existence, and of
forms of life, as also worldviews that constitute WoT class sets; as against
those that remain hooked to the circuits of global capital. It is also to
take a position against the story of a cooperative, concordant, and self-
contented ‘tradition’ or ‘pre-capitalism’ as part of an emotive/cultural
discourse of the third world, and one that with modifications (such as
through categories like social capital or community) serve as part of the
chain of substitute signifiers that shape the delusional veil of development
and help in legitimizing an array of interventions within WoT.
Such spaces of shared environment tied to WoT societies are punctu-
ated by numerous contradictions and antagonisms related to ecological
questions, as also to questions of class, gender, caste, and race and their
multi-layered effects, which in turn are brought to bear on the meaning
of, and one’s relationship with, nature. The relation of shared environ-
ment with nature does not only vary across WoT societies, but may
even vary within the same WoT societies as diverse groups come to hold
different understandings of the relation of nature with that of shared envi-
ronment. For example, it is not enough to say that WoT has common
access to forests. What is equally important is who within WoT has access
to forests and in what form. Do some (say, the subaltern) have limited
access to the forests or water resources than some others (say, the upper
castes or the priestly elite)?1 Formed by relationships stemming from the
overdetermined processes of class, caste, and gender, certain groups could
have relatively greater access to deities which are, say, worshipped by all in
WoT. Or, if the Dalits are, say, not allowed access to a deity worshipped
1 For example, in Indian villages, water, a natural resource, often emerges as a major
site of political struggle among constituents cutting across class, caste and gender.
by upper castes, they could have a different nature-god. All these possibil-
ities could affect the very way different groups within WoT view nature.
Shared environment, among other things, is thus marked by these contra-
dictory meanings of nature. As the relations of class, gender, caste, race
and religion change, so does the meaning of nature; this in turn helps
shape the relation of nature with shared environment, and thus the latter’s
idea itself. Despite such contradictions cutting across class, gender, caste,
race and religion, it is important to understand that they co-exist without
questioning subjects’ connect and access to nature, access towards which
is a minimal condition of reproducing social life in such societies. Such
shared environment span a vast expanse of WoT from the rural to the
urban, and, wherever they exist, they form the virtual lifeline for the
members drawing upon its network.
To reiterate an earlier point, in the process of conceptualizing the space
designated WoT and of its associated concept of shared environment, we
make no claim regarding its economic status (it could be rich or poor,
exploitative or non-exploitative), its cultural ethos (it could be fundamen-
talist in some axis or more than liberal in others), its political institutions
(it could be closed or open-ended with regard to rules of authority), and
its relation with nature (it could be friendly or non-friendly towards its
surrounding environment).
One of the objectives of the hegemonic is to disarm any possibility
of a challenge to its nodal signifiers and the capitalocentric-orientalist
metaphysics that underpins them. It is in this context that the third
nodal signifier of the hegemonic pertaining to the WoT—hegemonic
needs—is invoked, where the process of hegemonization is covered up
by the production of an alternative chain of substitute signifiers that
displaces the manner in which the WoT views itself, such that they become
hegemonized as third world subjects.
We have shown that along with the non-capitalist forms ranging from
independent, feudal, communitic, slave, communist, the space of WoT
may contain capitalist class sets (expanded and simple reproduction type)
as well. The distinction between the circuits of global capital and WoT
is hence not at all a distinction between ‘surplus-centered economy’ and
‘need-centered economy’. Questions of surplus and need are alive both
within the circuits of global capital and outside in the WoT. The distinc-
tion between global capital and WoT can only be understood in terms of
capitalist and non-capitalist class sets, in terms of those class sets that are
hooked to the circuits of global capital through the local–global market
and those that are not, as also in terms of hegemonic need and radical
need (see Chapter 3), but definitely not exclusively in terms of surplus
and need. Surplus and need—both require further disaggregation—in
terms of space, perspective and subject position. While Chapters 2 and 3
had decentred and disaggregated our understanding of surplus and need,
this chapter engenders a multiplicity in the register of hegemonic need.
To analytically drive home our point, hegemonic need is split further into
social need—which is the perspective of need that is operationally closer
to the circuits of global capital but not within (for example, risk manage-
ment in cases of purging out of the circuits of global capital through job
loss)—and survival need—which is the perspective of need that is opera-
tional at a site distant from the circuits of global capital. Social and survival
need perspectives could be operational in both Need I and Need II space.
Hand holding by the hegemonic (through a complex combination of
structural and microlevel interventions) is not just a matter of a top-down
structural project of uplifting of WoT but to incentivize the subjects them-
selves, as if of their own free will, to conduct themselves in such a manner
so as to extend themselves to the offered hand of help, to embrace the
hegemonic needs (even if it involves the destruction of their shared envi-
ronment or their modes of being), to lift themselves from what they
would acknowledge as their existential decrepitude. Multifaceted forms
of structural and subjectivity objectives hegemonize the WoT through
largely the developmentalist discourse of what we have designated in
Chapter 4 as the realvictim . The rest of this chapter and part of the next
chapter will focus on the relationship between the hegemonic and the
realvictim .
From World of the Third to Third World

WoT has always been described by capitalocentric-orientalist discourses as
containing inefficient practices and activities; as nurturing excess labour,
labour that is presumed to be unproductive, and hence a burden on
society; WoT is the figure of lack. For us, however, WoT emerges as
a world of differance; as the language of differance; a differance the
hegemonic must discipline, manage, and control, even punish at times;
but never acknowledge. The world of differance that WoT is can never
be hosted by the circuits of global capital. It is, as if, the difference of
language is real (see Chapter 3), and such a real threatens the hegemonic;
hence the real must be foreclosed (or in other words, the foreclosed is
the real). In this context, one can well appreciate that the differences
celebrated in the discourse of the hegemonic—differences pertaining to
hybridity, to multiculturalism, as also to the diasporic, are differences that
are constitutive of the circuits of global capital; these are differences that
do not put into question the hegemonic; the hegemonic lives at ease with
such differences. On the other hand, the real difference, or the difference
of the real (here WoT) can never be included within the circuits of global
capital; it must be foreclosed. What follows is a politically salient foreclo-
sure (and not just a clinically salient one); WoT emerges as the contingent
outside of the circuits of global capital—an outside whose displaced form
(qua third world) is to be managed by the World Bank, state, supportive
NGOs, and other organs of the hegemonic through the discourse of third
worldism. All that remains to be known about WoT is what the hege-
monic produces through its displaced representation in terms of its own
development imagination. While WoT is spatially everywhere, the repudi-
ation of fundamental signifiers pertaining to WoT means that it becomes
in effect absent in language.
What is thus remarkable about the foreclosure of WoT is that the
space of WoT is talked about, interrogated, but it is through this incite-
ment to discourse, through this paradoxical foregrounding, that the
moment of foreclosure takes shape; world of the third is not talked
about as WoT but as third world—third world as realvictim . The produc-
tion of marginalized sites—rural, agriculture, informal sector, etc., and of
marginalized figures—poor women, girl child, racially oppressed, Adivasis,
Dalits, displaced, and so on—produce a distinct chain of signification that
dislocates the received chain of signification within WoT. Repudiation of
the latter via its displacement by the former engenders the foreclosure of
WoT. In being reduced to the marginalized, the perspectives, practices,
and forms of life of WoT thus get rewritten in terms of the hegemonic
logic of development that begets and defends global capitalism. Here the
point is not to annihilate WoT, neither subdue it to coercive submis-
sion, but through the repudiation of its fundamental signifiers, secure the
sanctity and rule of the hegemonic.
Foregrounding of the Marginalized
In many regions poverty and inequality are often biased against ethnic
minorities or women, or disfavored geographical areas. Marginalized from
public discussion and excluded from the broader economy and society,
such groups are fertile ground for violence and instability, as many parts
of the world are increasingly learning. (World Development Report 1997:
4)
The striking feature of this quote, which is typical of the World

Bank and other such institutions, is the invocation of the perspective of
marginalization. The discourse is not tuned to a turning away or a putting
aside of the marginalized; rather, its very invocation inaugurates a process
of foreclosure of WoT. In fact, the World Bank functions through the very
production of the ‘marginalized’, as figures of third world victimhood.
One needs to distinguish the foreclosed (WoT) from the marginalized
(third world). One needs to distinguish the constitutive outside of the
hegemonic from the constitutive inside of the hegemonic (see Chapter 4).
One needs to distinguish the real from the realvictim .
Every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial contempt

for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign
of ’ethics’ coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism
and imperialism, with today’s sordid self-satisfaction in the ’West’, with
the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World
is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity – in short, of its
sub-humanity. (Badiou 2001: 13)
We further ask whether the World Bank is talking about marginaliza-

tion in general. No. The reference is towards those who are marginalized
by virtue of belonging to groups or geographical areas considered as
excluded from the normalized modernist version of the economy, i.e.,
being outside the circuits of global capital. What is WoT; how does
it function or what holds it together; or how do we distinguish this
society from the society surrounding the circuits of global capital; these
are not questions which fundamentally bother the hegemonic. It is not
even concerned with the complicity and at times the explicit role of
capitalism and modernity in fostering the fertile ground of ‘violence
and instability’ to which it wants to draw attention. It does not want
to accept that the contact of WoT with West/North has often turned
into a historical tragedy when “modern abuse [was grafted] onto ancient
injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality” (Césaire 2010: 45). World
Bank’s (and such modernist institutions’) objective of invoking marginal-
ization is not to situate the question of freedom of the marginalized
WoT from the vicious, circular trap of “rootless universalism” (champi-

oned by “growth and poverty alleviation” models) which it champions
and from the “clinging particularism”/localism (championed largely by
some strands of the postdevelopmentalist and postcolonial school; or
even by nationalist discourses) which it opposes (Bhattacharya 1954).
When invoking marginalization as a component of the sphere of realvictim ,
it seeks instead the hegemonization of WoT; its hallowed objective of
achieving equality in WoT has a certain hollowness to it.
In a rather curious way, the frontal organizations of the hegemonic
such as the World Bank are, as if, Foucauldian in their philosophy, as if
their invocation of marginalization is a turn to Foucault. But paradox-
ically the Foucauldian invocation of marginalization was to critique the
One—for example, Western Reason, Capital, State, Family, Party, as also
micro-processes of Christianization-in-depth and Normalization—that
marginalizes; it was a critique of the Normative World (Escobar 1995;
Chakrabarti et al. 2015: 73–85). The World Bank on the other hand,
invokes marginalization without a critique of the One who marginalizes.
It invokes marginalization without a critique of normalization. It invokes
poverty without a critique of capitalist development that causes poverty
through dislocation-displacement (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009). In fact,
it makes the structural backwardness of the third world responsible for
poverty in the third world; a clever move, that invokes the marginal-
ization of the displaced without questioning or challenging the cause
of the displacement—Development (more on this in the next Chapter).
Foucault’s work is a critique of normalization procedures, whether of the
economic, or of sexuality, or of grammar-language. He, in fact, would be
critical of what has emerged as centralized as against the marginalized;
he would look at the historical production of such centrality or perhaps,
centrism; he would show how such centrism, of say Reason, Heterosexu-
ality, Development, Western-Whiteness, Humanness would marginalize
the ‘mad’, the ‘homosexual’, the ‘South’, the ‘oriental’, the ‘brown-
black’, the ‘animal-insect’. Yet, in the World Bank genealogy of the poor,
discourses on the marginalized and its ‘required’ needs within the so-
called third world abound and continue to procreate at will. You ask for
one and the hegemonic will give you a handful.
To see what even the Foucauldian turn cannot give us, we must
extend the purview of our analysis from marginalization to foreclosure.
To start with, the relation between foreclosure and marginalization under-
scores the importance of the question of the subject once again. Foucault
would say, “we should try to grasp subjection in its material instance
as a constitution of subjects” (1980: 97). Modernism is in a way the
organization of knowledge turned towards the subject, say the homo-
sexual as subject/Identity; the subject as an object of analysis. Power
thus functions through knowledge to make individuals not simply func-
tions of power, but as carriers of power, as both the effect and vehicle
of power so much so “power reaches into the very grain of individuals,
touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes,
their discourse, learning processes and everyday lives” (1980: 39). To
quote Foucault again, they “are not only its inert or consenting target;
they are always also the element of its articulation” (1980: 98). Thus,
the objects of knowledge are always already the subjects of knowledge.
This process of the production of subjects includes all forms of societal
norms, cultural values, law, and consciousness. That is, the Moebius of
knowledge-power produces the ‘normal’ and its conditions, excluding
the rest as abnormal/marginalized. Individuals or groups are not born
marginalized but rather become one through technologies of the self and
‘games of truth’. Third world discourse such as that propounded by the
World Bank expands itself through the production of marginalization, as
also the invocation of resistance that it bends to suit its purpose, inviting
subject’s resistance against its own backward structure or networks of
exploitation-oppression in lived WoT space; the current incitement to
discourse on empowerment of rural subaltern women is a trope to
turn them against their own societies/communities and in the process
insulate capital-state-developmentalism from critique and resistance. This
marginalized yet resisting subject is the subject who is celebrated and
made into both the effect and vehicle of power. What is then produced by
the hegemonic is an alternative support system within WoT, which gives
the subjects the option to turn World Bank’s provided technique to use its
knowledge into the ground for their ‘self-empowerment’ and ‘liberation’,
as to partner the hegemonic in challenging their extant shared environ-
ment within WoT. This World Bank inspired strategy of production of
modernist subjects in WoT can be taken as a rough model followed by
most nation-states bent on modernizing the WoT.
What goes missing in all of this, however, is the moment of foreclo-
sure as also the language of the foreclosed (or perhaps the foreclosed [of]
language). Through the repudiation of fundamental signifiers and the
foregrounding of the delusional veil of realvictim –realevil –realDarkContinent
instead, a radically different relation is set up between the signifier and

the subject, a relation that sustains global capitalist hegemony.
This is not to stress on the reduction of WoT to the old problem of
consciousness—marginalized state as representing false consciousness, but
assuming it to have the repository of true or actual consciousness; and
progressive WoT politics as constituting a voyage from the former to the
latter. Some postdevelopmentalist positions could be shown to be tanta-
lizingly close to such a position. We would, however, like to mark our
steps with care.
First, we are emphasizing that both the dimensions of marginality and
foreclosure constitute WoT and its subjects. This brings in an element
of dissonance in WoT subjects stemming, as it is, from its constitution
flowing from two platforms; in terms of what the hegemonic does to it
and also in terms of what constitutes it from within. Further, this element
of dissonance has one important historical association—colonial moder-
nity. The subject as a complex knot of the imperial/global discourse and
the local discourse, speaking in two voices, continues to procreate in the
post-globalization era. Our analysis through an attention to the foreclosed
WoT helps us to see this dissonance that is at the kernel of the subject’s
experience—subject in both senses—subjectification/subjectivation and
subjection. Finally, we do not attach any ethical value to WoT as already
described; we do not attribute any ‘spontaneous consciousness’ to the
subject in question.
Many third world thinkers have long brooded over the issue of
marginalization. In terms of our analysis, they often end up dealing with
the third world and third world subject, discovering and rediscovering
their marginality (in some form), and thus in the end remain locked in
the realm of the realvictim . They remain locked into what we call the ‘dis-
course of survival’—trying to make life as humane as possible for the
marginalized. The discourse of survival paradoxically secures the hege-
mony of the circuits of global capital. This revelation, however, does not
mean giving up on the marginalized as a category even if the category is
suffused with hegemonic intervention. Instead, we emphasize the point
that any counter-hegemonic discourse must discuss the marginalized, but
in relation to the foreclosed WoT.
Finally, through the invocation of the category marginalized versus
the foreclosed, as also third world versus WoT, we have been hinting at
an attention to language, language as not just representing reality, but
rather the subject; language as not just setting up a relation between
the word (word-presentation) and the world (thing-presentation), but as

setting up a relation between and among subjects; we are hinting there-
fore at an attention to the “relation between the signifier and the subject”,
to the “most radical determinant’s of [wo]man’s relation to the signi-
fier”, to the “essentially linguistic structure” that underlies every possible
form of the question of the subject (Lacan 2006: 449; Borch-Jacobsen
1992: 85). Thus, the invocation of the fundamental relation between
marginalization and WoT subject colonizes the world, the language of
WoT subject. To question our continuing colonialism, to rethink the
counter-hegemonic, the subject needs to set up another relation—a rela-
tion where the subject is related not to the third wordlist language of
marginalization but perhaps, to the language of shared environment and
class, class and need, Need I and Need II (with all its contradictions
that we have discussed), and from there proceed to an ethico-political
standpoint that questions not just the hegemonic but also the modes of
exploitation-oppression and hegemonic need within WoT.
Through an incitement to discourse with respect to the category of
marginalized, we are also hinting at what such an incitement puts outside.
We are hinting at undisclosed language, at language that is neither
known nor unknown, at language that has been dimmed over, that has
been occluded, buried; we are hinting at covered-up language (Lacan
2006: 449). We are hinting at the language of that which was hitherto
unspoken (Moitra 1984). We are hinting at repudiation, “repudiation of
a fundamental signifier”. In a word, we are looking for an imagination
of development that is attuned to effects such as foreclosure, repression,
negation, and disavowal.
World Bank in World of the Third

Escobar (1995) elaborated on the discourse of development and the
construction of the third world. He showed how the World Bank appro-
priates at will, large areas and groups/communities in the Global South
into its ‘scopic regime’. The category ‘marginalization’ (and the objecti-
fication of the marginalized) serves the purpose of not only appropriation
and disciplining of such areas and groups/communities but also a large-
scale transformation of the extant “condition under which they live into a
productive, normalized social environment” (Escobar 1995: 156)—where
the terms of human productivity and the micro-normalization of life are
defined by the World Bank. Building on Chapter 3, one can argue that
the World Bank’s span of operations extends from the sphere of Need I
to Need II so as to implant the language and praxis of hegemonic needs
within WoT.
The World Bank has played a significant role as a self-proclaimed
knowledge-institution for the developing nation-states and private insti-
tutions, to nudge and convince them to follow and fine-tune their
development strategies of uplifting of third world through a discourse
of poverty. The dissemination of concepts (targeting, cost–benefit, risk
management, social protection, inclusion, community, social capital),
operational manuals, models, practices, and slogans (‘shared prosperity’
being the latest) by this knowledge bank that serves as a guidebook for
action is, from a Marxian perspective, an integral component of the hege-
monic apparatus that aims to command, coerce, and normalize WoT in
terms of the sibling signifiers of third worldism—especially the register of
the realvictim .
Is World Bank really a spoke in the hegemonic? It is common-
place knowledge that the post-Washington Consensus was structured by
a neoliberal template that reorganised the circuits of global capital—a
competitive market regime based on private decision-making, rule-based
fiscal policy, inflation targeting monetary policy, open market free trade
and competitive policy, changing legal structures favourable to private
property and privatization.2 This neoliberal package, discounting for the
moment the country wide variance, has since come to be known as ‘eco-
nomic reform’. In setting down its principle and role, the World Bank
strongly affirms the centrality of the neoliberal reform.
The current development strategy of the World Bank is two pronged,

designed to put in place growth-enhancing, market-oriented policies
(stable macroeconomic environment, effective law and order, trade liber-
alization, and so on) and ensure the provision of important public
services that cannot be well and equitably supplied by private markets
(infrastructure services and education, for instance). (World Bank 2000:
89)
While the self-proclaimed pro-poor image of the World Bank may

seem to be a far cry from the neoliberal template of global capitalism,
this apparently paradoxical position of the World Bank (a position which
2 See Chakrabarti et al. (2015, Chapters IV and VI).

helps it acquire legitimacy so as to function within WoT) is vital for

the hegemonic to materialize. Its menu of policies and interventions
may seem to be apparently outside the realm of the circuits of global
capital, and yet reinforces its expansion in no uncertain terms. After all,
for global capitalist hegemony to be successful, the hegemonic must work
in the seemingly contradictory sites of growth and need/poverty, struc-
tural adjustment program and poverty eradication in order to traverse the
circuits of global capital and WoT.
Long before critics were spilling ink over whether growth trickles
down or not, the hegemonic had already internalized this contradic-
tion in its strategy. For example, the World Bank recognized that its
approach must be “market-oriented policies to support growth, together
with well-targeted social programs” that addresses what it calls “human
development and poverty alleviation” (World Bank 1991: 36). But it
also recognizes that this seemingly dispersed set of discursive practices
cannot be operationalized in isolation; it needs a global architecture
to operate. All concerned international institutions—the World Bank,
the IMF, the WTO, the ILO, etc.—are supposed to intersect, comple-
ment, and reinforce one another to construct and operationalize such
a global architecture (which of course is in movement as the world
moves) that upholds the unquestioned centrality of global capital and the
market-driven growth process enabled by its expansion.
… we know that nations are dependent on one another. We know that

nations are no longer the sole masters of their destinies. We need global
rules and global behavior. We need a new international development archi-
tecture to parallel the new global financial architecture. (World Bank 2000:
17)
…our partnership must be inclusive—involving bilaterals and multilaterals,

the United Nations, the European Union, regional organizations, the
World Trade Organization, labor organizations, the NGOs, foundations,
and the private sector. With each of us playing to our respective strengths,
we can leverage up the entire development effort. (World Bank 2000: 13)
A clear illustration of the manner in which this architecture works can

be viewed by looking at the perceived relation between the World Bank
and the IMF:
World Bank and IMF staff will work to give each government their views
on the core impediments to poverty reduction and growth within the
country, and on the policy options for overcoming these obstacles…
It is crucial that each institution, as part of this joint support, focus
on its traditional areas of expertise. Accordingly, World Bank will take the
lead in devising on the design of poverty reduction strategies, including
the necessary diagnostic work such as poverty assessments, the design of
sectoral strategies, institutional reform and safety nets.
The IMF will advise governments in areas of its traditional mandate,
including promoting prudent macroeconomic, exchange rate, and tax
policies.
In areas where the World Bank and the IMF both have expertise – such
as fiscal management, budget execution, budget transparency, and tax and
customs administration - we will co-ordinate closely.
Closer co-ordination between the World Bank and the IMF will not
only help provide more useful assistance in the short run, but also clarify
the relationship between the macroeconomic framework, growth, and
poverty reduction over the medium and long run. (World Bank 2000,
2000/2001: 37–38)
The development initiative of the World Bank therefore must be seen

as part of a concerted effort to create an intricate network of global and
local agencies in the Southern countries; however, the fear of instability
and violence stemming from what the excised philosophy of WoT entails,
and what it can do, stalks the hegemonic. This fear is also important when
one realizes that the World Bank, working at the border of global capital
and WoT, knows fully well that the functions of global capital can and do
spawn further transitions in WoT that may not be fully welcome within
WoT, and even among segments within the circuits of global capital.
Such problems could also arise as a result of policies taken by its fraternal
agencies, such as the IMF which is explicitly committed to the cause of
privately driven expansion of the circuits of global capital through market,
trade and policy reforms to be adopted by the state. The World Bank, as
an institutionalized broker between global capital and WoT appears as the
most crucial actor in the process of hegemonization.
There are at least two direct ways in which the World Bank has inter-
vened in facilitating the creation and expansion of the circuits of global
capital. One, it generates consent by operationalizing the delusional veil
of compensation, resettlement, and safety nets to mask the coercive
process pertaining to M-C-P–C/ -M/ and its accumulation process—both
capital accumulation and original accumulation. The other clear connec-

tion to the circuits of global capital comes in the form of the standard
IMF policy prescriptions, the so-called Structural Adjustment Program
(SAP); SAP is part of the overall process of neoliberal reform, which
the World Bank and the development agencies as a whole flag as sound
macroeconomic management. Against the conditionality of market-driven
reform and privatization, some countries have voluntarily adopted SAPs,
some countries have been forced to do so either by circumstances of
economic meltdowns (signalling a crisis in the hub of capitalism itself)
and/or arm-twisting; countries prone to debt, foreign exchange or hyper-
inflationary problems, are particularly susceptible to such breakdown.
Whatever the variations, the hegemonic accepts that the social cost of
transition involved in SAP or some such reforms cannot be ignored.
The Fund approach to adjustment has had severe economic costs for
many of these countries in terms of declines in the levels of output and
growth rates, reductions in employment and adverse effects on income
distribution. A typical program prescribes measures that require exces-
sive compression of domestic demand, cuts in real wages, and reductions
in government expenditures; these are frequently accompanied by sharp
exchange rate depreciation and import liberalization measures, without
due regard to their potentially disruptive effects on the domestic economy.
(G-24, 1987: 9 as cited in Killick 1995: 12).
Market reforms can indeed boost growth and help poor people, but they
can also be a source of dislocation. (World Bank 2001: 32)
SAP as part of the process of ‘reform’ could produce new social condi-
tions or change existing ones that may throw a large section of the
population outside the circuits of global capital and into the heart of
WoT.3 It may also induce policies that may turn existing WoT forms of
life upside down. From the perspective of the hegemonic, while essential,
SAP can be dangerous for it.
In this context, the World Bank created the Social Funds (SF) program
that emerged in the 1980s as an instrument of its social protection
strategy to temper and mitigate the social costs of IMF imposed SAP
(Chakrabarti and Dhar 2013); it has since been applied for SAP eligible
3 The mass migration of labourers back to the rural from Indian cities during the
COVID-19 lockdown has done something similar (see Chakrabarti and Dhar 2020).
countries who are facing economic crisis (from post-Soviet systemic

