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1 Subalterns, injustice, and resistance
Concepts may be concrete or abstract. Whether concrete or abstract, concepts are complex and contested; yet they constitute the building blocks of our understanding of the social world. They help us to make sense of the social world or a particular social phenomenon under discussion (Swart, 1988). The complex and contentious nature of concepts call for the clarification of, at least, the key ones of any phenomenon or subject under scrutiny or discussion. The key concepts of this book are subalterns, injustice, and resistance. They interact and interdigitate to constitute the theoretical and political pillars and moorings of the book, but as is to be expected, they are malleable to different interpretations.
The purpose of this chapter is to clarify and specify the sense in which these concepts should be used and understood in this book, as well as discuss their analytical and political significance for the task at hand: why the subalterns resist or do not. This is done in the following order: first, I conceptualise the subalterns, the social class studied in this book as the potential agents of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Since a variety of social groups may be resisting neoliberal capitalism, it is important that the subalterns, considered as potential bearers of the struggle against neoliberal capitalism in this book, be delineated and described, setting them apart from other contending social groups that may be studied in other work or discussed in other discourses. Just who are the subalterns? How are they different from other social groups? Why the subalterns and not workers as the agents of resistance? Can the subalterns speak? If they can, are their voices heard and heeded? These are the questions addressed in the next section to conceptualise this marginalised and powerless social group and their agency.
Which of the myriad of injustices the subaltern classes face make them angry and rise up against the existing social order, even in the most inauspicious political conditions? This is the question addressed in the third, fifth and fourth sections of this chapter. Materially, capitalism is inherently and thoroughly unjust, through and through. Driven by the voracious logic of profit-making, capitalism is brutally exploitative of the subaltern classes because it does not seek to produce and distribute surplus fairly and sustainably, but rather to keep as much of it as possible for the capitalist classes. Tied to this accumulation is the wreaking of implacable ecological and social havoc on the subalterns. Neoliberal capitalism has pushed this imperative of accumulation to the extreme, taking it to a different new level; and with direst implications for the wellbeing of the subalterns; not only material terms, but social and ecological (Gill, 2015, p. 247). For neoliberalism, everything on earth that yields profits, and is commodifiable, must be commodified; a quality that has made it the most mean-spirited version of capitalism, as well as made the world atrociously inegalitarian and unjust (Piketty, 2014; Oxfam, 2016). Particularly, the inequality between peripheral and core regions, and between the subaltern classes and the wealthy/elite classes, with the latter present in both the core and periphery. Contrary to the caricature of the free market rendered by adherents of neo-classical economics, neoliberalism did not accomplish this feat (a ruinous one at that) through the magic of the unregulated market, or through the invisible hand of the market; but rather through the visible hand of the neoliberal state. As Samir Amin articulates brilliantly, âthe visible fist of the state must complete the work of the invisible hand of the marketâ (Amin, 2009, p. 15). In the case of Africa, this state is controlled by a corrupt political class that uses its power, responsibilities, and opportunities to serve its own selfish interest and the interests of global neoliberal capitalism. If material injustices are what make the subalterns angry and provoke them to resist, neoliberal capitalism and its political ally, the neoliberal state, will figure clearly in their consciousness as the target of resistance against the injustices they wreak on them. However, this chapter will illustrate that non-material injustices may be more powerful in influencing the political behaviour of the subalterns â qua resistance â than material injustices, even in their extreme forms that neoliberal capitalism wreaks on them.
The last section conceptualises and discusses resistance, at pains to bring some nuances and analytical rigour to the concept, and to rescue it from the conceptual fuzziness that characterise its usage in the mainstream anti-neoliberalism literature (Mittelman, 2000). This allows for more thorough interrogation of âglobalisation-from-belowâ, drawing a qualitative distinction between the various acts of resistance presented as resistance from âbelowâ to neoliberal capitalism in terms of how they equate with the subalterns making their own history in a capitalist world. This distinction is important in illuminating the quality of subalternsâ agency as global resisters to neoliberalism globalisation, focusing especially on the transformational and emancipatory potential of this agency, its limitations, contradictions, and complexity. These are issues that are so often eclipsed in the euphoric and romantic anti-neoliberalism literature.
