Infoallglobe

We will be talking here about a novel kind of hegemony-hegemony of post-colonial capital. In a non-essentialist framework. And enlightening its analytical power in the context of global capital.

Our primary concern is to bring out the specificity of capital’s hegemony in the context of a system guided by the logic of mutual constitutivity of parts -the subtle nuances of such hegemony, how they distance it from the hegemonic discourse on hegemony framed in a essentialist set up. The mazes and traps involved in an essentialist discourse on hegemony prod and prompt us to initiate an enunciation of capital’s hegemony in a non-essentialist frame. Our key proposition is that the hegemonic discourse on the hegemony of capital is itself complicit with the hegemony of capital.[1]

We take off from two competing views on hegemony – one grounded in an essentialist problematic (Chatterjee 1988, 1993) and the other informed by the concept of mutual constitutivity (Chaudhury 1988, 1994). Our rendition builds on Chaudhury’s concept of synthetic hegemony premised on cultural differences (1988), rewrites it in the economic terrain and deploys that to bring out the ploys of capital’s hegemony. We then counterpose it to Chatterjee’s enunciation of capital’s hegemony in the Indian social context, bring to light its essentialist and historicist undertones, and point to the aspects of what we consider to be false consciousness involved in such a rendering of capital’s hegemony. Finally, we contrast the two types of hegemony in the context of global capital and show that Chatterjee’s exit from his notion of hegemony is in fact a moment of synthetic hegemony. In the process of contrasting these two competing views of hegemony we hope to smuggle to you a story –our story- of India’s encounter with global capital, bits and pieces of it but hopefully vivid and telling in its effect. For much is at stake.

We will be talking here about hegemony – hegemony of capital. In a non-essentialist context.

Hegemony, then, turns into a problem that needs to be theoretically posed, conceptually formulated, discerned, prised open, but, as we shall see, cannot be countered and contested. But it has a beyond that can be lived leaving the hegemonic space. In a non-essentialist framework, hegemony is not a problem as a concept that is not simply uttered but has also to be theoretically articulated.

Hegemony in an essentialist framework is premised on the existence of two mutually exclusive subspaces founded and separated by two distinct essences. Hegemony consists in one subspace recognizing itself in the image of the other's essence, oblivious or ignorant about its own essence. Following Chaudhury (1988) we will call the above kind of hegemony simple hegemony. Working of hegemony, then, presumes false consciousness on the agent’s (proletariats, for example) part; the agent does not know himself, his essence.

Complex hegemony, on the other hand, is the hegemony of a constructed or surrogate essence uniting the essences of the two subspaces and therefore the two subspaces themselves into one – as if the essences of the two subspaces flowed from the surrogate essence (Chaudhury, Das with Chakrabarti, 2000). Complex hegemony ordains a two tiered determinism. One, there is a surrogate essence of the entire space. And two: the essence of one subspace can determine, manipulate and maneuver the surrogate essence. So, without false consciousness, there cannot be any complex hegemony either.[2]

Hegemony, in an essentialist framework, is then predicated on the possibility of the existence of some irrationality (misrecognition of one’s other as oneself) in and on agents minds.

Then how can one lodge the concept of hegemony in a rational space? By dis-lodging the essentialist space altogether and thereby making the issue of hegemony a theoretical problem. In order to comprehend how hegemony works, one must apprehend the impending danger of a false consciousness that underlines the very concept of hegemony. In short, one must lay out clearly (that is to say, as clearly as possible) what one understands by hegemony – how one defines it.

Laclau and Mouffe (1985) come out with a timely riposte to this question. Their basic proposition is “impossibility of society” that predicates hegemony as a conceptual device to contingently close it as a totality – albeit with cracks and fissures – in order to build up a (provisional) hegemonic social formation. In their scheme, impossibility of society is co-terminous with impossibility of totality, one of the key postulates in the post-modern paradigm.

But Laclau and Mouffe do not satisfy us. Their idea of hegemony occludes the question: whose hegemony is this and over whom? In a sense – in the above sense – Laclau and Mouffe's construct of hegemony signals one step backward from our essentialist wisdom.

We deploy another concept called synthetic hegemony in order to map out the locus of capital’s hegemony over what capital is not. The primitive question question asked is this: “how can the elite space, or more generally a space - say space I - have its hegemony over another space II without appropriating or including it - even while it excludes the other. How can a space have its hegemony over what it excludes? “ (Chaudhury 120, 2000). There are different levels at which hegemony may operate but one type is often ignored : “..how plural hegemonic formation interact with one another and in this process one hegemonic formation dominate over the rest.” (Chaudhury 127, 2000). There are two possibilities: (i) Space I dominates space II where both are present and mutually constituting one another within a totality, and (ii) Space I not only dominate space II within a common totality but also rules by dominating excluded spaces that are not within the totality. Ruling by inclusion and ruling by exclusion : these are the two moments of a hegemonic rule. Before beginning to spell out the details of the moments, let us hear what Chaudhury has to say about these layers of power equations:

“ ..in the beginning there is neither an elite space nor a subaltern space - but there are only two spaces - space A and space B. Space I emerges as an elite space through a process of (unequal) exchange that involves transfer of A’s metonyms into B signifying a surreptitious intrusion of space A into space B. I understand hegemony as a process of such unequal exchange out of which emerge elite and subaltern as discursive categories. [3]

So, the categories of elite and subaltern are not my points of departure, but points of arrival, through an exposition of the process of hegemony.....

Synthetic hegemony occurs through a process of exchange (of goods and meanings) that involves externalities. Metonyms of the reality (persuasive principles) of space A get condensed into the negation (principles of resistance) and the reality (collaborative principles) of space B and thereby usurps space B silently, surreptitiously, unseen.[4] Space A and space B apparently remains as what they were: different. But space B now is ruled by the part objects from space A that agents of space B do not recognize: they think that they are worshipping their own goddesses oblivious of the obvious that their Goddesses now put on denim jeans.

And as they negate too, they forget they are affirming an alien God, for the metonyms of the realities of another space now constitute even their negation.

.....Lacanian categories such as metaphor and metonym would bring out this point in a more focussed way: while the elite space appropriates the signifiers in the subaltern space in their metaphoric transformations, metonyms of the signifiers in the elite space get deposited in the subaltern space. These days, we designate this asymmetric exchange between the two spaces informing (elite’s) hegemony (over the subaltern) as mimicry of overdetermination.

Look: the above does not necessarily entail an appropriation or inclusion of the subaltern (signifiers) into the elite space. The elite space remains what it is. (valorization of subaltern signifiers does not alter it remarkably). But the (metonyms of) signifiers in the elite space intrude into the subaltern space, alter it, and put their marks on it, silently, surreptitiously. In other words, the elite space colonizes the subaltern space. Thus comes into being a colonized subjectivity, excluded from the elite space, yet thinking, speaking and writing in its idioms.” (Chaudhury 121, 122, 125; 2000).

There are two instances of hegemony then: one that emphasizes appropriation/inclusion and the other that excludes appropriation/inclusion. The former we designate as mimicry of overdetermination and the latter as synthetic hegemony. But what constitutes an excluded and an included space?

A totality - space - is construed around a nodal point. The nodal point of a class based economy is surplus labor; we conceptualize society in terms of surplus labor. The outside or excluded part of the class based society is the space where the nodal point of surplus labor does not exist and operate. The subsistence economy here would constitute the outside of the class based society. On the other hand, if we want to conceptualize capitalist economy as the totality then the nodal point of a capitalist economic is one instance of surplus labor - surplus value. The outside of the capitalist economic is the space where the nodal point of surplus value do not apply. Here the outside or excluded space is the non-capitalist economic. Similarly, the nodal point can be commodity while its excluded space that of non-commodity. The excluded portion is simply another space that that is beyond the totality construed around the nodal point. As the nodal point keeps on changing so does the meaning of the totality and its outside. Nodal points signify different angles - perspectives - standpoints - through which to look at the society. An explanation of society based on the nodal point of surplus labor is not the same as an explanation of society based on the nodal point of commodity. An excluded space built around the nodal point of surplus labor may not be excluded if the nodal point becomes commodity. The included becomes the excluded and the excluded the included as the meaning of totality keeps on changing with differing and different nodal point. This is not an essentialist rendition since every space is constructed, its meaning specific to that construction. But then how can a totality (say, capitalist economic) establish its dominance over the excluded space (say, non-capitalist economic)?

A constructed totality with a nodal point has its set of signifier. For example, a capitalist economic with surplus value as its nodal point has wage labor and price as the signifiers. This set of signifier creates a signaling system that enables the capitalist economic to project itself. For example, one type of signaling system is the accounting framework of the capitalist economic constituting principally of wage labor and price that creates the nodal point of surplus value.

The interior of the capitalist economic consists of the capitalist class (those who appropriate surplus labor) and working class (those whose surplus labor is appropriated). The two mutually constitute one another in the production process but not as equal. Surplus labor of workers gets appropriated by the capitalist class. This is an instance of mimicry of overdetermination. Overdetermination, by definition is present in every act but here any projected sameness – equality – symmetricity – is shown to be lapsing into difference – inequality – assymetricity. Another instance of mimicry is the so called freedom and equality of the workers. The “freedom” and equality lapses in many instances including the site where worker is outside the production process and when he is in the interior of the production process. It is not enough to be talking about overdetermines processes per se. We need to specify the type of relationship that emerges from the process of overdetermination. What overdetermination entails for those who are being mutually constituted. What type of constitution emerges from their interaction.

The outside of the capitalist economic with the nodal point of surplus value is the non-capitalist economic. Since the capitalist economic is in reality always in an interlocked process of mutual constitutivity with the non capitalist economic, the signifiers of the two sides has the possibility of travelling from one space to another. Sometimes not the signifier but their metonyms will travel. In other words, the signifiers as well as their metonyms has the theoretical possibility of travelling from one space to another. Not the price but the shadow price - a dwindled version of the parent concept - will constitute the non-capitalist economic. Not the wage labor but a dwindled form of wage labor will constitute the non-capitalist economic. And the metonyms may multiply - prices into shadow prices into further shadowy prices - metonyms into metonyms of metonyms and so on. Therefore the signifiers may contract further and further in their physical presence with their reach simultaneously expanding further and further. Since the signifiers are constitutive of the nodal point and the corresponding totality, this reach effectively signals the presence of the nodal point/totality in its outside space. And this without the nodal point ever crossing the boundary of totality. And without ever contesting/appropriatrion/including the nodal points/signifiers of the outside/excluded space in its system. We then say that space I -here- capitalist economic- establishes its (synthetic) hegemony over the excluded space, space II, - non-capitalist economic.[5]

If we have another totality built around the nodal point - surplus labor - then the interior constitutes of capitalist as well as other non capitalist economic because all of them are defined by the instance of surplus labor. The outside is then the subsitence economic where the rules of surplus labor do not apply. If the signifiers and their metonyms of class based economic travel beyond its totality into the outside space then we say that class (surplus) based economic establishes its (synthetic) hegemony over non-class (subsistence) based economic.

The definition of synthetic hegemony entails that synthetic hegemony of space A over space B is a product of condensation of the signifiers (in their direct or metonymic form) in space A and the displaced signifiers in space B. In the context of the question related to capital’s hegemony over non-capital, the definition is thus: capital’s synthetic hegemony is a condensation of the signifiers constitutive of capital and the displaced signifiers of non-capital.

If hegemony over the outside/excluded space is the synthetic hegemony then hegemony of one space over another within the interior of the totality constitutes mimicry of overdetermination. For example, within the totality via the process of mutual constitutivity, if capitalist economic establishes its dominance over the non capitalist economic then it is also an instance of hegemony. We call it mimicry of overdetermination. Why mimicry?

Space A constitutes space B via its metonyms/objectively and is constituted by space B via its metaphor/subjectively. Space A appropriates space B because it can exercise censorship - including part and excluding other parts of the entity - without space B having the same right/power. Thus a domination of space A over space B is produced via this instance of overdetermination producing asymmetrically in its constitutive elements, that we call mimicry of overdetermination. Mimicry because it projects overdetermination (mutual constitutivity) but not as equal. At the definitional level, both space A and B are equally treated but in the process of their mutual interaction/constitutivity, the equality relapses.

Synthetic hegemony is the beyond of mimicry of overdetermination. It is simply the space where appropriation or inclusion of space B by space A is not exercised but space A continues to maintain its hegemony by excluding space B totally from its rule. Ruling by exclusion and not appropriation or coercion – that is synthetic hegemony.