collapse as in Eastern Europe, or from economic crises emanating from
debt, hyperinflation, or balance of payment). SF was conceived as a
mitigating force, transpiring chiefly in the form of public works (princi-
pally infrastructural projects), social services (health, education, etc.), and
compensation for layoffs following privatisation (TendlerSerrano 1999,
2000). A closer look at the class nature of the flow of funds for SF betrays
the World Bank’s secret politics of working on behalf of the hegemonic.
Various projects concerning hegemonic social needs are sponsored by
nation-states, private trusts, charity, and religious organisations, corpora-
tions, regional blocs (e.g., the European Union) and other known global
agencies such as the World Bank and DFID. Generally, it is the inter-
national conduit of social surplus that funds the global agenda of the
World Bank. The sources of financial resources of SF are the following:
International Development Association (IDA) credits, African Devel-
opment Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development
Bank, Arab Fund, the European Union, Japan, the US Agency for Inter-
national Development, the Netherlands, French Development Agency,
global corporations, government of the host country, donations from
private and public sponsors, etc. (see Garnier and Imschoot 2003: 29–
32). Class-focused analysis shows how a flow of global surplus for SF
derived from appropriated surplus value (principally of the richest coun-
tries, as the donor list shows), which after deductions for subsumed class
payments (to meet all non-class conditions of existence) and social surplus
expenses for other need purposes (see Chapter 3), gets deposited with
the donors (state agencies, international agencies, regional blocs, corpo-
rations, etc.), who then forward it to the World Bank (or similar such
institutions) for the agreed-upon project. At times, international agencies
such as the World Bank may borrow from global financial institutions for
the purpose of lending for projects (signifying further flow of global finan-
cial capital), though this route is not popular in the case of SF. Instead,
as an investment bank, intermediating between investors and recipients,
a large sum of the World Bank loans on account of social protection,
including SF, come from grants from its rich member countries and the
other above-mentioned sources; for example, large sums of funds are typi-
cally routed through The International Development Association to poor
countries at zero or low interest rates. Due to the financial reliance of
social surplus on global capital, it is hardly surprising that the philos-
ophy of SF and its programmes, rather than being inimical to global
capital, should be in sync with it. At the least, it would be farfetched to

imagine that international agencies such as the World Bank would initiate
programmes that undercut the image and function of the global capitalist
enterprises on which it (and other donors in the integrated global conduit
of finance) depends for its existence. This connection of global capital in
poverty management via the World Bank in general, and SF in particular,
should dispel any doubt about the possibility of reconciling the contra-
diction between economic growth (propelled by the expansive logic of
global capital) and poverty management (secured to a large extent from
the distributions of global capital as social surplus) in so far as the World
Bank’s two-pronged strategy of development is concerned.
Attempts to reign in the dislocated are fraught with possibilities of even
more dislocation following the expansion of the circuits of global capital.
“To discuss ‘needs’ today requires acknowledging that more than ever
they are created through dispossession, in the classical tradition of the
enclosure of the commons that marked the beginning of capitalism. The
commoners, dispossessed of their means of subsistence, became people
in need of jobs, shelter, food, everything” (Esteva and Escobar 2019:
28). The development process of uplifting of third world in the name
of poverty eradication contains the seeds of creating new poverty, a
contradiction that the World Bank then attempts to govern through its
apparatuses and networks, by forwarding an ever-accumulating spectrum
of needs as the needs of these societies, i.e., as hegemonic needs. If the
hegemonic cannot stop the materialization of WoT, it must therefore
confront WoT—in a totally different platform, so as to incorporate it in
its rule. Development discourse must therefore undergo a change from
its one-sided emphasis on capitalocentricism to poverty management and
need fulfilment. Ironically, doing so does not question capitalocentrism,
but rather helps to secure it.
…our experience has shown the need for a new, integrated conceptual
framework that builds on previous knowledge but better reflects the world
situation at the beginning of the 21st century—a situation where risks and
opportunities are on the rise, here it is recognized that neither the state
nor the market alone will provide the best solution, and where the plight
of more than 1 billion poor people poses the question of how to manage
risk better, not merely providing handouts after a shock has occurred. For
the World Bank, this implies an even stronger need to incorporate social
protection subsectors within an overall framework. It also indicates the
urgency of integrating social protection with other sectors and themes at

the World Bank. (World Bank 2001: 7)
Growth does not trickle down; development must address human needs
directly. (World Bank 2000: 57)
As explicated in Chapter 3, the need-focused space is not given, but is a

contested terrain beset with social struggles. In this context, we have been
arguing that the World Bank-sponsored needs discourse is appealing to a
set of needs it deems appropriate from its objective. Other agencies such
as the ILO or rights organizations have defined quite other kinds of needs.
Such seemingly varied needs compensate, reinforce, and complement one
another. The chain of such needs is so invoked that they do not in any
way unsettle the surreptitious operations of the circuits of global capital. A
host of substitute signifiers—social capital, community, voices of the poor,
shared prosperity, etc.—are invoked that help to anchor the defined set of
needs. As such, this chain of needs can be called ‘hegemonic need’ since
it further anchors the process in terms of which the hegemonic projects
WoT as the third world. In this sense, hegemonic need is a nodal signifier.
Social surplus gets parcelled out for different kinds of defined needs.
Of particular importance in this regard is the struggle over poverty-related
needs. But what makes it possible for the World Bank discourse of poverty
to emerge as the dominant discourse and descriptor of poverty? What
must be foreclosed, what must be crypted for the World Bank’s poverty
need to emerge as hegemonic need as against other more radical versions
of need? Further, what kind of delusional veil—the developmentalism of
realvictim and realutopian , for example, covers foreclosure? How does such
a delusional veil complement the secret operations of the nodal signifier:
hegemonic need?
Poverty need has been defined in numerous ways—mass structural
poverty by the World Bank, material poverty in the postdevelopmentalist
discourse, poverty as capability deprivation in the capabilities approach,
and poverty in Marxian approach (Chakrabarti 2008; Chakrabarti and
Dhar 2009; Chakrabarti 2022). Such approaches profess different under-
standings of poverty as also of the subject of poverty: the ‘poor’ and
these tend to highlight distinct effects. However, it is the World Bank’s
theory of poverty which comes to occupy centre stage as really the need
of the poor. What makes this possible? Among many reasons, two are
worth mentioning. First, the World Bank in alliance with the nation-states
that sponsor similar capitalocentric-orientalist paradigms of development,

controls an enormous flows of social surplus destined for those segmented
as the poor. It is not that the other approaches to view poverty are
not operational; indeed, the distinctly different effects pointed out by
other theories of poverty are also impacting upon the concrete process
of the production of poverty. For example, whether the mode of appro-
priation is exploitative or not, or whether social surplus is available for
distribution for poverty eradication as against, say, investment in social
infrastructure, matters for poverty. However, this does not tell us as yet
how the World Bank’s discourse on poverty has come to acquire such
prominence; why is it that its take on poverty and its adopted poverty
eradication program have come to be considered as valid, such that other
discourses of poverty highlighting other social causes-effects pertinent to
the production/eradication of poverty, have remained non-consequential,
and have been consequently purloined? This takes us to the second reason
of the dominance of the World Bank’s discourse of poverty. It concerns
the extraordinary command of the global architecture that enables devel-
opmentalist institutions like the World Bank to enter, organize, and
channelize the terms of discussing and assessing poverty, that makes its
notion of poor and its proposed needs to be the only way to define and
discuss poverty. This it does by building a common purpose with the
corporations, academia, research institutes, think tanks, NGOs, and even
governments—a vast ensemble of institutional apparatuses—that enable
the creation of a rainbow of ideas, facts, and figures (in short, knowl-
edge) tuned to the World Bank notion of the poor. This helps subsume,
displace, and why not, in cases such as the class focused theory of poverty,
purloin altogether the other notions of poverty-related need. This need
struggle over the terms of discussing poverty and fixing its meaning is an
indispensable cultural condition for World Bank’s poverty need to emerge
as hegemonic need.
To illustrate the World Bank’s development discourse of poverty as a
process of hegemonization of WoT, we take recourse to its concept of
Social Protection (we have already seen Social Fund as one of its instru-
ments). Given prominence since the 1980s and finally institutionalized
in the form of a sector group in 1996, Social Protection is defined as
“public interventions that assist individuals, households, and commu-
nities to manage risk better and that provide support to the critically
poor” (World Bank 2001: 9). Social protection intersects, compensates,
and reinforces policies concerning social risk management and income
distribution in order to be linked to the broader discourse of poverty

centring on survival need, so as to transform WoT through market and
productivity-driven income activities. Along with its policy of intervention
following SAP, the World Bank has now made social protection its nodal
program that empowers it to move in and out at will, imperiously picking
on territories and targets.
To drive home our point, we make a distinction for convenience
between social needs and survival needs . Much of the social programs
emphasized in the 1980s and 1990s, such as those related to social needs
of education and health care were considered to have a positive exter-
nality on growth and have potentially a positive impact on the vitality and
expansion of the circuits of global capital; other such SF and compensa-
tion programs were supposed to mitigate the fallouts of structural shifts.
In contrast, survival needs refer to the set of needs that have no immediate
or necessary impact on growth, being exclusively addressed to a space of
WoT without possibility of connection with or into the circuits of global
capital. Our focus in discussing social protection is on survival needs.
World Bank traces such survival need in the archetypal marginalized
WoT space, consisting of those social segments perceived to be back-
ward institutions and cultures with so-called extreme forms of poverty
and deprivation. Where production and class processes are driven neither
by market-oriented profit consideration nor by accumulation motive but
rather by fulfilment of basic needs. From the Marxian perspective, this
invocation of survival needs can be partly seen as what we, following
Chapter 3, refer to as the hegemonic reconstitution of Need II space, a
space in which where surplus related activities may be absent or minimal
(Fig. 8.1).
While the register of social protection may somewhat compliment the
zones of social risk management and income distribution, it has to be
treated as conceptually distinct. On the shaded area, the World Bank
avers:
Advocates of policies to combat social exclusion argue that modern social

protection should not be limited to traditional forms of income support
but should include measures to promote social cohesion, solidarity, and
inclusion. On the one hand, an income support system for the unem-
ployed may not only enhance individual welfare by reducing vulnerability
but also help to achieve social stability. On the other hand, social protection
Fig. 8.1 Social protection sector 2001 (Source Social Protection Sector Strategy:
From Safety Net to Springboard, The World Bank: 10)
may extend well beyond mere financial and income-oriented consider-

ations. This broader approach would include investments to support
informal arrangements and upgrade the non-profit sector, strengthen the
“social rights” aspects of social policy, and extend the view of social risk
management to include the broader concept of “social capital” …
Promoting social inclusion is an important objective of the World Bank.
While the social, cultural, and political determinants of social inclusion may
be beyond the scope of social risk management, it is essential to recognize
the causes and consequences of social exclusion and to design strategies
that address these issues. (World Bank 2001: 11)
The above is an acknowledgement of the remainder that cannot be

included into the circuits of global capital, effectively announcing the
presence of a border. However, at the same time, the need to support and
upgrade the non-profit sector, and its associated informal arrangements
(including the non-capitalist class processes) characterises the attempt to
intervene and control the excluded. This is an acknowledgement of a
space that cannot be accounted for in terms of global capital’s internal
principles but which nevertheless must not be left on its own; it must
be included (see Dhar 2021 [2015] for the fundamental philosophico-
political doubt that haunts this book: what if, world of the third is
always already included—included in terms of third worldism—included
as realvictim ). Social protection-led discourses on survival need function
through an array of substitute signifiers—social capital, community, and

so on.
Previously, the logic of survival need and the logic of growth were
considered inimical to each other; the former was considered a remnant
of an archaic age that needed to be battered down by the march of capi-
talist growth. Since the late 1960s onwards, it was gradually felt that
this teleological reasoning was deeply problematic, as the population in
their multiple personifications of non-capitalist FCPs that could not be
accommodated/included within the so-called modern capitalist economy
refused to disappear. Figure 8.1 is the World Bank’s reminder to itself of
the impossibility of including everything in the circuits of global capital
and that the vast remainder qua WoT persists with extraordinary resilience
in the social terrain; yet, it also signals the World Bank’s need to include
WoT in terms of fundamentally displaced third worldist apparitions. It is
also the case that the rapid expansion with unprecedented speed and scope
of the circuits of global capital (with its capital accumulation and job
substituting mechanization process) and the local–global market (with
all its unevenness and turbulence), through dislocations and reconfigu-
rations, changed the process of formation of WoT, both in the rural and
urban areas. As in earlier decades, WoT in contemporary times too can
no longer be left alone. Questioning the hegemonic from this axis, that
is, WoT, would amount to questioning the very logic of the hegemonic,
or more specifically, the circuits of global capital and more dangerously
perhaps the nodal signifiers. This underwrites an anxiety over the reaction
of the people occupying WoT space and their possible transformation into
a fundamental resistance against the hegemonic. In this regard, we bring
two important aspects of the World Bank discourse to attention.
The first is the need to include the inappropriate(d) Other as the appro-
priate(d) Other, i.e., include WoT (the Other of capital) as third world
(the underdeveloped pre-capitalist other of capital).
The second aspect demanding attention is the need for control,
stability, and social harmony in the process of including the excluded. To
see development simply as need management, or as motoring the logic of
market, is to miss the story of how global capitalist hegemony (over WoT)
works. Need-based discourse of development works in both areas—within
the circuits of global capital with the intention of suitably reconfiguring
its growth (especially at the margin of the circuits of global capital, say
through delivery of education and health needs), and outside the circuits
of global capital, by controlling life forms therein in order to subdue their
subversive potential and maintain social harmony. One way it does so is to

appropriate the language of WoT in line with its policy target of survival
needs.
However, it is also the case that fear stalks the civil shield of the hege-
monic and its self-professed goal of peace and order; from time to time,
they are reminded that this fear is not unfounded. That is why along
with the poverty-focused discourse of need, the delusional veil of hege-
monic need needs to be backed up by a sovereign moment. This sovereign
moment is not that taking place with respect to the circuits of global
capital, but is related to the “wholly Other” of the circuits of global
capital. All these together are strategies of encircling and circumscribing
the WoT to the hegemonic of global capital in this high-tech age. The
method of doing so is time-tested and to which we draw attention now.
Crucial in this method is the accounting of the Other as split into
the ‘bad other’ (explosive, violent, unpredictable, etc.) as the realevil –
realutopic and the ‘good other’ (emotional, passive, helpless, etc.) as the
realvictim . One can indeed read some of the current geopolitical turmoil
in terms of rethinking the mechanisms of dealing with the materializing
WoT, of trying to protect the good hapless Other from the stifling grip
and coercive violence of the bad Other. The right of the hegemonic to
unleash sovereign violence over WoT is thus derived from a moral ratio-
nale of preventing harm on WoT by itself, and to help in its uplifting
towards modernity and democracy; third world discourse encapsulates
this latent civilizing mission as a basis of legitimizing sovereign inter-
vention. The hegemonic thus places WoT in a stage of siege through
three key moments: expansion of the circuits of global capital that directly
impacts WoT, the discourse on need that attempts to displace WoT’s own
social existence, and the sovereign moment encapsulated in the imperial-
military machine that attempts to control and subjugate WoT in the name
of protecting the good Other from the bad Other. Placed under siege,
WoT people are forced to rethink their resistance strategies, as also their
strategies of survival and reconstruction.
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CHAPTER 9
World of the Third: Encounters

with the Hegemonic
Introduction
The class-focused economy of WoT and its associated forms of life may
undergo fundamental transformations following the four encounters with
the hegemonic:
1. the already explored internal dynamics within WoT, which may

include, through the critical internalization of some of the princi-
ples of the circuits of global capital, an adoption of, adaptation to,
and assimilation into such principles,
2. the violent impact of the classical form of original accumulation in
which the existing WoT is literally destroyed and reconfigured into
something else,
3. global capital’s intervention within WoT by changing the latter’s
conditions of existence; in this non-classical form of original accu-
mulation, unlike 2, no attempt is made to intentionally dismantle
or displace WoT per se but the effect would nevertheless induce its
dislocation,
4. the pro-poor intervention within WoT as elaborated in the last
chapter through the role of NGOs therein.

Switzerland AG 2023
The materializing WoT is an outcome of numerous processes that

emanate from these four broad encounters. Because we have touched on
1 and 4 earlier, our focus will be on 2 and 3 in this chapter. This is because
we would not like to miss the process of violence, theft, and plunder—
what is called original accumulation—that come down heavily over WoT,
at times through the rationale of uplifting it (as realvictim ), and at other
times when in resistance (as realevil ) by crushing it. In all of these four
encounters, the facilitating role of state will be revealed. Finally, we briefly
discuss the question of nature from a class-focused WoT perspective.
Encounter I: Adaptation and Adoption

as Internal Change Within WoT
By adoption, adaptation, and assimilation we refer to the process of inter-
nalizing certain aspects (i.e. parts) of things (of the whole) occurring
elsewhere. WoT’s adoption of and adaptation from the circuits of global
capital could take the form of technology transfer, learning by doing (via
people working in the circuits of global capital migrating back to WoT),
educational methods, and curriculum imbibing notions of calculations,
ethics and justice, and even insights from its class organizational forms
and managerial techniques. Such adaptations could have various kinds
of effects on WoT economy and WoT livelihood; this could lead to an
eventual integration of segments of WoT economy with the circuits of
global capital. In the process of long-term adoption and adaptation (as
also assimilation), WoT could become the appropriate(d) other of the
hegemonic: third world.
It could also be the inappropriate(d) Other. It could, on the contrary,
emerge so strong that it is able to bypass the circuits of global capital, so
as to fashion alternative means of engagement with the forces of global-
ization. For example, it is possible for WoT farmers to form an agricultural
cooperative (akin to CC or AC type non-exploitative class enterprise) in
order to then sell the product in the national or world market. Indeed,
in this case, the agricultural cooperatives could be using modern tech-
niques and contemporary organizational structures, and be accessing the
global market, in order to subvert the grip of the extant circuits of
global capital. Such kinds of transformation could also be discerned in
the urban space, say, through the formation of industrial cooperatives
or community/solidarity economies outside the circuits of global capital.
The possibility of the postcapitalist ethico-political is in emerging as, or
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 243
becoming, the inappropriate(d) Other of the hegemonic. WoT stands at

a crossroad. It could get subsumed into third worldism as the realvictim .
It could also be the ground for a possible postcapitalist future and praxis.
Moreover, such alternative possibilities would challenge the hegemonic
organized around the nodal signifiers of private capitalist surplus value
appropriation, local–global market, and hegemonic needs. But then, these
three nodal signifiers would undermine the importance of non-capitalist
class processes, especially the non-exploitative forms. Such non-capitalist
organizational forms, that question the centrality of global capitalist
enterprises, are rendered an impossibility through the foreclosure of
“something primordial [here class] regarding the subject’s being”; such
that class “does not enter into symbolization and is not repressed, but
rejected…In the subject’s relationship with the symbolic there is [thus]
the possibility of a primitive verwerfung , that is, that something is not
symbolized and is going to appear in the real” (Lacan 1997: 73–88; also
see Chapter 4); this is true for radical needs as against hegemonic needs
as well. The moment of the invocation of the ‘political’ lies in turning
the process of adaptation into one of questioning global capitalism; and
such a questioning is premised on the return of the repudiated language
of class.
Encounter II: Violence of Global Capital on WoT

Violent encounter of WoT with global capital can take two forms. First,
directly, resulting from the attempt by the hegemonic to literally expro-
priate or annihilate WoT. Second, indirectly, where the functioning of
global capital produces moments of theft and plunder, where, by plunder
we mean the process of ‘taking without any recognition of doing so.’ The
second encounter transpires not by expropriating the whole of WoT, but
one or a few conditions of existence therein so as to make reproduction of
means of subsistence in WoT difficult if not impossible (see Chakrabarti
and Dhar 2009, for the two forms of original accumulation: classical and
non-classical). Here, intervention within WoT is rather a tangential effect
of the workings of global capital supported by the state that nevertheless
has a profound and lasting impact on WoT. Both of these, the direct and
the indirect mechanism, create the scenario of a continuous creation of
potential labour-power as a commodity, a condition of existence of the
capitalist class process; whether that labour-power finds employment in
the circuits of global capital is another matter.
These two phenomena are part of what Marx called ‘original accumula-
tion’. Before getting further into the discussion on original accumulation
it is important to acknowledge that the process of force and violence
mentioned in original accumulation come to be recognized and thor-
oughly analysed in economics, sociology, and policy circles, but as a part
of development-induced displacement (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, mark
a distinction between displacement and dislocation). “The prevalence of
certain concepts signifies not just a desire to communicate meanings but
also to frame a problem in a particular manner” (Dwivedi 2002: 715).
The concept of displacement contains its own repertoire of associated
concepts, and together they generate through an incitement of discourse,
the delusional veil to cover up the process of original accumulation. We
briefly touch upon the role of displacement as delusional veil before
proceeding to discuss in detail the two forms of original accumulation.
Displacement: The Delusional

Veil Over Original Accumulation
Beginning with a framework for ‘economics of compensation’ (from
Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to Little and Mirrlees’ social cost–
benefit approach to Ravi Kanbur’s compensation plus safety net), the
analysis of displacement has ended up with resettlement via the Improve-
ment Risks and Reconstruction (IRR) socio-economic model of Michael
Cernea and the World Bank (which, in accepting Cernea, criticized
monetary compensation as inadequate to improve or maintain pre-
displacement levels of income and livelihood) (see Chakrabarti and Dhar
2009, Chapter 1, Chapters 3–5). This so-called reformist-managerial
discourse of compensation and resettlement, separately or in conjunction,
is based on an a priori assumption, namely that the development process
propelled via the expanding circuits of global capital, or its condition
providing investment to secure this expansion (through creation of roads
and highways, industrial platforms, cities and townships, roads and high-
ways, irrigation systems, etc.) will inevitably cause displacement of people
in WoT by expropriating their lived space, which is justified and legit-
imized as part of the capitalocentric-orientalist project of developing the
underdeveloped third world subjects. The reformist-managerial approach
of compensation and resettlement emerges as an alternative chain of signi-
fiers to legitimize displacement and its associated category ‘involuntary
resettlement’ as part of, in a somewhat Social Darwinian sense, a natural
progression of human history that development entails. The force and

violence over the lived space of WoT (the real victims of capitalist devel-
opment) is hereby turned into an act of emancipation of the third world
from its self-imposed decrepitude state (the realvictim ).
The foregrounding of compensation and resettlement covers up and
sanitizes the embodied force and violence by delinking the cause of expro-
priation of WoT—the original act of capitalist development—from its
effect, and then turning the discourse towards the governance of effects;
resultantly, the focus being now the expropriated body of population—to
be shifted out and reallocated (if at all) in a relatively humane and effi-
cient manner. The latest attention on “involuntary resettlement”, as aptly
summarized by Dwivedi, “simply conveys that the movement of people
in displacement is not voluntary. But what the concept achieves is perhaps
nothing short of a political objective. It engulfs the act of displacement
and all questions on it. Displacement is cast as an operation of physically
relocating people” (2002: 715–716). What, therefore, this chain of signi-
fiers surrounding displacement does is to disguise the original act/sin of
capitalist development.
In contrast to the emphasis on ‘involuntary resettlement’ or on ‘phys-
ically relocating people’ that the concept of displacement foregrounds,
and with the intent to remove the veil from a depiction of bloodless capi-
talist development (told, according to Marx (1990: 873), as the bourgeois
tale of “diligent, intelligent and above all the frugal elite”), we want the
focus to shift back to the original act of development per se, the actual
history of the notorious fact of conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
plunder—in short, the force and violence surrounding the appearance
of capital and its accumulation. This is because the original act itself
underscores the phenomenon of expropriating space so as to usher in
the historical process of capitalism by subjugating the working people
into wage enslavement, ushering it by providing the delusional cover
of (capitalocentric-orientalist) development. Being precisely the concept
that captures this act/point of dislocation in all its multi-faceted forms,
Marx’s original accumulation1 encapsulates the violent act of expropria-

tion of WoT space, of the separation of subjects from the conditions of
existence of FCP (capitalist and non-capitalist) that secure their means of
subsistence. The dual process of the destruction of WoT societies, and
of the delinking of its people from their means of subsistence, creates
the historical condition of commodification of labour-power; and indeed,
the last few centuries have witnessed large-scale displacement and forced
migration of large sections of humans—sometimes as peasants, sometimes
as slave and bonded labourers, sometimes as planation workers, some-
times as informal workers, sometimes as causal workers and contractual
workers in (global) cities, sometimes as seasonal agricultural labourers in
faraway capitalist farmlands, sometimes as refugees, sometimes as vagrants
and beggars, sometimes as underclass, and sometimes as evicted due to
home foreclosure and gentrification, and so on; behind every such move-
ment lies the imprint of original accumulation. As Marx noted, “If money,
according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain
on one cheek’, capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore,
with blood and dirt” (Marx 1990: 925–926). Behind every Wall Street
and every Wolf of the Wall Street2 lies the history of the disintegration of
WoT across the rural and urban spectrum as a result of original accumu-
lation, involving a “loss of concepts”, a “loss of events”, a “loss of mental
states”, and at least a “threatened loss of identity” (Lear 2007: 295–298);
the delusional veil of capitalism (with all the highs and lows of booms
and busts), and all the incitement to discourse around it covers up for the
blood and dirt of ruined people and ruined societies.
1 Following the German text of Marx (where the term original was deployed) as
against the translated English text (where original was translated as primitive), we have re-
conceptualized the birth of capitalism in terms of original accumulation and not primitive
accumulation, all the more, because such a moment/process does not just refer to the
distant pre-history or the eighteenth or nineteenth century past of capitalism, but also,
the blood-soaked every day and the violent present of capitalism. In that sense, original
accumulation is not simply a temporal concept. It also encapsulates a logical step, a some-
what necessary logic in the birth of capitalism. In terms of the difference between third
world and WoT, the distinction between primitive accumulation and original accumulation
matters (see Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, 130–177 for details).
2 Who after all in the Wall streets of the world is not a Wolf?
Two Forms of Original Accumulation:

Classical and Non-Classical
The reformist-managerial school prescribes development-induced
displacement without naming it as original accumulation. Critiques
describe original accumulation often couched as primitive accumulation.
However, Marx is a critique of original accumulation, because, for Marx,
the point is ‘not to describe’, ‘never to prescribe’ but to have a world
without original accumulation. Taking off from earlier work based on
Marx’s Capital and the writings of Late Marx, we briefly summarize
our understanding of original accumulation and then turn our focus for
explanatory purposes to a few examples from India.3
Original accumulation is a historical process, as also a logical step,
of creating one of the conditions needed to start capitalist production
(M-C-P-C/ -M/ ) and capital accumulation (ΔC + ΔV); that condition
being the formation of labour-power as a commodity—resulting from the
expropriation of subjects from their extant means of subsistence. Unlike
merchant and usury capital, labour-power as a commodity (like the gener-
alized process of M-C-P-C/ -M/ or of its accumulation) does not have a
long history (Marx 1990: 267); moreover, given other non-capitalist class
enterprises procreating besides capitalist ones, its presence is not ubiq-
uitous. Therefore, original accumulation is a historical and logical (by
whatever means the logic is established, say development, for example)
condition of its existence. Our discussion here is organized with a specific
object in mind: how original accumulation can be construed as a continual
historical process that unfolds over WoT, by changing its conditions of
existence or through its outright destruction, both of which make it
partially difficult or completely impossible for the affected subjects to
reproduce their socially necessary means of subsistence. To capture this
complex unfolding, original accumulation is organized into two forms—
classical and non-classical; typically, both tend to unfold simultaneously in
an uneven way with telling effect on WoT.
3 For further discussion, see Shanin (1983), Dhar (2003), Basu (2008, 2012);
Chakrabarti and Dhar (2009); Chakrabarti et al. (2015); Chakrabarti (2017); Bhattacharya
and Seda-Irizarry (2017); Dhar (2020).
The Classical Form of Original Accumulation

Following Marx’s Capital, original accumulation in its classical form
appears through the expropriation of means of production that the direct
producers had access to; resultantly the direct producers cannot repro-
duce their means of subsistence; it transforms them (i.e. peasants attached
to land-agriculture, artisans and independent producers attached to their
tools, fishermen attached to the natural waterbodies, indigenous people
attached to forests, etc.) into wage labourers. Crucial here are the twin
moments of separation of direct producers from the means of produc-
tion and the means of subsistence; the first separation guarantees the
second separation. In the case of England, Marx emphasized the expro-
priation of land as an integral part of original accumulation; since then,
land has remained the pervasive theme in discussing original accumula-
tion, not least because its importance remains potent and topical. This
act of separation takes place via multiple sources, including colonial-
imperialist plunder and developmental projects, and is accompanied by
“bloody legislation” to impose stern control over those disenfranchised
producers and the normalization exercise that “obliterates the memory
of the past modes of production as well as any traces of the violent
foundation of the new mode of production” (Read 2002: 45). In the
contemporary scenario, rather than sequentially, these three aspects—
separation via expropriation of means of production-disciplining carried
out through legislation-normalization—occur in tandem in any process
of original accumulation.
In our rendition, expropriation of WoT space and forms of life (such as
through land acquisition for mining) captures the classical route of orig-
inal accumulation that the hegemonic represent as displacement to be
dealt with only through compensation and resettlement. Let us give two
examples from India of the classical form of original accumulation. Both
highlight the role of the triad of separation-disciplining-normalization.
Both exemplify the critical role of the delusional veil of capitalist hege-
mony in literally shaping our perspective and our politics to mask the
original sin of capitalism.
Example 1: Original Accumulation and Forest Rights Act

This concerns an unfolding non-class struggle over a ‘legal’ condition
of existence that in turn has the potential to open up the ‘event’ of
the separation of forest dwellers from their means of production and

means of subsistence. We draw attention to the recent Supreme Court
verdict on 13 February 2019 (that has since been stayed on 28 February
on account of a review petition) which rejects the traditional rights of
nearly one million indigenous dwellers from forestlands across numerous
regional states (some of whose ancestor’s ties to their forests date back
perhaps to a millennium). It ruled that indigenous dwellers have failed
to establish their individual claims in paper as forest dwellers under the
Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of
Forest Rights) Act 2006.4 It was delivered on the basis of a petition
filed in 2008 by an NGO ‘Wildlife First’ (showing how an environ-
mental fetish of wilderness, a typical Eurocentric understanding, can turn
into an argument for the eviction of a predominantly world of the third
forest dwellers) and few retired forest officials (originally involved in the
implementation of Eurocentric colonial law, the state personals, despite
modifications in the law, have often been in conflict with forest dwellers)
which in effect challenged the spirit and validity of Forests Rights Act
(FRA). The NGO’s underlying position seems to suggest an argument
that, in the name of giving the indigenous forest dwellers rights over
forest, FRA is encouraging deforestation and encroachment of forest land
(indicating the implied outcome of tragedy of commons in the behaviour
of forest dwellers). One can clearly discern here the production of a
chain of categories of liberal law (based on individual rather than collec-
tive rights), rationality and utilitarianism (wastage of scarce resources for
human gain) and cowboy environmentalism (use of environment to disen-
franchise the very people who have had the know-how of what the forest
is, and how to live with it, and not just on it or in it, and conserve it); the
underlying claim that the forest dwellers are incapable of relating with or
conserving the forests, and conservation can only be realized through the
actions of the modern state; this captures a live and ongoing process of
the third worldification of world of the third subjects in forest societies,
who see the ‘forest’ as a “living relative” mutating at its doorstep and not
as natural resource. These, and many more, constitute the weaving of the
cultural processes into a normalization exercise.
4 Live Law, February 21, 2019. Available at: https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/sc-

orders-eviction-forest-dwellers-tribes-whose-claims-under-forest-rights-act-stand-rejected-
143060, (accessed on 27 February, 2022). Also see Mookherjee et al. (2020) for further
discussion.
Coming as a departure from old colonial Eurocentric ideas of and

legal tropes around the forest which had persisted in post-independent
India, FRA recognizes two groups of people—Forest Dwelling Scheduled
Tribe (members of scheduled tribe living in forests) and Other Tradi-
tional Forest Dwellers (persons residing in forest, or dependent on forest
produce for 75 years)—on the basis of the two criteria of subjects tradi-
tionally residing in forests or forest land and traditionally dependent on
forest produce for livelihood. Whatever its shortcomings (such as keeping
the footprint of the state alive), an implicit supposition of FRA seems to
be that indigenous dwellers are the best conservers of the forest. On the
basis of this supposition, it allows for the claim of such forest dwellers to
be legally ratified and consequently to provide them with land rights, use
rights, and rights to conserve and protect forestland. The contradiction
here is that while, on the face of it, FRA was proposed as a piece of legis-
lation allowing ‘collective’ rights over forest, the Indian legal framework
seems to be based on ‘individual’ rights. On grounds of environmentalism
and property rights, the recent verdict strives to make a case for the latter
to triumph over the former and worse, negation of the former. Because of
the failure on the part of a large number of indigenous forest dwellers to
individually vet their legal claim (due to reasons like the political economy
of the forest whose power equation discourages this entire process, the
inability of the dwellers to understand modern law and/or provide proof
of their claim, the callousness of the regional state government to take
the necessary initiative, etc.), tens of thousands of original inhabitants
and perhaps many ‘encrochers’ (who arrived following original accumula-
tion elsewhere) find themselves facing the prospect of mass-scale eviction.
In case the review petition fails, and the original order stands, this may
open the route for the wholesale usurpation of forest dwellers from their
lived space, as also from where they derive their means of subsistence.
Further, if the review petition fails, the two apparatuses of the state—the
court which can usurp the legal condition of existence of the forest-
based class process and forms of life, and the administration, including
the policy-making bureaucracy, forest officials, and security force, which is
empowered to expropriate their means of production (the assigned phys-
ical space of forest itself now recovered as state owned property)—would
combine to complete the process of original accumulation.
Example 2: Hawking and the Right of Space

With the changing concept of city that liberalization and globalization
have ushered in, one position that has become popular among a section
of the Indian elite in the last few decades is that the hawkers are a
nuisance, an eyesore for investors of both domestic and foreign capital,
and a deterrent for tourism. The argument being that while getting rid
of the hawkers from their claimed urban space that provided them with
access to their means of subsistence will rob them of their livelihood in the
short run (by dispossessing them of their current but contested ‘rights’
over common public space), it will also act as a ‘signal creation’ to invite
global capital and tourists. The evicted people will be compensated in the
long run with jobs that would be created with the entry of domestic and
foreign capital as also flourishing tourism.
Hawkers were hardly considered as a problem till the 1980s in a place
like Kolkata, but liberalization and the advent of globalization changed all
that. The Communist-led Left Front government (that ruled the regional
state of West Bengal from 1977 to 2011 under political democracy) inau-
gurated ‘Operation Sunshine’ in 1996 with the intent of evicting the
hawkers from the streets of Kolkata to make the city more commuter,
tourist, and investment friendly. A non-class struggle erupted between
the state government and the hawkers, because the hawkers saw it as an
operation of expropriating their means of subsistence.
The two examples of forest dwellers and hawkers show that a host
of signifiers associated with the workings of global capital converge to
constitute the subjects in WoT (hawkers, agricultural subjects holding or
not holding land, forest dwellers, slum dwellers, street beggars, illegal
immigrants, the homeless, etc.); attached as these people are to images
of third worldization (sometimes projected as realvictim and when in resis-
tance as realevil ) the hegemonic develop and disseminate reasons as to why
the expropriation of their means of production is necessary. What was
once WoT may disappear; yet the people remain. The hegemonic could
leave them, as it often happens, to their own fate, to wander, migrate
and shift to new pores of WoT, say, in the so-called informal sector. At
other times, it tries to cover up, through a discourse of compensation
and resettlement, the violent act of the original accumulation process by
sending their agents—state organs, development experts, and NGOs—
to prop up an alternative support system as a supplementary measure
to help the dispossessed and dislocated. The hegemonic is not fortified
or secured simply through plunder and devastation, but is supplemented

through acts of benevolence. While original accumulation is the historical
starting point of capital that creates and recreates ongoing waves of poten-
tial wage labourers, it is the developmentalism that provides capital with
the delusional veil of covering up (that includes legitimizing) its ‘blood
and dirt’; as a historical process, capital cannot form itself without this
capitalocentric-orientalist remaking of WoT as third world awaiting its
redemption through its destruction.
Encounter III: The Non-Classical

Form of Original Accumulation
Faced with the historical inevitability of the transition from feudalism
to capitalism in the non-Western part and context of Russia (which sat
between West and East), the later writings of Marx (Late Marx in short)
not only rejected the historical inevitability thesis, but in doing so, led us
to the non-classical form of original accumulation. We start by asking
whether expropriating land (means of production) from the peasantry
ought to be a necessary condition for original accumulation?
In order to expropriate the tillers of the land it is not necessary to drive

them from their land as was the case in England and elsewhere; nor is it
necessary to abolish communal property by an usake. Just go and deprive
the peasants of the product of their labor beyond a certain point and you
will not be able to chain them to their fields even with the help of your
police and army.
(Marx 1970: 159)
Taking this as point of departure we revisit the idea of separation. Sepa-

ration no longer means only direct and complete expropriation from the
means of production as it transpires in land acquisition, enclosure and
other such moves. It entails indirect and partial expropriation of one or a
few conditions of existence governing the WoT class sets, in order to bring
about a major dislocation such that the reproduction of socially necessary
means of subsistence becomes impossible for WoT subjects. In the history
of capitalism, the processes related to modifications in terms of trade,
debt—private and public, knowledge and patent, technology, water,
forest, climate, soil fertility, etc. have led to various kinds of separation of
direct producers of FCP and condition providing enablers of FCP from
their means of subsistence, even if there was no overt attempt to expro-

priate the means of production of the direct producers. For example, the
state-sponsored changes in the terms of trade—by suppressing the ratio of
agricultural versus industrial prices—played a crucial role in the history of
capitalist-led industrialization (whether private or state capitalist driven)
and in urbanization5 ; likewise, the role of debt in causing farmers distress
in India has been much discussed and so has the role of public debt
(funded through what Marx called the credo of private capital—public
credit to state) in expropriating the social wealth and means of produc-
tion of entire nations and turning the condition of working population
therein into a ruinous skeleton of their former self (some East Asian coun-
tries, Argentina, Greece and Sri Lanka represent some extreme examples
in recent decades). Without any pretext of immediate conquest of means
of production, such changes in one or few conditions end up producing
serious dislocation of the affected WoT class enterprises, and of their soci-
eties, which may lead ultimately to the migration of people therein (for
seasonal work or permanently) as wage labourers.
Class-focused analysis has revealed that there is nothing that prevents
a subject from holding multiple class and non-class positions, in an enter-
prise and across enterprises, sectors, and regions; the non-classical form of
original accumulation incorporates, and not erases such polymorphisms.
Consider a person who owns an agricultural plot of land together with
other assets. Even with land and other property in rural areas (which
would typically be held as insurance), driving the means of subsistence
below the socially accepted average is enough to transform him into
a potential wage labourer (in rural or urban landscape). As intricate
interlinkages develop between agriculture and rural non-farm employ-
ment or between agriculture and industry, the multiplication of varied
interlinked class and non-class positions occupied by a segment of rural
individuals should not surprise us. Original accumulation that empha-
sizes the exclusivity of pure wage labour based on complete separation
from means of production, as in the classical rendition, would run into
trouble in capturing and explaining the complexity of such phenomena.
In contrast, alongside the classical form, our framework is able to consis-
tently integrate multiple subject positions and their shifting interlinkages
in theorizing original accumulation.
5 For the role of terms of trade in erstwhile Soviet Union see Resnick and Wolff (2002,
Chapter 8).
We now exemplify the non-classical case of original accumulation

against the backdrop of a series of events in Plachimada, a village in the
Palakkad district of Kerala. This particular process of original accumu-
lation transpired without any attempt to expropriate land or any other
property in WoT.
Plachimada: Original Accumulation Without Expropriation

Having acquired land through lease, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages
Private Ltd. (HCCBPL), a Subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company, had
set up in 1999, a coke bottling plant covering over 34 acres in a predom-
inantly agriculture-dependent indigenous community in Plachimada. This
plant represented, from the side of HCCBPL, a process of capital accumu-
lation (ΔCc + ΔV). The received logic of development would consider
the setting up of such a global capitalist enterprise in a perceived third
world backwater as progressive, since it allows global capital and its circuit
to prize open WoT territories for a project of development. Using the
example of Plachimada where HCCBPL makes a claim on a critical condi-
tion of existence, namely water (needed for cola), we would like to analyse
how this seemingly progressive step could turn out to be a nightmare for
WoT societies. Such intervention typically sets off a series of contradictory
effects tantamount to a process of theft and plunder that places these soci-
eties in the means of subsistence crisis even as they retain their property
and there is no pretext of any direct physical displacement. Theft, because
it involves an unacknowledged distribution of surplus value in the guise
of profit, and plunder, because that process of theft is related to a process
of dislocation of society. The theft and plunder co-constitute one another.
For setting up its bottling plant and activating the processes of perfor-
mance and appropriation of surplus, the state government has provided
HCCBPL land against which it pays rent. This site of production must be
in close proximity to clean water; availability of clean water from natural
sources is then a critical natural condition of existence for the process
of coke production and, in class terms, for the performance and appro-
priation of surplus in HCCBPL. HCCBPL had selected a site in the rain
shadow region of Plachimada, which had a large reservoir of underground
water, and to get the requisite amount of water/means of production,
HCCBPL dug six bore wells as deep as 750 to 1000 feet. Water had
hitherto provided an indispensable condition of existence to innumerable
agricultural and household class enterprises in WoT, whose village wells go
down to about 150 to 200 feet. Water was accessed in a shared manner in
this WoT society; water formed an integral part of its shared environment.
Though there was no expropriation of land, the process of extraction of
water by HCCBPL altered the composition and availability of water for
agriculture and household class enterprises.
Other than clean water, the HCCBPL enterprise would be consti-
tuted by, to name a few, non-class processes pertaining to (i) land-lease,
and other legal conditions provided by the state, (ii) supervision, strate-
gizing, advertisement, capital accumulation activated by managers, (iii)
loans provided by banks, (iv) money capital provided by shareholders,
and (v) the selling of manufactured coke through merchants. In this capi-
talist enterprise, the productive workers perform surplus labour, while the
productive capitalists in the form of the board of directors appropriate
the surplus value embodied in the value of produced commodity which
then they distribute as subsumed payments to the mentioned condition
providers. All these non-class processes, including the natural conditions
of existence, constitute the process of capitalist FCP. Collating the FCP
and SCP of HCCBPL,
SV = SSCPState + SSCPMan(sup,skills,adv,cap−accu) + SSCPBank

+ SSCPShare + SSCPMer + SSCPNp (9.1)
where
SV = surplus value produced by productive workers and appropriated
by productive capitalists.
SSCPState = Subsumed class payments to the state for providing land
and for ensuring the safe reproduction of property and other legal
conditions.
SSCPMan (sup, skills, adv, cap-acc) = Subsumed class payments to the
managers for purposes of supervision, strategizing, and for disbursing
funds for advertisement and capital accumulation.
SSCPBank = Subsumed class payments to the bank enterprises for
lending capital.
SSCPShare = Subsumed class payments to the shareholders for lending
capital.
SSCPMer = Subsumed class payments to the trading enterprises for
enabling the sale of the commodity.
SSCPNp = Subsumed class payments for natural processes.
In the case of Plachimada, while all ‘conditions of existence’ are paid

against their respective roles, no payment is made against the process
of drawing clean water (SSCPNP ) that helps sustain HCCBPL. Water
as ‘natural resource’ is consumed free. One can clearly see that if a
subsumed payment against this non-class process was to be made, the
subsumed payments destined for the other processes would fall. This
immediately indicates that there are gainers from this unpaid natural
process. Who gains from this and how?
The question of gain can be deciphered by looking at the profit
of HCCBPL, which is derived from the following value equation (see
Chapter 2):
W = Cc + V + SV (9.2)
where CC is constant capital, V is the value of labour-power, SV is the

surplus value, and W is the value of the commodity.
There are two cases to consider, one in which payment for the natural
process is acknowledged and the other in which it is not. Taking the latter
case first, by considering (9.1) and (9.2),
W = Cc + V + SSCPState + SSCPMan(sup,skills,adv,cap−accu)
+SSCPBank + SSCPShare + SSCPMer
Suppose, in terms of our specific case, the component of profit (before

tax) is the portion of surplus value directed towards the shareholders,
the state, and the managers for the purpose of accumulating capital.
After deducting from the surplus value, the payments made to the
moneylenders, merchants, and managers for purposes other than capital
accumulation,
Reported Profit = Π = W−(Cc+V+SSCPBank +SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv) +
SSCPMer )
= {W − (Cc + V)} − {SSCPBank + SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv) + SSCRMer }
As W – (Cc + V) = SV, ( )
Reported Profit = Π = SV− SSCPBank + SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv) + SSCPMer
= SSCPState + SSCPMan(cap−accu) + SSCPShare

This reported or bookkeeping profit, however, masks the process of not

paying against the natural condition of existence. Had it been accounted
for, the value of the commodity would have been:
, UNPAID
W = W + SSCPNP = (Cv + V + SV) + SSCPUNPAID
NP
And,
Πreal ( )
RealProfit= = W, −
( )
Cv + V + SSCPBank +SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv) +SSCPMer
( )
Π
real
SSCPBank + SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv.) + SSCPMer
= SV −
− SSCPUNPAID
NP
= SSCP,State + SSCP,,Man(cap-accu) + SSCP,,,
Share
where the difference between real profit and reported profit is W, −

W = SSCPUNPAID
NP which is added to the claimed profit. If the unpaid
amount is counted, that is, paid, then the subsumed class revenues to
the state, shareholders, and managers for capital accumulation would be
reduced. By aggregating the profit volume of all capitalists from such
kinds of theft and plunder the globally appropriated surplus values can
be summed.
The importance of non-payment lies in the fact that it leaves a greater
amount of appropriated surplus value to the board of directors. However,
non-recognition of the class language of surplus value means that one
only encounters and counts profit, thereby erasing the moment of the
non-paid component of surplus value appearing as profit. This implies,
as the accounting relation for HCCBPL clearly reveals, the receivers of
surplus value (productive and unproductive capitalists, state, and other
subsumed claimants) stand to lose together as a group in case the natural
process of drawing clean water is recognized as a provider of an indis-
pensable condition of existence and, accordingly, is remunerated. In what
is reported by the enterprise, credit rating agencies, and the market (in
the stock market, for instance), there is no recognition of the extraction
of clean water as a condition of existence. What gets reported is that the
profit appears as a result of increased efficiency of HCCBPL which, if
looked at from a class analysis, turns out to be an illegitimate claim.
‘Maximization of profit’ thus encapsulates distributed gains of wealth

for some at the expense of others; such class struggles over subsumed
class payments are integral to the capitalist enterprise. On the other
hand, higher profit could also be generated without reducing (and,
why not, even increasing) the other distributive components if greater
amount of surplus value is produced and appropriated. The scenario
where this comes with increasing working hours, or greater intensifica-
tion of work, or reduction in wage rate, might lead to a class struggle
between productive workers and productive capitalists over FCP.
Where the claimants of surplus value are united is with regard to the
legitimacy of unpaid processes. This is because, as the above accounting
relations show, all the claimants of surplus value have the possibility of
gaining from such non-payments for drawing upon the service of certain
processes (here, natural processes). This theft, and especially when accom-
panied by a process of original accumulation akin to plunder, could very
well set off a resistance against not just global capitalist enterprises like
HCCBPL, but the capitalocentric-orientalist form of development as well.
Let us explain, keeping the case of Plachimada in the backdrop.
Clean water drawn out of the natural world may very well be affecting
the availability and quality of such water itself if, as is usually the case,
such expropriation of resources for free—without any subsumed class
payments—is conducted by a host of capitalist enterprises. Given that such
global capitalist enterprises have no stake in what subsequently happens
to the quality of water and its availability for other purposes, the use of
natural resources by such enterprises can be indiscriminate. This is in sharp
contrast to the use of water by other enterprises geographically located in
the same space, whose shared reproduction depends critically on the avail-
ability of water. While water (or ecological) conservation is integrated into
the WoT economic and social life in Plachimada, the same is not true
for global capital. Even as the approach of WoT is geared towards the
preservation of nature, which is also a condition for their self-preservation,
the primary matter of concern, from the perspective of global capital, is
the maximum extraction of surplus value and profit making. The latter
would at times show concern for the environment (a concern that is radi-
cally different from concerns within WoT), say, by compensating for the
disruption of the ecological system, but such acts of ‘benevolence’ are
accidental to capital’s self-expansion process.
In Plachimada, farmers complained that the qualitative alteration in
the critical condition of water not only changed their class enterprises but
also had a profound impact on their required means of subsistence, their

health, and on the very forms of life:
The Coke plant’s alleged indiscriminate extraction of local ground water

sharply lowered the water levels where the surrounding communities live
and farm. The ground water has become contaminated and undrinkable …
poor, farm-labouring Dalits and tribals have had to stop cultivating paddy
because of this shortage of water, and migrate elsewhere to look for work.
(The Telegraph, 06. 05. 2004)
… things have turned against the company after it was found that sludge
flushed out by the company had toxic material, which allegedly polluted
the wells in the vicinity. (Financial Express, 31. 10. 05)
Two subsequent developments—groundwater depletion and surface

pollution—further point to the contradictory effects of the process of
capital accumulation of HCCBPL. First, it is claimed, that the water table
dropped sharply; village wells started drying up; and toxic matter such
as cadmium, chromium, and lead began showing up, which contami-
nated the whole watershed. The village wells as also the agricultural land
started feeling the brunt of the pollution. Second, as part of its ‘corpo-
rate social responsibility’, HCCBPL had begun repaying Plachimada with
sludge from its filtering and bottling plants (carried by 36 trucks every
day each with six 50-gallon drums) which it dumped in the fields and on
the banks of the irrigation canal with the claim that these were ‘fertiliz-
ers’. Later, reports from Kerala State Pollution Control Board suggested
that the ‘fertilizer’ contained dangerous levels of cadmium and nickel and
hence were useless as fertilizers. Further, the stink from the sludge made
people sick and gave rise to skin ailments.
This demonstrates once again how the intervention of global capital
in the shared condition of existence of WoT could create in it a crisis for
agricultural class enterprises (because of the non-availability of water for
cultivation and because of the presence of toxins) and household class
enterprises (because of the scarcity of drinking water and because avail-
able water is no longer fit for human consumption). The process of the
plunder of (unpaid) natural resources that secure reproduction of global
capitalist enterprise and the class revenue of productive capitalists, share-
holders, income bankers, managers, and merchants comes into existence
by creating a virtual crisis of existence for WoT class enterprises en masse—

exploitative as well as non-exploitative, for their means of subsistence, and
finally even for their existing forms of life, and all this happens without any
intended expropriation of forms of life in WoT.
If one counts for all the overdetermined effects of altering this one
condition for coke production—quality of water—on agricultural and
household class enterprises within WoT, on the health of the people, on
the ecology and on society per se, the subsumed payment Σ that HCCBPL
should be paying ought to be much greater than SSC PNUPN P AI D even
if the company did pay for water. Even if the payment is made, the private
payment still would not and does not reflect the social cost and its effects
(some uncountable and some unknown) on WoT. That would also put to
question any policy measure that seeks to enforce a calculated amount (to
be) paid for water, since no such calculi of cost–benefit can possibly iden-
tify, let alone measure, all the effects of this process of extracting water
on the overdetermined reality transpiring in a WoT settlement like Plachi-
mada.6 The true cost or payment is not simply the value of water or other
such specific non-class conditions (such as forest and natural ravines),
but must account for the combined loss from all such effects that have
required decades or even centuries to take shape.
Finally, the conceptualization of plunder deepens through what
Chaudhary et al. (2000: 92) call ‘sanctioned violence’. Sanctioned
violence entails a scenario of consent. The classic example is that of
the proletariat who when entering into the wage contract, sanctions,
by the very nature of the contract, to his/her subsequent exploitation.
Here, sanctioned violence takes the form of sanctioned exploitation. Simi-
larly, sanctioned violence could take the form of sanctioned colonization,
sanctioned exclusion, and so on. In the above example, the subjects in
6 Any attempt for monetary compensation (or, even resettlement) based on cost–benefit
analysis would have to consider choosing a few effects as important, usually the more
visible effects, effects that are transparent and effects that are impacting the present. This
is a bogus argument based on reductionist calculi since, in an overdetermined reality: (i)
any assertion or claim of one or a set of effects as relatively more important than others
requires that we need to know all the effects (which are infinite, some in the future that
we don’t know) in order to make a comparison of cost–benefit, which is impossible, and
(ii) because each of the immediate/identified effects has an infinite number of causative
influences (past, present and future weaved together) that manifest in combination with
one another; no ‘effects’ of a change in process proposed by efficiency analysis is reduced
to exclusively the proposed ‘effects’ chosen in efficiency analysis (Wolff, 2002; Chakrabarti
and Dhar 2009, 104–109).
WoT could consent to the intervention of global capital. Interpellated

to and subjectivated by the delusional veil of developmentalism, some in
WoT may desire to change their own conditions of existence to facilitate
the entry of global capital (or its developmental co-operator, the World
Bank). They could be seeking what is perceived to be a better standard of
living within the circuits of global capital and the glitters unfolding along
its border. This brings forth an important moment, that the encounter of
WoT with global capital is not necessarily without its consent or collabo-
ration (as in Plachimada); what WoT volunteered, but not what it sought.
And, quite often, this aspect of sanctioned violence may clash with those
forces in WoT who do not accept this sanctioned violence and may have
opposed it.
Mylamma is a tribal widow and agricultural labourer in her fifties. She lives
in the Vijaynagar colony in Plachimada village, adjacent to the coke plant.
She wants the plant to shut down immediately.
On the other side of the road, Vijayan, in his forties, is the plant’s lift
operator, and lives in Palakkad town. He is picketing to defend his job, in
case Mylamma succeeds in shutting the place down.
Both feel “robbed” of what they are entitled by right: Vijayan of
employment, and Mylamma of a vital natural resource – water. (The
Telegraph, 6 May 2004)
Vijayan’s struggle represents the moment of sanctioned violence; for

the job he has to consent to the destruction of shared environment of
Plachimada, probably consent even for its wholesale destruction (since
as reports say, most people will be migrating to other places) which he
probably did not foresee. Mylamma’s struggle is built on not giving in
to sanctioned violence. She wants the plant to be closed so that the
conditions from where she and the others draw their source of livelihood
can continue to thrive. The space of WoT remains torn between sanc-
tioned violence and resistance to sanctioned violence. Various kinds of
struggle, class and non-class, pull WoT into contradictory directions and
there is no a prior road to the future. This again highlights our point of
a disaggregated third and the problem of reducing it into a homogenous
figure/space or path. The idea of ethic-politics too must remain open to
the contradictions, ruptures, and fissures within WoT.
Encounter IV: Hegemonic