The subaltern classes
In this book, the subaltern classes, rather than the classic working classes or proletariat, are the potential agents of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. In peripheral capitalist countries like Ghana and Bolivia, a classic working class or proletariat does not exist in any significant numbers. Because of uneven capitalist development, an industrial working class, having nothing but their labour power to sell for a living, has not yet emerged in Ghana. Capitalist development here refers to the classical Marxist notion of capitalism as a specific and unique mode of production in which âappropriation [is] based on the complete dispossession of direct producers who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely âeconomicâ meansâ (Wood, 2002, p. 96; see also Brenner, 1977, p. 27; Amin, 1974, p. 139, 2009, pp. 95â97). In capitalist societies, the capitalist mode of production is predominant, even if other modes of production co-exist with it. Samir Amin has conceptualised the economies of the Global South as peripheral capitalism, as distinct from the classic capitalism formulated above. In peripheral capitalist countries, there is the âmonetarisationâ or the âcommercialisationâ of subsistence economies that involves the âpenetration by the capitalist mode of productionâ (Amin, 1974, p. 142). As he is at pains all the time to underline, the âcombined and unevenâ dynamics of capitalist development â dynamics that are inherently imperialist â do not permit the Global South to replicate the capitalist development of the core capitalist countries (Amin, 2009).
Though global in scope, capitalism leads to the reinforcement of the coreperiphery polarisation where the core capitalist countries remain advanced, not only in capitalist development but monopolise the political and economic resources to their advantage in the accumulation of wealth on a global scale; and on the other hand, the peripheral countries are not only unable to develop advanced capitalist mode of production, but are pauperised by the capitalist accumulation of the core capitalist countries (Amin, 1974, 1997, 2009). Like capitalist societies, non-capitalist societies may have patches of capitalist mode of production, especially with globalisation, but this does not make them capitalist because the predominant mode of production is non-capitalist: for example, the dominance of the agrarian economy in Ghana. As argued by Ellen Wood, it is not just the predominance of one mode of production over others, but the way in which they operate to reinforce the dominance of the dominant mode of production in a way that entitles us to speak of capitalist and non-capitalist societies without underrating or eliding their âintricate fabric of social, political, cultural, and moral lifeâ (Wood, 1995: 58).
To be clear, peripheral capitalist countries are not homogeneous in terms of the unevenness of capitalist development. For example, South Africa is more advanced in capitalist development in comparison with other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Broadly, however, the typical working classes, in exploitative and conflictual social relations of production with the capitalist classes, a condition engendered by the dispossession of peasants and other cognate social groups who live off the land, do not exist in peripheral capitalist countries â generally defined. However, there are various groups of people in peripheral capitalist countries whose life-chances have been made more and more precarious because of the commodification of their means and resources of livelihoods and social reproduction. These groups, though not in a typical social relation of production with capital as the classical working class, are no less affected negatively by the dynamics of accumulation by neoliberal capitalism than the working classes. In todayâs world, Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. 161) argue presciently
it is not only as a seller of labour power that the individual is subordinated to capital, but also through his or her incorporation into a multitude of other social relations: culture, free time, illness, education, sex and even death.
The various groups of people whose lives are subjected to the discipline of the market or dislocated by the primitive accumulation of neoliberal capitalism may be subsumed as the subaltern classes in peripheral capitalist countries such as Ghana and Bolivia. What, then, is the subaltern class? It is not within the scope of this chapter to engage in the conceptual and theoretical debates on the subalterns and their political agency in the Gramscian and post-colonial literatures. It is used here in two ways: descriptive and analytical. In the descriptive sense, it represents the people who are the empirical referent of my book; but who, as aforementioned, are not, theoretically and politically, the working class in the orthodox Marxists sense. The literal and popular sense of subalterns is what is intended: people who are lowest in social status and are oppressed one way or the other by the powerful class. Barrington Moore captured more succinctly the literal and popular notion of the subalterns: âpeople at or near the bottom of the social order: those with little or no property, income, education, power, authority, or prestigeâ (Moore, 1978, p. xiii). Within the âsocial power approachâ of Ananya Mukherjee Reed, the subaltern classes are a âstructural social groupâ â though comprising disparate identities â that share the same low position in the social power relations of the social formation in which they live (Reed, 2008, p. 3).