Let us summarize what we have done till now. Mimicry of overdetermination may generate hegemony if a particular space establishes its dominance over another space within the interior of the totality constituting of a nodal point. The excluded or outside space of the totality is the beyond of the mimicry of overdetermination where the constitution of that space is not based on the choosen nodal point. Synthetic hegemony presumes two hegemonic formations working – and interacting – concurrently as two subspaces. The definition of synthetic hegemony, and the subtle terms involved in it, theoretically nuance situation of dominance of one set of signifiers in a space over those in another space. West over the East, Developed over the underdeveloped, the first world over the third world, capitalist economic over the non-capitalist economic, surplus based economic over the subsistence economic, commodity economic over the non-commodity economic, elite over the subaltern, modern medicine over ancient medicine, and so on. Depending on how we construct a space around a nodal point, we can define the outside of that space as another space that it dominates via a chain of its metonyms of signifiers.

We suppose that it will be helpful if we illustrate synthetic hegemony at this preliminary stage of our analysis in terms of a simple example. We choose the household sector as a convenient point of departure to illustrate how synthetic hegemony of capital might work on it. Here we take commodity and not surplus labor as the nodal point with surplus value as the privileged signifier. The capitalist class process is then space A where commodity operates with surplus value/labor as the privileged signifier along with the metonyms of wage rate and price while the household class process is space B where commodity is absent. How does the capitalist economic establish its hegemony without including/appropriating that is by excluding the household class process?

The focus of the literature on household labor is on the moment of the theft of the household labor: whether it gets the full value of labor power. The concept of synthetic hegemony can supplement to this story: the housewife is not simply exploited within a parallel non-capitalist hegemonic that is her household (the site of the non-capitalist economic), but within a non-capitalist economic displaced by the metonyms of a capitalist market system. In other words, an additional domain –a displaced one- of exploitation is created via the linkage of household sector with capitalist sector. The housewife carries the weight of the exploitation of a displaced non-capitalist economic and the metonyms of exploitation of the capitalist economic condensed into one. In short household labor is subjected to the flow of synthetic hegemony.

Let us explain. Consider a traditional middle class household. The housewife does the household chores inside as well as outside the household. The husband teaches her two children physics, chemistry, mathematics and English everyday of the week. The housewife works sixteen hours a day within the household and the husband does the household job of teaching his children for only two hours a day. If household labor is homogenous, one would say that the husband exploits the housewife.

But in the market’s eyes all household jobs are not the same. The household chores can be got done, in Calcutta, in exchange of Rs 2000 (at most) to a housemaid. The corresponding job of the husband would require Rs 10000 (at least) for it to be done by a professional tutor. (Note: the children are staying home and studying alone – and not rushing to a private tutorial home where students are in bulk and hence tuition fees are much less).

Marx’s value theory informed by the concept of abstract labor would say that the housewife is the net exploiter. In other words, she is indebted to her husband. And the housewife remains indebted to her husband everyday – her debt grows, accumulates and becomes a burden on her that bends and binds her to the husband. And this, despite her working hard day in and day out.

It occurs readily enough to her that the market is not an impartial judge; it does not deem all jobs equally worthy. She cannot pursuade her point to an enlightened society because it is enlightenment – its civilized norms of equality – that devalues her labors. The whole capitalist world here condenses into her little (household) hole. Her sweated labors from dawn to midnight – from her getting her children ready for morning school bus to her bedroom performance – all melt into insignificance in the judgement of the market. And now she can feel the crushing pressure of a stranger (capital) into her hole; capitalist economic is right there in her household in disguise – as a metonym, as an absence, with an absurdity of its (synthetic) hegemonic sway.[6]

The pressure of synthetic hegemony requires consciousness and sensitivity to be felt. Blessed are the ignorant – and those with false consciousness – for they inherit the kingdom of fool’s paradise, outside the reach of capital’s synthetic hegemony.

The reverse is the context of essentialist hegemony. It requires a false consciousness not to be seen through in order to be articulated. Knowledge of essence exorcises essentialist hegemony: if one sees through essentialist point, then there is no hegemony but only the reality of the objective (capital as exploitative). Synthetic hegemony exorcises essence and produces consciousness of its absence leading to an existentialist crisis – because synthetic hegemony of an object over its outside consists in its overflow into the latter.

Let us hope that the above explains what capital’s synthetic hegemony is: an irresistible flow of metonymic surplus meanings into its outside, displacing it and getting condensed into it. Irresistible, that is to say, that which can be neither contested nor countered – impacting differently upon different sites. Household is one such site among many sites.

But that begs the question: what is capital? There are, of course, fragments of a definition of capital in the inventory of our general knowledge, but they are suffused – smeared – with essentialism. One must unhook them from their essentialist moorings and rearticulate them to a non-essentialist problematic.

Recall one of the popular definitions of capitalism: capitalism is the highest stage of commodity production in which labor power itself becomes a commodity. But that touches upon only one side of the coin –the instance of labor power- and leaves in the dark the other side – capital - undefined. So, once again: what is capital?

It is here that common sense and general knowledge associated with the traditional reading of capital stumble into the trap of reification: capital gets personified, as capitalist. And then: capital is a thing. Thinghood of capital pervades – prevents – common perception of it that predicates a life to it of its own that can walk, work, conspire, dictate and determine. For instance, capital can mandate a social system where it can dictate and determine the state apparatus. Though Marx has repeatedly cautioned that capital is not a thing, but a relation: of appropriation of surplus value produced out of wage labor and distributed, largely, through a market network, as commodities. Surplus labor in our opinion is the key concept – the nodal point that binds production, appropriation and distribution and therefore wage labor, capital and commodity into a chain, or more correctly, into a circle. And this whole way of conceptualizing and representing a social scene from the standpoint of production, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor we understand as class standpoint. So class is not a noun – but an adjective, a standpoint, a specific way of viewing a society (albeit, an impossible one to be closed contingently as here by class). Capitalist economic is an economic formation with surplus value as the nodal point privileging the two other signifiers price and wage rate associated with commodity and wage labor that structure the other floating signifiers in the economic into what we call capitalist economic.[7]

Capitalist economic, but not capitalism. Our concept of capitalist economic has only one nodal point – surplus value – that, together with two other privileged signifiers – price and wage rate – structures as a discursive space we call capitalist economic.[8]

Neither can this capitalist economic ground a superstructure. Our epistemological entry point, overdetermination, that is, the process of mutual constitutivity, commits us to a contingent totality of the economic, the political and the cultural. The nodal point, equality and freedom structure the political and the cultural as modern at the level of production, appropriation and distribution of power and meanings. Our rendition of hegemony of capital chooses to focus on the economic in the context of such a complex system. We understanbd that hegemony unlike class or capital is a political -power- concept and are conceptually different. But we are looking at moments of mutual constitutivity, where and how they relapse in the process of constitution, moments where the definitions operate and breaks down into “constructed” reality when the economic become the po;litical and vice versa existing in an interlocked manner and most important into moments where all the above may proudce a system- a regime - an order- of capital’s domination over its margins. A hegemony that is not given but produced. Facing these moments of hegemony are critical because we cannot even begin to address the issues of alternatives unless we are able to unravel the “order” of things and discourses that props up and reproduces capital’s hegemony over other spaces - surplus labor based or otherwise. Without understanding hegemony of capital, we cannot even begin to talk about politics of the Marxist alternative. What faith to break down if the order that symbolizes and sustains the faith is not known or understood?

We will understand capital as having hegemony over non-capital, if the metonym of the nodal point – surplus value – gets condensed with the signifiers in the non-capitalist economic resulting into the displacement of the non-capitalist economic. This produces the instance of mimicry of overdetermination if the two spaces are constituted in a totality with the common nodal point of surplus labor. Neither capitalist economic nor non-capitalist economic are then in the terrain of excluded space. On the other hand, it produces synthetic hegemony if the totality is constituted around the nodal point of surplus value. Non-capitalist economic then becomes the excluded space.

Let us be more specific. Instead of talking about capital’s hegemony over non-capital, let us construct theoretically, a subspace in non-capitalist space – community. Then, what is community?

Community too has its own economic, political and cultural, each overdetermined by the other two. But the usual conceptualization of community – for instance, Chatterjee’s – designates it by its political and cultural only: community is a space structured by shared myths, totems and taboos. We contend that this perception of community needs to be supplemented by an articulation of its economic, if we want to really explore the working of (post-colonial) capital’s hegemony – particularly, capital’s synthetic hegemony – over the community: how capital displaces community. Such displacement is lost from view if one suppresses the instance of economic (as Chatterjee does) in the very beginning.

Recall that our approach conceptualizes the economic in terms of class process, more correctly, in terms of fundamental class process defined as mode of production (or performance) and appropriation of surplus labor. Then one can think of a whole set of class processes capable of being represented in terms of a matrix along the axes of agencies of production and appropriation as shown below:

In this matrix, the first alphabet indicates production (of surplus labor) performed by direct labor (A), non labor (B) and collective (C) while the second alphabet captures the appropriation (of surplus labor) by A, B and C. The six types of fundamental class process in terms of which society can be organized are:

In the above matrix, AA and CC designates self-exploitative class process, AC and part of CA represent community class process, CC communistic class process and the rest map out different kinds of exploitative class processes to be further classified as capitalist class process, feudal class process and slave-based class process. Our focus will be on community class process, and more particularly, on a fractured community class process.[9]

Let us briefly touch upon the meaning of the two types of community class process –AC and the fractured CA. AC emphasizes one of the forms related to the process of the performance of labor that can go along with collective appropriation, but is not exactly similar to the collective performance of labor in the sense of being shared. This is the reason why AC is non-communist class process (in contrast to CC) even though it shares the latter’s feature of collective appropriation. Definitionally, an ideal community class process (AC) symbolizes a situation where the ‘community’ appropriates the ‘fruit’ collectively while jobs at the other (lower) levels of the production are done jointly by individual labor on the basis of a clear division of labor. Division of labor requires that each individual performs multiple different but clearly distinct tasks such that, within that structure of work, no individual has the option to do any other kind of work This exclusion may be culturally given. Agricultural production process might provide a typical example of the community production where individuals sow the seed (and do other kind of related jobs including household work) and the community reaps and appropriates the harvest collectively. In the context of the household, cooking would be an example of a community class process if the household members collectively appropriate (and perhaps distribute) the cooked food while the male partner does the related ‘outside’ jobs (such as shopping and gathering fuel), the female partner does the ‘inside’ jobs (such as the act of cooking).

CA can go into different directions – the adjective fractured henceforth. The two specific forms of class process that are associated with CA are fractured exploitative and fractured communitic. The aspect of sharing that constitutes the community, as “being in common” is present in the two forms of CA even though one of the forms is geared towards an exploitative class process. This again shows that community and communistic class processes are not the same. A class process that has communitic features may not be communistic but a class process that has communistic features is necessarily communitic.

The specificity of a fractured CA class process resides in the shared environment of the community as an input at the level of production and appropriation. The river supplying it water, the air it breathes, the land it tills, the birds it watches, the men and women its members talk to, the forest nearby, the kinship relationship it sustains, the knowledge/information of the terrain its members have – all these together constitute its environment.[10] This environment is shared because members of the “community” can draw upon this configuration of natural and social network without excluding other members to reproduce their life (style) including the economic reproduction. In fact this network may very well become one of the sites of performance of labor that constitute class. If that happens then the performance of labor and its appropriation may take place at two different vertically integrated sites. Generally, under CA type class process, one of the components of fundamental class process (performance of surplus labor) is based on sharing while the other is not (appropriation of surplus labor) – one community-based while the other may be based on individual or exploitative appropriation. In other words CA class process is fractured – the sharing aspect residing together with the non-sharing aspect in one coherent but divided manner.

One part of CA signifies a situation where work is done collectively in the sense of being shared with none of the members excluded from the aspect of sharing but one member (or a group) of the collective appropriates the total surplus labor performed including his own.[11] CA can then be exploitative since others’ labor is appropriated. An example would be a family farm where the entire family (head of the family, brothers, sisters, children, wife, cousin etc.) takes part in the production process jointly without any remuneration at that level but only one person the “head of the family” appropriates the surplus labor of all including that of his own which he then distributes according to some norms. CA can then be exploitative since others labor is appropriated.

But there is another possibility, that of CA being community based but fractured again. A crucial difference from the previous case is that now individuals appropriate their own surplus labor individually but not of others. An example could be the production of drawing milk from the goats/cow. It is common in Indian villages where goats/cows are bunched together to be taken for grazing/taking fresh air/bathing (set of critical labor performances for the final act of appropriation of drawing milk). People in the village join together to take the goats/cows out. Then at home, individually, milkman draws the milk from the goat/cow. Performance of labor is joint/shared while the appropriation is at the individual level. The grazing ground/forest/river – the shared environment or a part of it- and the house are two vertically integrated production sites where two different constituents of fundamental class process – performance and appropriation of surplus labor unravel. This is another reason as to why we call this community class process as being fractured.