Pro-Poor Practices and NGOs
As a social actor, the World Bank seeks to implant itself between the
nation-state and the people by persuading both to be followers of its
universal standard of conceiving, managing, and implementing poverty-
related ideas and development projects; rather than centralisation, the
ideal universal standard it seeks is decentralisation of a certain kind. Given
this connection, we now need to analyse the nature of the World Bank’s
intervention in WoT. As one of its important functions to strategize and
control the process of the uplifting of the realvictim , the World Bank too
needs a global ‘army’ of managers, technicians, educationalists (largely
economists, sociologists, political scientists, ecologists, etc.), develop-
mental professionals and practitioners, as also grassroots level workers,
even empowered SHG women from the underdeveloped community—
a rather civil and civilian army with dreams of do—goodism, civilizing
mission, modernization—to implement and supervise its third wordlist
discourse on WoT. Most Non-Governmental Organizations or NGOs
belong to that army (World Bank 1995; Kamat 2001; Chakrabarti and
Dhar 2013).
The World Bank formally defines NGOs as “private organizations that
pursue activities to relieve the suffering, promote the interests of the
poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services, or undertake
community development”.7 Specifically targeting the WoT space which
it sees as a reservoir of poverty, the World Bank sets up an encounter
with WoT such that it can never turn its voice or resistance into a chal-
lenge to the hegemony of global capitalism. To ensure that, it foregrounds
some qualifications regarding NGOs, qualifications that betray its political
agenda. The objective is to suspend the possibility of alternative polit-
ical imaginations, institutions, and praxis at the ground level and instead
leverage the transition process through a capitalism-driven development.
Constituting a huge segment by now, NGOs per se do not comprise a
unitary space that, by definition, serves the World Bank or likewise global
agencies uncritically. It is disaggregated and heterogeneous too, open
to contestation and conflict; it is open to rethinking and re-articulation
(Kamat 2001; Gibson–Graham and Ruccio 2001). In fact, NGOs or
7 World Bank (1995). Available at: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/

814581468739240860/pdf/multi-page.pdf. (Accessed on May 29, 2022).
similar such versions, without the official label, have existed all over the
world. Here, in India, non-party political formations such as various
Gandhian organizations, religious organizations like the Ramakrishna
Mission, and other social/cultural institutions (including organizations
related to the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha as also Left-wing
ones) have always carried out, in their respective and contradictory ways,
so-called pro-people services, rural transformation and the work of micro-
level changes. Many of them do profess (through their micro-level and
bottom-up interventions) ethico–political considerations that are in turn
ideals of social transformation and change. These non-state, non-party
organizations, whether called NGOs or not, can very well happen to be
politically oriented.
It is also worth remembering that, particularly with the rise of neolib-
eral globalization, the growing importance of World Bank-inspired NGOs
in terms of grassroots intervention that challenged non-state, non-party
political NGOs, or some such variants went hand-in-hand with a demo-
tion of the role of state as an implementer. The centrality of the role
of NGOs is acknowledged by the World Bank in the implementation of
poverty-related programmes:
In most developing countries NGOs are central actors in anti-poverty poli-

cies and programs. The social and educational background of many NGO
staff enables them to interact easily with the staff of national institutions,
and they can help create bridges between these institutions, outside agen-
cies, and grassroots organizations. NGOs can also be very effective in
delivering technical assistance to poor people. (World Bank 2000/2001:
110)
But then the World Bank also marks a difference between desirable
NGOs and the non-desirable ones.
As a general rule, collaboration should be limited to NGOs which are

non-political and do not engage in overt partisan political activities. (World
Bank 1995)
Sometimes NGOs reflect the political system in which they thrive, or local
interest groups, and thus may not serve the interests of poor people as well
as they might. (World Bank 2000/2001: 111)
It remains an open question as to what the World Bank means by the

‘politics’ of NGOs. It could be referring to old style non-party micro-
political formations (like say Gandhian or left-wing organizations or right-
wing RSS) that were always already opposed to the World Bank paradigm;
it could also mean conventional interventions by political parties through
NGOs. But what is important for our discussion is the acknowledgement
that the space of the NGOs is contested, pulsating with possibilities that
may be inimical to the hegemonic. What is also undisputed is the effort of
the World Bank to rearticulate the space towards a conception of NGOs
that is desirable, meaning hegemonic friendly. This involves its attempt
to sideline the undesirable NGOs and displace the category of NGOs
in such a manner so as to disqualify them as NGOs. More specifically,
the desirable NGOs would be the more depoliticised NGOs, which focus
upon managerial, technical, and execution aspects—aspects that serve the
pro-poor political agenda of the World Bank which in turn is tied to the
march of capitalist development.
The ‘desirable’ NGOs (with their trustees and CEOs) have now
emerged as a nodal figure in carrying out within WoT societies, against
the receipt of social surplus funds, the well-planned hegemonic needs as
defined and designed by the World Bank and other hegemonic institu-
tions (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2013). More often than not, the World
Bank allies with the organs of the state to fix policy in line with the
World Bank paradigm; but it then prefers to handover the micro-level
enforcing of policies to the NGOs. The appearance of neoliberal forms
of globalization was accompanied by the acceptance of the following
problems of government bureaucracy as an implementation agency: (i)
inefficiency at gathering information, (ii) long time-gap in adjustment to
ground level changes, (iii) information gap between layers of government
hierarchies, (iv) ‘soft-budget’ constraint with the implication that indi-
viduals and agencies can afford to fail without any accompanying cost
for such failure, (v) rent-seeking behaviour, (vi) the distance between the
centre (where decisions and strategies are taken) and the periphery (where
benefits are received), etc. To fix these implementation problems, the
NGOs, formally beholden to nobody at the local level, became substi-
tutes to government bureaucracies. This is not to say that government
bureaucracies or the state apparatuses do not play a role in the delivery
of social surplus. What we are trying to stress is the rise of the NGOs as
an institutional form for the enforcing of development policies alongside
government agencies. And, in the case of the World Bank-led develop-

mental paradigm, the NGOs have emerged as the preferred enforcer, its
third wordlist foot soldiers in WoT. At times, tensions may also arise, as in
case of India presently, between the state and the international agencies
over the NGOs; the state tries to control the influence of the ‘foreign’
ideas or programmes being propagated through the NGOs by coming
down hard on its financial routes (fragments of global social surplus).
The state would not be too averse to forge a partnership with interna-
tional agencies to get a portion of global social surplus for projects in
WoT, but it may express disagreement over who ought to be the appro-
priate private delivery agency at the ground level—the NGOs connected
to international agencies like the World Bank or the non-party agencies
connected to or under the supervision of the ruling disposition in the
country. The distribution of social surplus for hegemonic needs is only
one side of the contestation that takes place; the other side being about
who is to be seen as the pro-poor deliverer to the WoT people. Need
struggle thus plays out in many different ways.
Interventions within WoT through NGOs are engendered through the
trope of hegemonic needs that will, through the distribution of social
surplus, try to deliver social ‘sustainability’ and ‘community’ building in
these societies. The objective is to pull WoT subjects out of culturally
rooted (unequal) systemic ‘traps’ by recasting them as ‘entrepreneurs’—
sensitive to the markers of self-gain, market, competition, productivity,
commercialization, and profit (all signifiers of capitalism) (see Chakrabarti
and Dhar 2013). Recent examples of concrete interventions to this end
range from gathering experiential information from ‘voices of the people’
to mindscaping through behaviourally informed policies. For instance,
following the rise of behavioural economics backed by the localized
randomized controlled trials (RCTs), there has been a globally articu-
lated hegemonic effort to shift the problem from structural aspects to
cognitive deficiencies (biases, misconceptions, etc.) and trappings at the
level of individuals in WoT. Based on the results of the RCTs, addressing
poverty would require externally pushed, planned, and funded strategies
to induce behavioural changes in the poor through shifting social norms,
introducing choice possibilities and ‘nudging’ in market and credit-related
activities, restructuring their roles based on conditionalities, etc. (World
Bank 2015; Chakrabarti 2022).
With the circuits of global capital and its associated local–global market
expanding in reach and depth, and with a systemic shift of state focus
towards facilitating capitalist development, the importance of shared envi-

ronment that has traditionally sustained WoT economies gets diluted, and
the elements of risk, protection, and income that were hitherto inte-
grated in the reproduction of such societies become issues of concern.
This is where the World Bank steps in with its support system and to
emerge as pro-poor. The World Bank discourse on need/poverty converts
the victims of capitalist development into beneficiaries, who now as the
displaced, dwarfed, dwindled third wordlist version of WoT are open to
the clandestine moves of the hegemonic.
When there is resistance from WoT, the effort is to negotiate
and displace the terms of resistance towards a certain third worldism
that encourages accommodation-assimilation through measures like
compensation, resettlement, social protection, and social funds. When
accommodation-assimilation fails, the resistance comes to be designated
as evil (realevil ) and the sovereign apparatuses of the hegemonic are then
called upon to restore peace; in its aftermath, the army of NGOs will
re-enter the WoT once again.
Environmentalism and WoT

The post-enlightenment axiom of ‘alienated life’ generated a scientific
outlook that precipitated the hyperseparation of ‘human’ and ‘nature’,
thought and practice, politics and ethics.8 In the process, it displaced the
concept of nature into the concept of natural resources, without which the
birth of capitalist production system geared towards human utility/gain
could not have taken form. According to Bilgrami (2009), this was one
of the central points of resistance of Gandhi to the post-enlightenment
thought that came to dominate capitalism and to its expansion through
colonialism (and later development); he considered this instituted rift
between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ as unsustainable and immoral. Bilgrami
also sees in the critique of alienated life the intersection between Marx and
Gandhi; both considered unalienated life to be essential for sustainable
living.
Building on the writings of Marx, eco-Marxists have shown that capi-
talism creates an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social
metabolism” (Marx 1991: 949). Foster (1999) theorized and coined it
8 For a problem of the hyper-separation of ‘thought’ and ‘practice’, see Dhar (2018).
as ‘metabolic rift’. Along with Foster, Saito (2018) carefully constructed

and extended Marx’s critique of the Political Economy of Nature by
unravelling a clear connection of the expansive role of M-C-P-C/ -M/
and capital accumulation in the process of industrialisation of agriculture
with destructive effects on soil and biodiversity; this occurs in conjunc-
tion with the creation of city/town and village/country divide. Recent
eco-Marxist scholarship has developed and extended the analysis of the
metabolic rift to agricultural, atmospheric, climatic, oceanic, hydraulic,
and forest systems, so as to reveal the connection of capitalism with a
fulsome earth system crisis that places human existence in jeopardy (Foster
2003, 2020; Angus 2018). The challenge of an uncontrollable natural
crisis, deep economic crisis from capitalism and ever-growing income,
wealth, and social inequality has even led some eco-Marxists to join hands
with radical environmentalists to seek a socialist/communist project of
degrowth coupled with deaccumulation of capital (Kallis et al. 2020;
Akbulut 2021; Kallis et al. 2022). For all the above-described reasons,
the eco-Marxists tend to also remain critical of socialist experiments built
on unbridled capital accumulation.
In an important intervention, Vlachou (2001, 2017) theorized the
overdetermined and contradictory relation of class process with natural
process, and specifically of capitalist class process with natural process, of
how each constitutes and transforms the other. In this regard, decades
ago some Marxists warned eco-Marxists to remain watchful of the flex-
ible quality of the hegemonic in displacing the terms of approaching
the question of nature to its advantage; this quality might deflate and
undercut any prediction regarding the incapacity of capitalism to address
the contradictions of fossil-fuel-driven ecological crisis. “Contrary to the
dominant understanding of Marxist environmentalists, green capitalism is
not only possible but is already on the agenda…The vast and far-reaching
ecological reconstruction of material infrastructure and production tech-
nologies, I believe, will help constitute the next capitalist restructuring. As
capitalism becomes more green Marxists who believe in GOD will have
been caught crying ‘wolf’ yet again, and the Marxist critique of capi-
talism will be less attractive to social reformers” (Sandler 1994: 39, 55).
The subsequent rapid growth of green technology, finance capital, and
environmental regulation (with active role of state) in the backdrop of a
slogan of a new green deal of capitalism (riding on scepticism of fossil
fuels) has only highlighted the plasticity of the hegemonic response. That
response seems to be based on a supposition that capitalism need not be
reduced to only fossil-fuel-driven modernization; the earth system crisis

can be overcome without changing the capitalist class structure and its
profit-making objective. This supposition underpinning the green/eco-
capitalist proposal has been subsequently challenged by eco-Marxists
from many angles. One argument, for example, states that the “develop-
ment of science and technology cannot guarantee ecological sustainability
in capitalism, since the knowledge produced about nature is not only
fragmented and incomplete but also class-biased”; in addition, the cele-
bration of the consumerist culture in a contradictory way undermines
the moral ecological calls on individuals to respond to constrictions on
wants (Vlachou 2018: 486). Vlachou (2005) also shows that the solutions
of environmental regulation, market pricing, and subsidies in relation
to the capitalist production and appropriation of surplus value in turn
produce contradictory effects that undermines the proposed policy objec-
tive—sustainability. The stronger view highlights “an insuperable conflict
between Capital’s Time and Nature’s Time – between the cyclical Earth
system processes that have developed over millions of years, and capital’s
need for rapid production, delivery and profit” (Angus 2018: 170).
We greatly value the commendable critique of the political economy
of nature under capitalism. Further, to their credit, the eco-Marxists also
recognize and question severely the imperialistic practice of the global
capitalist system led by the ruling disposition of the North that cause
perturbation of existing ecological systems in the South. (Angus 2018;
Saito 2018; Foster et al. 2019) Not surprisingly, they lack the language
of WoT and therefore the conceptual resources to produce an eco-
Marxist theorization of nature from a WoT perspective. Matters become
even more hazy since, given the focus on growth and poverty reduction
through capitalist/socialist development, the critique of the earth system
crisis has come not typically from Southern Marxists but social move-
ments of other varieties9 ; in recent times, Latin America remains perhaps
an exception where a radical socialist movement could to an extent inte-
grate ecological concern from a WoT perspective. Overall, a theoretical
9 For example, in India, one of the growing economic superpowers, much of the radical
environmental movement, has come from the Gandhian organizations and movements
(intellectually, Ramachandra Guha being a forerunner) rather than Marxists; the Sangharsh-
Nirman of Marxist revolutionary Sankar Guha Niyogi led Chattisgarh Mines Shramik
Sangh (CMSS) is among few exceptions (Basu 2008, 2012).
deficit to account for WoT becomes a fetter to where we believe the eco-
Marxist approach can possibly traverse and in doing so deepen its analysis
and insight.
To better grasp the problem, let us approach by summarizing the
hegemonic response to the question of nature.
1. Viewed from within the {p, ~ p} human-nature dualism, systemic

exploitation of nature has historically taken the form of fossil-fuel-
driven capitalist development. In the hegemonic response, this repo-
sitioning of nature as realvictim specifically transpired with respect
to fossil-fuel driven capitalism and not capitalism per se. After
constructing a meaning of earth system as a common social need
for the world that needs to be salvaged to secure human exis-
tence, the hegemonic gears towards a new mode of exploitation
of nature through a recasting of for-profit capitalism that combines
green technology, green market, green finance, and environmental
regulation. Questions regarding the riskiness as also the futility
of this reorientation are raised from different angles, including
eco-Marxism.
2. Both the generation of the natural crisis and its redressal are viewed
from within the {p, ~ p} framework of the human-nature dualism.
At times, nature is looked upon in its extreme wilderness, repre-
sented as a distant Dark Continent; nature is, as if, realutopia . Here,
the perceived solution to the crisis takes the form of valorisation of
an unadulterated nature which is devoid of humans, as described in
the earlier example of the forest rights act; to the point of facili-
tating the expropriation of WoT indigenous population from their
natural habitat. Given the state control of nature that such orig-
inal accumulation enables, and the equally common phenomenon
of state thereafter delegating the use of resource extraction process
to industrial giants to feed the expansion of the circuits of global
capital, one is left wondering whether such an approach itself might
be the reason for the natural crisis.
3. At other times, given that the {p, ~ p}-based epistemology of
alienated life that is very much alive, nature is understood as
an impediment and threat—as if, as realevil —which needs to be
controlled and subjugated, i.e. hegemonized for the purpose of capi-
talist or socialist development based on profit (for enterprise) and
growth (for economy per se). In 1–3, the nature-woman connec-

tion qua the {p. ~ p} frame is noteworthy; either nature/woman is
evil/ hysteric, she needs to be domesticated; or nature/woman is
a victim, she needs to be protected (Plumwood 1993). Finally, the
contemporary role of ecological movements in shaping the delu-
sional veil of the new green deal is important to flag: the present
effort for a green deal is an exemplary imitation of all such previous
exercises of hegemonization based on the foreclosure of class process
of surplus labour, crypting of capitalist exploitation, and occlusion
of profit as a distributive form of surplus value from the discourse
of the earth system crisis. In its place enters a reformed capitalism,
green capitalism, with a new wave of green technology-driven capital
accumulation seeking to overthrow the dominance of fossil fuels and
save both human civilization and nature, and yet magically keep the
capitalist wealth creation process alive.
4. The incitement to the word ‘green’, sans class and WoT, is for all to
see. Nature is rarely understood as part of the lived life-experience
of WoT; the woman-nature continuum within much of WoT is thus
missed. The process of relating nature to the shared environment
and the lived experience of WoT are uniquely framed in these soci-
eties, in terms of what the late Marxist Shankar Guha Niyogi, called
‘our environment’10 ; ‘our environment’ can be construed as a living
organism and a sentient being in which the non-human world is
presumed to be feeling entity, which is speaking and communicating
with humans, a transhuman space containing music and stories as
part of the embodied existence (Ghosh 2021). Through the fore-
closure of class and WoT that the {p, ~ p} frame institutes, nature is
relegated to the realm of the real through a certain foregrounding of
nature as victim, evil, or utopian. This is then a matter not simply of
10 According to Niyogi, “the truth is that we will have to protect our earth and
our planet. The trees, plants, clean drinking water, clean air, birds and animals and
human beings – together all of us form part of this world. Through sensitive ideas
and flexible programmes we will have to maintain a balance in nature and in science
and this can be done on the basis of the development of people’s consciousness”
(Available at: https://vikalpsangam.org/wp-content/uploads/migrate/Resources/shanka
rguhaniyogi-hiswork.pdf). From our vantage point, this people’s consciousness is that
of ‘our environment’ built from a WoT perspective that rejects unalienated life and
metabolic rift as anti-people and any assault on ‘our environment’ of WoT in the guise of
development and environmentalism as suspect.
a critique of Baconian science, but of an articulation of that critique

with a contesting, in our case, a class-focused understanding of the
economy as well.
In some radical environmentalist movements, we find an argument

that since the corporations are enemies of nature, that by default makes
the employed workers complicit in it too; after all, the Vijayans fearing
job losses would stand in opposition to any movement against the
corporations. However, Foster (2000: 105–136) points out that such a
position tends to conflate the working force employed by the corpora-
tions as enemies at par with capitalists who, in their corporatist form, are
concerned with extracting the maximum surplus value and profit. The
struggle over the approach to nature question is consequently turned
into an inevitable struggle between the environmentalists-protectors
(representing Mylamma) and the corporations–workers (represented by
Vijayan). On the contrary, the bone of contention is the connection of
natural process with the capitalist extraction of surplus value with an
objective of profit-making (whose quantum is maximised by depriving
both Mylamma and Vijayan). The problem is systemic, no less.11
We have described in this chapter how through moments of violence—
sovereign and sanctioned—the hegemonic succeeds in breaking down
the symbiotic relationship between natural ecological processes and the
economy of WoT, creating in the process fresh bodies waiting to be
exploited, managed, and subsumed under the great new green age of
11 During the 1970–90s, Sankar Guha Niyogi led Chattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh
(CMSS), a registered trade union of the mine workers, challenged through a project
of concrete action (operationalizing Niyogi’s famous Sangharsh (resistance)-Nirman
(construction) thesis) the onslaught of nature-blind capitalist-led industrialization. This
onslaught impacted, on the one side, the industrial mine workers through its contradic-
tory effects on working and living conditions in a polluting environment; on the other
side, capitalist industrialization unleashed an original accumulation process that generated
an existential livelihood crisis for the indigenous community. These two effects inter-
sected not only geographically, but also because many of the indigenous subjects had
(to) become mine workers. Bringing the class and indigenous question together in the
discussion of nature helped CMSS to attempt a remarkable construction of a people’s
movement encompassing the Mylammas and Vijayans that questioned and challenged the
onslaught of soulless capitalist-led development, not only through organized opposition
to it, but also by way of attempting to reconstruct community based on an alternative
episteme of cooperation and non-exploitation (Basu 2008, 2012). For him and the CMSS
that he led, industry per se is not the enemy of people, but profit amassing industry run
on class exploitation is; such an industry will neither be sensitive to people nor to nature.
capitalist hegemony; how the World Bank-led pro-poor discourse could

have the effect of displacing the extant signifiers underpinning the social
metabolism in WoT by invoking another chain of signifiers (profit,
competition, cost–benefit, efficiency, productivity, etc.) that lay down the
subjective conditions of encouraging a culture of metabolic rift through
the creation of conducive new practices and institutions in it. To be
careful, this is not to say WoT is by default associated with an imprint of
unalienated life only; it is only the outside of the circuits of global capital
containing a tension-ridden site of contradictory pulls and pushes of
philosophies and practices of alienated and unalienated life. As we showed
in the case of Plachimada, the advent of global capital by opening new
contradictions clearly put the conditions of existence of shared environ-
ment in WoT, and subsequently, the production of life in these societies,
at-risk. An eco-Marxist view of nature, therefore, must account for the
conditions of existence within WoT, encouraging rather than dismem-
bering the transformation of those conditions in a direction that sustains
the metabolic interaction between humans and nature; in which tech-
nology is embodied in ecologically sustainable ways that reproduce the
shared environment and unalienated life of WoT.
Is the root of the problem of climate change in global warming or
does its secret reside in the hidden abode of the millions of real victims of
thousands of Plachimadas, across the South and North, due to capitalist
development? Can one discuss the earth system crisis without accounting
for the commission and enactment of centuries’ long, continual informal
warfare of original accumulation that not only keeps on destroying the
Plachimadas for-profit objective all over the world but with that also seeks
to annihilate the conceptions, memories, and imaginations of/from Other
knowledges beyond the {p, ~ p} frame? Can the governance of effects
without governing the cause be considered as a magic solution for the
crisis of human species and the earth system crisis? Any green–blue or
green–red deal that remains blind to the presence of class as processes
of surplus labour, WoT and of its pluriverse of shared, unalienated and
sustainable life and which remains perpetually trapped in the delusional
veil of realvictim , realutopian , realevil will in the end find it difficult to resolve
the earth system crisis.
Ethico-Politics of WoT
We now turn our attention to two aspects relating to the question of
ethico-politics that become vital in light of the arguments forwarded so
far:
i. There is to begin with, the question of intrusion and violence—

epistemic and physical, ideological and repressive—over WoT in
the name of third worldism. The justification of this intrusion and
violence is rooted in the presumed centricity and superiority of
capital and modernity; both presumptions are constitutive of the
hegemony of global capital. Such forms of intrusion and violence
are to be opposed as part of an ethic emerging from a WoT Marxist
perspective.
ii. While the intrusion and violence over WoT are to be opposed,
considerations of ethico-politics would make us vigilant at the same
time to the presence of exploitation, unfair distribution, oppres-
sion, and marginalization within WoT societies. The ethico-politics
must be based on a dual critique of both; one must carefully mark
the steps of resistance and transformation without falling into the
trap of either unbridled universalism or parochial particularism. The
next chapter builds on a possible overdetermination of questions of
ethics, social justice, and politics within and outside WoT, keeping
thought and practice, anti-capitalist critique and postcapitalist praxis,
as also postcapitalist praxis and postdevelopment praxis in dialogue
(Dhar 2022).
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CHAPTER 10
Expanded Communism: From World

of the Third Subject-Positions
Introduction
Injustice is clear, justice is obscure. Those who have undergone injustice

provide irrefutable testimony concerning the former. But who can testify
for justice? Injustice has its affect: suffering, revolt. Nothing, however,
signals justice. … justice is [not] merely the absence of injustice. … justice
is … more than the empty neutrality of a double negation. … Injustice
is not the immediate disorder of that for which justice would provide an
ideal order.
Alan Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics”1
The first section of this chapter takes off from the question of what
could be considered unethical or what could emerge as injustice with
respect to a Marxian perspective. For example, exploitation is at the same
time both unethical and unjust. Having thought the unethical and the
unjust, we invoke three possible approaches to the question of ethics
with respect to world of the third (hereafter WoT). We represent them
as (i) ethics to world of the third, (ii) ethics with world of the third,
and (iii) ethico-politics of world of the third—where the ethical rela-
tion or the relation of ethics with respect to the invocation of the ‘ethics
1 Radical Philosophy, July/August 1999. Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophya

rchive.com/issue-files/rp96_article3_philosophypolitics_badiou.pdf.

