1. Introduction: The Postcolonial Condition as a Strategic Concept for Critiquing This World

Mao Tse Tung, “Reform our Study”, May 1941, Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung III (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1960), p. 22.

V.I. Lenin, Once Again on the Trade Unions, 1921—http://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​1921/​jan/​25.​htm (accessed on 26 January 2016).

For instance, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970); significantly we find in Reading Capital the following remark that seems to recognise the problem yet appears unable to come to terms with it: “The analysis of Primitive Accumulation is part of the field of diachronic study, but not in itself part of the definition of the periods of transition (to capitalism). In fact, the analysis of primitive accumulation, of the origin of the capitalist mode of production, gives an element by element genealogy which passes through the transition period, but which in the same movement ascends to the heart of the previous mode of production. The outline definitions which can be borrowed from it must therefore be related to a different analysis which is not an analysis of the origins but one of the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production, and which in consequence does not proceed element by element, but from the point of view of the whole structure. In the study of manufacture we have a notable example of this analysis of the beginnings. The forms of transition are in fact necessarily modes of production in themselves.”—https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​althusser/​1968/​reading-capital/​ch03.​htm (accessed on 28 January 2016); See also Roman Rosodolsky, The Making of Marx’s “Capital” (London: Pluto Press, 1977). Rosodolsky views the section on primitive accumulation as a question of becoming—how the wage worker becomes a wage worker. He wrote, “Marx’s examination of surplus capital showed us that, ‘as soon as capital has become capital as such, it creates its own presuppositions, i.e. the possession of the real conditions of the creation of new values without exchange—by means of its own production process. These presuppositions, which originally appeared as conditions of its becoming … now appear as results of its own realisation … as posited by it—not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence! ‘What follows from this, however, is that the conditions of the becoming of capital are distinct from the capitalist mode of production itself and must be explained outside of it. This is not only of importance in refuting the evasions of the apologists, which were mentioned in the previous chapter. ‘What is much more important for us’, says Marx, ‘is that our method indicates the points where historical investigation must enter in, or where bourgeois economy as a merely historical form of the production process points beyond itself to earlier historical modes of production.” (Chapter 20, p. 268); Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975) excludes any discussion of primitive accumulation, though it discusses neocolonialism and unequal exchange. Even the glossary does not show awareness of it.

Karl Korsch gave a more nuanced observation in “Introduction to Capital” (1932), trans. T. M. Holmes, https://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​korsch/​19xx/​introduction-capital.​htm (accessed on 9 March 2016); Korsch wrote, “Finally he (Marx) addresses himself, with the same merciless and methodical realism to this ‘economically’ unsolved and still open-ended question. He too proposes not an economic, but an historical answer—although in the last analysis his solution is not a theoretical one at all, but rather a practical one that infers from past and present history a developmental tendency projecting into the future. It is only when we appreciate clearly the way in which Marx deals with the question of ‘primitive Accumulation’ that we can understand the proper relation of this final part to the foregoing parts of his book, and also the position within Part 8 of the penultimate chapter, which concludes the historical examination of the origin and development of the acculturation of capital with a treatment of the ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’. These considerations also make clear the compelling methodological reasons why ‘The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’ belongs at the end, and not at the beginning or in the middle of Capital. It was for these reasons that Marx positioned it there, and, for the same reasons, the reader too should save it up until the end.” (italics author’s).

London: Routledge, 1994.

On this David Harvey, Reading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Class XII, Chapters 26–33 (lecture on 16 September 6 2008, audio)—http://​davidharvey.​org/​2008/​09/​capital-class-12/​ (accessed on 26 January 2016); Harvey points out how by combining a critique of primitive accumulation with a critique of colonialism Marx squared up his engagements with Adam Smith (with the latter’s rhetoric of market as a natural institution) and Hegel (with Hegel’s rhetoric of rights) whose writings implied that capitalism could be peaceful. Marx had to reemphasise that state violence, in the form of regulations, laws, conquests and coercive measures, was not only evidence of the violence of capitalism and the production of the working class as a process, but was at the core of the process of accumulation itself.

Chapter 9 discusses this in detail; it also offers a theoretical–historical account of the question.

Some of what I am suggesting can be found in Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

On this, see Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially Chapter 3, “Science, Ideology, and Philosophy”, pp. 158–205; to be fair to Louis Althusser, he wrote that the very existence of historical materialism made it difficult for philosophy to exercise its traditional function of reconciling the category of the scientific with the status quo. Marxism, “causes a complete upset in philosophy: not only by forcing philosophy to revise its categories in order to bring them into line with the new science and its effects, but also, and above all, by giving philosophy the means, in terms of an understanding of its real relation to class struggle, of taking responsibility for and transforming its own practice”—Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 174.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

On this, Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), in particular Chapter 2, “Virtue and Fortune: The Machiavellian Paradigm”, pp. 37–98.