With surplus labor as its nodal point, the privileged signifier of community then is the aspect of “being in common” - sharing - shared environment. When the capitalist economic mutually constitutes the communitic economic within the nodal point of surplus labor, the signifiers of community and capital and their metonymic and metaphoric forms travel from one space to another. As a result, both the spaces in a continuous process of transformation are reconstituted and reorganised. When signifiers or their metonyms from one space to the another is blocked or truncated while the reverse is not true then mimicry of overdetermination is produced.

It is now the right time to recall why mimicry of overdetermination entail dominance as a possibility? Mimicry of overdetermination signifies asymmetric relation between the two spaces. Mutual constitutivity but not quite. This happens in the following case. Space A appropriates/includes space B by transforming space B by firing its set of metonyms and metaphors into space B thereby transforming it in an objective manner. There is no censorship here. The accounting framework of capitalist economic with its nodal point of surplus value along with its set of metonyms (such as wage labor, price, etc.) makes its presence felt within the non-capitalist economic such as community class process. The set of metonymic signifiers brings further instances of efficiency/competitiveness that hangs over, penetrates, constitutes the communitic class processes in an objective manner. Objectively meaning no exercising of censorship as a possibility by the non-capitalist economic is possible. The capitalist economic also takes part of signifiers or their metonyms of non-capitalist economic but selectively. For example, the aspect of community such as shared environment may be taken, selectively prised open, its many instances molded and then appropriated by the capitalist economic. In other words, the non capitalist economic constitutes the capitalist economic via its metaphoric instances where the transformation from community with metonymic meaning to that of community as a metaphor (i.e. with altered meaning) is produced by the censorship exercised at the doorstep of the capitalist economic.[12] Non-capitalist community economic lives in a coexisting, interlocked manner with its capitalist counterpart but where the mutually constituting aspect relapses into a not so equal relationship at the end. Mutually constituting - yes - but not as equal. That is, appropriation/inclusion - yes - but as equal no. And it is precisely because of this asymmetric engagement and through this that capital can exercise its hegemony over non-capital, here community. A subterranean sublimated and subtle power relation flows through the process that echoes overdetermination. If it were to be otherwise then the question of capital’s hegemony (and the possibility of alternatives by default) would simply not arise.

If we organize totality/society around the economic concept of class, then we find that the nodal signifier surplus value along with its metonyms –wage labor and prices – penetrates the non-capitalist class processes thereby constituting the other instances of surplus labor. If we define society in terms of the nodal point of surplus labor/class then it follows that the instance of surplus value usurps the other moments of surplus labor in its rule. The nodal point of surplus labor is then displaced, gets substituted by surplus value. That is how the hegemonic rule of capital is produced via the mimicry of overdetermination. Surplus value then emerges as the nodal point of society/totality and its metonyms – wage labor and price - as the dominant metonyms. Note that the other instances of surplus labor are appropriated/included but none of them qualify as the privileged signifier. The regime of capital then establishes its hegemony by constituting society in terms of its privileged signifier - surplus value - substituting for surplus labor. Let us call it “capitalist society.”

If capitalist society is construed around the nodal point of surplus labor/surplus value then the outside of that society must constitute of a social space where the surplus labor/surplus value does not operate. We call it the subsistence economy/society: a social space where class is absent as an economic concept. If non capitalist economic is the margin of capitalist economic then this space of subsistence/self sufficient economy is the margin of the margin – the space of the third – the excluded space – the (post) colony. (Post) colony because the rules of the capitalist society – the surplus labor based totality – does not apply here, as was the case with colonies in the 20^th century. And yet when the capitalist economic exercises its hegemony over this excluded space – the subsistence economy – with which it does not enter into a process of constitutivity we call it the synthetic hegemony of capital. The metonyms of capital – wage labor and prices – are transformed into further metonyms and into more metonyms while penetrating the subsistence economic. Capital/ surplus value becomes a distant entity/process that is so far removed from the reality of the subsistence economies that its presence is barely recognized and yet the regime of capital successfully establishes its rule. Capitalist economic emerges as the benevolent outsider and this it does without ever trying to appropriate or include the subsistence economic in any way within its economic domain.

But what about coercion? It is also part of any rule – sometimes performed in a pervasive manner and sometimes selectively. But we do not call coercion as an instance of hegemony. Hegemony thrives on creating a system of adherence/legitimacy for the rule by inculcating faith/belief in the system/regime/order among concerned agents. It is not exactly violence – brutal strength. An example of coercion is what Marx described as the primitive capital accumulation. Primitive capital accumulation as the extraction of assets (land, for example) from the owners (peasant owners of land) is not part of the process of hegemonic rule. Doing just this (primitive capital accumulation) will not generate any faith in the system and hence cannot qualify as an instance of hegemony. However this does not mean that coercion is not related in any way to hegemony. Often coercive mechanisms are followed or simultaneously backed by faith building measures. The hegemonic rule is not fortified by simply taking but also has to be supplemented by giving that will produce the belief/faith in that rule. The state may take away land of the people (primitive capital accumulation) but by measures of compensation, selling of rosy pictures (future job/wealth prospects for those losing land) which even may come true reinforces the faith/belief in the rule.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained. (Arundhuti Roy 1999, 72).

Coercion, hegemony as mimicry of overdetermination and synthetic hegemony are all present together working side by side and inside one another overflowing from one to the next and back. The rule of capital stretches layer by layer – from coercion to mimicry of overdetermination to synthetic hegemony. Each step deepening its rule and hold as well as stretching further and further incorporating spaces after spaces in its telescopic vision. More on this in section IV

The conceptual structures of hegemony - both mimicry of overdetermination and synthetic hegemony - that we have built are non-essentialist in contrast to the essentialist rendition of complex hegemony. To bring out clearly the moments of essentialism in complex hegemony and the reason for its rejection, we fall back upon the study of Chatterjee’s rendition of passive of revolution of India as a case of complex hegemony and bring to light the insuperable problems ingrained in that analysis.

In this section, We will follow Chatterjee’s (1986, 1988, 1993, 1994) highly influential analysis of India’s capitalist development as a case of the passive revolution of capital. Passive revolution is a social process that leads to the formation of what we call complex hegemony. So this section outlines Chatterjee’s narration of the process of formation of complex hegemony. The following section (section III) will bring out the essentialism and historicism underlining such a rendition while the last section (section IV) will highlight the complicity of Chatterjee’s position with synthetic hegemony of post-colonial capital.

According to Chatterjee, in the context of India, capital is only one amongst many particulars existing within society though it is assumed to be the dominant particular. Its dominance is revealed in the very construction of the project of nationhood. The unity of India as a nation is captured through its projection of a “post-colonial development state” (a term we will explain below) coalesced around the teleology of domination and the expansion of the modern sector by which we mean the sector that accumulates capital. The continuing process of capital accumulation is the uncontested premise of creating a modern nation and any challenge to this premise is a challenge to the content of this vision of nationhood. As Chatterjee points out,

The overall constraint here is to maintain the unity of the modern sector as a whole, for that, as we have seen before, stands forth within the body of the state as the overwhelmingly dominant element of the nation.... The identification of this sector cannot be made in any specific regional terms, nor does it coincide with a simple rural/urban dichotomy. But because of its unique standing as a particular interest that can claim to represent the dynamic aspect of the nation itself, the entire political process conducted by the state, including the political parties that stake their claims to run the central organs of the state, must work toward producing a consensus on protecting the unity of the modern sector. Any appearance of a fundamental lack of consensus here will resonate as a crisis of national unity itself (Chatterjee 1993, 217).

The teleology of capital accumulation, as a strategy for India’s development, was grounded on the idea of historical progress. Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, was firmly committed to that idea as can be gauged by the following comment he made, “We are trying to catch up, as far as we can, with the industrial revolution that occurred long ago in Western countries” (Nehru 1954, vol. ii pp. 96). If capital accumulation was the uncontested teleology of India’s development state and the essence of India’s nationhood, then the welfarist dimension, that Chatterjee points out is a political dimension, is also an integral part of the post-colonial development state. And this produces an almost unsolvable contradiction that constitutes the basis of the passive revolution of capital in India. Let us illustrate this point.

According to Chatterjee, in the classical cases of industrial development, for example in the case of England, the rigors of industrialization associated with capital accumulation proceeded first through the process of primitive capital accumulation propelled by the coercive machinery of the state. This coercive aspect of the state was legitimized in the political and cultural domain “by the equal right of property and the universal freedom of contract on the basis of property rights over commodities” (Chatterjee 1993, 209). The coercive character of the state was later challenged, leading to laws and legislation that mitigated to a great extent the rigors of industrialization (minimum wage, maximum hours of work, etc.). Over time, the coercive state was replaced by what Chatterjee called the welfare state and, consequently, the concept of welfare was substituted for the liberal concept of freedom.

However, in the case of India, the political leadership that came to power was already committed to the welfarist aspect of state ideology. In fact, it was through its claim to be the protector of the welfare of the nation and its constituent communities that the Congress party built its almost uncontested legitimacy as the voice for the nation against colonial rule.[13] According to Chatterjee, this crucial point is often ignored in both the mainstream and the left discourse on India. The Congress party’s opposition to colonial rule was not just grounded on the negative features of the colonial rulers (related to race, ethnicity and religion) that were present but it also had a positive political agenda which was grounded on the economic (colonial rule responsible for the creation of a backward economy, the transfer of national wealth to England, etc.). Colonial rule was deemed to be oppressive and illegitimate not just because of its negative aspects but also because the rulers economically exploited the nation of India as a whole and failed to protect its communities in times of need (from poverty, natural calamities like famines, droughts, etc.).[14] This attack on the British had the strong political effect of legitimizing Congress’s opposition to British rule and its claim for self-government as the only way in which mother India (the universal) and all its community groups (constituting particulars within the universal) could be protected. The post-colonial state (as conceived by the Congress party) as an embodiment of nationhood took upon itself the role of the protector of these different communities.[15]

The idea of the state as a development state carried (in addition to the teleological goal of capital accumulation) this welfarist aspect within itself which is rooted in the economic critique of colonial rule. This welfarist aspect, broadly captured by the envisaged role of the state as a protector of its community groups, provided the legitimacy for Congress’s claim of self-government. As Chatterjee writes,

Self-government consequently was legitimate because it represented the historically necessary form of national development. The economic critique of colonialism then was the foundation from which the positive content was supplied for the independent nation state: the new state represented the only legitimate form of exercise of power because it was a necessary condition for the development of the nation (Chatterjee 1993, 203).

The irony, as Chatterjee points out is that, along with its welfarist role, the Congress party was also fully committed to a modern industrial development strategy directed towards capital accumulation. So the crucial question is how could the “rigors” of capital accumulation be balanced against the welfarist aspect of the state which is basically the protection of pre-capitalist communities that are, Chatterjee argues, anti-modernist, anti-individualist and even anti-capitalist.[16] The two dimensions of Indian nationalism are fundamentally opposed to one another. How could capital accumulation be legitimized as the dominant economic process? Historical progress, which the modernization project demands, requires capital accumulation and its associated rigors but the welfarist aspect requires protection of all pre-capitalist communities and institutions. This immediately aborts the state-sponsored classical road to capital accumulation via primitive capital accumulation since the latter path will involve an assault on pre-capitalist property relations. Therefore, a tension between capital accumulation and the legitimization of capital accumulation as the dominant aspect of society arises which seems almost unsolvable. How can this tension be kept under control so that the unity of the nation (organized around the dominance of the process of capital accumulation) is not threatened? The resolution of this seemingly unsolvable tension between capital accumulation and the legitimization of capital accumulation is produced through the passive revolution of capital by invoking the concept of the surrogate synthesis. Let us illustrate this point.

Capital’s inability to annihilate pre-capital forms the basis of the passive revolution of capital in India. One rendition of passive revolution of capital, as we mentioned earlier, emphasizes the creation of a surrogate synthesis or universal via capitalism’s appropriation of pre-capitalism. In the context of the passive revolution of capital in India, “the object of the strategy of passive revolution of capital was to contain class conflict within manageable dimensions, to control and manipulate the many dispersed power relations (Chatterjee also calls these the pre-modern or traditional forms of relation) in society to further best as possible the thrust towards accumulation” (Chatterjee 1993, 214). Capital has to give space to the pre-capitalist elements, including the dominant pre-capitalist groups as their subordinate partners (subordinate because of the ontological social privilege accorded to capital) and, what Chatterjee calls the aspirations of the popular masses. The creation of this space (that is, the surrogate universal) conducive to conditions of capital accumulation involves a process of hegemonic construction of capital’s rule. That is, the production of the surrogate synthesis involves a process of construction of capital’s hegemonic rule. Alternatively, in this framework, the passive revolution of capital can be understood as the process of creating a hegemonic rule (involving capital’s appropriation of pre-capital) that enables capital accumulation to proceed without any substantive barriers. Kalyan Sanyal summarizes this particular point well:

We can discern a complex and subtle form of capital’s power exercised in relation to precapital. The frontal assault that characterizes primitive accumulation is now being replaced by an attempt to incorporate precapital as a separate entity within capital’s own program. It is appropriation, rather than annihilation, of the former by giving it a place in the latter’s world. And since accumulation can no longer be the sole content of development and the universal goal, capital’s agenda is revised so that it can now address the needs of precapital as well. In other words, capital’s projected ideology now recognizes the existence of precapital, and its particular goals and aspirations (1993, 124).

