Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age

This chapter introduces postcolonialism as a strategic concept to understand the global condition today, and the Marx to be heard here is the Marx who is crucial for a strategic deployment of that concept. This chapter argues that the relation between an appreciation of the global salience of the postcolonial condition and grasping the transformative power of Marx’s ideas is dialectical. The argument for a strategic deployment of the concept of postcolonialism derives from a political understanding of the postcolonial condition. Politics is the basis for the return to political economy, to the ideas of Marx, to the question of social transformation. An instance of the need of such an integrated and over-determined approach is around the continuing reality of primitive accumulation, which has been a salient part of Marx’s writings on capitalism. The postcolonial condition forces us to read these writings in a new way, just as Lenin read Marx in a completely refreshing manner. The postcolonial condition makes Marx relevant once again.

This chapter address the question as to why the postcolonial condition can be termed as one of predicament, that is to say a combination of contradictory circumstances—globally and specifically. This state of combination cannot be understood in terms of a theory of transition, but only as a state in its own right. The need for transformation of that condition demands that we analyse rigorously the paradoxes which define the postcolonial condition. The chapter takes up four sub-themes to explain the postcolonial predicament: (1) the postcolonial imprint on knowledge formation; (2) translation as part of producing the universal in the postcolonial age; (3) the migrant as the subject of the postcolonial predicament; and (4) postcolonial labour as the mark of this situation. The chapter argues that these four issues are global in nature, and hence what we know as the postcolonial predicament is global, and not merely specific to certain ex-colonial countries.

This chapter discusses in the framework of Marx’s concept of living labour the postcolonial context of informal conditions of work and migration. The discussion of postcolonial labour begins with reflection on the process of primitive accumulation as a feature of the postcolonial situation where labour migrates from work to work. The footloose postcolonial labour situation is also a consequence of international investment chains in production of commodities, which are overwhelmingly export-oriented, with production sites often being special zones. Wages are low, the work force is markedly female and labour-supervision rules are strict and characterised by violence. Another aspect of the same scenario is the supreme logistical sites, which require and create footloose labour. In this circuit of commodity circulation, capital will continuously change form, and value-producing labour will be more and more distant from the final stage when profit will be realised from the capital invested, and the revenue shared. In the postcolonial world this, then, is the milieu of living labour, which precisely through its footloose life proves itself also as abstract—ready to be deployed for any productive activity.

This chapter deepens the discussion on postcolonial labour through a specific examination of labour employed in the logistical and infrastructural expansion of economies. Such an expansion requires labour ready at hand but not always necessary; labour at work but not visible; labour living but whenever required can soon be made dead. In this ghostly transformative exercise, money (increasingly in credit and digital mode) seems to be the most important tool. This chapter reminds us of the lesson Marx drew on the question of money in circulation—the supply chain of money—that it becomes a commodity like other commodities, appearing as forms of circulation of the same capital. Hence, even though money’s function is one of capital, it appears as one of circulation—the spectral “other” of living labour in the postcolonial condition. Labour will follow the commodity chain, and will become a part of the commodity chain.

This chapter, on the basis of the discussion in the previous three chapters, examines some of the contemporary theories of postcolonialism. Through an examination of relevant concepts such as abstract labour, concrete labour, need economy and informal conditions of work this chapter attempts to clarify what constitutes the problematic of the postcolonial. It reinforces the argument of this book, namely that without Marx we shall be at a loss to understand the postcolonial problematic and will remain victim of various forms of the postcolonial fetish, such as difference, informal and need. In this background, this chapter picks up few well-known postcolonial works to show how, by neglecting Marx, some of these studies in their efforts to analyse the specifics of postcolonial condition failed in their task.

This chapter discusses the problematic of dual power as a significant issue in the annals of revolutions. The politics which constitutes the theory of dual power and is able to make sense of this feature and build around it is essentially a matter of organising this power, strengthening, defending and developing it as a feature of a particular situation. This can be called a new practice of power. In the revolutionary writings of Marxism, dual power is not presented as a doctrine, but as explanations of situations and suggestions of paths ahead. Hundreds and thousands of militant activists died in armed struggles in postcolonial countries on the basis of an agenda of creating dual power or a “red political base”. Yet there was no pure “red” power that could be brought on this earth and sustained by a programme, unless this idea of dual power had emerged in that programme as a feature of the society at a particular juncture in the history of struggle. Perhaps, then, we can see in the history of dual power not only the presence of an irresistible idea, but also the demand that scientific analysis be given utmost importance with respect to great ideas that have animated the spirit of revolutions.

This chapter studies closely Marx’s use of notions of people, class and multitude in his historical writings. How does revolution produce its subject? To begin with, labour is the objective condition for the reproduction of capital, yet labour is the revolutionary subject. These two meanings of labour stand at the heart of the postcolonial condition, their engagement trapped in a deadlock. Likewise, under the postcolonial condition the promise of an emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity can never be shown as a natural attribute of a phenomenon, but always an attribute of a condition: a conjuncture of circumstances when class struggles transform into mass struggles. It is thus a condition showing promise but no guarantee. The chapter discusses the term “multitude” from this angle, and draws attention to the problematic of people; why people have become the most important concept of politics in the postcolonial condition, how to understand the category of people, how to make sense of the overwhelming phenomenon called populism, and how to analyse the over-determination of classes and masses in politics. Radical transformation of society depends on a resolution of these questions.

This chapter revisits the theory of leadership and organisation with which the revolutionary writings of Marxism resonate. The discussion on the theory of leadership is linked to the issue of subject and plural subjectivities. This chapter therefore first discusses the domination of the theory of subject in Marxist academic writings. In this context, the chapter brings in the question of subject and the leadership, and the responsibility to lead. In this double bind of subjectivity, any subject-centric thought can be only fragmentary. The history of the political subject in colonial and postcolonial history demonstrates this duality: its fragmentary nature and its universality, which implies the responsibility to lead. In this context, the chapter revisits the idea of the vanguard.

Hovering over all the issues of economics and politics in the postcolonial context is the shadow of crisis—crisis as a concept, crisis as the reality of our time, crisis as the reality of all epochs of transformation. Time as an idea and as a reality of our life plays a great role in our understanding of crisis. The last chapter seeks to examine from the writings of Marx and other revolutionaries various expositions on crisis—expositions made in times of crises. These writings are thus self-reflections of the times of crisis. Can there be a revolutionary philosophy of crisis, or, to put it differently, is it possible at all to have a revolutionary philosophy not built around crisis and the idea of crisis? An understanding of this question has a great stake for transformation of the postcolonial condition and the postcolonial age of capitalism.