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.
Our predicament at the present time throws up new
questions… Sometimes if a person gets trapped in a previous moment of
history, you find it hard to carry on a conversation with him or her
because they are still out to defend something that you’re not against,
but you’re not with because it is no longer the relevant thing. … [It
was] necessary at a particular point in time, when we were still within
the whole identity crisis, when we were trying to evolve a peoplehood. …
But the moment we move beyond that, neocolonial man [and woman] can’t
talk about the Vietnamese in the singular or the African or the
Guyanese, etc. We must look at real life. In real life, Guyanese live in
certain different ways, have contradictions among themselves, have a
relationship with the rest of the world.
Walter Rodney, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”
Identity is the primary source of social and political capital in
“left-wing,” establishment politics. It’s the lever the “professional
activists” and “community leaders” use to extract grants from the
monopolies, the respect (and payouts!) from their Democratic Party
patrons, and railroad a good deal of like-minded, middle-class people
into pitiful mobilizations for state reforms that never have a chance of
passing, or – lord help us, some pathetic attempt to pitch in to a
national protest. The other thing is, the old, white vultures who run
the show want them up front, to deal these people out to their friends
like trading cards. Better PR that way. There are hundreds, if not
thousands, of them in “grassroots” organizations all over the region.
They are the class base of neocolonialism.
As a result, we have a monstrous, little garrison society of all
colors, all nations, all genders, and all sexualities united by a single
aim: parasitism from the margins.
The pigs ask you your preferred pronouns before they arrest you; they
gun down Black men and kidnap working Latin@s in the street. The DIY
venues all proclaim themselves “safe spaces”; the volunteers grope
teenage girls and shame survivors into silence like they always did.
Semi-popular chillwave artists try to solicit a hitjob on a 16 year old
lumpen for retaliating against the rape of his friend before the perp
splits town for Memphis. Up-and-coming, trans Latin@ activists pilfer the
treasury of a migrant worker’s org. Ambitious, young, and “woke”
Democratic Party employee turns out to have systematically preyed on
multiple young women, then isolated them by saying he was the
victim. A perfect oasis of liberalism and inclusion, but always remember
to smother resistance on your way up to the fucking big leagues!
Take your identities, your stagnant PACs and NGOs, your sterilized
communities (if they haven’t already turned that shit into an empty
acronym), and throw them in the fucking garbage. In a place like this,
there’s no such thing as civil resistance or unity across class lines,
only cash and connections. Exploitation and oppression have all
been pinkwashed, whitewashed, beautified with expertly-crafted “optics,”
suffused with grants from the Waltons, the Tysons, and the State Dems. That’s Clinton House rules.
Our line is this: eliminate parasitism from the margins with proletarian unity from the margins. Organize
the most oppressed workers, tend to their needs, engage their
militancy, intelligence, and creativity, help them carve out political
power through struggle, and unite them in real, proletarian
organizations that can keep the garrison society and their fucking
corruption at bey. Then they can really fight.
The left has chided us in the past for confronting liberalism and
neocolonialism. They think this is too ultra, too militant, when it’s
been the point all along. Instead, people talk big about the fascists
and the “Alt-Right.” The left’s sense of proportion on this matter, in
our opinion, is totally fucked. The truth is the fascists have very
little organized presence in the region because they’re so universally
reviled by the overwhelming majority of people. They pose a very small
obstacle to our work, which can be overcome by sheer force. Our greatest
political obstacle has always been neocolonialism and its
misleadership, which disarms and stifles genuine rebellion,
organization, and resistance from oppressed and exploited communities —
not with open terror but with discourse.
A lot of people seem to think we’re dealing with brutal, racist
“white trash,” when we’re dealing with a more sophisticated,
cosmopolitan kind of racism. They think we’re dealing with roving gangs
of fagbashers, when we’re dealing with people who buy our silence with
cash and flattery. They think we’re dealing with drooling, sexist pigs,
when we’re dealing with “woke” people who have weaponized “identity
politics” in order to dodge reprisal and punish survivors who assert
verifiable allegations of sexual violence. Old reality, new reality;
hard power, soft power. Less Birth of a Nation, more Get Out.
This is our situation: The fucking lynch mob is coming for us. They
haven’t snatched us yet, but they’re inching their way down the road.
