A Politics That Makes Sense

8/12/2019 A Politics That Makes Sense

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A Politics That Makes Sense

Asha Amirali andAasim Sajjad Akhtar

The emphatic victory of Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia marks another

phase in the stunning resurrection of the global left. Comprehensively different from its cold war

predecessor it may be, but the defining characteristic of todays global left is still its unflinching oppositionto global capitalism. Driven by a much more diverse some would say fragmented group of interests as

compared to the traditional working class movements of the twentieth century, todays radical left

necessarily espouses new hopes and aspirations, but also presents many more unanswered questions.

Among the more important of the immediate questions that the left in the periphery faces is how it will deal

with the challenge of possessing state power in a period of unbridled neo-liberal orthodoxy, which, by its

very nature, has arguably even more stultifying effects on peripheral economies than was the case during the

cold war when capitalist imperialism was still facing the challenge however flawed of Sovietism. But

arguably the most compelling question at the present conjuncture is why the global lefts resurrection is

almost completely isolated to Latin America. After all, even though there is widespread resentment to neo-

liberal capitalism around the world, it is only in Latin America that this resentment has taken concrete

political shape.

In much of post-colonial Asia and Africa, not only is the left not in a position to capture state power, it is in

fact a negligible political force. Instead forces on the right often religious are taking advantage of the

polarisations to which neo-liberal radicalism is giving rise. That many of these regressive forces

particularly in the Muslim world have become ever more powerful on the back of systematic political

collaboration of Muslim ruling classes and imperialism over the past two or three decades is not a matter of

dispute, and should not be understated in trying to evince the causes of the lefts weakness in these contexts.

However, it is also essential to broadly consider structural factors in the longue duree that have combined

with more immediate subjective factors to consign the left to its present quandary.

In the first instance, it has been noted that the social structure of modern Latin America as indeed the

entire New World is, in a rather perverse sense, a clean slate, reflecting as it does the almost total

annihilation of pre-colonial eco-systems. The New World settler colonies were distinguished from the vast

majority of Old World colonies in that the latter did not experience the social and cultural upheavals that

come with mass immigration. This is not to suggest that the impact of colonialism on Asia and Africa was

necessarily less acute than in the New World, or even that European settlement was exclusive to the

Americas, Australasia and the Caribbean as is proven by Southern, Northern and Eastern Africa but that

this difference necessarily engendered significant divergence between these regions in the long-run.

The most obvious long-term result of this colonial genocide has been the emergence of race as the majorfault line of difference in the Americas. More specifically, white Europeans or to a lesser extent half-

breeds have clearly constituted the ruling group whereas indigenous peoples and the descendants of

African slaves have never extricated themselves from their position of subjugation. While the trajectory of

racialism has been different in each distinct social formation in the Americas, there is little doubt that race

has been, and continues to be, a major political identity, if not the most important.

On the other hand class in Latin America has also been expressed in much more coherent and politically

tangible terms than in most post-colonial Asia or Africa states or at least those where revolutionary

decolonisation did not take place. This is also a function of the differential impact of European colonialism.

More specifically, in Latin America propertied classes that came to dominate the colonial and post-colonial

social formations and the subordinate classes that they exploited were unambiguously constituted as clearsubjects of a unique development project, albeit within the confines of an emergent world system centred in


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Europe. In contrast, the colonial and post-colonial conjunctures in much of the Old World were

characterised by considerable remnants of pre-colonial social formations, in economic, political and cultural

spheres of social life. As a result, the polar classes were not as clearly constituted as in Latin America and

therefore social conflict took many forms that glossed over class.

Race and class in the Americas therefore have a symbiotic relationship. This is apparent in the fact that thelong history of anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America has been characterised by an overt celebration of

the oppressed indigenous/hybrid culture as personified by figures such as Sandino and Zapata. Yet there are

those who argue that the historic subjugation of the racial majorities in Latin America did not constitute as

central a place in the analysis and agenda of the Latin American left during the cold war as it should have.