The late Giovanni Arrighi was on the verge of grasping the issue at stake when he wrote Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso, 2007) but he died soon after (2009). While Arrighi correctly located the shift of capitalism to newer territories in the South, his theoretical formulations were constrained because of his attachment to world system theory. Adam Smith in Beijing can be seen as a sequel to his The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 1994). It remains unclear in the works, particularly in Adam Smith in Beijing, what changes the trajectory of accumulation, precisely because he ignores the particularities of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation in the newer territories, in the postcolonial context in countries like India. Neoliberal capitalism broke the existing accumulation system and ushered in new dynamics by enhancing in specific ways the roles of extraction, finance, primitive accumulation, trade and a broad-scale restructuring of planks of production. Adam Smith in Beijing is very much a story of the decline of the United States. The main lesson of the book is not so much how capitalism advances in the South, but that the capacity to generate and attract excess capital is what sustains hegemons. In fact Arrighi argued in that book that the key to being a hegemon was to control finance and capital, not labour or technology. This was a continuation of his argument he developed also in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (with Beverly Silver; University of Minnesota Press, 1999), which traced the rise and decline of Holland and then Britain as world economic centres and located the present position of the United States against those trajectories. –See also review of the book by Frank Dobbin, American Journal of Sociology, 115, 2009, pp. 293–95; Arrighi however noted before his death that while in Africa massive dispossession of peasantry hindered capitalist growth, in China capitalism produced development because people had not lost access to resources, and the State had not surrendered to the market. See on this, William I. Robinson, “Giovanni Arrighi: Systemic Cycles of Accumulation, Hegemonic Transitions, and the Rise of China”, New Political Economy, Volume 16 (2), 2011, pp. 267–280.

V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Collected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1961), p. 394 n; on this see also, Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), Chapter 18, “From Populism to Marxism”, pp. 406–448. Significantly, the subtitle of Lenin’s book, often ignored, was, The Process of the Home Market for Large-Scale Industry.

Samita Sen defines transit labour as, “…I would suggest that we see this at the intersection of two major conceptual grids characterising the understanding of labour in the present: first, transitional forms of labour, which are inextricably related to transitions in mode of production, involving change in forms of labour arrangements, shifts in, creation or closures of labour markets, and in types and structures of labour deployment; and, second, transitory labour, which may be considered in chronological/empirical frame to denote changing and shifting patterns of employment or, in a more particularised sense, may address questions of labour mobility, both physical and structural.”—Samita Sen, “Engaging with the Idea of Transit Labour” in Samita Sen, Byasdeb Dasgupta, Babu P. Remesh and Moulehsri Vyas, Situating Transit Labour, CRG research paper series Policies and Practices, 43, 2012, p. 4; Moulehsri Vyas pointed out three features of the concept—migration as a continuing phenomenon, sectoral profile of labour demand and supply and labour flexibility, and the inbuilt problem of the city and labour—see Moulehsri Vyas, “Transit Labour in Mumbai City” in Situating Transit Labour, p. 10.

Marx described labour as the fire that gives form to a thing: “Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time”—Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–1858), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 308; see also “Immanent Singularities: A Minor Compositions Interview with Bruno Gulli”, http://​www.​minorcomposition​s.​info/​gulli.​html (accessed on 20 October 2015); Bruno Gulli, “The Labour of Fire: Time and Labour in the Grundrisse”, Cultural Logic, 2 (2), Spring 1999, http://​clogic.​eserver.​org/​2-2/​gulli.​html#note30 (accessed on 5 February 2016); see also, Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 2000).

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 245–255), Theses XIV, pp. 252–253.