We’re slowly waking up to the fact that neocolonialism has tied our
hands, dumped us in a nearby ditch, and left us for dead. The thing we
have to figure out is how to break free and escape, figure out how to
free all the revolutionary people. We have to help each other learn how
to stand up again, and struggle for a new world.
The fundamental problem isn’t that all the old terror — reactionary,
settler, and fascist or just plain, old imperialist — still exists,
grows, and haunts us, because us Communists know how to deal with it in
broad strokes: organize the united front, meet reactionary terror with
revolutionary terror. The problem is that neocolonialism and the legal
left have left the most oppressed and exploited communities wide open
and pacified to bear the brunt of the violence with absolutely no
recourse. We don’t have any good solutions for that.
Above all, this is what needs to change by any means necessary.
“Class is a human dimension in which we are both hammer and anvil, when most want to be neither. On this primal level of human society there is nothing but class and class elements, where classes are simultaneously the user of the tool, the hammer itself, and the object being changed. Just as class is the wielder of the knife, the weapon itself in its arc, and the present being cut open. Everything is made of classes and class strata, and class is the landscape and those moving on it and the atmosphere itself all at once. Our goal is simple, to improve our ability to identify the broken up class terrain that we are moving across, so that our step is more sure.”
J. SAKAI, “THE DANGEROUS CLASS AND REVOLUTIONARY THEORY”
Theory is, above all, a weapon. A “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” wielded for the purpose of conquering political power within society. Every class, strata, interest group, and groupuscule has one, each varied in its significance and scope, whether they realize or acknowledge it at all. Each one has their own little subjective twist on the uncharted course of events in the real, objective world, and on the appraisal of this world. The esoteric fascist has one; the capitalist has one; the radical egoist/individualist has one, too.
Marxism, or dialectical materialism, or scientific socialism, differs from all other theories in that the subjective thought is explicitly interrelated with its apparent opposite, objective reality; by correctly identifying objective circumstances and interacting with them in practice, shaping and reshaping our own thoughts in the process, real changes become possible, and practicable, within the objective world. Marxists grasp reality to make revolution.
Value is the foundation of all societies, from the caveman era up until now. We live and breathe value, and we exist to produce things of social value for one another – even if these things are as abstract and complex as love. This is the basic principle of us, as individuals, relating to each other and engaging with each other as human beings. I’m talking about all societies.
As for the society we live in – I’ll paraphrase J. Sakai on this: “In Marx’s analysis, the exchange of commodities is the fundamental relationship in capitalist society. A commodity is anything that has both use-value, that fulfills a human want or need, and exchange-value, a product of human labor for the open market. So, the oxygen we breathe has use-value but no exchange-value, since we take it ourselves from the atmosphere. However, that same oxygen in an oxygen tank has been separated, compressed, packaged, and transported by human labor, so it’s definitely a commodity. The most important commodity is the labor-power of workers, their ability to work, which is the commodity that more than reproduces itself in the hands of the capitalist.
“The value of commodities will inevitably express itself in the open market as price. Surplus value is the share of value not consumed in the production of the commodities or given to the workers as wages to sustain and reproduce their labor-power. Surplus value arises on the open market in the form of profit. Marx says that there’s no direct correlation between the value and surplus value created by some worker or some factory and the amounts of prices and profits that result. It’s a theory that’s pretty indirect and averaged out. Marx’s goal wasn’t to write a cheatsheet to the stock market but to radically grasp the dynamics of the capitalist system.”
“Beginner’s mind” is a zen phrase. It reminds us that when we first
took this path as beginners, we approached it almost with awe.
Self-conscious of knowing so little—knowing nothing, really—we were open
for seeing anything. Aware mostly of how unimportant our own little
knowledge was. But as we became much more experienced, even became
“expert,” it was different. We could separate useful from scrap, what we
judge is good from bad, so automatically we hardly needed to pause over
it. Our journey became a polished routine. And now we sometimes ask
ourselves, is it still a journey?
i was reminded of “beginner’s mind” all over again once, in a very
different context. Accidentally tuning past an ongoing discussion
between a few marxists and anarchists about the pros and cons of
leninism vs. “horizontal” spontaneity in revolutionary organization. It
was like people at a dinner party having a familiar argument across the
room from you. You can’t catch everything being said, but you know where
it’s going anyway.