Thus the eruption of popular support for the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and the upheaval in

Bolivia for example has largely been a function of a more overt appeal to the racial majorities, without

trying to subsume this cultural identity in the cloak of class.

Of course, that these new emancipatory projects are by definition anti-capitalist underlines that class has by

no means marginalised. Indeed class cannot be marginalised. Yet, the experience of actually existing

socialism in the twentieth century has unearthed many lessons for the global left, and foremost amongstthese is the recognition that culture, and the differences that it entails, cannot and need not be relegated to

the status of epiphenomena with no relevance in a materialist schema.

Regardless of the extent to which there is consensus over the place of race in the strategic engagements of

the Latin American left during the cold war therefore, there can be little disagreement that todays left has

announced openly that race is an immutable reality in modern Latin America and that it is high time that

racism as a systematic ideology of subjugation is addressed. It can and should be debated long and hard

whether the more expansive politics of todays Latin American left can take forward a genuinely

revolutionary political project that is wholly committed to a viable 21 stcentury post-capitalist alternative,

because there can be little doubt that the post-structuralist fashions that have been the intellectual bedrock of

neo-liberalism will continue to be employed to de-radicalise any meaningful political challenge to capitalism.

And given that Latin America has clearly become the vanguard of the global left at this present historical

conjuncture, it is here where this danger must be averted at all costs.

But then perhaps the best way to defend against such degeneration is for the left in the rest of the world to

join the party. But exactly how can it do this? As suggested above, the majority of post-colonial African and

Asian societies are not characterised by quite such tangible ideologies of subjugation that constitute clear

fault lines on which a collective working class consciousness can be cultivated. It may be argued that Indian

society for example is broken up along the lines of caste, and that there is as symbiotic a relationship

between caste and class in India as there is between race and class in Latin America. Generally speaking,

such reasoning is ahistorical and does not consider the fact that caste is form of stratification that precedesBritish colonial rule and integration of India into the capitalist world economy. Furthermore, the Indian caste

system is far more complex than a simple reflection of an oppressed-oppressor relationship. In any case,

caste has been a major political identity in India for most of its post-colonial history and has been shorn of

its potentially revolutionary edge.

That European colonial powers employed the infamous method of indirect rule to administer most of their

Asian and African possessions has been exhaustively documented. This process entailed preserving much of

a pre-colonial political culture something far from immutable that was heavily dominated by extra-

economic dynamics, while prying open segmentary economic units to the rigours of the international market.

The colonialists thereby ensured the political servitude of local propertied classes in many cases actually

giving them unprecedented rights to private property by introducing bourgeois legal and political structures


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while condemning the majority of the colonised peoples to a highly subordinate status that precluded their

recourse to the communal social networks that had existed previously.

Thus, in contrast to the social structure left behind in Latin America, European colonialisms legacy in much

of Asia and Africa in some very identifiable ways is far more complex. In the heyday of radical

theorising in the 1960s and 1970s, there were numerous attempts to theorise on the exact nature of theprojects of capitalist modernity that were created by colonialism in the colonies. Theories on the colonial

mode of production and overdeveloped post-colonial states were the vogue for many years, and made

bold and theoretically novel attempts to adapt classical Marxist critiques.

However, in retrospect and not in any way because of the tasteless post-modern polemic that was at the

forefront of the attack on the Marxist academy many of these seminal theoretical formulations have proven

to be inadequate in explaining the complexity of the post-colonial situation. Among other things, as Marxist

scholarship in general has learned over the past couple of decades, there is a far greater need to attribute

autonomy to the ideological and political realms, and to be much more dynamic in theorising about

historical change. This is clearly a lesson that the Latin American left has learnt, and it is important that left

forces in Asia and Africa also make that leap.

In particular, there is a need to pay more attention to the nature of politics itself in much of Asia and Africa.

