Global Capital and Social Difference

V. Sujatha, V. Sujatha

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume offers insights into ongoing global socioeconomic transformations by directing attention to the significance of labour, work, craft, community, social institutions, social movements and emergent subjectivities in different parts of the world. This is in contrast to theories that project globalisation as a process driven exclusively by global capital and technology, a scheme in which some parts of the world forever will be 'peripheries' supplying labour and natural resources, the lives and work of those people purged of originality, meaning and value by the very construct that describes them. Together the chapters in the book present a nonessentialist and non-linear reading of global transformations by examining the relations and adaptations between economy, polity and society, which remains a fundamentally unresolved question in the social sciences.

Combining a wealth of conceptual and empirical investigations, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, globalisation studies, anthropology, economics, development studies and area studies.

Part 1

Social change and temporality

Interrogating linear time and sequentiality in the social sciences

1 Capital, time and difference

Modernity and the European episteme

Aditya Nigam

In this chapter, I look at the twin categories of ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’ and how they construe ‘economic difference’. Modern, that is, ‘capitalist’, economies see themselves as homogeneous entities where difference is essentially seen as survivals of ‘past’ forms. On the other hand, proclaiming such living forms too as ‘modern’ is not of much help either, as it simply leaves the category of modernity uninterrogated while at the same time expanding it so much as to render it meaningless. In engaging with this key question, this chapter attempts to disaggregate both ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’. In doing so, it also references a body of recent work that seeks to bring the debate on ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’ out of its very narrow, European history, thus providing a global background to their emergence. However, this body of scholarship too, this chapter argues, suffers from the same problem – of laying claim to a modernity and a capitalism whose theoretical contours, erected on the European episteme,¹ are never interrogated. The term ‘European episteme’ in this essay refers to something very specific: a mode of thinking which installs the ‘economic’ – not in the sense of livelihoods and well-being of people at large but as a reified instance that has nothing to do with the well-being of the population – as the foundational level of social being. This is a large and complicated issue, and some scholars like Timothy Mitchell (2002) have been persuasively arguing, in recent years, that the idea of ‘the economy’ is a much later, early twentieth-century product. What I refer to here is not the object of macroeconomics that Mitchell talks about but rather the idea that the modern, rational and civilised mode of being entails the creation of new wealth by harnessing all the forces of nature, bringing all its land into productive use. This notion is closely tied to the idea that lives lived close to the natural state are indicative of savage existence. Closely allied to this is the emergence of the notion of the modern, self-maximising individual who thus becomes the exalted figure driving the machine of human progress. Indeed, this notion of the economy or the economic undergirds all notions of progress, which drives much of the violence of modernity.

‘Globalisation’ and economic difference

The onset of the 1990s saw the rapid rise of the term ‘globalisation’ – not just as a way of describing but rather of ordering the new politico-economic configuration emerging in the wake of the collapse of ‘actually existing socialisms’ and the global victory of neoliberalism. Labelled a trifle too hastily as the ‘end of history’ by Francis Fukuyama (2006), the word ‘globalisation’ did not just name that conjuncture; it soon became an imperative that arose from a heightened sense of an inexorable movement of destiny that demanded specific ways of thinking and acting – both of political elites and ordinary citizens. Finally, that long-deferred destiny was here and prognostications about the ‘bourgeoisie building the world in its own image’ made by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto were proving to be right. Curiously, it was not just neoliberals and the corporations who were celebrating but radicals of various hues, too. Celebratory anticipations of the world rapidly being transformed into a ‘global village’ became the order of the day. The era of the nation-state was supposedly over. Talk of global institutions of government and global civil society and even global ‘governance’ was in evidence everywhere. Theorists like Habermas (2001) announced the emergence of the new ‘postnational constellation’ – where ‘postnational’ meant little more than ‘global’. Scholars like David Harvey (1990) talked of the phenomenon in terms of an unprecedented ‘space-time compression’, while still others like Zygmunt Bauman (1998) even went so far as to announce that globalisation amounted to a virtual ‘liberation from space’ for capital. More radical versions of this imagination of the new global order brought Deleuzian categories like ‘nomads’ and ‘flows’ into play in order to gesture to what they saw as the new emancipatory possibilities immanent in a world without nation-states and borders. This radical imagination reached its apogee in the figure of the multitude – the supposed new revolutionary subjectivity produced by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their trilogy [Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009)].

It is not my intention, in this chapter, to go into an examination of the various ‘theoretical’ flights of fancy that that moment of celebration, emanating mainly from the West, produced. Nor do I want to suggest that all prognostications were necessarily wrong – even if sometimes highly exaggerated. Now that the euphoria has long passed and we have had results of Brexit polls on the one hand and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States of America on the other, alongside rampant xenophobia in our own society, it is time perhaps to look back critically.² There is indeed a close connection between economic transformations like the integration of global production chains and the ‘liberation’ of markets from the constricting ‘protectionist barriers’ imposed on them in the heyday of the nation-state, on the one hand, and the fearful rise of xenophobia that we witness today, on the other. I am not suggesting a causal connection here but one that calls into question the separateness of ‘the economic’ domain from other questions like culture, habits and traditions, for all these tumultuous changes in the economic realm cannot be considered purely economic – unlike goods and commodities, when human beings and cultures cross borders as migrants or when jobs move to more lucrative parts of the world, they aren’t apprehended through the sanitised language of social sciences; they create fears and anxieties and open up the political field for all kinds of xenophobic mobilisation. It might be easier to understand the way migration of people affects people in host countries, but equally important has been the effect of relocation of industries and jobs from the first to the third world, where both labour and environmental regulations are lax: It is the losers of this process, the white working class in many parts of the United States and Europe, who often rally behind xenophobic political mobilisations.