Switzerland AG 2023
to’, ‘ethics with’ and ‘ethics of ’’ carry three distinct connotations. The
second section tries to think what would constitute justice from a Marxist
standpoint. This section invokes three tentative approaches (by no means
exhaustive) to the question of justice: (i) appropriative justice, (ii) produc-
tive justice, and (iii) development justice. In this section, we lay down our
partial and contingent understanding of the justice criterion with respect
to a Marxist standpoint from a WoT subject position. We name this critical
engagement with the {Capitalism-Development} complex in general, and
the {Global Capitalism-Third World} complex in particular, the discourse
of WoT Marxism.
Marxian Ethics
We put forward our general position on ethics as an ethico-politics of the
real , which in other words, is an ethico-politics of the foreclosed. At a more
particular level, it would be ethico-politics of WoT. ‘Ethics of the Real’ is
the title of a work by Zupancic (2000). We reproduce through the phrase
ethico-politics of the real, a displaced version of the same to (1) acknowl-
edge the import and importance of Zupancic’s rather incisive work and
(2) to mark out despite such an acknowledgement, the specificity of our
rendition of the Lacanian Real as real—once again a displaced rendition—
an ab-original rendition.2 In our rendition Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real
is rewritten as the ethico-politics of the real.
2 The book invokes ‘aboriginalization’ in a two-fold manner (see Dhar, 2015, 2017a,
2018a). The first is about the now-known history of the aboriginalization of Southern
cultures during the colonial era. The first is about the characterisation of Southern
cultures as aboriginal and the consequent degradation and devaluing of such cultures,
as also representing them as the lacking other. The first is about Orientalism (both white
and brown). Third worldism is an aboriginalization of WoT. The second is about a
possible post-Orientalist episteme. The first is about how third wordlist cultures were
made out of WoT space. The second is about what new cultures of knowledge (as
against the Orientalist knowledge of WoT cultures) can be produced. The second is about
creating knowledge of WoT as against an extant knowledge of third worldism. This also
required putting under erasure (as in Derridean deconstruction) the original formulations
of Marxian and Freudian knowledge. The rewriting of the Lacanian ‘inassimilable Real’ as
the ‘foreclosed real’ is an ab-Original rendition of classical psychoanalysis. The rewriting
of ‘historical materialism’ as ‘class-focused Marxism’ is also an ab-Original rendition of
classical Marxism. The ab-Original rendition of Marx and Freud takes us to the doorstep
of WoT. Immersion in WoT takes us to the doorstep of an ab-Original rendition of Marx
and Freud.
10 EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD … 279
We have arrived at an ethico-politics of the real through a working at

the overdetermined interface of a displaced version of psychoanalysis (i.e.
when psychoanalysis is turned ab-original) and a displaced version of the
Marxism (i.e. when traditional Marxism is “sufficiently deconstructed”3
[Laclau, 2000: 205]). In Chapters 2–5, we have worked towards and
have re-produced, respectively, a deconstructed rendition of Marxism and
an ab-original rendition of psychoanalysis. Having laid the ground for a
reworked rendition of both Marxism and psychoanalysis, we, in the subse-
quent chapters, have tried to work at the overdetermined interstices of
Marxism and psychoanalysis—of their respective focus on hegemony and
foreclosure—on reality (as hegemonic) and real (as foreclosed)—of global
capitalist hegemony and the attendant foreclosure of class-WoT. In this
chapter, we think ethico-politics to/with/of WoT, WoT as the foreclosed
real of global capitalist hegemony.
1. Ethics to World of the Third
For some there is nothing difficult in the thinking of ethics. For them
the relation between global capitalism and WoT is a hierarchical relation;
WoT is lower down the slope of hierarchy and hence amenable to First
World do-goodism. What one does in this context is measure WoT in
terms of the principles of the circuits of global capital. The logic of this
measure is such that WoT never measures up to the parameters of the
circuits of global capital. WoT is always already the lacking-lagging other.
WoT, therefore, needs to be included in the circuits of global capital;
as if, to survive, WoT needs to get included. It is altogether a question
of access. Include WoT either in the civilizing missions of the colo-
nizing west (as in nineteenth-century colonialism); or in the development
programmes of international funding agencies (as in a twentieth-century
postcolonial world); or in the democratic release of the repressed initiated
by the hegemonic in the aftermath of 1989, include her in the circuits of
the universal human rights programme. If inclusion within the circuits of
global capital is the economic imperative upon WoT in the age of global-
ization, inclusion in the circuits of the universal human rights programme
3 “It is not just that deconstruction cannot found a politics, while other ways of thinking
can. It is that deconstruction can make founded political programs more useful by making
their in-built problems more visible. To act is therefore not to ignore deconstruction, but
actively to transgress it without giving it up” (Spivak, 1989: 206).
is the political imperative upon WoT.4 The above impulses, civiliza-

tional, developmental, rights-based democratization, are inter-related;
they constitute the present in their mutual constitutivity. In all three
impulses, the anchoring signifier that sets to work the liberal agenda puts
aside the particular complexities of WoT. In all three moments there is also
a certain “fetishizing of the ‘ought’” (Lucas, 1980: 68). Ethics (to WoT)
becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for the Master’s Discourse
to pass off its own economic commandments, its own version of devel-
opment as economic growth and human need as the truly authentic and
honourable (Zupancic, 2000: 1). This is observable in the case of Kantian
ethics.
The Kantian philosophy investigates human practice only in connection

with the highest forms of morality. … As in all consistent idealist philoso-
phies, Kant sets up a hypostasizing fetish of reason. In world-views of this
kind, necessity loses, even at the epistemological level, the ‘if… then’ char-
acter which alone can render it concrete; it simply appears as something
absolute. The most extreme form of this absolutizing of [western] reason is
naturally enough displayed in morality. The ‘ought’ is thus torn away from
the concrete alternatives facing men—both subjectively and objectively.
These appear instead, in the light of this absolutizing of moral reason,
simply as adequate or inadequate embodiments of a kind of absolute
commandment, a commandment, which therefore remains transcendent
towards man himself. As Kant puts it, ‘In a practical philosophy, where
it is not the reasons of what happens that we have to ascertain, but the
laws of what ought to happen, even though it never does …’ The [cate-
gorical] imperative that calls forth these ‘ought’ relationships in man thus
becomes a transcendentally absolute (crypto-theological) principle. (Lucas,
1980: 68–69)
We have seen in this book how the trope of Development (as growth
+ hegemonic need) emerges as one such crypto-theological principle,
transcendentally absolute, something that ought to happen to WoT.5
4 The above impulses, civilizational, developmental, rights-based democratization, all

three are not to be understood in a simple diachronic manner, as one following the next
in historical time or in a simple chronological mode, as the next superseding the previous
altogether, but as inter-related, as constituting the present in their mutual constitution.
5 The crypt (see Abraham and Torok, 1986) is our theoretico-political shorthand for
the experience and phenomenon of the “secret” in transition, the invariant within the
variant; it signifies the unchanged in the changing phases; it is the secret static under the
How WoT or for that matter the WoT subject responds to the (inter-
pellating) call of this crypto-theological principle is another question; a
no less important question, however. Does the WoT subject give in to
the imperatives of global capitalism? Does a giving in to the imperatives
of global capitalism erase in the process the language of WoT? Does it
keep in repudiation the language of WoT, a language premised on the
fact that WoT is the space outside of the circuits of global capital, a space
that could concurrently be speaking the language (albeit partial) of non-
exploitation, sharing (in the form of shared environment and surplus)
and culturally contingent contextual need: radical need? Does it inaugu-
rate, in turn, that language of third worldism that sustains the hegemony
of global capitalism? Does third worldism reduce WoT subject to silence?
How could WoT subject speak? How could she speak the language of
WoT? Ethics to WoT, even while being ethical to WoT, reduces WoT to
silence; somewhat paradoxically the (apparent) concern for ethics, ethics
to WoT, reduces WoT to the crypto-theological principles of Global Capi-
talism. WoT remains unspoken of in the process. What we have in the
end is an ethics of the real turned victim, an ethics of the victim real, or
realvictim ; an ethics circumscribed by the given-known language of third
worldism, an ethics so circumscribed by the World Bank’s interventionist
politics, that there is hardly any space for the ethical.
2. Ethics with World of the Third
For some others devoted to the “phenomenology of the other”, to the

Altogether-Other, to a kind of “ethical radicalism”, the relation between
global capitalism and WoT is never a hierarchical relation. For them, WoT
is not reducible to the principles of global capitalism. WoT is a world of
difference. The difference is such that it is never too easy to know the
third; it is never too easy to know the being of the third; let alone the
otherness of the third; it is never too easy to be ethical to the Other, to
the radical otherness of the Other. Hence, a certain impossibility haunts
the possibility of an ethical relation to the third. Levinas (1979 [1961]:
condition of apparent and incessant movement; as we shall see in a later section, while class
is foreclosed, the secret that it hides as the world moves relentlessly is exploitation (one
cannot access exploitation without class as processes of surplus); for it to have any political
sense, Marxism, therefore, cannot but be an encounter with the crypt (Chakrabarti, Dhar,
and Dasgupta 2015: 145–167; Dhar, 2017b).
21) places the ethical above the naïve politics of inclusion; for Levinas as
also for us, the politics of inclusion suspends ethics; it rescinds ad interims
the unconditional imperatives; it renders ethics derisory; it strips politics
of the difficult work of ethics. It is to Levinas, that we owe our kind
of ethical radicalism. Levinas remains to this day, one of the foremost
philosophers to have raised the problem of Sameness, to have raised the
question of the ethical primacy of the Other over the theoretical ontology
of the Same (Kayatekin and Amariglio, 2020). He maintained that meta-
physics, imprisoned by its Greek origins, has subordinated thought to the
logic of the Same. It is for us to devote ourselves to the Other, to a
principle of alterity, to the principle of the Altogether-Other, which tran-
scends mere finite experience. We remain sensitive to Levinasian ethics, to
the Levinasian leash on thought conceived ontologically under the domi-
nance of self-identity [identite-a-soi]. For us Levinas inaugurates an ethics
of the Real, an ethics circumscribed by the limits of knowledge as also
by the limits of love (see Lacan, 1998), an ethics circumscribed by the
unspeakable, an ethics so circumscribed by the remainder, so menaced by
the impossible that there is hardly space for the political. While the authors
of this work do remain menaced by an ethics of the Real, we are also in
an obstinate search for an ethico-politics of the real , an ethico-politics of the
foreclosed; we remain in search of not just ethics, but also an ethico-politics.
Ethico-politics of the real thinks ethics and politics in their mutual imbri-
cations, without reducing one to the other, as also without giving up on
either.
3. Ethico-politics of world of the third:
In this section, we rewrite ethics to the real and ethics with the Real as
ethico-politics of the real. We ask: Why can’t the third or the perspective
of the third be a ground for ethics and politics? How could we come
to respect the Other as the foreclosed real, not just as the inassimilable
Real? By making the Other matter? By making the Other the legitimate
territory of and for ethics? By making the Other the ground for an Other
episteme? By making the language of the Other the language of and for
ethics? By making foreclosed language the language of ethics? By making
the language of (a) non-capital, (b) non-exploitation, (c) fair distribution,
and (d) radical need, the language of ethico-politics?
In a word, by making the postcapitalist language—cocooned (yet

crypted) in WoT (not the whole of the language of WoT) the language
of ethico-politics? By making particular postcapitalist moments in the
language of WoT the ground for a partial perspective on ethico-politics?
For us we could not be ethical or political to WoT, or for that matter,
WoT could not be ethical or political in itself. One can’t be ethical or
political without an epistemo-ontological explication of the truth of WoT.
One needs to retrieve the third from foreclosure as also from its represen-
tation as either the real as victim, or the real as evil, or the real as utopian,
or the real as the Dark Continent. One needs to retrieve the truth of
WoT—retrieve both the truth of Otherness as also the Other truth (albeit
partial) that WoT is. That links epistemo-ontology to ethico-politics.
While we would never deny that the Otherness of WoT is at one and
the same time overdetermined in terms of of class, race, caste, gender,
and sexuality, in this work, we explicate the dimension of Otherness of
WoT that inheres in and through the question of class. It inaugurates in
turn the initial beginnings of a class-focused-discourse-of-WoT. We have
named it WoT Marxism. The section of this chapter titled ‘WoT and trans-
formative political praxis’ is an elaboration of an ethico-politics of the
WoT.
From an ‘Ethics of the Impossible’

to an ‘Ethics of the real’
This work thus moves from the foreclosed (Chapter 4) to an ethics
of the foreclosed. It is trying to retrieve to an extent the very thing
excluded—excluded not just from the traditional field of epistemo-
ontology, but from the traditional field of ethics as well and turn
it, i.e. the hitherto excluded, instead “into the legitimate territory of
ethics” (Zupancic, 2000: 3). But then, such a turning of the hitherto
illegitimate/excluded/the-not-considered into the legitimate territory of
ethics would mean a moving out from the prevailing ethical ideology to
a certain ethics of the real that relates, in turn, to an ‘ethic of truths’
(Badiou, 2001).
The prevailing ‘ethical ideology’ has two ‘philosophical poles’. First, a

(vaguely Kantian) universalizing pole which, indifferent to the particularity
of any given situation, proscribes in advance any possibility of an orga-
nized … situated intervention in the name of collective ‘Good’: ethics
here is grounded in the abstract universality of general ‘human’ attributes

or rights. And second, a (vaguely Levinasian) differential pole, attuned to
the irreducible alterity of the Other: ethics here is expressed in an equally
abstract respect for mainly cultural differences.
Neither this universality nor this alterity, Badiou suggests, can be
rigorously founded without tacit reference to theology, either way, the
[prevailing] ethical ideology conceives of ‘man’ as a fundamentally passive,
fragile and mortal entity—as a potential victim to be protected (most often,
as a ‘marginalized’, ‘excluded’ or ‘Third World’ victim, to be protected
by a dutiful, efficient, and invariably ‘Western’ benefactor/exploiter.6
(Hallward, 2001: xiii)
In contrast, Badiou’s ethic of subjective truths7 would presume that

WoT can be active; WoT is indifferent to established or state-sanctioned
differences, it operates in the realm of practical division (for or against
the event,8 for or against the real) and situates its affirmation precisely
there where the stay of the situation can see only the non-known and the
non-obvious (Badiou, 2001). This is thus a journey from the prevailing
ethical ideology, from classical ethico-political philosophy to a psychoan-
alytically informed ethico-political philosophy. One could ask: Why do
we need to make this journey from classical ethico-political philosophy
to a psychoanalytically informed ethico-political philosophy? Is it because
psychoanalysis’ understanding of the ‘unconscious’ as also the real is
important for the patient and painstaking praxis of postcapitalist recon-
struction of the subject and the social (Dhar and Chakrabarti, 2021)?
6 Badiou “rejects the almost universally accepted argument that ethics should essentially
concern the Other as such (as potential victim of violence or misrecognition) … Perhaps
nothing is more orthodox today than a generalized reverence for the other qua other
… the alterity of the other … Couched most notably in terms of the logic of the gift,
Derrida’s ethical reflections circle obsessively around notions of inaccessibility and secrecy,
around that which is beyond [re]presentation or identification, around subjective impos-
sibility …” (Hallward, 2001: xv–xxiv). Badiou tries to provide an “inspiring, rigorously
argued alternative to the tired moralizing truisms of neo-Kantian universalism on the one
hand and a more or less tolerant liberal communitarianism on the other” (Hallward, 2001:
xxx).
7 “Access to the real m of truth … is wholly subjective: it is founded only on the
subjects who ‘bear’ its trajectory” (Hallward, 2001: ix).
8 “… a truth procedure can begin only with some sort of break with the ordinary
situation in which it takes place—what Badiou calls an event. An event has no objective
or verifiable content. Its ‘happening’ cannot be proved, only affirmed and proclaimed”
(Hallward, 2001: ix).
Does it have a certain significance for “politics implied by the ‘science of

imagining difference’ (Geertz, 1986) and specially for how we conceive
of the possibilities of change consistent with the psychoanalytic emphasis
on the unconscious” (Cornell, 1993: 171) and the real? Is it because
psychoanalysis is an encounter with the real ? Is it because the ethics
of psychoanalysis is also an ethics of the real ? Is it because there is in
psychoanalysis no turning away 9 from WoT?
In this work, we have tried to show how reality as always already a
hegemonic order is produced through foreclosure—through a simulta-
neous production of the real. In this chapter, we would like to relate
our particular imagination of counter-hegemony and of its ethico-
politics, to the perspective of the real. Our imagination flows not from
peripheral re-configurations of existing reality (we would designate such
re-configurations ‘capitalist alternatives’; green capitalism, for example)
but from the real (we would designate such praxis ‘alternatives to capi-
talism’), flows not from the Real but from the real. We name it an
ethico-politics of the real; it is an attempt to re-think the traditional
domain of ethico-politics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimen-
sion of the real, by setting up an encounter with the dimension of the
real.
Ethics of the real is an ab-original rendition of ethics flowing from
an ab-original rendition of the real. Ab-original Freud-Lacan meets ab-
original Marx-Althusser in our work. We have shown above how (a) the
rewriting of the inassimilable Real as the foreclosed real and (b) the
symbolic order as hegemonic is an ab-Original rendition of Freudian-
Lacanian psychoanalysis. We have also shown how the rewriting of (a)
historical materialism as the micro-transformation of 24 class sets and (b)
class as power-property with class as processes of surplus labour is an ab-
original rendition ab-Original rendition of Marx-Althusser (see Dhar,
2015, 2017a, 2018 for genealogies of ab-originalization). The ab-original
rendition The ab-Original rendition of Freud-Lacan and Marx-Althusser
took us to the doorstep of foreclosure, delusional veil, crypted nodal
signifiers, and the constitutive outside of the hegemonic: WoT (Chapter 2,
9 Freud returns to ‘non-reason’ at the level of its language; this time one would resume
a dialogue with non-reason and lift, as if, the Cartesian interdiction. Freud returns to
non-reason, to the outside of Western philosophy, returns to the radically Other (Derrida,
1994). We remain predicated by this return—by this attitude of not turning away—by
the psychoanalytic attitude to be—such that there is no turning away from the foreclosed.
4, and 5). Ab-original Freud-Lacan meets ab-original Marx-Althusser in

this chapter to inaugurate an ab-original ethico-politics. Unabashedly ab-
original. Ab-original ethics is ethics that refuses to be based and premised
on the Original capitalocentric-orientalist discourse and desire of the
World Bank and nation-states; it refuses to be based on what passes of as
(categorical) imperative—whether in desire, in imagination, or in reality.
This is because “what philosophy calls the moral law—and more precisely,
what Kant calls the categorical imperative—is in fact nothing other than
the superego. … In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of
the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for
any [master or] ideology which may try to pass off its own command-
ments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honorable’ inclinations of
the subject” (Zupancic, 2000: 1). Ab-original ethics “equally refuses the
unsatisfactory option of a ‘(post)modern’ ethics based on the reduction of
the ultimate horizon of the ethical to ‘one’s own life’” (Zupancic, 2000:
5).
For us the ethico-political question is to be articulated from the point
of view of the location of the subject in relation to the real. And since
our ‘normal’ conscious everyday life, our psychological status quo—the
“ego’s era”10 —is structured around foreclosure, access to the real must
be achieved through an “essential encounter” (Hallward, 2001: xvii). But
then how do we set up an encounter with the real? Where do we meet
this real?
In the next section—the section titled ‘Interpretation Hits the real’ we
explicate on the contours of an encounter with the real (see Biswas and
Dhar, 2010). We show how faced with the real—faced with the lack of
harmony between the ‘word’ and the ‘world’—how faced with ‘Quinian
underdetermination’ both Marx and Freud (in a historical sense) had set
up conceptual encounters with the real. We harp on the need to do the same
10 “Like Max Weber, Lacan makes the psychological conditions under which capital
could gather steam pre-date its social eminence, although he does so with a very different
understanding of ‘psychological conditions’, one which is centered on the ego. But
although the ego’s era begins before the advent of capital, it is accelerated by it. …
Lacan’s theory of the ego’s era … provides us with a lever … for thinking through the
trajectory of modernity. … But the trend is to concentrate on Lacan’s polemic against ego
psychology (and other ‘sciences’) while neglecting his polemic against the social order,
which produces them. As Gallop points out, Lacan does not limit his attacks to Amer-
ican psychoanalysis. There is a more general attack against the ‘American way of life’”
(Brennan, 1993: 7–8).
with WoT. Thus having set up class as real in the context of capitalist hege-
mony, we work further on the lack of harmony between the ‘word’ (of
Western Marxism11 ) and the ‘world’ (of the third). Marx would work at
the overdetermined interstices of the ‘analytic’ and the ‘synthetic’, of the
‘rational’ and the ‘empirical’, of the subjective and objective. A number
of new conceptual moments (Marx, 1993 [1857–58]: 472–479) would,
therefore, surface out of such encounters with the ‘world’—with Other
worlds. Such conceptual detours make conceptual room for a possible
Marxism of WoT. Marxism of WoT is a Marxism that does not shy away
from an encounter with the real and then tries to think an ethico-politics
of the real. In the process it also makes the hegemonic (here global capi-
talist hegemony) come face to face with the real (here class and WoT) it
itself forecloses.
This is, of course, no going back to the unsullied innocence of the
‘community’—“A [wo]man cannot become child again, or [s]he becomes
childish. But does [s]he not find joy in the child’s naivete, and must
[s]he … not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not
the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children?
Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful
unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm?” (Marx,
1993 [1857–58]: 111).
Interpretation Hits the real
If Cleopatra’s nose changed the course of the world, it was because it

entered the world’s discourse, for to change it in the long or short term, it
was enough, indeed, it was necessary for it to be a speaking nose. (Lacan,
1977: 123)
In the analytic situation, Lacan moves from the Imaginary to the