To repeat, capital cannot rule directly (as in the case of uncontested bourgeois hegemony) but only by mixing some ideas from the autonomous domain of pre-capitalism (the traditional) with its own ideology to create a surrogate synthesis with the intention of legitimizing the process of capital accumulation.

What is the surrogate synthesis for the case of India? The answer, as should be obvious by now, is the notion of nationhood which reifies itself in the body of the state. The state, representing all the different parts of society, embodies the spirit and site of the surrogate synthesis (nationhood) and capital legitimizes its rule via the body of the state.[17] As Chatterjee writes,

To talk about the state as an ‘actor’ is to endow it with a will; to say that it acts according to coherent and rational principles of choice is further to endow it with a consciousness...(1993, 51).

The reification of the ‘nation’ in the body of the state becomes the means for construction of this hegemonic structure, and the extent of control over the new state apparatus becomes a precondition for further capitalist development. It is by means of an interventionist state, directly entering the domain of production as mobiliser and manager of investible ‘national’ resources, that the foundations are laid for industrialization and the expansion of capital (1993, 64-65).

capital has to project the nation as a united whole, with precapital as one of its constituents, in terms of one single set of goals: its national identity does not permit it to allow a part of the nation to exist as its outside. The noncapitalist goals for the periphery, however, cannot be pursued by capital on its own; the mediation of the state is essential in this regard (1993, 126).

The state legitimizes the dominant position of capital (accumulation) not just through coercive mechanisms but also through the mechanism of persuasion.[18] The mechanism of persuasion is effected through its welfarist role as the protector of the many disparate pre-capitalist communities and institutions.[19] According to the theorists of the passive revolution of capital, this political aspect in the making of economic decisions (economic protection for culturally underprivileged and backward groups based on caste, tribe and religion; subsidies, taxation, pricing, licensing, etc. related to non capitalist organizations of production) is completely missed by both the proponents of the recent free market policies and the traditional Indian Marxists. Both these groups of theorists, in different ways, question the existence of the ambiguities (related to the dynamic productive potential of the process of capital accumulation versus the unproductive legitimization strategy of welfare donations) that can be found in the policies of the state. Chatterjee points out that such viewpoints completely gloss over the complex reality of Indian society. According to him,

First, that these ambiguities are necessary consequences of the specific relation of the post colonial development state with the people-nation; second, that it is these ambiguities that create room for maneuver through which passive revolution of capital can proceed; and third, that these ambiguities cannot be removed or resolved within the present constitution of the state (Chatterjee 1993, 217).

It is important to understand this third point. The state embodying the spirit of nationhood emerges as the virtual representative universal which holds together a unity of particulars. Capital is not the universal but only a particular, albeit a dominant particular. There are other particulars, like the landlord, the peasantry, caste groups, religious groups and so on.[20] The unity of the particulars takes the form of “nationhood” (surrogate synthesis) which then reifies itself within the body of the state. The unity of the particulars in the body of the state must reflect the dominance of the particular -capital- as representative of the nation as a whole. Otherwise, the unity will fall apart. The unity of particulars as a construction of “nationhood” is produced in the political domain as a construction of the hegemonic rule of capital. The state, as an allocator of resources, takes upon itself (since there are no other universals acceptable to the particulars) the (welfarist) task of distributing resources to each particular’s subject to the overall constraint of the whole (given by the universal which must protect the dominance of capital). As Chatterjee points out, “a development state operating within the framework of representative politics would necessarily require the state to assume the role of the central allocator if it has to legitimize its authority in the political domain” (Chatterjee 1993, 216). Capital establishes its hegemonic rule by hiding behind this state so that, through the legitimizing process of capital accumulation processed through the state, it can proceed with accumulation without facing any fundamental challenge from other pre-capitalist communities. The ambiguities, seen by the free market proponents or the traditional Marxists, are of course present but it is through the very ambiguities itself that capital establishes its hegemonic rule. Without these ambiguities, the Indian ‘nationhood’ and the state will cease to exist in its present form. Without seeing Indian reality as an instance of the passive revolution of capital, these intricacies cannot be understood. The proponents of the free markets and traditional Marxism read India’s capitalist development only in terms of a narrative of capital accumulation when, in fact, the situation is far more complex.

However, we no longer have an uncontested hegemony of capital. Since other particulars are included in the unity, capital’s dominance will be contested within the body of the state.

Let us excavate the essentialisms embedded in Chatterjee’s conceptualization of passive revolution of capital. His conceptualization takes the Hegelian framework and the essentialisms (and historicism) inscribed in it as its integral components. The basic framework remains the same as in orthodox Marxism except for the displacement of a (true) Hegelian synthesis by a surrogate or false synthesis. The concept of thesis, anti-thesis and universal (albeit a surrogate one) remains the basis for theorizing passive revolution of capital. Consequently, the essentialisms’ and historicism embedded in the Hegelian framework overflow into the theorization of the passive revolution of capital.

In Chatterjee’s narration of passive revolution of capital, thesis (capitalism) and anti-thesis (pre-capitalism) are considered to be independent and autonomous parts of society where both capitalism and pre-capitalism are explained by the essence -the economic- from which the political and cultural flows as a derivative. In other words, the moments of the universal (thesis and anti-thesis) are self-referential and are being driven by a source -the economic. The political and cultural adjust according to the demand of the economic. Thus while political and cultural aspects of society are included in the description of passive revolution of capital, the dynamics of the society are being driven by capital or the economic. In this literature, capital accumulation is the essence or driving force of society. Political and cultural aspects have to adjust in such a way that capital can establish its rule by which it can accumulate freely.

given an ontological social privilege to capital accumulation, power remains the primary explanatory variable of the discourse. Thus the problem posed is whether capital can establish its rule in the context of the inability of capital to proceed with primitive capital accumulation in a systematic manner. If capital can establish its rule in such a situation, then capitalism exists in India. Thus whether capitalism exists in India is determined by its rate of success in establishing its dominating role in society. Capital and its associated class discourse are made passive at the level of theoretical exposition — classes are often reduced to power. Consequently, the popular rhetoric which is often used in the literature on passive revolution is ‘capital’s power’ versus ‘power of the communities’ or ‘power of pre-capital’ (communities and pre-capital are terms which are interchangeably used in the literature). Let us focus totally on this point (that is, capital and its class discourse) and bring the essentialism and absurdity of the concepts used in Chatterjee to light.[21]

Chatterjee writes as if capital has a life of its own; it is the subject who is capable of taking a decision about the best road to development. Capital, somehow, realizes that it cannot annihilate pre-capitalist communities and, in this context, the historical role of capital is ‘to control and manipulate the many dispersed power relations in society to further as best as possible the thrust towards accumulation” (Chatterjee 1993, 214). How could capital control and manipulate unless an element of life and subjectivity is given to it? History must progress by accumulating capital and capital knows that. It must control and manipulate the traditional economy, traditional cultural and traditional polity to legitimize its rule by which it can accumulate freely. The idea seems to be that the narrative or logic of capital is embodying the subjectivity of the capitalist class and capitalism tout court. That is, since capital is located in the production process, it has an inherent interest that could be passed on to the individuals who own capital (the capitalist class).

In Chatterjee and the subaltern studies school generally, the peasantry (or any group that is named as class or otherwise such as caste) is treated as a homogeneous group of people who, because of their dominated and consequently “exploited” status, are grouped together into a homogeneous entity or identity called class. For example, the peasant class is considered to be a social actor capable of formulating and executing decisions. There are two problems with such a notion of “peasant class.”

Firstly, the concept of an entity as a noun, that is, as a homogenous group of conscious social actors, cannot simply exist (Hindess, 1987). A social actor is a locus of decision and action, where the action is in part a consequence of the decision made by the social actor. [22] Classes (such as the working class or capitalist class) cannot be regarded as social actors who struggle against each other. Unlike actors like human individuals, and social actors like capitalist enterprises, trade unions, political parties and state agencies, these classes have no definite means of formulating and executing decisions which can be considered as the minimal condition required for a conceptual existence of an actor. In this light, it is difficult to imagine how the peasant class can be treated as a social actor since peasantry as a homogenous group of people that is as a collective has no definite (operational) means to formulate and execute decisions. As with actors like human individuals and social actors like capitalist enterprises, trade unions, political parties and state agencies, concrete peasant organizations (which may even be led by non-peasant leaders) too can perform as social actors but not the peasant class itself.[23]

Secondly, the assumption of real or true interest (class or community interest) as given or reflecting some social structural location is logically wrong and assumes away explanations of any event. Chatterjee in line with subaltern school analysis has treated groups of people (working class, peasantry, caste, etc.) as social forces representing some given common (inherent) interest originating from the positions they occupy in the relations of production. Here the identities of these groups, say the caste, are construed around their respective interests that are presumed to be pre-given. For example, the interest (of say not owning property) emanating from the economic (relations of production) is the true or real interest of the working class and it is assumed to reflect its imputed consciousness. Hindess (1987, 1988) points out that interest is not something which is autonomously given but is, rather, produced contextually at the very moment at which individual or social action is being processed. He avers that,

there is no possibility of interests (or norms or values) operating as mere transmissions between the social structure and actor’s decisions. Interests have consequences only in so far as they enter actors’ deliberations and contribute towards providing them with reasons for actions. Interests in this sense have to be formulated or capable of formulation by those who act on them -which is to say that the existence of interests depends on the forms of thought available to actors. There is therefore a significant element of circularity in any suggestion that actors’ forms of thought reflect their interests (Hindess 1988, 110).

The combination of the above mentioned two points related to the conceptual hollowness of class as social actors and that of reflective interests have a destructive impact on the subaltern theory of class as they understand it. Reformulating Hindess’s argument we argue that since interests “are thought to relate to the decisions of particular actors, and therefore to their actions” and since one cannot think of class as social actors, class actors with pre-given interests are incompatible elements. Consequently, “the claim that class as a social force can be understood in terms of the representation of class interests must therefore collapse” (Hindess 1987, 112-3). This devastating critique leaves no room but to abandon such a notion of class thereby obliterating the agents of transition (that is, classes) from the conceptual apparatus. This very important point has been highlighted in numerous works and constitute the point of departure of a (post)modern construction of a class based Marxist theory (Hindess 1987, 1988; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1990; Resnick and Wolff 1987; Amariglio, Callari and Cullenberg 1989).

What is going on in Chatterjee’s rendition of passive revolution of capital is a power discourse. The economic is assumed to be given and then what is being argued is the relations of power between capital and its ‘others’-both its internal other and its external other. That is, class in so far as it is being reflected by terms like capital(ist) and working class (capital’s internal other) is subsumed under relations of domination-subordination. The same is true for the relation between the capital(ist) class and the pre-capitalist classless communities (capital’s external other). Classes as the performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labor are rendered redundant in such an analysis. It is appropriated under a power theory of class. We submit our disquiet over this appropriation : the effects produced by class processes on society is not the same as the effects produced by relations of power and the latter cannot be reduced to the former.[24]

Summary: It is important to realize that in Chatterjee while capital accumulation is given an ontological social privilege as the driver of change, power remains the primary explanatory variable of the discourse. It remains the telo (the essence) around which Chatterjee’s theory of transition is propounded. Capital as a category remains untheorized and this untheorized capital is simply accorded a privileged status. If Chatterjee is taking a different position vis-a-vis historical materialism then he has to explain his stance on the meaning of capital. Is it the same or is it different? If it is the same, then the essentialism and historicism associated with a historical materialist reading of capital passes on to his framework. If it is different then where is it? It is indeed surprising that a category that constitutes the nodal point of Chatterjee’s theory of transition remains totally untheorized, as a given category. Either way, the lack of theorization of capital constitutes a major theoretical problem in Chatterjee that virtually amounts to the castration of his framework. Of special interest is the point that since capital is taken as given, the dynamics of capital based on a class discourse are made passive at the level of theoretical exposition. This begs the question of what is the economic in Chatterjee. The explanatory variable that captures space of the economic is not the dynamics of capital based on surplus labor based definition of class but a non-economic element, power. It follows as a corollary that the space of economic itself remains untheorized even when claims on the economic are being made on the basis of a non-economic category of power. Marxists categorize this economic space in terms of class (defined as subset of processes related to production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor). Chatterjee simply reduces this economic nodal point of Marxists -class- to power and delivers a power theory of the economic (a contradiction) parading this explanation as an explanation of class (the economic). To be fair to Chatterjee, this reductionism is simply not his own but has a historical lineage in the way class has been understood by the subaltern school as a whole. That is, untheorized, confused and reductionist.