Oftentimes the left latches on to the liberal explanation of corruption as underlying many of the problems of

Asian and African polities. It is postulated that African and Asian post-colonial states with overbearing

authority extract massive amounts of surplus and that the administrative legacy of the colonial state

dominates over its far less developed legislative and judicial arms and indeed over society at large. To the

extent that colonialism left behind an overdeveloped administrative state, this analysis is accurate. But it is

highly inaccurate to view politics in the colonial period (and likewise in the post-colonial period) as simply

reflective of some unchanging economic structure. In fact, as suggested earlier, politics in large parts of the

world cannot simply be represented as a one-way extractive relationship between oppressor and oppressed.

By drawing upon and reinforcing many political and cultural peculiarities that it encountered, colonialism

gave rise to a structural logic that is far more complex than the impersonal exchange relationship that

characterises modern capitalist society.

In the post-colonial conjuncture, the state has been penetrated by society at large in that there is no longer a

strict separation between a white state and a native society. As dominant groups and even low and mid

level state functionaries now have access to state resources, and given that state directly or indirectly

controls such a significant proportion of resources in post-colonial societies, a very complex political sphere

has evolved. The operative feature of politics is patronage, yet this is far more complex than simple

corruption, and needs to be understood as such. While the more obvious and decadent manifestation of

corruption is indeed attributable to dominant classes, it also represents a strategy of political engagementof the subordinate classes that is perceived to be in Gramscis words common sense in that it does not

require them to challenge a state and propertied classes that perennially possess the threat of coercion.

There are of course innumerable examples of an expansive revolutionary politics in Asia and Africa in

which subordinate classes have transcended this designated political sphere and courageously attempted to

perpetrate structural change. But then perhaps conceiving of the prevailing dialectic of politics and culture in

such terms is not helpful. After all, there is something to be said for the fact that much of the cold war left in

post-colonial Asia and Africa was unsuccessful precisely because it either attempted to dismiss all existing

political and cultural specificities as feudal or backward or instead itself became vulnerable to a politics

of patronage that is truly difficult to stay wholly aloof from.


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Studies of patron-client relationships were common in mainstream anthropology in the post-war years and

were typically associated with traditional societies. Most Marxist structural analyses did not adequately

deal with the static dichotomy of traditional and modern and the most significant attempt was made in the

idea of articulation of modes of production in which it was postulated that elements of different modes could

and in the real world did co-exist. However, this notion still attributed far too much causality to the

economic realm without considering that the political and cultural realms were extremely complex and had adynamic of their own. As the capitalist mode has become more and more dominant in the third world at

large, politics and culture have remained highly enigmatic, and are far from simple reflections of

encroachments of capital. Indeed, as the Latin American example proves, so-called pre-capitalist culture

becomes a potent form of resistance even as it evolves dialectically with the cultural forms produced by new

relations of production.

In Asia and Africa too the most vibrant examples of resistance to the ravages of neo-liberalism in recent

decades have at some basic level been celebrations of culture, expressions of politics both wedded to the

practices of the past and attempts to break the shackles of domination by the state and propertied classes. For

instance there are the numerous struggles of indigenous communities against big dams all over the world,

most notably in India. Unfortunately many organised left parties have been unwilling and/or unable to makemeaningful links with such movements, while the movements themselves have often represented a clear and

tangible attempt to defy the orthodoxy of the traditional left. Both sides need to recognise the futility of

trying to go it alone, although the greater onus falls on those who overtly refer to themselves as the left to

really meet the challenge of eschewing ahistoricity and pre-conceived notions.

To some extent the resurgence of the left in Latin America reflects a willingness to break with obsolete

methods and analyses. Perhaps more importantly the teleological understanding of historical change that has

afflicted too many Marxisms in too many parts of the world has been rejected. Across the periphery, politics

and culture both of the common sensical and revolutionary kind have to be considered in a much more

sophisticated manner in which the generic objective of development or the victory of the modern over

the traditional is not prescribed blindly. Indeed, the so-called traditional is far from static and unchanging

and has actually maintained a meaningful place in post-colonial social formations, alongwith the modern

which has long been alleged to be its binary opposite.

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A Politics That Makes Sense