Symbolic and then to the real. For Lacan the subject would have an
Imaginary, a Symbolic, and a real face—each of which predominates at
a certain point in analysis. The aim of analysis would be to bring the
11 This is not to say that Western Marxism is One—Western Marxism has moved over
the years through a number of conceptual detours—both at the level of the communist
parties as also at the level of non-party pronouncements and theorizations.
analysand through these different moments to the point where interpreta-

tion hits the real —where the subject comes to be related to the real. This
is possible because something anomalous always shows up in language,
something unaccountable, unexplainable: an aporia; aporias point to the
presence within the Symbolic of the real, as kinks in the symbolic order.
This work, somewhat in a Lacanian vein, tries to seize upon the real,
the real as a kink in the symbolic order. This work tries to occupy
throughout the act of writing, the space of the real. The aim of this work
is thus to produce the hegemonic Signifier (‘Capital’ for example), to
render visible its “produced” character (Zizek, 1993: 2), and to show at
the same time that it is produced through repression, negation, disavowal,
and foreclosure. The aim of this work has also been to show that the real
has been reduced to the triplet realvictim (real as victim), real’evil (real as
evil), and realutopian (real as a utopia); that WoT (the classed third) has
been reduced to the third world (the non-classed third). This work moves
from the other’s Demand to the Other’s Desire to the subject as Drive. As
demand the subject is stuck in the Imaginary register; as desire the subject
is essentially a stance with respect to the Symbolic Order; as drive there is
a “subject in the real”. It moves from alienation in the Other to separation
from the Other to a traversing of the fundamental fantasy—a traversing
of the fundamental fantasy of Capital-ism - of the delusional veil called
Capitalism through a setting up of an encounter with the real—where the
hegemonized hits upon the real—where interpretation hits the real.
The question that still haunts us: Does analysis end here? Do we find
the truth? Do we find the truth here? We started with Kant’s categorical
imperative and Levinas’ ethics of the impossible as the two philosophical
poles of the hegemonic ethical ideology. We had then somewhat parted
company with Kant and Levinas (although one can never deny the impor-
tance and import of their respective understanding of ethics) and moved
over to Badiou and his ethic of (subjective) truths. This we had done to
set up an engagement with an ethics of the real, that this work wishes
to propose as an alternative to the hegemonic ethical ideology, a radical
ethical imaginary that draws heavily from Lacan and links up rather explic-
itly Badiou and Lacan; that links up, on the one hand, an ethic of truths,
and, on the other, an ethics of the real.
Ethics of the real is thus an articulation of the ethical question from
the point of view of the location of the (exploited/classed) subject with
respect and in relation to the real—the real as foreclosed—as that which is
disavowed doubly in the normal conscious life of the psychological status
quo. The real, rejected from any stable assignation of place within the
symbolic, is what seems ‘empty’ or ‘void’ or the ‘dark continent’ (as
realutopian ) from the perspective of those who represent or hegemonize
the situation. Access to the real is achieved through an ‘essential encoun-
ter’ (Hallward, 2001: xvii). Badiou would call this enduring encounter an
event —an event that as if tries to escape all structuring normativity.
But then having hit the real one needs to keep going. There is thus
no end to analysis; there is no end to our engagement with the real,
with truth. In order to keep going, the subject of truth must resist the
temptation to impose an absolute definitive order of truth. Such an impo-
sition would effectively objectify the truth. “A truth compiles, step by
step, everything that affirms the strict generic universality of all members
of the situation. The point is that any such generic affirmation cannot be
made ‘in theory’ or a priori, as the basis for an established consensus. It
can take place only through an ‘evental [evenementiel ]’ break with the
status quo [break with the sinthome that holds the Borromean knot … a
radical repudiation of all merely consensual social norms], a break sparked
by an event that eludes classification in the situation … ‘The’ ethic of
truth, then, is fully subordinate to the particularity of a truth. There can
be no ‘ethics in general’, no general principle of human rights, for the
simple reason that what is universally human is always rooted in particular
truths …” (Hallward, 2001: xii–xiv).
There is thus no end to our engagement with the real; with truth;
one needs to keep going in one’s communist becoming in an interminable
manner.
Marxian Justice
For all the different turns in radical thinking, the most enduring chal-
lenge to capitalism in the last century has come from communism.
Despite suffering many defeats, the ideal of communism has endured;
communism remains to this day the most puissant yet the most feared
imagination. It was precisely this fear that propelled the need to displace
communism into an epitome of evil —into the real turned into evil, or
the evil as the substitute or the displaced form of the real—in short, the
realevil ; or into something that was dark and distant—primitive commu-
nism as a thing of the far away past—as realutopic —as unachievable, as
impossible. However, we remain committed to another truth of commu-
nism. Not the truth the hegemonic is forwarding. Ours is a fidelity to a
contrasting truth; truth of the face of communism that aspires to a world

free from exploitation, plunder, and marginalization; communism as a
ground to think justice; as a ground for imagining a new global order;
as a ground for articulating counter-hegemonic social imaginations and
practices, however much impossible it appears.
In Chapters 2 and 3, we have highlighted the importance of articu-
lating social practices from an ethico-politics that flow from the discursive
terrain of both class and need—class and need in their overdetermined
existence as neither collapsed into One nor split into Two. Our under-
standing of Marxist justice is premised on an ethico-political impera-
tive that explores an overdetermination of class and need, namely a
form comprising of non-exploitation and radical needs. As indicated in
Chapter 3, we visualize such an alternative conception of justice in terms
of what we call expanded communism.
Class, Need, and Expanded Communism

We have already touched upon the foregrounding of the mainstream or
hegemonic notion of need by the organs of the hegemonic (e.g. the
World Bank) against a concurrent foreclosure of WoT. The mainstream
notion, often dubbed the ‘thin’ version of need, however, was put to tren-
chant critique by the postdevelopmentalist school who subscribe to what
we could call the ‘thick’ version of need (Fraser, 1998: 14). Postdevelop-
mentalists describe the emergence of need from its contingent meanings
flowing from subjective necessities and desires in subsistence economies.
Their ‘thick’ theory of need focuses on how people experience their needs
either in a culture, or individually, and is, therefore, particular; as against
the conventional development rendition that puts down need as univer-
sally defined lacks common to all humans, and hence one that can be
objectively defined, defined without recourse to any cultural content and
subjectivity. In this context, we have argued in Chapter 3, that defining
and satisfying need constitutes the quintessential objective of the hege-
monic discourse so much so that life in WoT societies becomes nothing
but need-based development. Need-based development is designed to
ensure the continuing metamorphosis of a space, the space of WoT from
its contingent and subjective moorings of need to a paradigm of need tied
to the concern of the hegemonic. The mainstream notion of need thus
operates like a crypto-theological principle that sets to work the agenda
of an ethics to WoT, or perhaps, an ethics of the realvictim , an ethics of the

real as victim.
However, while postdevelopmentlists criticize such a transcendental
notion of need, they underplay the more difficult task of counter-
hegemonic ideological production pertaining to need; their difficulty in
deconstructing the economy, capitalism, and in the inability to differen-
tiate third world from WoT, makes this task difficult. Counter-hegemonic
notion of need, as against the mainstream or hegemonic notion of need,
is premised on a critique of that version of development that embodies
the hegemony of global capitalism. In Chapter 3, we have argued that one
could radicalize the notion of need in the tradition opened up by Marx;
we have called it radical needs. As explained radical need span the realm
of both Need I (where the axis of surplus is present) and Need II (where
the axis of surplus is absent). One can now work at the overdetermined
interstices of radical need and class (i.e. non-exploitation) to produce the
standpoint of expanded communism. The invocation of the notion of
radical need as anathema to (capitalist) exploitation, as stripped of the
concerns of global capital and as tied to the concerns of WoT instead,
sets to work the agenda of an ethics of WoT or perhaps ethics of the real.
We thus take off in this work from two critiques of the discourse
of development. One, the Marxist critique premised on the demonstra-
tion of a class-focused decentred and disaggregated economy, and the
other, the postdevelopmentalist critique premised on the conception of
a ‘thick’ rendition of need. We have argued for the necessity of working
at the overdetermined interstices of the two—class and need—so as to
announce a paradigmatically different discourse—WoT Marxist discourse.
This is important because even though the economy is problematized
in the class-focused Marxist frame, development premised on need has
remained less important in its rendition of the economy. And since
development as need is the quintessential third worldist discourse, class-
focused Marxism, despite its powerful anti-Euro-centric impulse, remains
unmindful of the third world discourse of development that works over
WoT. Consequently, the urgency of providing an alternative theoriza-
tion of need from this concern is not felt either. We, therefore, raise
the question of need in the class-focused Marxian frame. We ask how
one can theorize the question of development as need in a disaggre-
gated class space? We develop an articulation of class with development
(as need) in the form of non-exploitative class processes and radical needs.
Premised on the overdetermination of non-exploitative class processes
and radical needs (both are possibilities in the space of WoT) we produce
a non-essentialist and non-historicist imagination of development. This
alternative imagination of development is possible because the idea(l) of
a class-focused discourse of non-exploitation and culturally contingent
contextual need (that moves away from the universally defined objective
and immutable need that the hegemonic espouses) are anathemas to the
idea(l) of global capitalism. In Chapters 7 and 8, we have already shown
how the hegemonic uses a complex ensemble of practices to reconfigure
non-capitalist class enterprises into its hegemonic rule and rearticulate the
space of contingent need to displace existing conceptions of need; as also
displace possible radical needs into a platform that construes need as a
pre-given, universal set of deeper level necessities. This turns the real into
the realvictim . The possibility of an ethics of the real is put outside through
a foregrounding of an ethics of the realvictim that in turn gives shape and
consistency to the hegemonic. The foregrounding of an ethics to WoT
purloins the possibility of an ethics of WoT .
Expanded communism is premised on ideas-practices that are against
the hegemonic’s principles of growth and welfarism. Further, as an imag-
ination, expanded communism is premised on an ethico-politics of WoT ; as
an imagination, expanded communism steers clear of any third worldist
impulse, an impulse that could be termed Orientalist; this is in addition
to its anti-Capitalocentric impulse. As an imagination, expanded commu-
nism requires a rethinking of many issues, both at the micro and macro
levels, which must materialize into what Gibson-Graham (2003) describe
as the construction of new forms economic practices overdetermined
by the political-cultural-natural processes, as also the production of new
forms of subjectivity.12 At the macro-level, it would involve a rethinking
of the very meaning of the global order, and how local existences are
to be conceived in a global context. Perhaps a new international that
could collectively deliberate on such issues is required. For us, expanded
communism provides the ethico-justice criterion of living in a Marxian
way.
12 It is our contention that WoT subjectivity premised on the praxis of non-exploitation

and radical need could be a crucial clue to thinking communist subjectivities.
Class, Need, and the Question of Justice

In Chapters 6, 7, and 8, we had rethought the social in terms of the
twenty-four class sets comprising of capitalist, feudal, communist, inde-
pendent/ancient, slave, and communitic class processes. That helped us
pose the notion of a decentred and disaggregated economic and social
totality, that remains open to equally decentred possibilities of micro-
transformation (not big bang transition). Three features mark out our
differences from the concept of big bang transition deployed in clas-
sical Marxism (Chakrabarti and Dhar, 2017). First, we adopt a decentred
conception of transition (we call it transformation) that is predicated in
turn on a decentred totality. We are concerned with both diachronic
and synchronic shifts in the originary multiplicity of class sets within a
society. In our understanding of a decentred theory of transition, history
is not driven by either the Hegelian teleology of reason or the preor-
dained succession of modes of production. History is not the progressive
unfolding of a universal truth that can be deciphered by theory (such
as historical materialism). Rather it is non-linear and is contingently
produced. Second, our decentred Marxian approach to transition is not
indifferent to the direction of societal change it favours. We advocate a
transformation in economy and society that.
(i) replaces exploitative class sets with non-exploitative class sets,

so that those who produce surplus labour are not excluded
from process of the appropriation of surplus labour and
(ii) works towards a fairer and ‘just’ distribution of produced wealth.
Third, what happens to the retained surplus? If it is further distributed,

then to whom is it distributed and by what criteria? Fair distribution is
not a question of natural right. From a class perspective, fair distribution
pertains to political contestation and is a moment of justice.
Let us recast the above discussion in terms of a dialogue between
Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2003) and DeMartino (2003). DeMartino
asks radicals to acknowledge three justice criterions: productive class
justice, appropriative class justice, and distributive class justice.
Productive class justice refers to Marx’s principle of “from each
according to [their] ability” which entails principally individuals’ obliga-
tions to their communities. Productive justice has an intimate relation
with appropriative justice, which is achieved when the forms of appro-

priation become non-exploitative. Productive justice is guaranteed if by
the non-exploitative organization of class enterprises, direct producers are
aware that they will appropriate and distribute the surplus labour, and
their decisions as product of collective deliberation are going to have a
profound impact on the development and well-being of the community
as a whole. Not only is this obligation to the communities different from
what we would have under an exploitative organization of surplus labour
(in which the surplus value is appropriated by a few non-performers) but,
reversibly, the community, as part of the social articulation, may in fact
have an important role in deciding how much, how to, and whom to
distribute, and also for what purpose. The ethical plane in which the
producer functions, as well as the social pressure, helps create a sense
of obligation on the part of the producers to produce socially desir-
able surplus, as also to produce according to the principle of from each
according to [their] ability. In so far as the pressure of distribution of
surplus works backward on the production of surplus, productive justice
could be understood as a justice criterion arising from the pressure of fair
distribution.
Appropriative class justice calls for the condition whereby those who
produce the surplus should also appropriate the surplus. Exploitation—
the exclusion of those who produce surplus from the process of appro-
priating the surplus—is considered unjust for two reasons that we have
discussed in Chapter 2: (i) exploitation is a form of social theft and (ii)
exploitation denies one their rightful right to participate in the process
of distributing the appropriated surplus. The former point leads to an
argument calling for the producers not to be denied the right to partici-
pate in the process of appropriation, and the latter point signals to the
fact that those who appropriate the surplus should also distribute it.
Exploitation is unjust not simply because producers are denied the right
to possess the surplus, but also because producers are at the same time
denied the right to decide on the distribution of the surplus. Since the
axes of distribution are numerous, the authority acquired to distribute
the surplus via appropriative justice becomes a valuable asset. It is valu-
able principally because it helps one to cross the limited domain of surplus
and participate in the creation of what Luc-Nancy (1991) designates as
“being-in-common”. But this begs the question: By what criteria should
the surplus that is appropriated, be distributed? This immediately takes
us to the aspect of distributive class justice. Distributive justice encapsu-

lates the principle: “to each according to [their] need”, which according
to DeMartino, “requires that the allocation of that share of the social
surplus that is destined for consumption be based on people’s distinct
needs: those with the greatest needs should receive the greatest shares.
This proposition entails a strong obligation on the part of the commu-
nity as a whole to its individual members” (DeMartino, 2003: 13). Class
justice must incorporate the aspect of fair distribution à la distributive
class justice.
We are now in a position to expand on DeMartino’s rendition of
distributive justice. The departure is premised on the argument that
distributive justice, while intimately related to the question of class, is
not per se class justice. Taking off from the concept of social surplus (see
Chapters 2 and 3), we aver that distributive justice pertains to the aspect
of need which arises in the milieu of development. Processes pertaining to
the performance, appropriation, distribution, and receipt of surplus labour
are not the same as processes pertaining to social surplus. That is justice
pertaining to the issue of the distribution of social surplus is conceptu-
ally not a matter of class justice. Thus to differentiate our conception of
distribution from that of DeMartino, we replace, following Chakrabarti
and Cullenberg (2003), the third justice criterion of distributive justice
by the notion of developmental justice.
In this work, we focus on the criterion appropriative class justice (as
a criterion focused on the question of surplus labour, a criterion that
works towards eliminating exploitation) and developmental justice (as a
criterion focused on the question of radical need, a criterion that works
towards ensuring fair distribution) in producing the conceptual space of
expanded communism. We show in the course of our work, how the
moment of productive class justice too is ingrained within the space of
expanded communism.
Conceptually, expanded communism is the Borromean Knot of appro-
priative, developmental, and productive class justice. (Fig 10.1)
This knot is important because there is no one-to-one correspondence
between non-exploitative class processes and fair distribution. One can
imagine a non-exploitative class society with an unfair distribution of
surplus. For example, the workers who appropriate the surplus may not
want to give away any portion of the surplus to the unemployed and those
whose necessities and desires remain unfulfilled. One can also imagine
a situation where most of the surplus appropriated by the workers is
Appropriative Class Justice

Developmental Justice
Productive Class Justice
Fig. 10.1 Appropriative, developmental, and productive class justice (Source

Self-constructed)
paid as subsumed class payments to government bureaucracies who do

not spend money in the ways that are considered part of a process of
fair distribution. Because of the possibility of such a society dominated
by non-exploitative class sets, there is a need to articulate a concept or
concepts of fairness to go along with the non-exploitative class sets. In
this context, transformation towards non-exploitative class sets, accompa-
nied by the transformation of class sets as well as of their conditions of
existence leading towards a fair redistribution of wealth, is what we mean
progress/development/well-being/ quality of life.
In the above rendition of “progress”/ “development”/ well-being/
quality of life, we impute no teleological meanings. Nothing in Marxist
theory can assert that the journey of the social follows some pre-given
pattern, such that it will move inexorably towards a non-exploitative and
relatively fair society. What it says, in contrast, is that it is a desirable
movement, and one should work towards it. Hence Marxism is a ques-
tion of transformative social praxis. But a praxis of non-exploitation and
fair distribution, of course, does not guarantee that it is going to happen
or stabilize. Further, even if we assume that such a social situation is
reached or achieved, the concept of overdetermination and contradic-
tion precludes the situation from being a permanent one. Constitutive
processes and political actions may force some class sets to move back to
exploitative forms and the social distribution of wealth may again become
extremely unfair. In this context, class struggle and need struggle to
maintain the (counter-)hegemony of non-exploitative class sets and fair
distribution are part of a ‘permanent revolution’: it is a never-ending and

interminable-inexhaustible praxis.
Finally, the Marxian praxis of expanded communism cannot be
restricted merely to the interface of class-need. As explained in Chapter 3,
it is important to recognise the realm of need that is not applicable in
a non-surplus, need-based economy. There is a difference between the
question of expanded communism in the context of the presence of
class and surplus as concepts (even if class division and exploitation are
absent as in the communist class process) and in a classless scenario where
class and surplus as concepts are redundant. We have also seen that the
perspective of radical need is active not just in the space of what we have
designated Need I in Chapter 3, but also in the space of Need II, where
the classless, need-based economy—with its production, distribution and
consumption considerations—may be organized based on ‘each according
to his need’. Along with radical need in Need I space, Marxian ethico-
politics will have to account for radical need in Need II space when one
is positing development justice from a Marxian perspective. Radical need
and expanded communism traverse both of these arrangements. Weaving
through contradictions and conflicts, expanded communism is, therefore,
about creating new non-exploitative class processes, and transforming
existing class processes from exploitative to non-exploitative forms; it
is also about struggles over fair distribution based on radical needs in
the spheres of co-existing exploitative and non-exploitative scenarios.
Evidently, the struggle for expanded communism that we have depicted
in Table 10.1 will only become more complex; but more importantly,
it will require a careful consideration of the questions of transformative
political praxis.
World of the Third

and Transformative Political Praxis
Having discussed a possible ethico-politics of WoT and a possible contour
of an expanded praxis of communism, this section of the chapter shall
take up the question of transformative political praxis—and shall bring
to dialogue in such praxis postdevelopment and postcapitalist strands
(Chakrabarti and Dhar 2019, 2022; Chitranshi and Healy, 2022; Dhar
and Chakrabarti, 2019, 2021, 2022; Dhar, 2020, 2022). In this section,
we focus only on class-based society and expanded communism to make
our point regarding the cocooned yet crypted presence and importance
of transformative political praxis. Additionally bringing the classless, need-

based economy into the discussion will need careful consideration; we do
not pursue that angle any further in this chapter.
Recall from Chapter 8, by taking the possible combination of class
as processes of surplus labour, output distribution, and worker’s remu-
neration into consideration, we have represented economic reality as
decentred and disaggregated in terms of 24 class sets as reiterated in Table
10.2. We have thereafter derived WoT as space from Table 10.2.
We begin by summarising our discussion in Chapter 8 regarding the
WoT space: (i) leaving out simple reproduction type class set 17 would
occupy the centre of the hub of the circuits of global capital, (ii) of the
22 “what are not capitalist class sets”, at least twelve (i.e. class sets 2,
4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24) are outside the circuits of
global capital and hence part of WoT, (iii) class sets 5 and 17 could also
be inside (i.e. hooked to) or outside the circuits of global capital; when
outside, they are part of WoT and (iv) the other ten non-capitalist class
sets—even if they are non-capitalist—could be either inside or outside the
circuits of global capital, depending on whether their produce is hooked
to global capital via exchange in the local–global market (see Column 6
above), local market (see Column 7 above), or non-market (see Column
8 above) site.
Let us now focus on extracting out the ethico-politics from the WoT
space. What is cocooned inside WoT? Of the twelve non-capitalist class
sets that are outside the circuits of global capital, six of them (i.e. class sets
2, 4, 14, 16, 22, and 24) are non-exploitative in addition to being non-
capitalist. Moreover, among the twelve class sets (i.e. the odd-numbered
Table 10.1 Marxian politics in a class frame

Marxian Politics in a Class Frame
Fair Distribution – Accounts Unfair Distribution - Does

for radical need not account for radical need
Exploitative Classes Strategically situated Unacceptable
Non-exploitative Classes Political goal of expanded
communism - class based Strategically situated
Source Self-constructed
Table 10.2 Class sets and World of the Third
No Performance Appropriation Distribution Worker’s Anti−Capitalist Postcapitalist World of the Third Modes of
of surplus labour of surplus labour remuneration Politics Politics (WoT) Appropriation
1 A A COM WAGE Possible Possible Non−E

2 A A NON−COM WAGE WoT Non−E
10
3 A A COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible Non−E

4 A A NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT Non−E
5 A B COM WAGE Possible Possible E
6 A B NON−COM WAGE WoT E
7 A B COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible E
8 A B NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT E
9 C A COM WAGE Possible Possible E
10 C A NON−COM WAGE WoT E
11 C A COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible E
12 C A NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT E
13 A C COM WAGE Possible Possible Non−E
14 A C NON−COM WAGE WoT Non−E
15 A C COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible Non−E
16 A C NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT Non−E
17 C B COM WAGE Possible Possible E
18 C B NON−COM WAGE WoT E
19 C B COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible E
20 C B NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT E
21 C C COM WAGE Possible Possible Non−E
22 C C NON−COM WAGE WoT Non−E
23 C C COM NON−WAGE Possible Possible Non−E
(continued)
EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD …
299
Table 10.2 (continued)
300
No Performance Appropriation Distribution Worker’s Anti−Capitalist Postcapitalist World of the Third Modes of
of surplus labour of surplus labour remuneration Politics Politics (WoT) Appropriation
24 C C NON−COM NON−WAGE WoT Non−E

A = individual, B= none, C =collective, Class sets are
outside Circuits of
Global Capital
com: commodity, non−com: non−commodity
E: Exploitation; Non−E: Non−exploitation
Source Dhar and Chakrabarti (2019: 94–95)

ones) that could be hooked to the circuits of global capital via local–global
markets, once again, six (class sets 1, 3, 13, 15, 21, and 23) are non-
exploitative. Therefore, class sets 2, 4, 14, 16, 22, and 24 constitute (and
class sets 1, 3, 13, 15, 21, and 23 could also constitute) the cocooned
fragment of the (a) non-capitalist and (b) non-exploitative sets in WoT as
space.
What, however, is crypted13 by the hegemonic, is the possibility
of a postcapitalist politics of reconstruction; it is crypted to even clas-
sical Marxian praxis (Chakrabarti, Dhar and Dasgupta 2015, 145–157;
Chakrabarti and Dhar 2022; Chitranshi and Dhar, 2021; Dhar and
Chakrabarti, 2019, 2021; Dhar, 2017b). The finding-founding of WoT
as space creates ground for a politics of place; politics of place as the
“site and spur of [possible] becoming”, which is “not a politics of iden-
tity per se, but a politics of the co-production of subjects and places. A
politics of becoming in place” (Gibson-Graham, 2016: 288). Rather than
an assumed place of politics, it is only reconstructive praxis that can give
birth to WoT as place. WoT as space births the necessity of a transfor-
mative praxis. Transformative praxis in turn births the possibility of WoT
as place. It is the appreciation of the re-creative political as painstaking
praxis of reconstruction that is crypted in classical Marxism; the return of
the crypted has to supplement the return of the foreclosed WoT, so as
to create the ground and condition for a ‘possible’ postcapitalist future.
What is not crypted in classical Marxism is class struggle over capitalist
class sets 5, 17 so as to transform their class form to non-exploitative ones,
such as 21–24 or 13–16. This is crypted in Economics or Development
Economics but is recognized in classical Marxism; it continues to have an
enduring presence in our imagination of anti-capitalist struggle. However,
what is crypted not just in Economics or Development Economics but
also in classical Marxism, are non-exploitative class sets 2, 4, 14, 16, 22,
and 24, which are cocooned within WoT space; as also class sets 1, 3, 13,
15, 21, and 23, which are cocooned within the circuits of global capital,
but are non-exploitative. The latter means that in addition to the class
resistance against {5, 17}, class struggle in favour of non-exploitation in
non-capitalist class sets must transpire within the circuits of global capital
too, as part of politics of place for contesting and reconstituting its inte-
rior. Finally, alongside non-exploitative class sets 2, 4, 14, 16, 22, and 24
13 See Footnote 3.
there must be a place of class struggle over exploitative class sets (non-
capitalist class sets 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, as also capitalist ones) within
the WoT space. Praxis is not just about resistance to capitalist hegemony,
which operates by securing and facilitating the expansion of circuits of
global capital, through the operations of capitalist class exploitation and
original accumulation. We have demonstrated through the WoT Marxism,
that the register of praxis conjoining resistance and reconstruction, opens
up the realm of politicized social transformation, including that within
WoT.
Radical politics—Marxian and non-Marxian—may ultimately never get
to the point of politicized social transformation. It is so because politics
addressing the crypt (which even if secret is very much real) is rare. On
the other hand, Marxism is about the politics of breaking into the crypt;
breaking into the crypt by working through the delusional veil. It is the
politics of the ‘progressive elaboration’ of capitalism’s ‘personal dictio-
nary’, the politics of the cataloguing of ‘deciphered hieroglyphics’. One
could call it the politics of decipherment. One could also call it the politics
of the secret , about the secret, around the secret, on the secret. Because
what is at stake [in politics] is what takes places secretly [i.e. that which
deludes], or takes a secret place [i.e. that which is foreclosed], in order to
keep itself [i.e. the hegemonic] safe. Marxian politics is about breaking
not only into the crypt of capitalism, but the crypt of all class divided
societies, class exploitation as such; and this breaking into the crypt of
class exploitation would inaugurate in turn, and somewhat paradoxically,
the breaking out of class division per se. Marxian transformative praxis
encapsulates the process of breaking into and breaking out of the crypt,
rather than getting circumscribed, wittingly or unwittingly, by the preser-
vation of the crypt (the transition of Soviet Union from private to state
capitalism is an example that preserved the crypt of exploitation through
change in its forms). From a Marxian standpoint, transformation could
then perhaps be the logic-language-ethos of a post-transition imagination
not reduced to historical materialism or liberal gradualism or such imag-
inations that do not address the question of the foreclosed real and the
crypted (Chakrabarti and Dhar, 2017).
Hegemony, Third World, and World of the Third

