World of The Third and The Hegemonic Capital
World of The Third and The Hegemonic Capital
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
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Titles Published
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
71. Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern
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.
Titles Forthcoming
xiii
xiv TITLES FORTHCOMING
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
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.
xxiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
‘(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside’ is the title of the paper by Chakrabarti,
Dhar and Cullenberg (2016).
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
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.
6 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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)?
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)
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?
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?
1 (UN)DOING MARXISM FROM THE OUTSIDE 17
References
Abraham, N., and M. Torok. 1986. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy,
trans. N. Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Badiou, A. 1992. Conditions. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1999. Manifesto for Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
———. 2009. Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels. London: Continuum.
Basole, A., ed. 2015. Lokavidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination
for the Knowledge Age. Delhi: Aakar Books.
Basu, P.K. 2016. “Inclusive Growth”: A Lacanian Reading. Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 28 (2): 255–262.
Berger, M. 1994. The End of the “third world”? Third World Quarterly 15 (2):
257–275.
Bhattacharya, K.C. 1954. Swaraj in Ideas. Visvabharati Quarterly 20: 103–114.
Bosteels, B. 2009. Translator’s Introduction. In Theory of the Subject, ed. A.
Badiou. London: Continuum.
Callari, A. 2016. Marxism from the Outside: A Take on World of the Third and
Global Capitalism. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture &
Society 28 (2): 263–270.
18 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
1 See Wolff (1996) for a dialogue and possible reconciliation between Hegel and
Althusser on the issue of contradiction.
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 23
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.
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 25
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.
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;
26 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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.
34 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 35
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.
36 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
40 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 41
6 On Marxian theory of wage, profit, and income, see Resnick and Wolff (1987, 2006).
42 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
Generally,
Σ Σ
SV = SSC P
Σ
conditions of such revenue generation, another set of expenditures of Y
are incurred,
Σ Σ
NC R = Y
7 See Resnick and Wolff (1987, Chapter IV) for a full-fledged discussion on profit.
48 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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].
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 49
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
50 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 51
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
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 53
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
2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 55
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2 CLASS AND OVERDETERMINATION 57
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,
1 See Chakrabarti et al. (2008), Chakrabarti and Dhar (2013) and Chakrabarti (2013).
62 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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
64 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
3 THE SECRET ABODE OF NEED: FROM HEGEMONIC NEED … 65
(remunerated) (un-remunerated)
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)
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)
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
80 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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:
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.
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CHAPTER 4
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?
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
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
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 89
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)
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.
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
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 93
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.
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 95
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
98 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 99
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:
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.
100 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 101
1. the realvictim
2. the realevil
3. the realutopian …
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.
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 103
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.
104 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 105
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.
106 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 107
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).
108 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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’.
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 109
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
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.
110 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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?
4 FORECLOSURE, DELUSIONAL VEIL, AND THE LACANIAN … 111
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.
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 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)
realvictim realutopian
[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)
real
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
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CHAPTER 5
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
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”
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.
128 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
130 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
132 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
5 GLOBAL CAPITALISM AS HEGEMONIC: WORLD … 133
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.
5 GLOBAL CAPITALISM AS HEGEMONIC: WORLD … 135
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.
Hegemony
Foreclosure
Real-real
Remainder-reminder
Unspeakable-unspoken
Capital
WoT
THIRD WORLDISM
Fig. 5.1 The hegemonic: between the delusional veil and nodal points (Source
Self-constructed)
138 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
Foreclosure of Class
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.
144 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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 .
References
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the Practical and the Propositional. In Women’s Education and the Politics of
Gender. Kolkata: Bethune College Press.
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Bilgrami, A. 2009. Value, Enchantment, and the Mentality of Democracy: Some
Distant Perspectives from Gandhi. Economic and Political Weekly 44 (51):
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Chakrabarti, A., and S. Cullenberg. 2003. Transition and Development in India.
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B. Dasgupta, and S. Sen. Singapore: Springer.
———. 2012. Interrogating Inclusive Development in India’s Transition Process.
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an Unrepentant Postcolonial Collaborator. Calcutta: Anustup.
Derrida, J. 1981. Positions, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5 GLOBAL CAPITALISM AS HEGEMONIC: WORLD … 147
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,
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.
152 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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).
6 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: FROM … 153
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.
6 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: FROM … 155
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
158 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
162 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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).
6 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: FROM … 165
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:
6 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: FROM … 167
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)
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Bhattacharya, R. 2019. Primitive Accumulation and Surplus Population: A
Critique of Capitalocentrism in Marxian Theory. In ‘Capital’ in the East, ed.
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170 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
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
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
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.
7 GLOBAL CAPITAL AND ITS CIRCUITS 177
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.
178 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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
182 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
Fig. 7.1 Circuits of global capital. Source Chakrabarti and Dhar (2012)
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
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.
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.
188 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
17 https://www.leathermag.com/features/featuresacred-cows-6708073/ (accessed on
18 June 2022).
190 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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).
7 GLOBAL CAPITAL AND ITS CIRCUITS 193
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.
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.
194 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
7 GLOBAL CAPITAL AND ITS CIRCUITS 201
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
7 GLOBAL CAPITAL AND ITS CIRCUITS 203
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
204 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
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.
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
(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
exploitation
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.
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
216 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
218 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
8 WORLD OF THE THIRD AS FORECLOSED: THIRD … 219
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 .
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.
In many regions poverty and inequality are often biased against ethnic
minorities or women, or disfavored geographical areas. Marginalized from
8 WORLD OF THE THIRD AS FORECLOSED: THIRD … 221
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)
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
224 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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 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).
230 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
…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
232 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
Growth does not trickle down; development must address human needs
directly. (World Bank 2000: 57)
Fig. 8.1 Social protection sector 2001 (Source Social Protection Sector Strategy:
From Safety Net to Springboard, The World Bank: 10)
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CHAPTER 9
Introduction
The class-focused economy of WoT and its associated forms of life may
undergo fundamental transformations following the four encounters with
the hegemonic:
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.
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?
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 247
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).
248 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
5 For the role of terms of trade in erstwhile Soviet Union see Resnick and Wolff (2002,
Chapter 8).
254 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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,
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.
256 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
W = Cc + V + SV (9.2)
W = Cc + V + SSCPState + SSCPMan(sup,skills,adv,cap−accu)
As W – (Cc + V) = SV, ( )
Reported Profit = Π = SV− SSCPBank + SSCPMan(sup,skill,adv) + SSCPMer
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
… 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)
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).
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 261
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)
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:
But then the World Bank also marks a difference between desirable
NGOs and the non-desirable ones.
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)
264 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
8 For a problem of the hyper-separation of ‘thought’ and ‘practice’, see Dhar (2018).
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 267
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).
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 269
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.
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.
9 WORLD OF THE THIRD: ENCOUNTERS … 271
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.
272 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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:
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276 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
Introduction
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
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
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).
280 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
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.
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).
282 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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?
10 EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD … 283
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).
10 EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD … 285
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.
286 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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).
10 EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD … 287
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).
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.
288 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
290 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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.
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
(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
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.
302 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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).
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?
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
306 A. CHAKRABARTI AND A. DHAR
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
10 EXPANDED COMMUNISM: FROM WORLD OF THE THIRD … 307
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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 311
license to Springer Nature 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
312 AUTHOR INDEX
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
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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 315
license to Springer Nature 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
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
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
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