We will now follow through the consequences of Chatterjee’s essentialism and demonstrate the existence of a false consciousness inherent in a discourse on complex hegemony: contestation of complex hegemony means its legitimization. We then conclude by pointing to the strength of the concept of synthetic hegemony by showing the possibility of how the dynamics of global capital and consequences of multinationalizations of firms produces a Waste Land that threatens to overrun our present meaning of “living” (to hijack a terminology from Amartya Sen), especially in the underdeveloped countries. In contrast, the complex hegemony of Chatterjee that builds on Nation-state is simply unable to address such issues-ones that are of paramount interest in the 21^st century.

As communities mobilize their masses in terms of their shared myths, totems and taboos (caste, creed) for a greater share in the surplus labors, the acquired surplus labors might well slip back into the hands of the capitalist sector. The million dollar question is: mobilization of the masses for what - and not in terms of what. Chatterjee stresses the later. Partha Chatterjee writes:

“On the one hand, there is the system of electoral representation on a territorial basis in the forum of single-member constituencies. On the other hand, competing demand may be voiced not only on the basis of permanent interest-group organizations but also as mobilizations building upon pre-existing cultural solidarities such as locality, caste tribe, religious community or ethnic identity” (Chatterjee 1993, 217-18).

But why do these mobilizations take place? Because the constructed synthesis (planning) that unites the thesis and antithesis is a false universal to be contested and therefore has an outside that is capable of articulating itself. Partha Chatterjee calls this outside politics. Listen to Chatterjee:

“And yet the best effort to secure “adequate information” leave behind an unestimated residue, which works imperceptibly and often perversely to upset the implementation of plans. The residue, as the irreducible negative, and ever-present beyond of planning, is what we may call, in its most general sense, politics” (Chatterjee 1993, 208).

The business of the state authority and its planning board is to take note of the demands raised in the terrain of the political, accommodate and contain them, and thus legitimize the state authority.

“The point therefore be made here that the centrality which the state assumes in the management of economic demands in India is not simply the result of the large weight of the public sector on the existence of state monopolies, as is often argued. Even otherwise, a development state operating within the framework of representative politics would necessarily require the state to assume the role of central allocator if it has to legitimize its authority in the political domain” (Chatterjee 1993, 216).

Chatterjee thus builds his argument on the triad: planning-contestation-legitimization. So, legitimization on complex hegemony is premised on contestation. Contestation, in turn, occurs in the terrain of politics around the central-state authority - in terms of mobilizations on community-based demands. The implicit assumption is that accumulation and contestation are two binary opposites. Accumulation destabilizes. One of the purposes of planning is, to minimize this instability - that is to legitimize accumulation - through the appropriation of some of the demands causing such grievances and mobilizations - contestation thus idealizes planning - contestation seeks appropriation.

Why does contestation re-affirm the surrogate synthesis that planning is? How come that contestation of planning underwrites its morality, the founding assumptions behind it? Because what is being contested is a false notion of hegemony, a false object embodying it: a particular plan, a specific surrogate synthesis - and not the very concept of surrogate synthesis. In other words, a contestation within an essentialist framework can lead, in the final analysis, only to its legitimization.

We have dealt at length with the essentialist lapses in Chatterjee’s rendition of the working of complex hegemony. Now the consequences of the lapses come out sharply: the irreducible, negative and ever-present beyond of planning....-politics that Chatterjee talks about is an empirical beyond, an empiricist outside of planning and politics that he refers to is a politics about and around the nation state. On the contrary, the outside/beyond that synthetic hegemony signals resists appropriation. It is beyond the scope of the paper to outline what the beyond of synthetic hegemony entails though we tried to indicate a little bit in section I. But we might as well hint one more step as to why this beyond comes out in the context of synthetic hegemony, It is because of the inherent assumption underlying a post-modern totality, the assumption of impossibility of any totality even under full information - because of unreason hiding in reason. Lacan-Zizek calls it symptom. Let us now abrogate from this beyond of synthetic hegemony for it only displaces our present focus. Back to the issue of synthetic hegemony itself.

We can perhaps say why the kind of politics Chatterjee talks about cannot address the issue of synthetic hegemony. Because it is centered on the idea of the nation state and the synthetic hegemony of capital that we profess accounts for a space of global - post-colonial- capital, that is beyond the reach of any “autonomous” domain of the nation state.

We share Chatterjee’s key assumption that capital flourishes mostly in situations where accumulation is possible with minimum political and social instability. And the source of instability resides in the vast terrain of the outside of the organized high tech capitalist sector, in its dehumanizing conditions- that prompts community-based mobilizations. But it is less clear to us, from Chatterjee’s writings, why the rhetoric of planning is necessary to contain their grievances and for the upliftment of their conditions. Why this valorization of planning with a concurrent denigration of the public sector? (Recall Chatterjee’s comments: “the centrality the state assumes in the management of economic demands is not simply the result of the large weight of the public sector”). In the absence of the public sector, the word planning loses its nodal point and reduces the management of the nation states to budget management, in short, to fiscal policy. The state must be strong enough to tax the capitalist sector, in sufficient quantity, and be able to collect it in order to spend it on the outside of the capitalist economic to ensure its viability, economic and social. Or more correctly, the capitalist economic must be efficient enough to generate sufficient surplus values so that it can be handed over a portion of it to the nation state by way of taxes to be utilized for, among other things, the upliftment of the non-capitalist sector. But - it means weeding out of weak capital. More so, in the context of the presence of unfettered global capital, with its much higher rate of exploitation, capable of paying the taxes and yet earning enormous profit. It means weeding out nation-based capital that is weaker.

So, Partha Chatterjee’s concept of planning denigrating public sector and valorizing community means a planning of community dependent on multinationals - financed by them.[25]

And if they do not like the nation state’s ways, it can fly over. Partha Chatterjee’s concept of planning as an ideological device wedding capital and community builds on sands. We are yet to find a better instance of living anachronism than his statement that “the two together - this contradictory, perennially quarrelsome, and yet ironically well-matched couple - constitute the identity of the developmental state in India today” (Chatterjee 1993, 219).

And what is the economic content of struggles by communities that Chatterjee puts values on? For reservation of jobs in the state sector that is freezing jobs, doing exercises to be slim and trim. Chatterjee’s idealized mobilizations has no content. And he is blind to such mobilizations as have contents: mobilizations to protect the environment of the state as well as the “environment” of the fractured communities: the right of the community to breathe in its environment -- the right not to be uprooted. And mobilizations on demands for right to roots means constraints for urbanization, for building an infrastructure that can host post-colonial multinational capital. Here Chatterjee’s ignorance of the economic space becomes vivid. Capital is an economic category; its entry involves a host of economic disjointment. How are we to capture this disjointment without categorizing clearly the space in which it occurs? Contrast that with our notion of fractured community.

The cost of the entry of multinational capital/global capital are multiple, including the loss of the “environment” in which people perform labor to sustain their livelihood. But what do we mean by the “loss” of environment. For it to be a loss then there must be some cost attached to this content of loss. What is this cost? It is the truncation or extinction of the space of “shared” environment. For example, the cost of building the series of dams in the Narmada valley project is simply not the displacement of the people but also that of the (shared) “environment” (already defined in section I) in which people have undertaken their reproduction process. The content of this shared environment bigger than but including the natural factors like river and forest, all that goes into creating the possibility of sharing in economic reproduction, that required centuries to build up and integrate into the knowledge/information structure within the operating system, are lost forever. When speaking of compensation, the right question is whether people are getting the value of that irrecoverable shared environment along with the direct cost of land?[26] Arundhuti Roy (1999) describes in details how, through a vast network of intertwined institutions, local and global capital (including the world bank) are effectively appropriating the wealth/productive capacity/surplus labor of the affected people via the construction of the Narmada Valley project. The Dam is simply a further medium of -a different context in which the process of- redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich unveils. And the state on whom Chatterjee is depositing his faith via its welfaristic dimensions to reside with the community is not only not willing to hear the case for compensation for the loss of shared environment but is also complicit in the entire process of this primitive capital accumulation. Directly.

Primitive capital accumulation is taking place right here, in India, in the 21^st century in every nook and corner of the country due, among other things, to the pressure from the entry of multinational capital and is not simply a first world historic relic of the 18^th and 19^th century as Chatterjee would have us believe. And its form is changing, even intensifying. Let us touch upon one such change in form.

It is not that the process of primitive capital accumulation is always undertaken by multinational capital or government directly for some projects. Some of them clearly have only symbolic (via a configuration of metonyms and metaphors) connotation attached to the procedure. For example, in order to attract multinational capital, government may undertake “faceliftment” measures such as removing hawkers from the city pavements, removing slum dwellers which are eye sore to investors and foreign visitors, removing villagers from their land to build up cities that could be paraded as infrastructural development and so on. The entire objective of such measures is “signal” generation that will function to reveal the “business mindedness” of the government thereby creating a symbolic show of support/friendship for the potential global capital. There is now clearly a cut throat competition between state governments in India to send as many “signal” as possible (especially to foreign multinationals for foreign direct investment) since the image of investor friendliness of the respective state governments’ will be judged accordingly. This process of destroying ones own resources today in the hope –i.e. with some probability- that GOD (read: global capital) will finally arrive to create wealth for us may seem risible/madness to people from outer space but state government Ltd. companies across India along with the central government are playing the game with a vengeance. To visualize the transformation that nation, nationhood and the hegemony of capital is undergoing it is important to understand the ramifications of global capital, its new found power of mobility (including easy exit) and the competition it has generated between state governments at various levels to attract those capitals. The massive disjointment in economic space is recreating the meaning of what is right and wrong (the moral economic values) and hence the meaning of politics/cultural as well (via the overdetermined process). For example, one position that has become popular in India only recently is that hawkers are nuisance to modern society and an eye sore for investors of domestic and foreign capital. Getting rid of the hawkers will of course rob them of their livelihood in the short run but, via the signal creation process, will be compensated in the long run with jobs to be created with the entry of domestic and foreign capital. The language of politics has accordingly undergone a transformation. Remember. hawkers were nowhere conceived as a problem in the 1980s but liberalization and the advent of globalization changed all that. Suddenly hawkers have become a problem - object of inquiry and politics. And object of inquiry from the standpoint of the regime of capital. The metonyms of capital constitutes the communities (the body of hawkers, peasants in land, etc.) developing and distributing reasons as to why their destruction (via the process of primitive capital accumulation) is necessary/legitimate and then, having performed primitive capital accumulation, through a network of media and political intervention backed up by a set of compensations further legitimizes the exclusion of the lost community from its rule. The communities simply disappear into oblivion and yet the people remain. It may so happen that instead of breaking the faith in the hegemonic rule, the primitively accumulated people – the excluded bunch now- become grateful to the regime for receiving the benefits (compensation) in return or are simply awed by the growth of the cities so much so as to sing the praise of the state/capital that in turn further legitimizes its rule. Here is a possible case where complex hegemony, primitive capital accumulation and synthetic hegemony implodes into one in a series of unfolding events.

All these streams of critical issues cannot be even begun to be addressed by sticking to Chatterjee’s domesticated Nation state/planning or its fragments or contestation. The question of an alternative system/resistance/mobilizations/movements to the regime of capital does not arise (which is precisely what (the regime of capital’s) hegemony strives to produce – to numb us into silence – to silence the questions) unless the mechanisms of capital’s carnage and the costs involved in it are properly understood. Nation state or nationhood is still important, in fact one of crucial factors, for the reproduction of the regime of capital but that is not the domesticated Nation state unfazed by the mechanics of global capital and its institutions (ranging from the World bank, IMF to The Economist). The meaning of Nation state, in our formulation, is very different, as one overdetermined by, amongst other things, global capital.

Any thinking person will tell you that today planning, as we knew it, is a dead wood. The content of the meaning of government (and planning) is changing and that, amongst other things, due to the process of globalization especially the entry of multinational capital (witness Enron in Maharashtra and Cogentrix in Karnataka). Unless the economic space is structured to capture this hinge between the global capital and government (national state) not as separate entities but as overdetermined ones (the content of the mutual constitutivity and what it entails is a separate issue) there is no way we can even begin to address the economic issues surrounding the linkage.

