9. The Fragmented Subject and a Theory of Leadership

Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1922), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: The Merlin Press, 1971), p. 197.

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. J.B. Baillie, Section B, “Self-Consciousness”, para 179–183—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​hegel/​works/​ph/​phb.​htm (accessed on 20 December 2016).

In some sense, Michel Foucault’s intellectual life with its specific discontinuities and ruptures represented the possibilities and limits of this history of inquiry into the dynamics of subject-formation. See on this, Michael C. Behrent, “The Genealogy of Genealogy: Foucault’s 1970–71 Course on The Will to Know”, Foucault Studies, 13, May 2012, pp. 157–178.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 226.

Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857–58, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 392; also available at Marxist Internet Archive—http://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1857/​grundrisse/​index.​html.

“History, Production and Method in the 1857 ‘Introduction’”, pp. 14–15.

Partha Chatterjee’s Nation and Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992) is tantalisingly perched on this dilemma.

Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, English edition, 1892, in Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 95–151.

V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902), The Marxist Internet Archive, https://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​download/​what-itd.​pdf, pp. 47–48.

Lenin wrote specifically, “We urged the necessity of carrying the class struggle into the rural districts in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the emancipation of the peasantry… In connection with the new law we attacked the feudal landlords and the government which serves them… and we welcomed the illegal Zemstvo congress. We urged the Zemstvo to pass over from abject petitions… to struggle… We exposed the “senseless dreams” and the “lying hypocrisy” of the cunning liberals… while pointing to the violent fury with which the government-gaoler persecuted “peaceful writers, aged professors, scientists, and well-known liberal Zemstvo members” (What is to be Done?, p. 58).

Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism (1847), section 8—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​marx/​works/​download/​pdf/​Manifesto.​pdf (accessed on 26 December 2016).

Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), p. 111.

Mao Tse Tung, “The Question of Independence and Initiative within the United Front” (1938), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 2—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-2/​mswv2_​11.​htm (accessed on 28 December 2016).

Mao Tse Tung, “Unity to the Very End” (1940), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 2—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-2/​mswv2_​36.​htm (accessed on 28 December 2016).

Mao Tse Tung, On New Democracy (1940), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 2—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-2/​mswv2_​26.​htm#p5 (accessed on 28 December 2016).

“Be a True Revolutionary” (1950), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 5—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-5/​mswv5_​08.​htm (accessed on 27 December 2016).

“Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War” (1936), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 1—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-1/​mswv1_​12.​htm (accessed on 27 December 2016).

Naga rebel leader T. Muivah’s interview to Kapan Thapar on the BBC TV Hard Talk programme; the interview is discussed in details in “A Rebel’s Vision” in Ranabir Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject, (New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 2010), Chapter 6, pp. 162–186.

In this context we have to study rigorously the narrative of what is known as “counter-Enlightenment”. See for instance an account of the debate on counter-Enlightenment, Robert E. Norton, “The Myth of Counter-Enlightenment”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (4), October 2007, pp. 635–658; historians have also recorded the collective violence, oaths of solidarity, swearing, use of harsh language, ardent appeals, forceful interventions and the display of an energy produced out of the “combustible mix of indignation, ritual humiliation, and the threat to the blood”—phenomena noted, for instance, by William Beik, “The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution”, Past and Present, 197, November 2007, pp. 75–110. Beik notes the moral indignation of the people, “their desire to punish the authorities for the latter’s abuse of power”, “the emergence of factional politics” out of this hyper energy, and a clear decision among the people, “excluded from decision making (now) shifting their loyalty to the rioters”. Beik notes what we may call the moral contagion.

Georg Lukacs, Hegel’s False and His Genuine Ontology, trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Merlin Press, 1978).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus—A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 248.

R. Samaddar, The Materiality of Politics, 2 vols (London: Anthem Press, 2007); R. Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject (New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 2010).

Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital (Volume 3) remain the best instances of that.

Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, Part III, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1969)—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​althusser/​1962/​overdeterminatio​n.​htm (accessed on 29 December 2016).

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their article, “The Materiality of Communism: Politics beyond Representation and the State”, are aware of the paradox when they write in a critique of the idea of politics as representation, “Nevertheless we are convinced that the criticism of political representation is a key feature of a communist politics—to put it even more sharply, we are convinced that, there is no communist politics without a criticism of political representation. There is no contradiction here with the unease we have just declared. When Marx and Engels famously wrote, with a reference to the statutes of the First International, that “the liberation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself” they clearly set the stage for a communist politics conceived of as a radical criticism of representation. At the same time, we believe that because Marx and Engels were not naive, they were also acutely aware of the difficulty and even of the paradoxical nature of the task they were outlining. The “liberation of the working class” is presented here as the result and the effect of the process through which the working class constitutes itself as a political subject”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 113 (4), Fall 2014 (pp. 778–790), p. 784.

E.J. Hobsbawm wrote in The Revolutionaries, “Here again, what forces people towards conscious revolutionism is not the ambition of their objective, but the apparent failure of all alternative ways of attaining it, the closing of all doors against them… Becoming a revolutionary implies not only a measure of despair, but also some hope. The typical alternation of passivity and activism among some notoriously oppressed classes or peoples is thus explained.” (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 248; see also in connection to this various reflections on revolutionary activism in the sixties of the last century; for instance, Ernest Tate, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s: A Memoir, Volume One, Canada, 1955–1965 (London: IMG Publications, 2014).