People’s democracy as a concept has been intimately linked with the question of the nation, national classes and the national popular. As a theoretical concept within the communist movement it developed after the Second World War. It allowed in theory for a multi-class, multi-party democracy as the pathway to socialism in the decolonised countries and countries liberated from Nazi rule. After the rise of fascism and Nazism, Popular Front governments were created in France and Spain and the Comintern under Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov advocated a broad multi-class united front. In this way the possibility of a multi-class democracy became part of communist movements in many countries. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet leadership suggested to the leaders of Eastern European communist parties that they should advocate people’s democracy as the present goal. The Soviet leaders maintained that, the possibility of peaceful transition to people’s democracy and then to socialism was conditional on the global strength of socialism, and the strength of the USSR as a socialist superpower. Mao also argued for a similar idea of a cross-class democracy in On New Democracy (1940). In 1949 he spoke of people’s democratic dictatorship. However it was broadly agreed that in each particular country, people’s democracy had its own distinctive features, since the socialist transformation would happen under specific historical and national conditions. The issue of the united front, people’s democracy and the nation had been always linked in communist theory and practice (on many occasions violated too), contrary to what the postcolonial theorists of the nation would have us believe. See Mao Tse Tung, On New Democracy, Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, Volume II (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, n.d.), https://​www.​marxists.​org/​reference/​archive/​mao/​selected-works/​volume-2/​mswv2_​26.​htm (accessed on 1 January 2016).

Apart from Mao’s writings on peasant revolutions in the period before the-Second World War, which continued to guide communist movements in many ex-colonial countries, one of the illustrative instances of such analysis in the postcolonial context was the influential book, Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma (eds.), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); also see, on the critique by the Chinese communists of what was considered as national bourgeoisie but comprador in nature, “The Revolution in Tibet and Nehru’s Philosophy”, Renmin Ribao (The People’s Daily), 6 May 1959, now available online, http://​www.​claudearpi.​net/​maintenance/​uploaded_​pics/​Nehru_​Philosophy1.​pdf (accessed on 7 February 2016); and “More on Nehru’s Philosophy in the Light of the Sino-Indian Boundary Question”, issued by the Editorial Department, Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) October 27, 1962, now available online, http://​www.​claudearpi.​net/​maintenance/​uploaded_​pics/​More_​on_​Nehru (accessed on 7 February 2016).

To date, Andre Gunder Frank’s, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” in James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gunder Frank and Dale Johnson (eds.), Dependence and Underdevelopment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972) remains a classic; for a short exposition of the school lay-readers can visit the essay by Vincent Ferraro, “Dependency Theory: An Introduction”, http://​www2.​fiu.​edu/​~ereserve/​010029521-1.​pdf (accessed on 3 January 2016).

Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1968); R.A. Ulianovskii, Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal’s Concept (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973).

Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historic Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001) notes the historic evolution of the concept of postcolonialism, avoids relevant debates around anti-colonial revolutions and national independence in that discussion, and includes French thinkers like Foucault and Derrida in the formation of postcolonial theory.

Benedict Anderson’s dramatic intervention (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983) arguing for the autonomy and salience of the nation made mark in this context.

The notion of condition can be human-oriented or can be structural. The human condition is ordinarily assumed to be made of select characteristics, key events and situations that compose the essentials of human existence, such as birth, death, material and affective factors and conflicts. With philosophical neutrality Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition (1958, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); in it Arendt introduced the term vita activa (active life) by distinguishing it from vita contemplativa (contemplative life), which represented her understanding of Western society. According to her there were only three human activities: labour, work and action. They correspond to the three basic conditions under which humans live. Action corresponds to the political actions of anyone. Labour was one of the only three fundamental forms of activity that constituted the human condition. It was repetitive and included the activities necessary to mere living, such as the production of food and shelter as well as any material production, with nothing beyond that. The condition to which labour corresponded was sheer biological life. The third activity, “action”, was specifically political and could only take place in the public realm, that of creating something lasting within the world. It called for speech (“logos”), needed to declare his or her unique existence in order for that action to be considered “human”. The notion (of work) as something rare as well reifying, distinct from ordinary labour, persisted in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard argued, “The postmodern would be that, which in the modern puts forward the un-presentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms… it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable, which cannot be presented.” (p. 81). Condition thus always suggests something more than the condition from which the suggestion emanates. There is nothing postmodern in this, only the logic of reality that will produce its double. The postcolonial condition thus suggests another site—that of a possible dynamics suggested by this reality, to which we give the name “condition”.

Friedrich Engels, “Preface” (1892) to The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (reprint of March 1892 edition, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943), pp. v–xix; also—http://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​files/​17306/​17306-h/​17306-h.​htm (accessed on 25 January 2016).

Lenin, in “Elements of Dialectics” mentioned (point 15) “the struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content…”—Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Book III, “Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion”, V.I. Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Volume 38, p. 222.

Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2009, pp. 13–75), p. 31.

In the usual postcolonial studies—even of Marxist persuasion—the notion of crisis is absent, partly because even Marxist postcolonial scholars focused on condition of production only and ignored the circulation process of capital, which is often the site where the antagonisms in economy flare up. On this see the discussion by David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), p. 337.