Through a conceptualization of an outside to (global) capital, our rendi-
tion takes us beyond the familiar and hitherto dominant cartography of
national economies, of third world economies. It also takes us beyond the

now fashionable global-local and even beyond what we have provision-
ally called the simple difference of North–South/West–East (to ultimately
tease out what we earlier called the WoT perspective).
We thus end up with indeed a different geography that actually and as
a possibility, displaces the cast of given characters. But this spatial outside
to the circuits of global capital does not appear as a space of differance;
instead, depending on how one is (inter)subjectivized in the economy,
it emerges paradoxically as a devalued, decrepit other in postcolonial
conditions. This involves a further transmutation of the capitalocen-
tric rendition of the economy through Orientalism. If capitalocentrism
turns the diverse “what are not capitalist” into a homogenous other qua
non-capitalist, then orientalism captures further turning of non-capitalist
into the devalued, pathological, decrepit other: pre-capitalist. WoT as the
outside of circuits of global capital, thus slides down the stepladder of
progress, and emerges as its lacking pre-capitalist underside qua third
world. This slide in effect legitimizes the project of management and
social engineering of WoT space, all in the name of the development of
third world; it also legitimizes violence against WoT via original accumula-
tion as liberation of the third world from its decrepit state. The true intent
and content of original accumulation are thus ‘crypt’-ed in the substitute
trope of third worldism. From above the table, original accumulation
looks justified, even needed; it is a logical extension of the historical
inevitability thesis. From below the table, the same original accumula-
tion looks to be unjust wounding and violence on WoT. The realm of
ethico-politics cannot but be a contested space; hence contestation and
resistance.
Within the hegemonic, third world (as the lacking/lagging inside of
global capital) embodies the substitute signifier of WoT (WoT as the
foreclosed outside), where the third world is the appropriate(d) other—
appropriate for capital—and WoT is the inappropriate(d) other. Third
world is capital’s constitutive inside, what it can foreground, even as it
forecloses WoT. The foreclosure of WoT by foregrounding third world is
what reaffirms the hegemony of global capital; it is the foundation which
makes possible development. Working through the substitution, or what
Marx calls the delusional appearance of things, helps one to arrive at the
WoT and thus attend to the question of the postcapitalist subject.
In much of the global South as also the East, we “either accept or
repeat the judgments passed on us by Western culture, or we impotently
resent them but have hardly any estimates of our own, wrung from an
inward perception of the realities of our position”. This grows into either
a kind of “unthinking conservatism” or “an imaginary progressiveness
merely imitative of the West” (Bhattacharya, 1954: 104). This is why a
Marxian theory must be premised on a bidirectional critique of both the
West’s hegemonic principles and principles (emanating from either the
West or the East) that hegemonize the Orient. It was this attention to
the dual critique that took us to the doorstep of the concept of WoT and
to politics as possible place of transformative becomings. Can the theory of
WoT unveil in turn a critique of capitalocentric-orientalist theory as also a
theory of critique from the South as also the East, including of conditions
within WoT? How to arrive at (pro)positions where our theories could
be adapted to our lived experiences and not our lived experiences to a
Theory?
The Counter-Hegemonic Subject

The question of the subject of counter-hegemonic praxis is indeed an
impasse in contemporary Marxism. For us this involves a defamiliar-
ization of the familiar—that is, the hegemonized subject position. The
process of the constitution of the counter-hegemonic subject position
as elaborated in this book consists of a turn to the foreclosed outside
(of class and WoT) so as to inaugurate within, the (impossible) return
of the foreclosed outside. The turn to the foreclosed real, however, is
not spontaneous; the encounter with usually the inassimilable Real is the
precondition for the turn. It is also contingent upon an overdetermined
and contradictory multiplicity, including those elements marked by effects
from party politics, social movements, revolutionary upsurge, and alterna-
tive social/community reconstructions; hence, there is an unpredictability
to the turning, and it is irreducible to telos, to consciousness, or to pure
rationality.
Badiou’s “Meditation Thirty-Five” in Theory of the Subject can be
instructive to imagining a post-Cartesian doctrine of the (Marxian)
subject: “A subject is not a substance … A subject is not a void point
either … A subject is not, in any manner, the organization of a sense
of experience … every subject is rigorously singular … A subject is not
a result—any more than it is an origin” (2009: 391–2). It is the local
configuration of a generic procedure, a configuration in excess of the
situation, from which a truth is supported. Badiou thus offers a somewhat
thin understanding of the subject (not just the revolutionary subject), but
a subject nevertheless as “local configuration”, “configuration in excess of
a situation”, and locus of “a truth”. “Every subject is political. Which is
why there are few subjects and rarely any politics” (2009: 28). What does
Badiou mean by “every subject is political”? Of course, he does not mean
every subject, that each and every subject is political; he means, perhaps,
that the political, in excess of the given consensus, is the condition of the
becoming of subject; the subject is in excess of the “human animals” that
we are otherwise in our daily procreation; the political sutures the subject
into being. Bosteels shows how this is developed further in Badiou’s
Conditions: “Every subject is induced by a generic procedure, and thus
depends on an event. Which is why the subject (not existence, or individ-
uality) is rare” (Bosteels in Badiou, 2009: x). Badiou thereafter connects
or brings to co-implication subject and truth; for him, a theory of the
subject, “at the farthest remove from any purely experiential or moral
account, is always the theory of the formal conditions for the emergence
of a universalizable (not universal) truth” (Bosteels in Badiou, 2009: x).
Badiou takes care of the possible tautology of subject and the political (the
political sutures the subject; the subject sutures the political) through the
invocation of a third: truth.
In this book, in contrast to Badiou, the third is the (Lacanian) real, the
foreclosed real.
Finally, in Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou (1999: 108) renders the
domain of truth as fourfold: (1) politics (nonvulgar Marxism), (2) art
(poetry and tragedy), (3) science (mathematics), and (4) love (psycho-
analysis)—and all four, according to Badiou, are all equally capable of
bringing into existence a subject (Bosteels, 2009: x). Hence, the question
before us is: Does the experience and truth of the foreclosed real (i.e. the
WoT), the near universalizable truth of outsidedness induce the possibility
of the birth of a subject? We foreground, therefore, a connection of the
political with the psychoanalytic.
We bring the “canonical teachings of Althusser” into dialogue with
Lacan (Badiou calls it “unexpected help” from Lacan for Marxism), but
the project cannot be completed without the very concept of the subject
that classical materialism (a materialism Marx critiques in the first of
the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach; see Dhar and Chakrabrati, 2016; Dhar,
2018b) had previously debunked as “sheer idealist humbug”. Marxism,
for Badiou, is the discourse with which the proletariat sustains itself as
subject. Badiou does not wish to let go of this idea. But how to retain
the idea (in a post-Cartesian form) is the question.
Once again there is “unexpected help” from Lacan. In his Seminar
XIV on the logic of fantasy, Lacan moves from accepting Heidegger’s
critique of the Cartesian cogito to the paradoxical and counterintuitive
embrace of the cogito—but cogito this time as the subject of the real. The
Lacanian subject is thus the subject of the real and is not necessarily the
really real subject. It is as if Lacan at first accepts Heidegger’s point that
the Cartesian cogito inaugurates the forgetting of being, but for Lacan
the real is external to being so that what is for Heidegger the argument
against the cogito is for Lacan the argument for the cogito—the real for
Lacan can only be approached when we put being under erasure. This is
why, for Lacan, not only is the cogito not to be reduced to pure thought
but, paradoxically, the cogito is the subject of the real: that is, the cut in
being in which the real breaks through.
Early on, Lacan decentred being with regard to thought: “I am not
where I think”; the core of being is not in (self-)consciousness; however,
this takes being beyond thinking or language, a proposition that runs
counter to Lacan’s thesis that the unconscious is “structured like a
language”. Later on, Lacan moved to “I think where I am not”, which
decentres thinking with regard to being. Lacan’s stress is on the gap that
separates cogito from sum, thought from being. Lacan thus undermines
the illusion of their simple or conscious overlap by pointing to the fissure
in the apparent and assumed homogeneity of thinking-being (see Dolar,
1998). The subject is thus paradoxically in the gap: the gap of the real,
the real as the foreclosed of conscious thought. Lacan thus moves to “It—
the real thinks: therefore I am subject/political” (given that the subject is
where the political is and the political is where the subject is).
In Lieu of a Conclusion
One note of caution in lieu of a conclusion: the real as the touchy entry
point (the entry point of class and need) does not serve in our work
as ground for another hegemonic nodal articulation complete unto itself
with its own attendant foreclosures. There is no denying the fact that our
counter-hegemonic imagination could produce other nodal articulations.
But there would be a radical difference between a counter-hegemonic
nodal articulation and a hegemonic nodal articulation. The counter-
hegemonic nodal articulation would not be hegemonic in the sense that
it would have nodal signifiers as well as foreclosed signifiers. The nodal

signifiers in a counter-hegemonic formation would not be nodal in the
sense that it/they would have attendant foreclosed signifiers; at its worst it
could have ‘purloined signifiers’. Further, such purloined signifiers would
not remain perpetually purloined in the counter-hegemonic nodal artic-
ulation, that would produce once again a totalitarian closure; such an
articulation would thus not be ethical. A counter-hegemonic articulation
would not have strong exclusion systems, the way in which a hegemonic
system is exclusionary; at its worst it could be a weaker exclusion system;
for example, exploitative class processes are excluded, are an impossibility
in the imagination of expanded communism. In the counter-hegemonic
articulation, the purloined are purloined contingent to particular nodal
signifiers; the very fact that some signifiers are purloined would also be
open to contestation in a new counter-hegemonic nodal articulation;
none of the nodal signifiers, however, contingent (along with its/their
purloined signifiers) could be taken as given in the counter-hegemonic
nodal articulation. In the hegemonic articulation both nodal signifiers
and foreclosed signifiers are secure in their respective articulations. In the
counter-hegemonic nodal articulation both nodal signifiers and purloined
signifiers are un-fixed in their articulation—un-fixed in the sense that
both remain locked in an overdetermined constitutivity—un-fixed in the
sense that the particular nodal reality remains menaced perpetually by
its own purloined letters. This is just how a non-metaphysical Marx
and a non-metaphysical Freud meet in this book. For both there is no
end to their engagement with the real; with truth; they keep going’;
their realities remain menaced by their purloined letters, as also by
the inassimilable Real.
There is thus no end to our engagement with WoT ; with processes of
transformative political praxis; praxis of both self and social transforma-
tion; one needs to keep going …
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Author Index
A Chakrabarti, A., 7, 22, 27, 29, 43,

Abraham, N., 13, 280 46, 48, 50–52, 61, 66–69, 73,
Achuthan, A., 130 75–77, 80, 86, 126, 127, 130,
Althusser, L., 7, 22, 86, 125–127, 136, 144, 153–156, 158, 160,
141 161, 166, 178, 180, 183, 196,
207, 222, 229, 232, 243, 244,
260, 262, 264, 265, 284, 293,
B 295, 297, 301, 302
Badiou, A., 118, 221, 283, 284, 288, Chaudhury, A., 2, 12, 27, 61, 68, 69,
289, 304–306 127, 130, 154, 180, 196
Basole, A., 216 Chitranshi, B., 94, 150, 152, 297,
Berger, M., 9 301
Bhattacharya, K.C., 8, 16, 151, 177, Copjec, J., 1, 115
Cornell, D., 109, 114, 285
181, 198–200, 247, 304
Cullenberg, S., 1, 22, 23, 30, 43, 48,
Bhattacharya, R, 151
50, 51, 61, 66, 68, 80, 127, 180,
Bilgrami, A., 144, 266
196, 232, 247, 293, 295
Bosteels, B., 305
Breman, J., 161
Brennan, T., 103, 286 D
Dalio, R., 176
DeMartino, G., 51, 293, 295
C Derrida, J., 17, 90, 93–96, 104, 105,
Callari, A., 3, 4, 7, 10 113, 144, 145
Césaire, A., 221 De Soto, H., 161
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 311
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
312 AUTHOR INDEX
Dhar, A., 1, 2, 7, 11, 29, 50, 61, 66, I

68, 69, 75–77, 80, 86, 87, 90, Illich, I., 73–75
93, 94, 96, 106, 120, 126, 127, Irigaray, L., 77, 131
136, 144, 150, 152–154, 158,
160, 174, 178, 183, 207, 213,
216, 222, 226, 229, 232, 235, K
243, 244, 246, 247, 262, Kallis, G., 267
264–266, 273, 278, 281,
284–286, 293, 297, 301, 302,
305 L
Dolar, M., 139, 306 Lacan, J., 1–3, 7, 12–14, 85–87,
89–94, 96, 98, 100, 103–105,
107–112, 117–119, 126, 129,
E 145, 193, 225, 243, 282,
Escobar, A., 50, 73, 75–78, 154, 222, 285–288, 305, 306
225, 231 Laclau, E., 12, 16, 279
Esteva, G., 73, 231 La Porta, R., 162, 163, 196
Lear, J., 216, 246
Levinas, E., 281, 282, 288
F
Foster, J.B., 266–268, 271
M
Foucault, M., 15, 95, 222, 223
Madra, Y.M., 7, 21, 22
Fraad, H., 29, 213
Marx, K., 2, 3, 7, 10, 13, 14, 24, 25,
Fraser, I., 70, 72, 74, 78, 79, 290
32, 33, 35, 38, 41, 42, 46, 60,
Freud, S., 7, 12, 86, 87, 91, 103,
62, 78, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 106,
104, 106, 107, 118, 120,
120, 125, 126, 141–143,
125–127, 129–131, 278, 285,
151–153, 157, 159, 174, 177,
286, 307
186, 195, 199, 200, 244–248,
252, 266, 267, 278, 285–287,
291, 293, 303, 305
G Mouffe, C., 12, 16
Geertz, C., 285
Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2, 4, 5, 7, 10,
14, 49, 154, 158, 292, 301 N
Gorz, A., 79 Negri, A., 4, 15, 194
H R
Hallward, P., 284, 286, 289 Resnick, S.A., 2, 5, 13, 14, 21, 23,
Hardt, M., 4, 15, 194 29, 30, 39, 41, 42, 47, 51, 52,
Heller, A., 78 68, 80, 172, 177, 201, 213, 253
Hindess, B., 43, 51 Roberts, B., 36, 39
AUTHOR INDEX 313
Roy, S., 177, 181, 198–200 Tregenna, F., 38, 39

Ruccio, D., 76, 154, 262
V
S Vanheule, S., 92, 93, 98
Saito, K., 38, 267, 268 Vlachou, A., 267, 268
Savran, S., 38
Seda-Irizarry, I.J., 177, 181,
198–200, 247 W
Sen, A., 71, 74, 213 Wainwright, J., 2, 3, 11
Shaik, A.M., 39 Wolfenstein, E.V., 102, 103
Shiva, V., 73 Wolff, R.D., 2, 5, 13, 14, 21–23, 29,
Spivak, G.C., 2, 23, 86, 96, 103, 279 30, 39, 41, 42, 47, 51, 52, 68,
Stavrakakis, Y., 118, 119 80, 172, 177, 201, 213, 253,
260
T
Tendler, J., 230 Z
Tomšič, S., 87 Zizek, S., 98, 105, 288
Tonak, E.A., 39 Zupancic, A., 105, 106, 278, 280,
Torok, M., 13 283, 286
Subject Index
A communitic, 26, 27, 31, 32, 41, 48

Ab-original, 91, 100–102, 105, 106, exploitative, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33,
108, 113, 119, 126, 127, 136, 293
278, 279, 285, 286 feudal, 26, 27, 29, 53
Accumulation, 3, 9, 15, 16, 26, independent, 26, 27, 29, 41, 48
36–38, 40, 45, 46, 54, 55, 59, non-exploitative, 27, 30, 32, 48,
138, 150, 157, 163, 178, 194, 293
200, 212, 228, 229, 234, 241, self-appropriative, 26, 27, 48, 211,
243–248, 251–257, 259, 267, 212
269, 270, 302, 303 slave, 25–27, 29
Adivasis, 220 Appropriators, 24, 30, 31, 35, 41, 81,
Alienation, 288 157, 185, 186, 198
Alternative economic cartography, 79 Aufhebung , 118
Antagonism, 90, 97, 217
Anti-capitalist, 2, 153, 273
B
Anti-capitalocentric, 76 Backward, 1, 97, 115, 141, 149, 153,
Antiorientalist, 76 196, 234, 294
Apparatus Backwardness, 50, 154, 161, 163,
hegemonic, 7, 226 196, 216, 222
ideological, 7 Barred
repressive, 7, 273 other, 99
Appropriation of surplus subject, 98, 99
capitalist, 13, 25–27, 29, 31–33, Basic needs, 72, 73, 76, 234
42, 189, 214, 268 Battery of signifiers, 112, 154
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 315
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
316 SUBJECT INDEX
Being-in-common, 10, 69, 294 state, 31, 35, 44, 46, 52, 165, 175,
Bloody legislation, 248 253
Borromean Knot, 133, 289, 295 unproductive, 41, 42, 46, 174,
Bourgeois, 245 178, 257
Capitalist accumulation, 3, 16, 36, 37,
270
C
Capitalist development, 2, 10, 12, 37,
Capabilities approach, 71, 120, 232
76, 135, 152, 181, 201, 222,
Capital
245, 264, 266, 269, 272
constant (Cc), 33, 40, 157, 176,
Capitalocentric-orientalism, 15, 154,
213, 256
164
global, 4–6, 9, 11, 15, 76, 77, 79,
Capitalocentric-orientalist discourse,
126, 132, 136, 138–141, 143,
219
144, 146, 153, 171, 174,
Capitalocentrism, 5, 6, 8, 15, 50, 76,
176–199, 201–204, 207, 208,
78, 113, 141, 153, 154, 158,
211–221, 224, 226–232,
231, 303
234–237, 241–244, 251, 254,
258, 259, 261, 265, 269, 272, Caste, 75, 77, 217, 218, 283
273, 279, 281, 291, 298, Centre-periphery, 150, 198
301–303 Circuits of global capital, 4–6, 9, 15,
human, 196, 201 76, 77, 79, 126, 132, 136,
social, 16, 207, 217, 226, 232, 138–140, 171, 178–182,
235, 236 184–193, 195–199, 202–204,
variable (V), 40, 157, 176 207, 208, 211, 212, 214–216,
Capitalism, 1–4, 6, 8, 9, 11–15, 218–220, 224, 227–229, 232,
48–50, 59, 70–72, 76–79, 85, 234–237, 241–243, 261, 265,
87, 96, 98, 135, 136, 138–142, 269, 272, 279, 281, 298, 301,
145, 152, 153, 156–159, 162, 303
182, 191, 198, 200, 203, 220, Circulation, 24, 41, 42, 177, 178
221, 226, 229, 231, 243, 245, Civilizing mission, 154, 237, 262,
246, 248, 252, 262, 265–270, 279
279, 281, 285, 289, 291, 292, Class distribution, 62, 65, 67
302 Class enterprise, 25, 26, 29, 43–45,
Capitalist 47, 138, 173, 186, 253–255,
financial, 41–43, 186, 197, 200 258–260
merchant, 39, 41–44, 174, 176, Class-focused analysis, 27, 42, 46, 50,
199 163, 177, 193, 253
private, 16, 44, 46, 52, 53, 75, 82, Class focused cartography, 76
138, 142, 165, 175, 178, Class-focused economy, 158, 164
193–196, 202, 203, 243 Class-focused Marxian theory, 21, 23,
productive, 33, 35–37, 39–43, 46, 30
172, 175, 177, 178, 186, 208, Classless society, 80
255, 258, 259 Class matrix, 26, 27, 48
SUBJECT INDEX 317
Class-need, 60, 66, 67, 70, 77, 79, Commodification, 197, 246
81, 297 Commodity
Class-need struggles, 77 capitalist, 31, 33, 35, 138, 178,
Class process 189, 194
AA, 27, 28 communist, 30, 189
AB, 27–29, 33, 48, 214 market communist, 30
AC, 27, 28, 31, 32, 48, 80, 81, state communist, 31
242
Communism, 31, 79, 81, 114, 115,
capitalist, 5, 12, 14, 16, 29, 32, 42,
142, 143, 146, 158, 289, 290,
48, 50, 138, 162, 207, 243,
292, 295, 297
267
Community, 10, 16, 69, 198, 207,
CB, 27–29, 33, 48, 214
217, 226, 232, 236, 242, 254,
CC, 27, 28, 32, 48, 80, 81, 242
262, 265, 287, 294, 295, 304
communist, 27, 30, 32, 79, 80,
Compensation, 128, 215, 228, 230,
293, 297
234, 244, 245, 248, 251, 266
communitic, 27, 31, 32, 80, 293
Competition, 16, 36, 37, 47, 54, 55,
feudal, 26, 29, 214
138, 163, 178, 181, 186, 188,
fundamental (FCP), 24–27, 29–37,
192, 194, 195, 202, 265, 272
39–46, 48, 51–54, 60–62, 65,
67, 68, 80, 172, 173, 175, Conditions of existence, 21, 25, 39,
176, 185, 189, 195, 208, 211, 40, 44, 51, 62, 63, 164, 173,
213, 216, 236, 246, 252, 255, 176, 178, 180, 182, 185, 191,
258 198, 201, 216, 217, 241, 243,
independent, 27, 32, 74, 81, 213, 246, 247, 252, 255, 256, 261,
293 272, 296
slave, 29, 48, 213, 293 Constitutive inside, 10, 77, 88, 104,
subsumed (SCP), 24, 36, 61, 62, 133, 221, 303
172, 256 Constitutive outside, 4, 10, 77, 100,
Class set, 26, 27, 31, 48–50, 80, 81, 138, 221, 285
89, 106, 155, 157, 162–165, Consumption, 64, 68, 69, 87, 197,
178, 182, 196, 203, 208, 212, 259, 295, 297
211–214, 218, 252, 285, 293, Contingent, 4–6, 9, 10, 12, 16, 22,
296, 298, 301, 302 50, 66, 69, 71, 87, 89, 90, 96,
Class struggle, 35, 37, 40, 42, 47, 97, 99, 105, 139, 145, 165, 193,
51–54, 65, 66, 71, 141, 186, 220, 281, 290, 292, 304, 307
203, 258, 296, 301, 302 Contradiction, 22, 38, 43, 54, 67, 70,
Closure, 89, 90, 95–97, 99, 115, 193 77, 110, 125, 136, 153, 186,
Collectives, 7, 26, 28–32, 40, 69, 81, 188, 203, 216–218, 225, 227,
152, 249, 250, 283, 294 231, 250, 261, 267, 272, 296,
Colonialism, 3, 50, 200, 221, 266, 297
279 Contradictory process, 22, 23, 25, 26,
Colonization, 140–142, 260 37, 66, 119
318 SUBJECT INDEX
Corporation, 39, 178, 179, 181, 182, 245, 247, 251, 254, 258, 262,
197, 199, 230, 233, 271 264, 266, 268, 269, 278, 279,
Cost-benefit analysis, 260 290–292, 294–297, 303
Counterhegemonic Subject, 7, 8, 304 Developmentalism, 8, 74, 135, 203,
Counterhegemony, 8 223, 232, 252, 261
Credit, 37, 44, 157, 175, 180–182, Developmental struggle, 62
184, 185, 196, 200, 257, 265, Development economics, 149, 150,
268 153, 301
Crisis, 37, 38, 45, 47, 166, 229, 230, Differänce, 96, 212
254, 259, 260, 267–270, 272 Direct producers, 24, 26, 30, 31, 34,
Crisis of enterprises, 47 39, 184, 213, 248, 252, 253,
Crypt, 13, 55, 94, 302 294
Crypto-theological principle, 280, Disaggregated, 4–14, 25, 32, 42,
281, 290 48–50, 55, 76, 78, 79, 88, 89,
Culture, 8, 16, 40, 70, 73–76, 106, 95, 136, 138–141, 154, 158,
197, 268, 272, 290, 303 165, 171, 193, 195, 207, 215,
219, 261, 262, 291, 293, 298
Disavowal (Verleugnung ), 2, 85, 134,
D 288
Dalits, 217, 220, 259 Discourses, 54, 55, 70, 144, 151,
Debt, 2, 176, 181, 188, 229, 230, 194, 203, 222, 233, 235
253 Dislocation, 229, 231, 236, 241, 244,
Decentred, 23, 25, 32, 45, 48, 49, 245, 252–254
76, 78, 79, 119, 195, 291, 293, Displacement (Entstellung ), 91, 158
298, 306 Distribution
Decolonial, 2 class, 62, 65, 67
Deconstruction, 2, 106, 138, 153 developmental, 62, 65
Delusional veil, 5, 10, 12, 13, 16, 48, fair, 69, 76, 80, 282, 294–297
55, 59, 72, 82, 87–90, 97–99, unfair, 51, 52, 76, 273, 295
101, 111, 115, 119, 126–129, Distribution of surplus, 36, 181, 254,
135, 139, 153, 155, 157, 203, 294
207, 217, 223, 228, 232, 237, Dual economy, 48, 50, 156–158, 160
244, 246, 248, 252, 261, 270,
272, 285, 302
Democracy, 51, 237, 251 E
Determinism, 25 Ecological, 38, 152, 217, 258, 267,
Determinist, 159 268, 270, 271
Development, 3, 4, 8, 15, 48, 50, 51, Economic dualism, 59, 60, 76,
59–65, 67, 71, 74–77, 128, 130, 153–155, 160, 161
144, 146, 149–151, 153, 154, Economy
156, 159–161, 163–167, 196, agricultural, 159, 165, 167
201, 208, 212, 217, 220, formal, 167
225–229, 231–233, 236, 244, global, 76, 136, 171, 180
SUBJECT INDEX 319
industrial, 165, 167 Ethics