Complex hegemony with its surrogate synthesis in the nation/planning is unable to account for multiple aspects of global capital that are newly inscribing their presence within geographical periphery of the nation state. Legitimization/contestation within a domesticated nation state requires a level of accountability for example through mobilization, the voting system, or through some rule or law or even social customs to which social actors are bound. The level of accountability can also be market specific. But accountability whether in political or market specific form must be within the ambit of the nation state for it to be implemented by the nation state. Laws and rules are enacted that enable the state to enforce the socially agreed upon accountability on the social actors. However, if social actors/institutions are able to operate within the geographical boundary of a nation and yet cannot be held accountable either at the level of politics/mobilization or market then those actors/institutions constitute the outside of the nation state. Increasing globalization has thrown up social actors/institutions/processes that are not bound by considerations of geographically specific rules and regulations, and hence could not be held accountable at the level of nation state. At certain axes, multinationals are not accountable at the political or market level even if they operate within the geographical boundary of the nation state. If they do not like the business in India they can simply leave. A recent example is that of Cogentrix in Karnataka which was supposed to have built a power plant in India. However when faced with certain regulatory laws it decided to leave one fine morning and there was nothing that the Indian nation state could do about it. No Indian firms could behave in this arbitrary manner. They are held accountable to the nation state and its citizens. Its behavior can and is regulated by the nation state whose actions are in turn is a function of the mobilization/contestation faced at the grassroots level. An NGO organization can wind up anytime and go out of business. The nation state cannot do anything about it. Increasingly, the techniques of doing business (read: the patent laws, Internet technology, etc.) are undergoing qualitative changes that are outside the purview of the nation state. While the increasingly mobility of capital via the progressive removal of capital control producing extreme volatility in financial markets with their subsequent effect on the real sector are creating further strains on the nation state’s ability to control the economy. In light of this complex presence of the “outside” of nation state, complex hegemony, even if we ignore the other problems with it, is simply inappropriate as a technique of revealing capital’s hegemony.

Let us come back to our story of Chatterjee’s planning. While Chatterjee’s denigration of public sector underwrites a displacement of the content -concept- of planning, his valorization of a few community-demand based mobilizations with concurrent silence on some other mobilizations-such as mobilizations based on community- right to its roots - entails a displacement of the concept of community endorsing its displacement -i.e. uprooting - in real life. The stage is set then for the metonymic surpluses of post-colonial capital to inflect the notion of planning. In other words, Chatterjee’s concept of planning is a condensation of the metonyms of post-colonial capital and displaced community. In short, his concept of planning is a key signifier of post-colonial capital’s synthetic hegemony.

If the institution of planning is an agency of post-colonial capital’s synthetic hegemony at the national level, WTO (World Trade Organization) is its agency on the global plane. The implication of the linkage at this level is enormous as we shall see now.

WTO is an international organization (barring China), a site for setting norms and laws regarding global trade, as well as a platform for voicing protests against and suggesting rules of behavior for the units (corporations, industries) participating in world trade. Its recent (1999) meeting in Seattle veered around issues concerning the latter part. The heat (for us, light) came from the debate over, on and around uniform labor standpoint across globe. We will focus on this aspect.

The key demand articulated here is that every worker deserves protection of basic human rights-prohibitions against child labor, slave labor, discrimination and the freedom to join together with others in a union. The WTO must incorporate rules to enforce workers’ rights while environmental and consumer protections and compliance should be required of any new member. National and state laws and regulations concerning public health and the environment must be safe from global veto.

Surely the above suggests a move in the right direction. It will give the global economy a human face.

Then why do we say that WTO is an agency of post-colonial capital’s synthetic hegemony? The ingredients of synthetic hegemony reside in its surplus meanings – in what it negates. John Sweeny, president of the AFL-CIO remarks: “It is time to cut through the posturing – when it comes to making the global economy work for working people, there is no third way, only a right way and a wrong way.

Incorporating enforceable workers’ rights, human rights and environmental protections in every US trade and investment agreement is the right way; admitting a repressive China into the WTO is the wrong way. Prohibiting the important of goods manufactured by children is the right way: excluding the voices of working families from the WTO is the wrong way.”

Focus on the underlined parts; the emphasis has, of course, been added – by us. But the emphasis has always already been there, as a surplus meaning, implicitly. We have only made it explicit. The American way of gentlemanly writing includes, while debating (over) a position, considerations of both sides of a coin. The side it wants to stress is spoken in concrete terms, while the other side is represented in vague abstract terms. In the quotation in consideration, only the underlined parts have concrete dimensions.

The concrete here is China and Child labor. But these are only metonyms – for inhuman labor. The point is to prohibit import of (trade in) goods produced in inhuman conditions, with inhuman conditions having their contextual meanings stated earlier.

But does not it mean barring trade with industrial and agricultural units selling commodities produced at inhuman wages? The global economy after all is an interdependent network of multinational capital, nation-based capital and non-capital. Does uniform labor standard mean its uniformity at all levels?

No; it concerns only labor engaged in multinationals and nation-based capitalist sector and does not apply to labor done in the non-capitalist sector. And if uniform labor standard is imposed on nation-based capital, then most of it cannot engage and survive in competition. So, only the multinational will have rights over goods produced in non-capitalist sectors produced at inhumanly low wages. The proper metaphor for such non-capitalist sectors is colony. Then, what is at issue here is a struggle (though certainly not the only one) between multinational capital and nation-based capital for rights over colonies – all couched in honey-coated metonyms.

But, what is subhuman wages? Wages below the value of labor-power. And value of labor-power, Marx says, is the value of the socially determined subsistent basked necessary to reproduce the laborer and his/her family.

But the ancillaries of multinationals – those who sell their products to consumers and supply them the inputs – in third-world countries pay wages to them that can barely sustain a single person. In a large segment of society, to have a family is increasingly becoming a distant dream. Multinationals redefine value of labor power that means now the subsistence cost of a single person. Or it, having a family, can be a dream come true if both the partners work. But what about a child – the children. “What you get married for, if you don’t want children,” T.S. Eliot asked in his Waste Land. Post-colonial capital turns non-capital into its colony and its colony into a wasteland. Bearing and rearing a child is a luxury, a substitute for other comforts for laywomen. Multinationals abolish child labor and, by its metonymic surplus meaning, the responsibility of paying, through wages, for the rearing of children. The world, large enough to sustain out of its own goods, will supply new labors to multinationals. However, let us not forget the loss – a fall from grace for mankind - involved in this transformation for that will in many ways define the content of struggles against multinational capital and government in the near future. Let us, as a way of conclusion, document this loss of grace and what it involves.

The transformation of the meaning of a living wage – from that of value of the socially determined subsistent basked necessary to reproduce the laborer and his/her family as in Marx to that of a reservation wage or the minimum basket of commodities required to sustain a single individual (the constraint condition for both firms and individuals in mainstream economics) signals, as we mentioned above, one of the most serious fall outs of globalization. Payment not sufficient to reproduce the family (that is, below the value of labor power) was defined as cheating by Marx. For Marx the reason was simple but profound: development of the economy (and the society also) is a long run process. It involves not simply the present reproduction of the laborer but that of future workforce as well. How can sustainable growth be attained if investment is not made for the future reproduction of the labor force? Are we not forsaking future growth in favor of a very myopic idea of present profitability? Is it not suicidal for capital itself? Are we doing our future generations justice by not making this investment? However we will pretend that the above considerations are unimportant - for capital. The super-human families (with a very high level of income) and sub-human families (because they are beasts) will produce children enough for the consumption of capital. But what about the loss of satisfaction of the present individuals who are denied access to the joys of family life because they cannot afford getting married? What about the loss to the couple of not being in a position to bear and rear children because only one of them may be employed? What about the loss of values (sharing system, support system, love chain, friendship chain, etc) embedded in the concept of family (look: we are not talking about family values but values of family – two very different things)? Bourgeoisie economists in recent times have emphasized the role of market failures as a reason for intervention either by government or some other third party. What happens if there is a failure at the societal level, at the level of community, at the level of reproduction of families, at the level of reproduction of future workforce? What are we going to do about this failure? Who and how are we going to bear this cost of globalization brought about, amongst other factors, also by the multinationalization of firms and easy exit policy from business that is guaranteed by government? Till now we have expected government to take up the role of a third party intervention. Even Marxists have believed in it. But, as pointed out, government is complicit, is a party, to this cheating. Its future reproduction itself is tied to the goodwill of multinationals. So let us not have any illusions about the “welfaristic” objective of government, at least on this issue. The third party has to be something else –trade unions, religious, environmental organizations, etc – or some combinations of them- who are directly involved in the issue and willing to take on the government as well as global capital to demand redemption from this futuristic waste land. It will mean new realignment of political forces, new ways of visualizing and thinking of development and politics, and giving meaning to the process/practice of realignment. Above all, it will mean breaking down the reservoir of faith in the rule of capital that the hegemony of capital purports to hold up.

Conclusion: Amidst the process of globalization and multinationalization of firms backed up with a rosy futuristic picture projected by the (post) modern bourgeoisie, something sinister is going on. Dark, very dark. Everything that glitters is after all not gold. The star wars of future will not only be fought in some distant space or land but also at the most primitive level – at our home, within our community, in our conscience - where capital’s shadow has entered as never before as metonyms to cast a spell on Life and Living as we know it to be. And these metonyms have transformed the set of questions posed above into a rhetoric of radicalism, non progressive madness, queer thinking, capitalocentric psycopathy in short, wishful thinking at the level of discourse thereby silencing the questions at the level of practice/things as encounters with extremism. The order of discourse and things (to hijack Foucault’s terminology) is undergoing a transformation reflecting capital’s attempt to reinscribe its dominance in the new age where as Escobar (1993) rightly pointed out the meaning/practice of environment, community, development, etc are undergoing serious reordering but only that.[27] The reordering of discourse and things involves a reworking of the way hegemony of the rule of capital is produced in society. We have demonstrated via our encounters with complex hegemony at different time and space that complex hegemony, with its essentialist mooring in a domesticated nation state, is simply redundant in this scenario as a mode of analysis.

As mentioned many times in this essay the very purpose of hegemony is to silence/demote the uncomfortable points/specter that could turn back on it in a very ugly form. Via the process of demoting/silencing the regime of capital develops/generates the faith in the rule of capital/nationhood. As pointed out, one of the ways in which this is produced is via the transfer of capital’s metanomic and metaphoric signifiers to constitute the other spaces, to transform them qualitatively, so that even in opposition/contestation/negation to the rule of capital there cannot be anything - to be seemingly achievable- other than some variant of capitalist economic itself. That is how the regime of capital reproduces its hegemony. Since we believe that society (epitomized in our case by the instance of class) is impossible, fractured, forever postponed in its finality, capital’s hegemony is only a perverse projection of its unreal power as real trying to frighten away, keep at bay, denigrate all those other (societal) possibilities that exist in heaven and earth. Some of those possibilities that we call (decent/humane) life. Alternatives would require bringing into open the zone of silence/demotion/possibilities, breaking down the system of faith generation (by tracking down among other things the metonyms and metaphors) through discourse/mobilization/conflict thereby questioning/ripping apart the legitimacy of the rule of the capital and the nationhood that is complicit in its rule. To break or not to break the faith: this is the big question.

Bhaji Bhai, Bhaji Bhai (one of the tribal villagers turned into a destitute by the Narmada Dam project- emphasis mine) when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say “That’s enough!” and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be? When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength? When will you break the faith? Will you break the faith? Or will you let it break you? (Arundhuti Roy 72, 1999)

As people living alongside Narmada river, Dahanu, Chilka and where not are rising up in protest/contesting the big faith, we believe that the battle lines are being (re)drawn for the big War – between life and death. We choose life. What about you?

Amariglio, J.L.; Callari, A. and Cullenberg, S. 1989. “Analytical Marxism: A Critical Overview.” Review of Social Economy 47 (4).

Chakrabarti, A. 1996. Transition and Development in India : A Critique and Reformulation. Ph.D. diss. University of California, Riverside.

Chakrabarti, A. and Cullenberg, S. 2000. “Development and Class Transition in India : A New Perspective”. Forthcoming in Re/presenting Class : Essays in Postmodern Political Economy. Ed. Kathy Gibson, Julie Graham, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. Duke University Press.

Chatterjee, P. 1983."More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry." In Subaltern Studies II, ed. R. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chatterjee, P. 1984. “Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society.” In Subaltern Studies III, ed. R. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chatterjee, P. 1986. Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Books.

Chatterjee, P. 1988. "On Gramsci's 'Fundamental Mistake'." Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy 23 (3).

Chatterjee, P. 1989. "Caste and Subaltern Consciousness." In Subaltern studies VI, ed. R. Guha. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Chatterjee, P. 1993. Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, P. 1994. “Development Planning and the Indian State.” In The State and Development Planning in India, ed. T. Byres. Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chaudhuri, A. 1988. "From Hegemony to Counter Hegemony." Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy 23 (3).

