Recently I read some thing calling for land reform in Pakistan. Land reform is important, but leftists need to be clear on the parameters and forms of land reform necessary. Here are some tentative thoughts.

It’s not enough to break up large landholdings and to distribute them amongst small farmers.

For many small farmers who already have possession of land, they lack the capital (that is, money) required to invest in the land to make it intensively productive. They cannot afford fertilizers, pesticides, appropriate seeds, and other forms of inputs needed to make things work out.

Additionally, some kinds of capital, especially machinery, requires extensive (not just intensive) farming. The smallholding patterns, with individual households making individual decisions about crop growth and consumption/sale, will and does get in the way of potential for larger scale farming.

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Provincializing Marxism: Vivek Chibber and the Specter of Subaltern Studies[1]
Noaman G. Ali

Vivek Chibber’s trenchant criticisms of the Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) have justifiably attracted considerable attention. Marxist critiques of postcolonial theory have a long pedigree, but at least since the 1990s they have been somewhat defensive in orientation. Buoyed by the emergence of mass movements in North Africa and in the West, Chibber seeks to present his contribution as a decisive blow.

Aside from the question of criticism, the engagement between Chibber and the Subaltern Studies project (SS) should also reignite debates within Marxism. At one point, Chibber describes SS’s Marxism as that of a “particular kind [that] would scarcely be recognized by many contemporary Marxists” (10).[2] Chibber refers specifically to SS’s supposed “amalgam of liberal and Marxist elements” and the resulting “Whiggish interpretation” of modernity that glorifies the role of the bourgeoisie, but he is actually making deeper claims about Marxism as a whole, that are not only analytical but also normative. This, too, is worth interrogating.

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The greatest example of non-violent revolution is supposed to be M.K. Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian nationalist movement, and this proves that non-violent revolution is not only desirable but possible. Unfortunately, the history of non-violent movements is taught selectively and I would say misleadingly. The neo-Gandhian formula is premised upon an inadequate and inaccurate assessment of i) formation of modern states in general, ii) the Indian independence struggle, and iii) Gandhi’s politics.

Modern state-formation is the result of tremendous struggles among various actors. Different classes occupy different positions of power, and often modern state-formation has been the result of class struggle, mixed in with several other considerations, like ethnicity, nationality, geography, regionalism, so on. These struggles have, in general, been very violent. The key question is not whether or not a political order can be established without violence, the key questions are: who is wielding the violence? whose violence wins? who maintains and imposes violent after the formation of the new order?

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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.

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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