Most influential in the conceptualisation of the subalterns is Antonio Gramscian and his adherents. The chief characteristic of the subaltern classes that one gets from their conceptualisation is that they are subjugated, marginalised and oppressed economically, socially and politically under any mode of social production; be it capitalist, socialist, agrarian or communal. Gramsci saw the subaltern groups as âalways subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise upâ and that it is only âpermanentâ victory that can break their subordination but this is not always immediate (Hoare and Smith, 1971, p. 55). In that sense, he described the subaltern class in his Prison Notebook 25, as âslaves, peasants, religious groups, women, different races, and the proletariatâ (Green, 2002, p. 2; see also Howson and Smith, 2008, p. 2). They are structurally disempowered, subjugated and exploited by the more powerful social groups of society (Guha, 1997, p. xvi).
From (neo)Gramscian rendering of the concept, we are reminded of two important things. First, subalternity or a subaltern class presupposes the existence of the elite or powerful classes which suppresses and exploits them â ignoring for the moment, the possibility of intra-subaltern power relations. Thus, the concept is relational, and captures a relationship between the powerful and powerless (Guha, 1982, p. vii; Howson and Smith, 2008, p. 3). Second, this relationship is not limited to the material or economic sphere of life as power and powerlessness characterise many other spheres of life. The reference to women, races, and religious groups in Gramsciâs definition stated above illustrate not just this point, but the overlap between various spheres of life in human societies. In the social context of South Asian societies for example, Guha (1982, p. vii) makes it clear that the subordination of the subalterns is applicable to âclass, cast, age, gender, officeâ; and even adds loosely âor in any other way.â
As noted by Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. 161) above, domination and exploitation are not just economic in the Marxist sense, but political, cultural and social. The defining characteristics of the subalterns in Ghana and Bolivia is that they live like âsupernumeraries of the human raceâ (Gorz, cited in Leys, 1994, p. 34), suffering from grinding poverty, a situation deepened by the market disciple of neoliberal capitalism. In the two countries analysed in this book, the people who belong to the subaltern classes may include, but not exclusively, various marginalised groups such as poorly paid wage-workers in the private sector, low-level government workers, the various classes of the peasantry (landed-but-poor, landless, women, youth) and those who may be broadly classified under Marxâs ârelative surplus populationâ (Arn, 1996; Patnaik, 2008; Li, 2013). Bearing in mind that the subalterns so defined are not necessarily and exactly the same in the two countries, there is a sense in which, as a descriptive category, they constitute a distinctive social group relative to other social groups â particularly the elite and middle classes.
The second (and analytical) sense of the concept, subalterns, concerns their agency as bearers of counterhegemonic struggles or struggles for their own emancipation and a just social order. There are two opposing views on this: the optimistic and the pessimistic. The optimistic view is that the subalterns have the capacity to resist their oppression and marginalisation, to make their own history rather than it made for them. They are capable of transforming the existing oppressive social order to a more just and equitable one. Simply put, the subalterns can emancipate themselves. The pessimists think that they cannot do this or doubt that they can do it. Gramsci is associated with the optimistic view while Spivak is associated with the pessimistic view. Gramsci is very much alert to the challenges the subalterns face as the agents of their own emancipation. However, he is more optimistic than Spivak, who doubts of the capacity of the âsubalterns to speakâ and to be heard (Maggio, 2007). While Gramsci saw them as a class âfaced with an ensemble of political, social, cultural, and economic relations that produce marginalisation and prevent group autonomyâ, he, nonetheless, believed that âthey have the ability to transform their subordinate social positionsâ (Green, 2002, p. 15).
Like Gramsci, the Subalterns Studies Group in India, led by Ranajit Guha was also optimistic about the political agency of the subalterns, that the subalterns in India have âdefied high command and headquartersâ by reinventing the modes of resistance that were used against colonialism against their own ruling elites (Guha, 1997, p. xviii). However, within the socio-historical optic of this book (see Chapter 2) we do not get far in our understanding of the political agency of the subalterns if we frame the problem in dichotomous terms; which is either to be overly optimistic that they are rebellious or overly pessimistic that they are submissive. As one of the scholars of the Subaltern Studies Group has correctly noted, the subalterns have always alternated between resistance and submissiveness in their reaction to injustice;
It is well known that defiance is not the only characteristic of the behaviour of the subaltern classes. Submissiveness to authority in one context is as frequent as defiance in another. It is these two elements that together constitute the subaltern mentality.
(Bhadra, 1997, p. 63)
The political behaviour, qua rebellious or acquiescent, is contingent on the sociohistorical context in which they find themselves. It is only by systematic and open-minded research that one can arrive at a particular conclusion, something this book has done to explain ...
