Yesterday I read Dipesh Chakrabarty’s key article for the umpteenth time. And I think that, while it raises some valid points, it goes too far. The point about our historical narratives always following in the footsteps of Europe is a valid concern, and one that does in fact apply to many iterations of Marxism as well in their peculiar formulations of the relationship between base and superstructure.

However, to plug everything (Gandhian peasant utopia to Marxist socialist revolution) into the same metanarrative of “Europe” as telos is intellectually dishonest, aside from flattening the myriad ways in which these projects are understood and debated by their practitioners. (Can we seriously say that the spread of Maoism in the 1960s and 70s from “east” to “west” was litte more than some privileging of “Europe” at the end of the day? That it was precisely such expansion of Maoist ideology that got some of the original Subaltern Studies folks to pursue a Gramscian understanding of peasant insurgency is overlooked by Chakrabarty.)

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Eric Hobsbawm calls it the short twentieth century. It began with the first world war in 1914, and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Perhaps, looking back, people will say that the twenty-first century began when the masses reignited history in 2011.

(Mostly, I just want to drop something here before 2012.)

Capitalist society teaches us to hate ourselves, to hate each other. There’s nothing about ourselves that we’re actually encouraged to love unless it fits into some ridiculous norms and standards. We’re taught to compete with each other to get what we need and want, we interact largely in depersonalized and disarticulated ways — this kind of interaction is encouraged. At its worse, it’s the kind of opportunism that tells you to get in touch with someone to the extent that you can use them. These attitudes have become a kind of second nature, so that it seems natural (you know how people say that it’s “human nature” to be greedy).

To change capitalist society we have to replace this hatred with love. But that’s not so simple, when the entire society moulds you into this kind of hate, trying to cultivate love is tough. And to try and change this society without a basis in love is tough. You can’t really do one without the other. So how do we go about it?

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All of a sudden I find myself reading with keen interest this old school Dobb-Sweezy debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe, and I’m thinking, why the fuck do I care? Part of it is that I want to move on to other mode of production debates, outside of the European context, and all of that shit. But then there’s something that Sweezy writes — that “we live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.” It occurs to me, then, that the reason I’m reading any of it in the first place is because I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that if we aren’t ourselves now living in a time of transition from capitalism to socialism — a time when people are questioning the very roots of capitalism and searching for a humane and just alternative system of organizing the whole wide world — then we damn well ought to be, and I’d like to help make that transition happen.

An excellent rejoinder on the politics and sociology of caste and identity in India.

When I was in primary school I had a class called Islamic Studies in English. I think we had one in Arabic, too, but I probably flopped that one. I remember that as part of our homework we were supposed to have read chapters from the course textbook (stuff like when you walk you should not display haughtiness, or be rude by spitting on the ground, but be humble for being a creature of Allah).

We were supposed to get the chapter or something signed by our parents. I don’t recall my father ever testing my knowledge or understanding of the chapters, but he would often sign it anyway.

There was a hefty punishment for not getting it signed. I think, but can’t say for sure, that corporal punishment was involved. Certainly, from the one vignette I can remember, students who hadn’t gotten their books signed were being sent to the front of the class. Perhaps to have their hands slapped with two of those foot-long wooden rulers that had been rubber banded together, the rulers would be pulled back and then released on the palm of the hand — snap. I do remember having been punished with that ruler at other times, and I do remember that it stung.

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A couple of years ago when I was at York University I remember a conversation between two other graduate students at a campus restaurant, in that campus mall. They were talking about capitalist development, and how it ought to be judged considering a radical critique and considering the betterment of people’s lives. The example of South Korea came up and the one student pointed out that living standards had gone up and people were living better lives than they had been living some fifty years ago in general, and that this was a result of capitalist development. What would a Marxist say to that? The other student tried to counter that a Marxist would talk about how capitalism alienates the worker from fellow workers, or something like that, trying to give a fairly abstracted answer to a fairly concrete question. It was clear the brother didn’t know much about South Korea.

Neither did, I for that matter. I don’t remember if I interjected to voice what I do remember thinking, that to the contention that capitalist development had raised living standards a Marxist would not, without concrete investigation, say much. The Marxist would go and study South Korea and see what trajectories its historical development had taken, and then come back with an answer about whether or not capitalist development was beneficial to it.

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That was it?

After racing through Manning Marable’s nearly 500-page biography of Malcolm X, recently released, I realized that I hadn’t learned anything significant, more than that which I already knew, except that Malcolm was not very happy in his marriage (I knew Betty wasn’t happy with Malcolm’s sexual performance at some stage in their marriage) and that he may have cheated on Betty a few times near the end of his life, just as she may have cheated on him. We also get some more details on Malcolm’s tourism/activism abroad, and details on the relationships Malcolm had with people inside and out the Nation of Islam. Sometimes, these details are almost mundane and gossipy. Overall, the book leaves one with an empty feeling.

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Guest post by Elleni Centime Zeleke

I am confused by the analyses of the anglo-phone left with regards to the social revolts in Libya. The only thing folks seem able to muster are a series of bifurcated abstractions. Thus certain metaphors in the analyses of Libya prevail such as, “greed and grievance”, “patron and client”, “rapacious rule vs innocent population “, “madness vs sanity” etc. Absent from the discussion are: social forces, social base, achievements and contradictions of Libya’s Green revolution, contradictions of liberal-democracy, and the contradictions of market dependency on specific social formations. One of the results of such a skewed discussion is that liberal democracy is idealized as the only viable political order in Libya (or the rest of the world for that matter). This is because absent of an analyses of social processes (which the left seems incapable of doing), liberal democracy gets proffered as at least having the institutional checks and balances to keep evil at bay. Of course, historically we know that this is not true. In fact liberal democracy is very often the problem, as it also entrenches certain odd forms of non-state and state led dictatorship and rule. And no stage-ist theory of history can get around this problem. Liberal-democracy does not necessarily lead to things getting better, sometimes life becomes much more ironically cruel. Modestly, then, we can say that what we need is to build institutions that speak to the specific historical problems of a given social formation. And yet given that the category of evil has been one-sidely operationalized as the concept through which we think about Libya and Ghadaffi, the end result has been that we have all been led down the path as believers of liberal-democracy.

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Why is it okay for Libyans to use violence in resisting tyranny, whereas Palestinians are supposed to renounce the use of violence in resisting tyranny?

Why is it okay for Libyans to use violence in resisting tyranny, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt and other states “both sides” were and are asked to refrain from the use of violence (even though it was and is only one side using violence)?

(I make this post with caveats about the nature of the Libyans resisting tyranny — it remains to be seen if, given that they are now apparently headed by former-Qaddafi regime members, they will be less tyrannous.)