local, 76, 136 of world of the third, 82, 282
market, 76 to world of the third, 212, 277
need-based, 68, 69, 80, 297, 298 with world of the third, 277
need-centered, 218 Ethnocentrism, 114
pre-capitalist, 106, 159 Eurocentric, 74, 77, 249, 250
surplus, 61, 68 Exchange, 10, 25, 30, 33, 34, 44, 69,
surplus-centered, 218 176, 187–190, 194, 199, 228,
traditional, 76, 155 229, 298
Efficiency, 16, 55, 138, 159, 160, Exclusion, 10, 11, 26, 28, 134, 136,
178, 193–195, 202, 257, 272 157, 234, 235, 260, 294, 307
Empire, 4, 15 Expanded communism, 79–81, 144,
Employment, 142, 159, 167, 213, 165, 290–292, 295, 297, 307
229, 243, 261 Expanded reproduction, 178, 190,
Enterprise 191, 193, 194
capitalist, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, Exploitation, 26, 29, 30, 35, 42, 48,
43–45, 47, 48, 50, 138, 51–54, 78, 80, 81, 126, 141,
172–175, 178, 180–193, 197, 142, 153, 158, 200, 212, 216,
201, 211, 215, 243, 254, 258 260, 269, 270, 273, 277, 290,
communist, 49, 173 294, 295, 297, 302
feudal, 26, 29, 49 Export promotion, 191, 192
financial, 41, 43, 46, 175, 176, Expropriation, 245–248, 251, 252,
181, 185, 201 258, 269
global, 138, 172–175, 178,
180–183, 185, 187–192, 196, F
197, 200, 201, 211, 213, 215, False-consciousness, 14
231, 243, 254, 258, 259 Fantasy, 13, 118, 203, 288, 306
independent, 29, 41, 43, 49 Fetish, 14, 249, 280
local, 173, 180, 182, 189–193, Feudalism, 49, 252
214–216 Food security, 51, 66, 67
merchant, 39, 41, 43, 46, 176, Foreclosed outside, 88, 126, 171,
180, 185, 189, 192 303, 304
national, 173 Foreclosure (Verwerfung ), 2, 3, 85,
slave, 49 91, 92, 100, 195, 243
Entry point, 23, 25, 29, 55, 99, 100, Foregrounding, 10, 53, 68, 71, 104,
127, 306 115, 116, 125, 145, 157, 194,
Epistemology, 152, 155, 159, 160, 207, 220, 223, 245, 270, 290,
269 292, 303
Ethico-politics Forest rights Act (FRA), 249, 250,
of the foreclosed, 127, 278, 282 269
of the real, 105, 278, 279, 282, Formalization, 151, 164, 167
285, 287 Formal sector, 161–165, 166, 196
320 SUBJECT INDEX
Freedom, 221 Grundrisse, 3, 5

Free market, 182
Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, 285
H
Harris-Todaro model, 150
G Hegemonic inside, 126, 171
Gender, 27, 54, 77, 202, 217, 218, Hegemonization, 59, 69, 106, 145,
283 190, 194, 208, 218, 222, 228,
Global, 2–6, 8–12, 15, 16, 75–77, 233, 270
79, 82, 85–88, 101, 126, 130, Hegemony, 1–3, 6, 10–13, 16, 55,
132, 135, 136, 138–141, 143, 59, 78, 79, 82, 85–90, 92–101,
144, 146, 150, 151, 153, 155, 115, 125, 126, 136, 138–141,
156, 164, 171–204, 207, 208, 145, 171, 191, 195, 203, 207,
211–221, 224–237, 241–244, 224, 227, 236, 248, 262, 272,
246, 251, 254, 258, 259, 261, 273, 279, 281, 285, 287, 291,
262, 265, 268, 269, 272, 273, 302, 303
279, 281, 290–292, 298, Historical materialism, 106, 285, 293,
301–303 302
Global capital, 4–6, 9, 11, 15, 76, 77, Home-based class process, 213
79, 132, 136, 138, 140, 141, Homo economicus , 70, 126
144, 146, 153, 171, 174, Household, 23, 29, 53, 54, 64, 65,
176–197, 202, 203, 207, 208, 132, 154, 212–214, 216, 254,
211, 212, 214, 216–221, 259, 260
226–229, 231, 234–237, Hub of global capital, 138, 178, 183,
241–244, 251, 254, 258, 259, 191, 196, 202
261, 265, 268, 269, 272, 273, Human capital, 196, 201
279, 281, 298, 301, 303 Human development, 74, 119
Global capitalism, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 15, Human rights, 17, 73, 279, 289
135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 145,
182, 220, 226, 243, 262, 278,
279, 281, 292 I
Globalization, 174, 178, 182, 187, Imperial, 140, 224
191, 196, 200, 201, 242, 251, Import-substitution, 191
263, 264, 279 Inclusion, 10, 11, 87, 136, 234, 235,
Global South, 16 279, 282
Governance, 165, 198, 245, 272 Income, 36, 51, 69, 71, 177, 181,
Government, 36, 65, 67, 184, 185, 195, 229, 233, 234, 266
188, 229, 230, 233, 250, 251, Income distribution, 27, 229, 234
254, 264, 296 Indigenous, 16, 106, 150, 154,
Growth, 8, 60, 71, 74, 75, 128, 149, 248–250, 254, 269
152, 159, 166, 167, 179, 182, Industrialization, 152, 163, 197, 253
222, 226–229, 231, 234, 236, Inequality, 67, 76, 141, 152, 179,
267, 268, 270, 280, 292 267
SUBJECT INDEX 321
Injustice, 76, 77, 277 socially necessary abstract (SNALT),

Institutions, 17, 63, 82, 152, 154, 33, 34
156, 181, 202, 203, 217, 218, unpaid, 34–36
221, 226, 227, 233, 234, Lacanian real, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 94
262–264, 272 Lacanian symbolic, 2, 13, 112
International Monetary Fund (IMF), Leviathan, 9, 13, 89, 95, 98, 135,
187, 227–229 136, 141, 145, 203
Interpellation, 7, 13, 95, 97, 98, 203 Lewis Model, 155, 157
Investment, 60, 87, 98, 199, 202,
230, 233, 235, 244, 251
Irreal, 93, 111 M
Marginalization, 140–142, 144, 194,
207, 212, 221–225, 273, 290
J Marginal productivity, 150, 159
Jobless growth, 166 Market, 10, 16, 25, 30, 31, 33–36,
Jouissance, 87, 92, 129 38, 41, 54, 55, 64, 75, 76, 82,
Justice 155, 157, 164, 174, 176, 178,
appropriative, 51, 52, 278, 294 180, 182, 186–190, 192–198,
development, 51, 278, 295 202, 203, 207, 208, 211, 215,
distributive, 51, 52, 295 218, 226–229, 231, 234, 236,
social, 73, 81, 82, 273 242, 243, 257, 265, 268, 269,
298
Marxian ethico-politics, 79, 81, 297
L Marxian struggle, 52, 54
Labour Marxian value theory, 198
necessary, 24, 40, 68, 69 Marxism, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 51, 52, 59,
paid, 36 61, 86, 87, 90, 93, 102, 103,
surplus, 5, 13, 23–27, 29–34, 51, 106, 119, 127, 149, 278, 279,
54, 55, 106, 126, 139, 142, 283, 287, 291, 296, 301, 302,
173, 185, 186, 194, 195, 203, 304, 305
214, 255, 270, 272, 285, Means of production (MOP), 24, 30,
293–295, 298 33, 44, 157, 173, 180, 185, 189,
unpaid, 34–36, 164 248–254
Labourer Metabolic rift, 267, 272
productive, 35, 36, 39, 172 Metaphoric cuts, 96
unproductive, 36, 38, 39 Metaphysical, 105
wage, 34, 35, 185, 214, 252, 253 Metonymic slides, 96, 97
Labour-power, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, Migration, 153, 201, 246, 253
40, 185, 189, 191, 198, 199, Mode of production, 151
243, 246, 247, 256 Modern, 50, 76, 105, 135, 149,
Labour process, 24, 33, 34, 185, 216 155–160, 162, 163, 234, 236,
Labour time 242, 249, 250
paid, 36 Modernism, 134, 223
322 SUBJECT INDEX
Moebius, 11, 14, 86, 87, 223 Non-class conditions of existence, 30,
Money, 33, 34, 40, 174, 176, 181, 37, 39–42, 44, 211, 215, 230
296 Non-class process, 23–26, 29, 32, 35,
Monopolization, 199 36, 39–48, 50–52, 54, 62, 71,
Multinational corporations (MNCs), 158, 172, 176, 186, 207, 211,
182 213, 216, 255
Munshi, 213, 214 Non-class struggle, 51–54, 248, 251
Non-commodity, 29, 48, 164, 208
Non-market, 156, 190, 194, 211, 298
N Normative, 74, 222
Need
hegemonic, 12, 16, 17, 59, 60, 66,
O
70, 71, 75–79, 82, 116, 204,
Object petit a, 112
218, 219, 226, 231–233, 237,
Oppression, 212, 273
243, 264, 265, 280
Orientalism, 2, 6, 8, 15, 50, 76, 106,
luxury, 78
153, 154, 303
natural, 78
Original accumulation, 9, 14–16, 128,
necessary, 78
152, 241, 242, 244, 246–248,
poverty, 60, 66, 232, 233
250, 252–254, 258, 272, 303
radical, 77–80, 82, 219, 225, 281,
Outside, 1–4, 6, 7, 9–12, 15, 21, 59,
282, 291, 295, 297
73, 74, 77, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89,
social, 60–63, 66–68, 70–73, 78,
93, 96–98, 102–104, 108, 109,
219, 234, 269
113–116, 126, 133, 135, 136,
socially created, 78
141, 150, 151, 167, 171, 178,
subsistence, 68 180, 184, 187, 190, 191,
survival, 68, 219, 234–237 194–196, 198, 204, 207, 208,
true social, 78 211, 212, 216, 220, 221, 225,
Need I, II, 61, 68–70, 78, 79, 219, 227, 229, 236, 242, 263, 272,
225, 226, 291, 297 273, 281, 292, 298, 302, 303
Need process, 60, 65–67 Overdetermination, 13, 21, 22
Need struggle, 65, 66, 68, 77, 233,
265, 296
Negation (Verneinung ), 2, 85, 91 P
Neoliberal, 174, 178, 182, 191, 226, Paradigm, 17, 82, 92, 156, 167, 201,
229, 263, 264 233, 264, 265, 290
Neurosis, 12, 92, 93 Particularism, 8, 273
Neurotic phenomenon, 14, 90 Partnership, 174, 178, 182, 227, 265
NGOs, 65, 132, 196, 220, 227, 233, Peasantry, 149, 150, 252
241, 251, 262–266 Per capita income, 167
Nodal point (point de capiton), 12, Performance of surplus, 31, 32, 173,
72, 75, 82, 88, 99, 100 179
Non-capital, 3–6, 10–12, 15 Permanent revolution, 297
SUBJECT INDEX 323
Planetary, 73 cultural, 188, 249

Plunder, 140–142, 242, 243, 245, economic, 23, 25
248, 252, 254, 257–260, 290 natural, 23, 40, 152, 188, 202,
Plurality, 118 256–258, 267, 271
Political, 2, 7, 23, 24, 36, 37, 40, 51, political, 40
55, 61, 65, 66, 76, 77, 79, 93, Producer, 25, 32, 41, 213–215, 248,
94, 98, 105, 106, 112, 114, 118, 294
119, 127, 128, 130, 133, 141, Production, 7, 8, 14, 17, 24, 25, 27,
155, 159, 164, 201–203, 218, 29, 32–35, 42, 43, 61–63, 65,
235, 243, 245, 250, 251, 68, 69, 79, 80, 87, 90, 96, 98,
262–264, 268, 282–284, 286, 100, 103, 104, 106, 140, 142,
290, 293, 296, 298, 305, 306 156, 157, 162, 178–181, 184,
Politics, 1, 7, 10, 51, 52, 54, 63, 66, 185, 195, 197–200, 202, 203,
73, 74, 82, 86, 90, 94, 99, 105, 212–215, 218, 220–223, 233,
118, 119, 127, 129, 131, 133, 234, 247–249, 254, 260,
142, 153, 154, 158, 212, 230, 266–268, 272, 285, 292, 294,
248, 261, 264, 266, 273, 279, 297, 301
281–283, 301, 302, 304, 305 Productive capitalist, 33, 35–37,
Post-Althusserian Marxism, 86 39–43, 46, 172, 175, 178, 186,
Postcapitalist, 2, 5–11, 51, 55, 59, 208, 255, 259
78, 106, 144, 153, 242, 243, Productivity, 34, 60, 159, 160, 162,
273, 283, 284, 297, 301, 303 163, 167, 188, 225, 265, 272
Postcolonial, 2, 3, 8, 15, 50, 222, 303 Profit, 16, 26, 35, 46
Postdevelopmental, 70, 73, 74, 76 Progress, 10, 15, 43, 74, 144, 149,
Post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, 86 159, 164, 212, 296, 303
Post-orientalist, 2, 3, 9, 106 Proletariat, 260, 305
Post-structuralist, 95, 97, 100 Property rights, 250
Poverty, 6, 8, 60–62, 66, 67, 74,
139, 150, 153, 156, 159, 207,
220, 222, 226–228, 231–234, R
237, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268 Race, 27, 54, 217, 218
Power, 10, 25, 27, 51, 54, 55, 66, Racism, 76
72, 75, 87, 106, 112–115, 134, Ranis-Fei model, 150
157, 176, 178, 191, 192, Rate of exploitation, 34
197–199, 202, 208, 223, 250 Rate of profit, 47
Praxis, 8, 11, 55, 106, 128, 140, 226, Real, 86–88, 90, 92, 96–103, 105,
243, 262, 273, 284, 285, 108, 109, 111–114, 118, 131,
296–298, 301, 302, 304 136, 145, 285, 304
Pre-capitalist, 50, 106, 140, 154, 164, real
303 realDark Continent , 88, 127, 128,
Primary goods, 71 139, 140, 144, 207, 223, 283
Process realdystopic , 88, 130, 139, 140, 207
324 SUBJECT INDEX
realevil , 88, 90, 101, 102, 104, formal, 161–164, 166, 196
114–116, 127–133, 139–143, home, 189, 213–216
207, 223, 237, 242, 251, 266, household, 154
269, 272, 288, 289 informal, 132, 141, 154, 155,
realutopic , 237, 289 160–167, 196, 220, 251
realvictim , 71–73, 88, 90, 101, 102, Self-reliance, 191, 192, 202
104, 114–116, 127–133, 135, Serf, 29
136, 139–141, 143, 144, 207, Sexuality, 77, 222, 283
219–224, 226, 232, 235, 237, Shared environment, 202, 216–219,
242, 243, 245, 251, 262, 269, 223, 225, 255, 266, 270, 272
272, 281, 288, 291, 292 Sharing, 29, 31, 69, 70, 81, 160, 281
realvictim –realutopic –realevil , 88, 90, Signification, 54, 99, 111, 113, 145,
101, 102, 104, 114, 115, 129 193, 220
substitute real-s, 87, 88, 90, 102, Signifier
114, 139 anchoring, 97, 280
Reality, 95, 100 crypted nodal, 87, 89, 97, 126, 285
Real-real, 90, 101, 102, 114, 128, floating, 16, 97, 138, 178, 193,
131, 138 195, 202
Receipt of surplus, 5, 24, 25, 27, 36, missing, 2, 85
37, 51, 79, 139, 179, 295 nodal, 16, 17, 32, 59, 82, 101,
Remainder-reminder, 138 115, 127–129, 138, 139, 154,
Rent, 12, 36, 46, 90, 155, 157, 181, 178, 180, 193, 195, 196,
198, 199, 215, 254 202–204, 218, 232, 236, 243,
Repression (Verdrängung ), 1 307
Reserve army of unemployed, 151 substitute, 17, 55, 127–130, 132,
Resistance, 153, 202, 223, 236, 237, 133, 140–142, 157, 193, 194,
242, 251, 258, 261, 262, 266, 203, 217, 218, 232, 236, 303
273, 301–303
Signifier-jouissance complex, 85
Revenue
Simple reproduction, 189–191, 207
non-class, 44, 174, 181
Sinthome, 104, 114, 130, 289
subsumed class, 44, 172, 174, 257
Site, 23, 25, 26, 29, 43, 51, 77, 173,
Risk management, 219, 226, 233–235
174, 187, 211–214, 216, 219,
Rural, 15, 144, 149, 150, 153, 156,
254, 272, 298
160, 166, 196, 197, 211, 218,
Slavery, 3, 29, 54, 81
220, 223, 236, 246, 253, 263
Socialism, 52, 142
Social protection, 196, 207, 226,
S 229–231, 233, 234, 266
Secret, 59, 82, 89, 94, 98, 119, 145, Social surplus (SS), 17, 62–67, 69,
203, 230, 232, 272, 302 82, 230–233, 264, 265, 295
Sector Sole proprietorship, 178
agricultural, 159, 197 South, 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 115,
agricultural-informal, 195, 196 155, 177, 181, 192, 199, 200,
SUBJECT INDEX 325
211, 213, 222, 225, 268, 272, Symbolic order, 12, 13, 87, 106, 285,
303 288
Sovereign, 140, 237, 266, 271
Spectral, 90, 93, 94
Standard of living, 60, 182, 261
T
State, 17, 21, 22, 29–31, 35–37, 39,
Taboo, 109, 217
42–44, 46, 52, 53, 61, 65, 67,
Technology, 34, 50, 173, 179, 191,
71, 75, 80, 97, 109, 140, 165,
242, 252, 267–270, 272
172, 174–177, 181, 182,
Teleological, 69, 164, 165, 236
184–186, 188–192, 196,
200–202, 208, 212, 213, 220, Telos, 26, 154, 167, 304
223, 224, 228, 230, 231, 242, Thick version of need, 74, 75
245, 249–251, 253–257, Thin version of need, 71–74
262–265, 267, 269, 302, 303 Third world, 1, 4–6, 8–11, 15–17,
Structural adjustment program (SAP), 59, 71, 74, 76, 77, 82, 97, 112,
227, 229, 234 119, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135,
Subject, 2–8, 10–14, 16, 25, 41, 42, 136, 140, 154, 155, 158, 208,
51, 53, 68, 69, 73, 82, 91–93, 212, 217, 218, 220–222,
95–99, 106, 109, 111, 118, 129, 224–226, 231, 232, 236, 237,
140, 141, 143, 174, 195, 203, 242, 244, 245, 252, 254, 288,
208, 212, 219, 222–225, 232, 291, 303
243, 253, 278, 281, 284, Third world economy, 5, 15, 139,
286–289, 303–306 143, 242, 266, 291
Subjectification, 224 Third worldification, 249
Third worldism, 3, 4, 16, 17, 50, 68,
Subjection, 224
77, 106, 125, 129, 130, 136,
Subjectivity, 70, 98, 219, 290, 292
139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 195,
Super-exploitation, 198 203, 207, 208, 217, 220, 226,
Surplus 235, 266, 273, 281, 303
production, 62 Third worldliness, 154
social, 17, 62–67, 69, 82, 230–233, Third world woman, 16, 119
264, 265, 295 Trade, 51, 176, 181, 200, 226, 228,
Surplus economy, 61, 68 253
Surplus population, 151 Trade union, 21, 40, 51, 52
Surplus value (SV), 3, 11, 16, 24, Traditional, 29, 32, 50, 74, 76, 77,
30–47, 52, 54, 63, 64, 75, 138, 95, 105, 143, 154–156, 159,
142, 157, 172–175, 178, 180, 160, 228, 234, 249, 279, 283,
181, 185, 189, 193–195, 285
198–200, 202, 203, 214, 215, Transition, 26, 50, 106, 136, 139,
230, 255–258, 270, 271 150–152, 154, 159, 160, 162,
Sustainable, 152, 266, 272 163, 165–167, 186, 196, 197,
Suture, 87, 90, 96–100, 305 228, 229, 262, 293
326 SUBJECT INDEX
U 228, 237, 242, 244, 245, 260,

Unconscious, 7, 13, 86, 97, 126, 261, 271, 273, 303
203, 284, 306
Unconscious discourse, 89
Universal basic income (UBI), 67 W
Universalism, 8, 72, 75, 273 Wage
Urban, 15, 149–151, 153, 196, 201, contractual, 161
202, 211, 218, 236, 246, 251 in kind, 161
Urbanization, 152, 201, 253 subsistence, 161
Welfare, 81, 191, 234
Use value, 24, 26, 34, 43
Worker
productive, 39, 40, 42, 43, 52,
255, 258
V unproductive, 39, 40, 42, 46
Value, 10, 15, 24, 26, 30–44, 46, 54, Working class, 6, 39, 42, 43, 53, 149,
63, 64, 67–69, 82, 105, 138, 150
139, 141, 143, 150, 157, 160, Working through, 8, 9, 14, 302
162–164, 172–181, 184–186, World Bank, 11, 17, 65, 70, 71, 73,
188, 190, 193–196, 198–201, 74, 82, 135, 163, 166, 187, 196,
208, 212, 215, 224, 243, 208, 220–223, 225–236, 244,
254–258, 260, 268, 271, 294 261–266, 281, 290
Value added, 162, 184, 198, 199 World of the third (WoT), 2, 4–7,
Value capture, 198–200 9–11, 13, 15–17, 59, 71, 77, 82,
Value chain, 41, 150, 184, 185, 188, 85, 88, 119, 128, 129, 133, 136,
198–200, 215 151, 158, 159, 196, 207, 208,
Violence, 14, 15, 59, 96, 128, 134, 211, 212, 220, 235, 249, 277
149, 150, 153, 158, 212, 221, market, 187, 188, 190, 193

World of The Third and The Hegemonic Capital

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

World of the Third and

World of the Third

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Orbon Alija/E+/Getty Images

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment

Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the

Peter Lamb, Harold Laski, the Reluctant Marxist: Socialist Democ-

Given that Marx provided an analysis of nineteenth-century western

globalization has been a recurring sub-theme in the encounter of the ‘rest’

West Bengal, India Anjan Chakrabarti

1 (Un)doing Marxism from the Outside 1

Author Index 311

(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside

In contemporary analysis of the relation of psychoanalysis to [Marxian]

The book’s focus is on the outside, as also on hegemony. The urgency of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

negation (Verneinung ), disavowal (Verleugnung ), foreclosure (Verwer-

hegemony—the book addresses “the question of the subject and of the

Marx analyzed capital’s relation with not-capital in the Grundrisse (1857),

In addition to the question of capital and pre-capital–non-capital,

… the historical evolution of a theoretical system, especially one like

Which script no longer works? We have argued in this book that

birthed in an overdetermined and contradiction-ridden milieu. One such

disaggregation under conditions of global capitalism. Hence, this book

Between Marx and Freud

Chapter 10 is a reflection on these questions. This chapter, however,

imbricated within the logic of local–global markets, and even if imbri-

4 “The ‘Third World’ began as a loose political alliance (‘non-alignment’) between

third world as lacking underside works as a delusional veil on the truth

The Moebius of Inside-Outside

We have designated this foregrounded other as the small “other”,

discourse, or what we have designated as hegemonic need in Chapter 3 (to

Capital, Capitalism and Hegemony:

This book argues, however, that the question of hegemony, especially

The hegemonized, on the other hand, is unconsciously interpellated to

World of the Third: Beyond Global and Local

Chapters 7–9) and its relocation to the simple dualism of capital/pre-

The auto/bio-graph (Derrida 1987: 336) of world of the third that we

Chakrabarti, A., and A. Dhar. 2009. Dislocation and Resettlement in Develop-

———. 1998. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge …

Class and Overdetermination

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

or a few processes; all are the result of a constellation of processes (known

(structure/whole determining the individuals/parts). Either way, both

non-class processes. As the relation between class and non-class processes

Class, Economy, and Society

What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the

feudal if marked by a feudal FCP; and so on. Notwithstanding its identi-

Modes of Appropriation and Exploitation

Class Matrix and Class Set: A Detour on Method

Class Matrix and the Forms of FCP

Table 2.1 Fundamental class process and modes of appropriation

Appropriation of surplus labour

Performance of surplus labour Individual Labour Non-labour Collective Labour

from appropriation, but involving appropriation) from appropriation)

Source Chakrabarti et al. (2020: 509)

As explained earlier, class enterprise as the site of overdetermined class

of its organization of exploitation in value form, which we will do in

becomes a state communist commodity. One needs to extract the commu-