In India too, post-modernism has proliferated among a section of dissident intellectuals, disillusioned ‘Marxists’ and more particularly amongst the thousands and thousands of NGOs. Though the bulk of them may not subscribe to post-modernist philosophy openly (and may not even know its contents), they generally reflect that type of thinking. This is manifested in a mode of thinking that has a common thread, and, as such, ends in being anti-people.
One strong factor in their approach is their attitude to power. First, as they have the approach that all power is bad they oppose any change in the existing order, on the grounds that the new power will be as bad. This, de facto, amounts to support to the present capitalist/imperialist system. Also, on the same grounds they are averse to organisation and organised dissent as that too will result in alternative power centres; so continuous ‘discourse’, like at the WSF, is more their focus rather than coming to conclusions and evolving organised plans of action.
Generally, all these NGOs also take a negative attitude towards revolutionary organisations, and when they do associate they have the approach to subvert them — philosophically all these are linked to their approach to power. Second, their primary focus is at a micro level, they have no macro focus, also a part of the post-modernist approach. Third, their anti-modernist, anti-reason approach makes them turn back to tradition and the glorification of backward feudal thinking — this can result in them even becoming apologists of reactionary views like Hindutva.
Fourthly, their emphasis on compartmentalised ethnicity and opposition to class unity results in them promoting exclusiveness of the dalit, women, tribal, etc. questions, resulting in the fragmentation of the unity of all the oppressed. Such then is the negative role that post-modernism is playing at the ground level within the Indian scenario.
The Post-modernist critique of the ills of this system has its basis in the horrendous impact of the present crisis ridden system that is, affecting every sphere of human activity. The acute impoverisation of the masses; the intense alienation faced by the people; the degrading status of the more marginalized sections; the vulgarisation of the utilisation of science, as seen in the medical, armament and other spheres; the rapacious destruction of the environment; the blatant mafia-style operations of the power brokers and big business; and the fascist terror and imperialist wars — all have resulted in a groundswell of opposition to this system. But, some ideological basis is necessary to anchor such sentiments. With the weakening of the communist movement, post-modernism has sought to fill the vacuum, and was used primarily as a weapon against Marxism. What is required is a re-assertion of science, reason and a creative application of Marxism to the ill of this system.
This can only be achieved by making Marxism a living social science to be creatively used as an ideological tool with which to understand present phenomena, and devise a way out of the morass. To do so, one has to rescue Marxism from the grip of the revisionists, dogmatists, empiricists and all those who vulgarise its scientific, class and revolutionary essence. Only then will Marxism be able to effectively counter post-modernism and illumine a path for the suffering masses to a new bright future.
Post-modernism is a trend of thought opposed to modernism (i.e. ideas
emanating in the post-feudal era) and is therefore not only opposed to
Marxism, but the entire leaps in thinking and values that came with the birth of capitalism — i.e. the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Reason and even science.
Post-modernism, though it can trace its roots to over a century back, in its present garb, it draws extensively from the philosophies of Nietzche, the philosophical farther-figure of Hitler’s fascism.
Post-modernism got a major boost due to the intellectual vacuum resulting from the temporary set-back to communism, resulting from the reversals in the Soviet Union and China, and a retreat of the national liberation movements that witnessed an upsurge in the 1960s and the 1970s. In the resulting atmosphere of pessimism, post-modernism found thousands of takers even from the ranks of the Marxists, demoralised by the setbacks.
There is no doubt that the post-modernists address the ills of society thrown up by the capitalist/imperialist system, whether in the field of science, medicine, architecture, bureaucratisation and power polity, oppression and discrimination, etc etc., but their opposition does not come with any solutions. Though the Chinese experience, particularly that of the Cultural Revolution, did give many answers to these questions, it was short-lived and the reversal there, soon after, reduced the impact of that experience.
Post-modernism has, in fact, flourished in this period of ‘globalisation’.
The set-backs in the above-said movements facilitated, in a big way, the
offensive, on a world-scale, of imperialist capital, which has come to be called ‘globalisation’. And with ‘globalisation’ and the retreat of the State from all welfare measures, together with the vacuum created by the retreat of communism, the imperialists pushed and funded lakhs of NGOs throughout the world, and particularly in the backward countries, where levels of poverty became even more extreme. What existed earlier in pockets was now made an overwhelming phenomenon. And today, it is these NGOs that are one of the major vehicles of post-modernist ideas and views.
