Anup K. Dhar

Gravel in the Shoe: Nationalism and World of the Third

This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging in the contemporary landscape of global capitalism under neoliberal conditions. This Utopia is shown to be marked by a fundamental split that helps secure and facilitate the reorganization of Indias national cartography into the ‘expanding circuits of global capital’ and its constitutive outside: ‘world of the third’. Highlighted are the encounters with flashpoints of conflict emanating from nationalisms intricate encounter with the contemporary ‘gravel in the shoe’: world of the third.

The Question Before the Communist Horizon

This commentary regards the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. It highlights several points of departure having to do with “the communist horizon,” the Lacanian Real as the register of the foreclosed (and not just the register of the remainder, the Impossible, or the inassimilable), the philosophy and ethico-politics of transformation (as against transition), and the theorization of class as the constitutive Real of capitalism.

Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore's Ideas on the Cooperative Principle

This paper rediscovers Rabindranath Tagore as delivering an innovative understanding of economy and a critique of the mainstream ideas of development and capitalism. Demonstrating that capitalism appears through the logic of development, his intervention finds fault with individualism, income fetishism, progress, capitalist ideological apparatuses, and bourgeois subjectivity. In contrast, he lays down an alternative idea(l) of ethical economy founded on the template of cooperation. Tagores ethical economy is read as pointing toward a communist form of living that is holistic, balanced, and responsible.

Rethinking Poverty: Class and Ethical Dimensions of Poverty Eradication

Marxism and poverty have always lived a contradictory existence, especially in the global South. While socialism/communisms ethical imperative aspires to create a nonexploitative society, poverty eradication has been concerned with overcoming the material threat to peoples livelihoods. An exploitation-free world does not necessarily mean the eradication of poverty, while the eradication of poverty does not automatically entail the erasure of exploitative relations. Struggles to eradicate poverty are distributional problems pertaining to the allotment of social surplus, which is also a class question since production surplus originates there. Correcting the injustice of poverty is not simply a distributional question, as most discourses on poverty tend to emphasize. Not only is it also a question of production, but it is very much a class question as well.

Rethinking and Theorizing the Indian State in the Context of New Economic Map

In this chapter, we argue that the rationale for the existence of the Indian state has undergone a fundamental displacement since the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP henceforth). This displacement is in alignment with the re-articulation of the Indian economic cartograph into the mutually constitutive triad of neo-liberalism, global capitalism and inclusive development that form the Order of Things (a la Foucault) at present. India’s economic transition now must take this historical conjecture as its point of reference and departure. In this regard, the theory of the Indian state must contend with (i) why and how it helped create this triad, (ii) what this triad entailed for its own existence, and (iii) how the state encounters and negotiates with new-fangled contradictions emanating from the triad and thereby transforms itself or gets transformed in the process. State as a transformative entity must thus be understood in relation to the new Order of Things in whose creation it plays a central role and which in turn affects it. There is one important thread that runs through the changes that has materialized with respect to Indian state in the last two decades: the rationale for the existence of Indian state has changed which implies in turn a different philosophy of governance.

Marxism as Asketic, Spirituality as Phronetic: Rethinking Praxis

This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth—the cognitive notion of truth—and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possibility of an anti-Oedipal future for Marxism and a this-worldly present for spirituality.

Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spirituality with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

This conversation with the fourteenth Dalai Lama—the spiritual-political inspiration of the displaced Tibetan community—revolves around questions of why a practitioner of the Buddha Dharma would like to call himself Marxist, and also his views on the violence of both Marxist praxis and religion. The Dalai Lama splits Marxism into, on the one hand, violent paranoid statecraft, and, on the other, the moral principle of equal distribution. He aligns with the latter. He also displaces other-worldly religion to this-worldly moksha; he calls it spirituality. The conversation brings to dialogue the possible political consequences of a this-worldly spirituality and the possible spiritual consequences of a reflexive Marxism keenly attuned to experiences of human suffering.

Un)doing Marxism from the Outside

The essay’s focus is on the outside. The urgency of rethinking an outside to (global) capitalism stems from the need for critical reflection on two sets of ideas incumbent upon the South: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection takes the essay to a rethinking of the given script of Marxism from the outside, reengaging with advanced Marxian reflections on questions of “hegemony” and psychoanalytic exegeses on questions of “foreclosure” (verwerfung). Interrogation of extant theorizations on hegemony and foreclosure lead both to more abstract considerations on the Lacanian symbolic and the real and also to apparently more concrete reflections on “global capitalism” and its outside: the “world of the third.” Other than defamiliarizing the given script of capitalist development, this has the potential to open up new avenues to think of politics and subject.

Orientalism and the New Global: The Example of India

N owadays we are often told that the third world is dead. This underlies another proposition that, with the third world as the Other disappearing, the Orientalist framework is no longer relevant. We consider the pronounced death of the third world and the implied irrelevance of the Orientalist framework as theoretically weak, premature, and politically counterproductive. With the new global order emerging, the third world gets displaced as its external Other into a new plane. We trace the economic history of India and deconstruct the mainstream Indian development paradigm to reveal this emerging contour of Orientalism. Specifically we attempt to read the economic history of India and its transition through different moments of Orientalism, moments that are distinct but each nevertheless help one space—the West, North, or New Global Order—define itself and protract its superiority by producing an external Other.