Chaudhuri, A. 1991-1992. "From Hegel to Gramsci: Capital's Passive Revolution." Society and Change 8 (3 & 4).

Chaudhuri, A. 1994. “On Colonial Hegemony: Toward a Critique of Brown Orientalism.” Rethinking Marxism Vol. 7 (4).

Chaudhuri, A. 2000. “Synthetic Hegemony: Trauma of Avante Garde Third World Writing.” Margins February.

Chaudhury, A. and Chakrabarti, A. 2000. “The Market Economy and Marxist Economists : Through the Lens of a Housewife”. Forthcoming in Rethinking Marxism.

Chaudhury, A; Das, D. and Chakrabarti, A. 2000. “Margin of the Margin: A Profile of an Unrepentant Post-Colonial Collaborator.” Forthcoming by Anustup: Calcutta.

Escobar, A. 1995. “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.”

Laclau, E. 1990. New Reflections on The Revolutions of our Times. Trans. J. Barnes et al. London: Verso Press.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack. London: Verso Press.

Nehru, J. 1954. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Publications Division.

Popkin, S.L. 1979. The Rational Peasant: the Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Resnick, S. A. and Wolff, R. D. 1987. Knowledge and Class: A Marxist Critique of Political Economy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Roy Chaudhury, Sartak. 1999. “In Search of a Homely Marx” Working paper, Economics department Calcutta University.

Sandler, B. 1994. “Grow or Die: Marxist Theories of Capitalism and the Environment.” Rethinking Marxism 7 (Summer): 38-57.

Sanyal, K. K. 1988. “Accumulation, Poverty and State in Third World Capital/Pre-Capital Complex.” Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy 23 (5).

Sanyal, K. K. 1991-1992. "Of Revolutions, Classic and Passive." Society and Change 8 (3 & 4).

Sanyal, K. K. 1993. "Capital, Primitive Accumulation, and the Third World: From Annihilation to Appropriation." Rethinking Marxism 3 (fall).

Scott, J. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasants. New Haven: Yale University Press.

* We would like to thank ,Pranab Basu, Ajit Chaudhury, Stephen Cullenberg, Keith Griffin and Victor Lippit for their helpful comments at various stages of the project. This paper draws on Sarthak Roy Chaudhury’s PhD thesis at the department of economics, University of Calcutta.

[1] We use the term “regime of capital” to point to the political configuration (not fixed all the time but always existing) that strives to hold together and develop further the “rule of capital” where by rule of capital we mean the configuration of elements (including but not only capital accumulation) that are fundamental in the reproduction of capitalist economic (the space where surplus value is performed, appropriated, distributed and received). Sometimes metaphorically we substitute “capital” for “regime of capital”/“rule of capital” but it carries the meaning implied by “regime of capital”/“rule of capital”. By the substitution, we do not impose any innate/divine spirit into the category of capital.

[2] In this theory, the domain of the passive revolution of capital is at the historical juncture of capitalism’s (anti-thesis) contradiction with pre-capitalism (thesis). In this context, Gramsci’s concept of the passive revolution of capital can be formulated as the case where the anti-thesis does not annihilate or supersede the thesis; it appropriates part of the thesis to create a surrogate or false synthesis (universal). Pointing out the major difference between the surrogate universal and the Hegelian universal, Chaudhury writes,

There remains a fundamental difference-between the Hegelian universal and the surrogate universal. The Hegelian universal is real but essentially contradictory: contradictory because the idea is ever changing -it is always implicitly what it is not, its other- in its development, unfolding itself. The surrogate universal, on the other hand, creates an illusion, is unreal; but an illusion, rooted in the real -it is not any society that can create this illusion, the illusion is embedded in this society, therefore is not pure imaginary. The surrogate universal resides in a non-imaginary unreal space.... The surrogate universal is only a symptom: it is a symptom of the false unity that it represents.... To repeat: the unity exists in fact, in real space and time. Therefore, there must be a unity in truth, at least as a possibility. The elite converts the possibility into an actuality, projects a universal which in turn strengthens the unity, makes it relatively permanent, stable (Chaudhury 1991-2, 46-47).

Arguing along the same vein, Sanyal correctly points out that many interpreters of Gramsci have incorrectly interpreted the inability of capital to establish the uncontested bourgeois hegemony as a failure of capital’s rule:

The surrogate synthesis is hardly a “case of failure” on the part of the bourgeoisie to rule by thesis, as suggested by the orthodox Marxist interpretation of Gramsci. On the contrary, the strength of the bourgeoisie lies precisely in its ability to produce the surrogate synthesis and to elicit collaboration from the subaltern classes in favour of the apparently non-bourgeois universal that is associated with it. The hegemonic power of capital essentially rests on its ability to create illusions, weave myths, make victory look like defeat and defeat, victory. The world of capital is a world of half-truths -but of far more complex ones than what the traditional Marxist interpretation of Gramsci would suggest (Sanyal 1991-2, 29).

[3] We suppose it will be helpful if we quickly explain the terms involved – metonym, condensation, displacement and nodal point – in the definition of synthetic hegemony. Metonym is a Lacanian category that signifies a part of an object (crown for the emperor). Displacement and condensation are categories Freud deployed to enunciate the structure of a dream. Displacement occurs when a signifier appears, in a dream sequence, in its altered form (mother for the girl friend). Condensation, on the other hand, involves a combination of a signifiers (mother’s bust and girl friend’s face composing a composite figure). Nodal point is the key signifier in a post-modern totality that structures the other signifiers to shape a contingent totality. While the nodal point in Lacan is constant (phallus), Laclau and Mouffe treat it as a variable, contingent. But never indispensable. The nodal point, in their scheme, privileges a few signifiers whose metonymic surplus meanings permeate the entire space to give rise to a hegemonic formation.

[4] The negation of space A is its coercive principles.

[5] An example is the case of the ancient Indian society where the villages were self-sufficient entities and where nor the Badshah (the ruler) neither his apparatus of power institutions had any contact with the villages, never ever even touching the periphery. Yet the villagers sang the praise of the Badshah and flocked to his army and defense when the time of crisis came. The Badshah ruled by excluding the villages from his interior power domain. This is an instance of synthetic hegemony.

[6] The details of the linkage between capitalist sector and household sector and its implication for the rule of capital and Marxian value theory are discussed in Chaudhury and Chakrabarti (2000).

[7] Here we will be basically following the treatment of class-based framework as espoused by Resnick and Wolff (1987) and their followers. We know of no other framework that focuses on the economic space, theorises that economic space in terms of a surplus labour definition of class, formulates and explains social relationship in terms of class without giving class the ontological or any other type of privilege, disengages its theory from any historicist content and yet satisfies the mathematical conditions of the transformation problem underlying the process of surplus labour performance, appropriation and distribution. This is presently the only known Marxist theory that satisfies most conditions of postmodernism and subsequently often takes the name post modern Marxian theory. An alternative and better theory must have all these qualities and something more. We know of none and, if the reader thinks she does, we leave it as a challenge for her to show us. Till then we will continue to focus on the best at hand. Notationally, we will be referring to this approach as Marxist theory and post-modern Marxist theory interchangeably.

[8] Here we share in spirit Cullenberg’s (1992) and Chakrabarti and Cullenberg’s (2000) class set approach of differentiating the economic in terms of such signifiers.

[9] For details of the class matrix and the process of classification, see Chaudhury and Chakrabarti (2000), Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2000).

[10] While the feudal serf is tied to his environment forcefully by the landlord, members of community are free to leave their environment but loved to be tied to it.

[11] Appropriation of surplus labor of the type “direct labor” means that individuals appropriate their own surplus labor and not of the others. Now this phenomenon can become fuzzy if it so happens that individuals appropriate their own surplus labor along with the surplus labor of others. Here the instances of individual and exploitative appropriation are telescoped together as a differential one - direct labor itself getting fractured at the very moment of becoming - that we still call as appropriation of surplus labor of the type “direct labor”. The meaning now of direct labor however keeps on changing - sometimes in its exactly precise form or sometimes overflowing its boundary - depending upon the context in which it is operational.

[12] The agency of capitalist management appropriates these metaphors and gives them various concrete forms by way of rarefaction — a refined and dwindled form of appropriation of the metaphors of non-capital. An example could be the new ideas of a good worker coming up to constitute the capitalist class process in an era of what sometimes is called flexible accumulation. The new idea of a good worker is one that resembles the simple commodity producer in the AA class process. The simple commodity producer is celebrated as a more complete and cultured figure than the capitalist worker because he can perform many more functions than the capitalist worker. The simple commodity producer is, at the same time, an innovator, planner, worker, self-supervisor, negotiator, seller of commodities, that s, multiskilled. Today’s capitalist enterprises are encouraging importing and implanting these ideals of simple commodity producer through a conscious subjective intervention. Such a laborer is deemed to be cost-effective (reducing cost of supervision, internal planning and other costs associated with imperfect information problems) and quality improving for the capitalist class process. The new worker of the capitalist enterprise is then a rarefacted imaginary expropriated from the simple commodity economic and implanted in the capitalist production process via a conscious subjective intervention. Symbolically, the worker’s best form is the modern MBA – the jack of all trades with a wholistic approach. The rarefacted transference of this image is not possible without the subjective interference.

Another example is that of the rarefacted transference through which the communist class process –CC- or the community class process –AC or CA- constitutes the capitalist class set. The idea of shared environment as a dimension of labor process is so powerful that even the capitalists could not ignore it for long. Community then takes the rarefacted imaginary of shared participation in the capitalist labor process. The idea of participatory management, for example, is nothing but the rarefacted transference of community into the capitalist class set via a conscious subjective intervention.

[13] The dichotomy between Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru is well documented by now. While the former believed in the economic development of India via the development of the cottage based system and intervention of a welfare, benevolent state, the latter was strongly in favour of growth (that is, capital accumulation) through the development of large scale industrialisation. The Congress party and the post-colonial Indian development process (which was dominated by the Congress party) aspired to combine these economic dimensions in the (political) rule of the state.

[14] Chatterjee uses the term community groups instead of citizen groups. According to Chatterjee, these are different terms signifying different types of identity. The idea of citizen is a product of western post-enlightenment thought and is not the same as that of community which is specific to pre-capitalist societies. The former is derived from the narrative of capital and is fundamentally opposed to the (pre-capitalist) communities which are viewed as backward. In Western thought, citizen groups are not taken as a priori given but, instead, need to be constructed so that the groups are associations of individuals who have joined together of their own free will. Pre-capitalist communities, like those in India, are fundamentally different. Chatterjee (1983) uses Marx’s analysis of pre-capitalist societies in the Grundrisse to theorise his claim that these (pre-capitalist) communities are autonomous and independent from one another and from civil society. One can consider such a community as a prior whole (to use the Hegelian terminology) and individuals existing as part of the whole. Chatterjee points out that this whole is beyond and above the individuals who constitute it. That is, the individuals exist as social individuals because they are part of the whole (the community). The social is given by the whole (community) -community is the social- and the individual’s social existence flows from it. There is no notion of social constructivism of the individual here as is the case in much of Western thought. Because of its autonomous and independent nature, such communities have a pure (inner) consciousness that can be recovered by theoretical analysis (that is, recovering the narrative of the community). Chatterjee’s work on caste (1989, 1993) and the peasantry (1983, 1993) poses this possibility of recovering the immanent (inner) consciousness of these communities. In other words, he attempts to recover the pure, uncontaminated zone of community and the consciousness it generates. The outer domain is that of civil society while the inner domain is, as we mentioned, that of the community. For example, Chatterjee (1984, 1986, 1993) interprets Gandhi’s work as a case of a “critique of the civil society”-the outer domain- and an attempt to build a nationalist discourse on the basis of the other narrative-that of the community (the inner domain).

[15] Chatterjee argues that this is a different narrative than that related to capital accumulation. In fact, it is fundamentally opposed to the narrative of capital accumulation. As he points out, “The crucial break in the history of anticolonial nationalism comes when the colonised refuse to accept membership of this civil society of subjects. They construct their national identities within a different narrative, that of the community. They do not have the option of doing this within the domain of bourgeois civil-social institutions. They create, consequently, a very different domain -a cultural domain- marked by the distinctions of the material and the spiritual, the outer and the inner. This inner domain of culture is declared the sovereign territory of the nation, where the colonial state is not allowed entry, even as the outer domain remains surrendered to the colonial power. The rhetoric here (Gandhi is a particularly good example) is of love, kinship, austerity, sacrifice. The rhetoric is in fact antimodernist, antiindividualist, even anticapitalist” (Chatterjee 1993, 237).