In this chapter, I focus my attention on one key element of what came to define ‘globalisation’, namely ‘capital’, and in particular, one aspect of it – one that relates to the problem of difference and, more specifically, economic difference, and try to suggest that no reconsideration of the economic question is possible today without a re-opening of the larger story of modernity itself.

From the point of view of the ‘three continents’ of Asia, Africa and Latin America, globalisation was that moment when the anxieties of economists in general, as well as of Marxists, regarding the inability of capitalism to develop ‘properly’ on a world scale, gave way to the celebratory rhetoric of its global triumph. Even Marxists who opposed globalisation and saw it as a manifestation of ‘imperialist threat to national sovereignty’ (Aijaz Ahmed 1983; Prabhat Patnaik 1995, among others) could not resist the temptation to invoke the well-known formulation from the Communist Manifesto that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot live without constantly revolutionising the means of production and transforming the whole world in its own image’. What this meant for Marxists in the postcolonial world and in countries like India, in particular, was that they would now, finally, be able to liberate themselves from the ‘curse’ of ‘arrested’ or ‘retarded’ development. The heterogeneity of Time would now come to an end, as it were, as ‘backward’ societies like India too would now be able to step into the ‘common’ global present.³

The desire to see a clean break from ‘past’ economic and life forms was equally shared by economists whose discipline and profession themselves are predicated on the need to eliminate problems posed by the existence of ‘dual economies’ by devising ways of expanding the modern/capitalist sector such that it eventually eliminates what is seen as the ‘traditional’ sector. As is well known, the existence of precapitalist agriculture and the preponderance of an urban informal sector have always constituted serious problems for them, as they represented both an ‘irrational’ lack of enterprise and a ‘sub-optimal’ level of existence that was and is said to be inimical to the theology of growth. Many economists, including radical ones, have long believed, after Joan Robinson, that the one worse thing than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by it.⁴

Are we always already modern?

This coexistence of ‘past’ forms alongside modern/capitalist ones has often been theorised in the received categories of social and political theory in two extremely problematic ways. On the one hand, there is the view that recognises them as past forms and therefore views them as survivals of earlier social formations that either need to be eliminated or are historically destined to be eliminated. A variation of this view would hold that though these forms belong to the past, it is important to ensure that no violence is done to them, and though they need to be incorporated into modern development, they should be gradually transformed and incorporated into it. This is the path that many postcolonial states adopted via the strategy of what is often referred to, after Gramsci, as the ‘passive revolution’ – import-substituting industrialisation accompanied by some form of land reforms being one predominant form. However, as can be seen from the case of Nehruvian India, it was not as if violence was totally avoided. After all, it is well known that Jawaharlal Nehru, while proclaiming big dams to be the ‘temples of modern India’, actually appealed to the displaced adivasis and peasants to ‘suffer for the nation’. Nonetheless, it is equally true that the violence of the postcolonial Indian state, for instance, was quite marginal compared to the violence of industrialisation in Britain, which, for some strange reason, came to stand in for the ‘standard’ or ‘classic form’.⁵

On the other hand, there are those who see such forms as already ‘modern’ or ‘capitalist’ – in the sense that they are no longer untouched by the modern or by the ‘logic of the capitalist world-market’. Modernity and capitalism, in such theorisations, are understood as all-encompassing global totalities that are the conditions of our ‘being’ in the world today. As such, this view holds, we cannot talk of ‘tradition’ or a ‘non-modern’ or ‘non-capitalist’ way of being any longer in any meaningful sense. We therefore have had theories that talk of the ‘invention of tradition’ or even the ‘modernity of tradition’ on the one hand (by theorists of modernity) and of the ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ on the other (by theorists of capitalism).

Take for instance, the following passage from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, where he elaborates on Ranajit Guha’s (1983) discussion on peasant insurgencies in his spirited refutation of Hobsbawm’s claim that peasant insurgencies were ‘pre-political’:

His [Guha’s] point is that what seemed ‘traditional’ in this modernity were ‘traditional only in so far as their roots could be traced back to precolonial times, but [they were] by no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded.’ This was a political modernity that would eventually give rise to a thriving electoral democracy, even when ‘vast areas of life and consciousness of the people’ escaped any kind of ‘bourgeois’ hegemony.’

(Chakrabarty 2000: 15, all emphasis added)

I want to underline here the expression, ‘this was a political modernity that would eventually give rise to a thriving electoral democracy’. A few pages earlier, Chakrabarty presents us with the category of ‘peasant-as-citizen’ and claims that ‘Guha’s statement recognized this subject as modern’ and hence ‘refused to c...