However it goes further than a knee-jerk
opposition to Third Worldist programmatics into the domain of the actual
theoretical perspective of Workers World Party-type Marxist-Leninists.
These self-labelled revolutionaries would, and quite often do when
confronted directly in debate, argue that it would be an absolute
injustice to the white worker to make a call for the return of land. In
essence, theirs is a theory and philosophy that requires as one of its
fundamental premises the always-already genocide and dispossession of
Indigenous nations and the emptying out of Turtle Island. They require
this fundamentally as the ground on which to build their new
socialist/communist society. They radically (in the sense of getting to
the root) cannot enact their vision of “revolutionary” socialist change
without prefigurative anti-Indigenous violence.
This is why, hand-in-hand with their
rejection of Third Worldist political economy, they reject the critique
of settler colonialism as (as put by the late Patrick Wolfe) a
structure, not an event. They may talk about settler colonialism (and in
this regard modern north amerikan Maoists are almost always better than
Marxist-Leninists like the Workers World Party) but implicit within
their theoretical treatment of the subject is the understanding that
settler colonialism is only (one might even say merely) an onto-historical event that can and must be understood only as history and legacy. Indeed this kind of thinking about “the history of settler-colonialism and its legacy of racism” is explicitly made twice within comrade Mond’s article.
This kind of perspective, which sees settler colonialism only as historical event, fails to grasp the material fact that settler colonialism is an ongoing structuring process—not
only as one of central foundations (along with the ongoing theory and
practice of antiblackness and slavery/enslavability) of north amerikan
capitalism but of the entire modern/colonial/capitalist world-system—a
process that drives towards the elimination of Indigenous people and
the continued dispossession of our lands. It is not merely a fact of
history who’s residual legacy is racism. The difference between
understanding settler colonialism as ongoing, living, breathing
eliminative anti-Indigenous violence continuously enacted by the settler
colonial nation-state[iv]
on Indigenous lands, nations and bodies versus it merely being a
question of histories and legacies has profound impact on how one
understands the current juncture and the growing calls for
decolonization within our Indigenous Liberation Movement and those of
our closest allies.
Further, the rejection of settler
colonial critique and of Third Worldist political economy by
Marxist-Leninists and Maoists is hard, if not impossible, to separate
from the idea that it would be an injustice imposed upon the white north
amerikan worker to return Indigenous land and to smash global
imperialist parasitism. This is because at the uninterrogated heart of
their worldview is the idea that it is fundamentally just for the white worker to have not only what they already do, but to have more.
Indeed the essential injustice of the capitalist system is precisely
that they do not have more. Thus, because of the ineluctable link
between what the white worker has, as well as their potential to
accumulate more, and the processes of ongoing Indigenous genocide and
dispossession, the ongoing theory and practice of antiblackness and
enslavibility, and the ongoing parasitism of the imperialist nations on
the colonized world it is injustice to call for those structures to be overturned in the most revolutionary fashion possible.
The u.$. has an extensive track record of using ROK’s government to facilitate kidnapping and trafficking thousands of DPRK citizens, and women from South East Asia who are forced into sex work in “juicy bars” outside u.$. military bases in ROK.
The number of Filipinas forced into prostitution for the u.$. military colonialist presence in
ROK increased by more than 1000% from 1994 to 2002 (250 women to 3000).
Nearly all of them say they were victims of trafficking.
Rather than Third World communism being “revisionist,” it is in fact an application of a materialist analysis, or a Marxist analysis, to the present conditions of global capitalism. It is not bourgeois white intellectuals who have arrived at this conclusion either. In the 1920s, for example, the Marxist Latin American revolutionary José Carlos Mariátegui maintained that socialism in the region could not be “a tracing or a copy” of European socialism, but a “heroic creation” that explained “our own reality, in our own language.
Linked to Mariátegui’s call for a non-Eurocentric application of Marxism are revolutionary leaders and thinkers from the Third World such as Lin Biao, Ruy Mauro Marini, Che Guevara and more recently, Omali Yeshitela. They suggested that revolutionary struggles in imperialist centers are stunted by some layers of the working class benefiting from imperialist loot.
Exposing the fact that a large portion of the workers in the West benefit materially from imperialism should not serve as a cause to be “nihilistic” and “reckless,” as suggested by comrade Mond. Instead, it should serve as a reason to join hands with billions of oppressed people across the Third World who wish to destroy parasitic capitalism and imperialism, prioritizing their struggles ahead of those in the First World.