[16][16] Chatterjee mentions many types of “rigor” associated with capital accumulation though; save for one (breakdown of communities) he does not discuss them in detail. Firstly, there is the rigor associated with the “lack of freedom and equality within the industrial labour process itself and the continued division of society into the opposed classes of capital and labour” (Chatterjee 1993, 235). Then, capital accumulation can “turn the violence of mercantilist trade, war, genocide, conquest and colonialism into a story of universal progress, development, modernisation and freedom. For this narrative to take shape, the destruction of communities is fundamental” (Chatterjee 1993, 235). Sanyal (1993) discussing the debate between Scott’s (1976) “moral economy approach” and Popkin’s (1979) “political economy approach” points out a similar antithetical relation between community and capital: “The controversy highlights the antithetical relation between community and commodity, and how the discursive annihilation of the former is essential for the establishment of the latter” (1993, 128).

[17] Chatterjee (1993) gives a detail account of the concept of “nationhood” as can be gauged from the title of his book “The Nation and Its Fragments.” He studies the fragments (women, elite, peasantry, caste and religion) of the Indian nation and finds that these groups construct their national identities within the narrative of the community. Yet “nationhood” is bigger than these fragments. It is the identities of all these fragments interrupted violently by the identity related to capital accumulation that, according to Chatterjee, is fundamentally opposed to the communities. This interruption -the unresolved struggle between capital and communities- is India’s nationhood that is reified in the body of the state. This nationalism (artificial and, hence, surrogate), as can be contemplated by its very construction, is open to contestation and is consequently very fragile and, yet, this nationalism must be reproduced for the procreation of the Indian (developmental) state in the present form. It is important to note that capital establishes its dominance at this level of “nationhood” and not directly at the level of state. As we have already mentioned, a challenge to capital’s dominance is a challenge to the Indian “nationhood.” However, since ‘nationhood’ is situated in the space of the state, capital’s dominance is practised at the level of the state.

[18] On the details of these mechanisms of coercion and persuasion, see Chaudhury (1988, 1991-2, 1994), Sanyal (1988, 1991-92) and Chatterjee (1988).

[19] This balancing act between accumulation and welfarism is clearly brought out in this passage of Sanyal,

Unlike the case of primitive accumulation in Western Europe where the state acted as an explicit power organ of capital in estranging direct producers from their means of livelihood, the poverty eradication programs are now launched by the state. Acting on behalf of capital, the state now explicitly recognises the need to provide the people of the periphery with entitlements sufficient to meet a certain standard of living. It can be done by transferring a part of the fruits of accumulation to the periphery and giving it out as a dole.... The property relations and modes of labour associated with it (that is, the system of production) are clearly non-capitalist, and in fact it is somewhat of a reversal of the process of primitive accumulation. While capital’s power was used in the process of primitive accumulation to estrange direct producers from their traditional production activities, labour is now being united with the means of labour to revive direct production for meeting a required level of consumption. The tramps were once forced into capitalist labour process; now capital’s power is being used to keep them away (1993, 126-127).

[20] Unlike in orthodox Marxism, capital cannot annihilate the other particulars to establish its uncontested hegemony. Here, capital must accommodate the other particulars and, yet, should be able to establish its dominance. Consequently, the construction of capital’s hegemony in this context will be different and more complicated. Again, see Chaudhury (1988, 1991-2, 1994), Sanyal (1988, 1991-2) and Chatterjee (1988) for details.

[21] There are other major problems in Chatterjee’s framework, which are not highlighted here. Of special interest is the historicism inherent in Chatterjee’s framework. There the desired development model for third world countries involves a transition from the form capitalism takes in underdeveloped societies (produced by the passive revolution of capital) to socialism to communities. For details of this historicism and other problems in Chatterjee and the subaltern literature in general, see Chakrabarti (1996).

[22] Hindess defines actor as “ a locus of decision and action, where the action is in some sense a consequence of the actor’s decisions. Actors do things as a result of their decisions. We call those things actions, and the actor’s decisions play a part in their explanation. Actors may also do things that do not result from their decisions, and their explanation has a different form. This is a minimum concept of the actor” (Hindess 1988, 45).

In order to carry out decisions and actions, the actor must be able to formulate and execute decisions. Hindess points out that there are two types of actors: individuals and social actors. Social actors are entities like political parties, trade unions, churches, etc. According to Hindess, “The actions of capitalist enterprises or community associations always depend on the actions of others -managers and other employers, elected officers, and sometimes other organisations. We call these ‘social actors’: each and every one of their actions depends on social relations with other actors” (Hindess 1988, 46).

[23] Hence, class per se cannot act or struggle; class as an actor with some form of (subjective) political identity is a logical impossibility. This does not preclude the conceptual existence of class identity and class struggle. In the Marxian framework, collective action signifying class struggle needs to be socially constructed (and is not automatically given), where class struggle is defined as a struggle over the mechanisms of class processes, that is, over the existence, size, manner and form of performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labour. Social actors such as the trade unions, political parties, government, religious institutions can engage in such class struggle and they do, all the time. The political dimension of class in the form of class struggle and the economic dimension of class as constituted by fundamental and subsumed class processes are distinct even though there is a close relation between the two: class struggle is fought over economic processes related to the performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labour. This class struggle requires as pre-requisite a construction of identity formation around the issues (which signify the context of the formation of identity) of class processes in order for collective action on those issues to materialise. This process of identity formation, however, faces three major constraints : (i) the identity of individuals in society is dispersed (via its race, caste, gender, etc., position), (ii) courtesy of our concept of class as a process, the classes are also dispersed such that it is feasible for a worker (doer) to be a shareholder capitalist (non-doer) or for a worker (a doer) in capitalist enterprise to be a feudal lord (a non-doer) in the household, and (iii) like any other social site, the domain of the political is also fragmented, with the body politic being pulled into different directions by considerations of class, race, religion, gender, caste, etc. The dispersed nature of individuals, classes and the body politic means that class identity (or, for that matter, any identity) cannot be based on performed subjectivity, interest or consciousness emanating from the individual’s occupation of class position. That does not mean that these entities are not important. Far from it. These entities have to be laced on to the process of identity formation and collective action in order for these to originate. That is, they overdetermine or constitute the process of identity formation and collective action. And since class identity formation is contextually produced (that is, depending upon the specific issues related to class processes), its constitutive elements such as interest or consciousness must be considered at those very moment of constitution. In fact, it is at those (contextual) moments that these entities announce their existence. They help in defining the context (placing it, changing it, refining it) as much as they are a product of the context. And in what form will these entities come into existence is the play of politics.

[24] Consider the case of a power theory of class where power relations of domination and dependence may serve as the essence explaining away the existence of the surplus labor aspect in society. Subaltern studies and its theoreticians such as Chatterjee do not produce a class theory but a power theory of class. The power theory of class may produce a very different interpretation of social relationships than what we would have under a postmodern Marxian framework. Let us give an example of how similar power relations can imply different forms of class relations.

Consider a hypothetical relation in an Indian village between an upper caste landlord-moneylender who advances money capital and land to a lower caste sharecropper. The sharecropper then might employ other labourers to produce commodities for the market. Given the power structure embedded in the caste system, the former clearly dominates the latter. The subaltern theorists will also say that this aspect of domination-subordination encapsulates the relations of class (exploitation) since the class that dominates owns property (the pre-condition of being an exploiter) while the class that is dominated do not own property (the pre-condition of being exploited). The sharecropper is exploited by the landlord-moneylender because of the one to one correspondence between exploitation and relations of power. Thus, by reducing the class aspect to the power relations given by caste aspect, We get a power theory of class. Now consider the same relations from a Marxist perspective. There is no doubt that relations of power will shape the social relationship between the upper caste and the lower caste individual. But that does not follow that there is a one to one correspondence between this relation of power and mechanisms of appropriation. While the upper caste would dominate the lower caste, the lower caste individual, the sharecropper, would appropriate the surplus produced in the land, a part of which would then be distributed as subsumed class payments to the landlord-moneylender for the land and capital advancement. Unlike the case for subaltern power theory of class, the sharecropper may turn out to be an exploiter or a self-exploiter. Whether an individual exploit or not is determined here by subset of processes related to production and appropriation of surplus labour and not by relations of power. This is not to say that power relations have no impact on the mechanisms of surplus labour generation process. Far from it. Because of the relations of power in our example, the landlord-moneylender could demand a greater amount of surplus product than usual as subsumed class payments. This will effect the retained surplus of the sharecropper and may act as a disincentive factor thereby changing the composition of investment in the next period. However, all these effects do not change the point that the sharecropper is either an exploiter of others labour if he employs labour power or a self-exploiter if he does not. Consequently, in our example, the relation between the sharecropper and landlord-moneylender could turn out to be different for the two cases. In Chatterjee and subaltern studies, it signifies the relation of exploitation between the two while in case of the Marxist theory it embodies a relation between the appropriator, distributor and receiver of surplus product, that is, relations between fundamental class exploiters and subsumed class receivers of surplus product. In other words, the social relations around the concept of class as processes are explained away by the usage of power theory of class.

[25] If you are not convinced about the size of multinationals and their influence in the present global economy, read this:

The universe of TNCs (transnational corporations) in the early 1990s was composed of at least 37,000 parent firms that controlled over 200,000 foreign affiliates worldwide, not counting numerous non-equity links. Two-thirds of these parent firms –26,000- were from 14 major home developed countries, an increase of 19000 since the end of the 1960s. Foreign affiliates generated sales of more than $4.8 trillion in 1991, slightly more than world exports of goods and non-factor services (some one-third of which were intra-firm) and twice the sales figure at the beginning of the 1980s. The influence of the largest TNCs on output, employment, demand patters, technology and industrial relations should not be underestimated: the world’s largest 100 TNCs, ranked by foreign assets, held $3.4 trillion in global assets in 1992, of which about 40 percent were assets located outside their home countries. The top 100 control about one-third of the world FDI stock (UN, World Investment Report, 19994, p XXI).

We would like to remind the reader that the pace of multinationalization of firms has increased at a monumental rate in very recent times with a series of mergers and acquisitions especially in the huge banking and insurance sector as well as the manufacturing sector such as automobiles and gas. If we add those to above figure the size and impact of multinationals will be even more staggering.

[26] The poignancy and absurdity (both existing here together in one divided manner) of this loss is superbly brought out by Arundhuti Roy in the following description of the Narmada Valley project:

I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.

I had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsinshi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the tribal hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile, homes. I could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorised peanuts. I knew I was looking at a civilisation older than Hinduism, slated-sanctioned (by the highest court in the land)-to be drowned this monsoon when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir (one of the many dams under this project – emphasis mine) will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh?

Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam) had enquired whether tribal children in the resettlement colonies would have children’s parks to play in. The lawyers representing the government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and what’s more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river pushing past and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect…

Over the last 50 years India has spent Rs 80,000 crore on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than they were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.

The government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of foodgrain or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year or what the total surface area of the National Highways adds up to. It’s possible to access minute-to-minute information about the stock exchange or the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we’ve lost on a Friday in Sharjah. It’s not hard to find out how many graduates India produced, or how many men had vasectomies in any given year. But the government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of “National Progress”. Isn’t this astounding? How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who paid for it? How can the ‘market’ put a price on things – food, clothes, electricity, running water – when it doesn’t take into account the real cost of production?” (Arundhuti Roy 54, 57; 1999)

[27] But why the reordering in the first place? This was one of the subjects of Escobar’s enquiry (1993). Escobar pointed out that movements against the regime of capital pertaining to issues involving environment, community, gender, etc, which had been previously kept outside of the regime of capital, forced it to face the set of issues. The legitimization process in tune with the old hegemonic structure was not appropriate to face these movements/issues. For example, it was claimed that capitalism is inherently anti-environmental. So when environment became an important issue it could no longer ignore the issue as secondary. The regime of capital accordingly reorganised the concept, appropriated part of it and sold itself as environmental friendly (Escobar 1993, Sandler 1994). In doing the same with other concepts, the regime of capital transformed the concept/issue of development at the level of discourse and things. New modes of intervention at the level of discourse and things were invented such as sustainable development, participatory development, human development, etc. It is to be noted that all these reordering and renaming only helped to renew the legitimacy of the regime of capital. None of these modes of developmentalism is anti-capitalist in any sense of the term but are rather seen as complementary or as input to the future vibrancy of capitalism. This transformation involving the renaming, reordering and part appropriation of the outside by the regime of capital has in turn transformed the order of discourse and things encapsulated in a new hegemonic construction best understood in our opinion by the concept of synthetic hegemony.

	Appropriation of surplus labor
Production of Surplus labor	Direct Labor (A)	Non-labor (B)	Collective Labor (C)
	AA	AB	AC
	Fractured Community – CA¹	CB	CC
	Fractured Exploitation – CA²

Infoallglobe.com writers forum, published on 14/04/00

Post Colonial Capital’s Hegemony: Theorizing the Waste Land of Global Capital and its Aftermath