Anjan Chakrabarti

University of Calcutta · Department of Economics

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus,...

The discourse of development is premised on an analytical structure of ‘economic dualism’. Taking off from a class-focused perspective, this chapter demonstrates that the engendering of economic dualism is based on capitalocentric-orientalism; that in turn secures and is secured by the twin foreclosure of class and world of the third. Capitalocentr...

This chapter takes up the question of ethics, justice, and the political in Marxian contexts. It first takes up the question of ethics to, with and of world of the third. Ethics is relational; ethics is contingent upon the nature of the Other’s irreducible otherness. It then takes up the question of justice—justice as distinct from both law and eth...

Our particular rendition of world of the third Marxism cannot be founded without the return of a class-focused discourse—class understood in terms of processes of surplus labour. Beginning with the entry point of class as processes of surplus labour and the epistemo-ontology of overdetermination, this chapter provides a basic introduction to a bare...

This chapter is an elaboration of the question of hegemony in general and global capitalist hegemony in particular. Taking off from the class-focused approach, we first define global capital and then the circuits of global capital; these circuits are shown to comprise of a global network of capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises as also other ki...

How could an apparently decentred and disaggregated reality be turned into the fantasy of a whole called Capitalism? How does this fantasy include such a devalued outside, as the third world? This sets up the background of Chapter 3 that seeks a theoretical understanding of the relationship between the decentred and disaggregated concrete, the fant...

This chapter’s and book’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 reflect...

This chapter builds on chapter 4 relates hegemony to global capitalist hegemony, the foreclosed real to class and world of the third, and the realvictim - realutopic - realevil to the delusional veil of third worldism. The foreclosure of class takes shape through the transmutation of the decentred and disaggregated economy into a hegemonic structur...

This chapter focuses on the different kinds of encounter of the circuits of global capital with world of the third. We show through ‘case studies’ how the workings of global capital over world of the third engender processes of the original accumulation of capital—of expropriation, theft, and plunder—in the name of the development of the third worl...

Marx shows two limit points to capitalism: one, exploitation as the limit of equality, liberty, and fraternity and original accumulation as the limit of the purportedly virtuous cycle of capitalism. He has also gestured towards another limit point of capitalism arising from its systemic method of optimizing resources for profit—destabilizing nature...

The multiplicity of class processes delinked from the local–global market come to constitute our entry point for identifying world of the third as the constitutive outside of the circuits of global capital. Building on a class-focused theorization of world of the third, we shall show how the delusional veil of third worldism is engendered through t...

This book of collected essays offers a theoretically grounded and competing interpretation of contemporary Indian economy and society from a class-focused perspective. However, it is also about how the relation between India and Marxism can offer an alternative guiding methodology to rethink the theoretical tenets of Marxism. India as context bring...

Taking off from a class-focused perspective, Satyaki Roy's book, Contours of Value Capital: India’s Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development, dissects the global network of value added by labor power during production to reveal a process of value capture by global capitalists in the Global North. Thus, even when sites of production may have moved...

This chapter brings class and capitalism to a dialogue in the context of India’s economic transition. Based on my previous research findings, I throw light on the effect and role of class process of surplus labor in shaping India’s development strategy, from the period of planning to neoliberalism, which I argue has facilitated India’s transition f...

Broadly speaking, there have been two ways of dealing with poverty, one that of approach and the other that of measurement. In recent times, attention has turned more to the issue of measurement which, if one agrees that poverty is important, is not to be discounted; issues of measurement do throw challenges to theories of poverty. However, as Amar...

Much ink has been spilled on poverty measurements and trends, at the expense of revealing causality. Assembling multidisciplinary and international contributions, this book shows that a causal understanding of poverty in rich and poor countries is essential. That understanding must be based on a critical interrogation of the wider social relations...

This paper problematizes one crucial concept in Marxism: ‘third world’. It problematizes it through the return of the foreclosed language of class in the economy; which in turn enables us to find-found the ‘world of the third’ as the outside to the circuits of global capital. Such an outside opens the possibility of understanding Marxian postcapita...

This paper makes space for eleven possible moves to humanize development. The first is to turn to capabilities-functionings, quality of life and questions of well-being (in addition to ‘growth’). The second is a critique of the reduction of a part of humanity to the epithet underdeveloped and the consequent dehumanization. The third is a disaggrega...

Using the methodology of overdetermination, class process of surplus labor as the entry point and socially determined need of food security, we deliver an alternative class-focused rendition of the public distribution system (PDS) in India. We first surmise our theoretical framework to infer that the overdetermined and contradictory relation of cla...

Based on the class process of surplus labor and of overdetermination as mutual interaction of processes, I review Marx’s critique of trinity formula espoused by Classical Political Economists and show it as divulging a concise value theoretic frame of exploring the connection of capitalist relations of production to that of the class distributi...

Building upon Marx’s late turn to the Russian path and Tagore’s turn to Sriniketan, this paper moves the standard imagination of politics from ‘critique’ to ‘transformative-reconstructive praxis’ (including the axis of self-transformation à la askesis). It also moves from Tagore’s critique of a ‘politics of collectivism’ (in Right-wing imaginations...

This review of Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics centers on a claim made by mainstream economics to have surpassed the narrow horizon of neoclassical economics, understood as general equilibrium or Walrasian economics, having differentiated into a pluralist field. Through a detailed study of neoclassical economics, Madra distills the mispla...

This paper claims that the trading company should be understood to be occupying positions in both fundamental class process and subsumed class process and constitute a site of both productive and unproductive capital/labour. Individuals inside the trading company may occupy diverse class positions pertaining to performance, appropriation, distribut...

This is a short note on the relation of income distribution and class process in a capitalist economy following Marx’s critique of trinity formula espoused by the Classical Political Economy (CPE) (Marx 1991, 953-70). By making visible the connection of class and social relations with capitalist mode of production, the importance of Marx’s critique...

EconoPhysics Internetwork String in Spacextime of Banking Company Stocks

Globalization has unleashed two concomitant forces in India since 1991: neoliberalism and private capitalism. Neoliberal globalization enabled India’s economic transition from state capitalism under a centralized plan regime (1951–1991) toward private capitalism that took the form of global capitalism (1991–). In the post-globalization era, while I...

Building on late Marx’s turn to the Russian road and Tagore’s turn to Sriniketan, this paper moves the standard imagination of politics from ‘critique’ to ‘transformative reconstructive praxis’ (including the axis of self-transformation à la askesis). It also moves from Tagore’s critique of a ‘politics of collectivism’ (in Right-wing imaginations i...

Abstract: Three conclusions on social need are highlighted from a Marxian perspective. Social need signifies the limit of capitalism, a point of its crisis. It reveals that class and social need are in an overdetermined and contradictory relation and this dynamic relation historicizes both class and social need forms. Finally, what gets opened up i...

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This essay looks at the condition of the working class in India in the context of India’s economic transition as the “old order” premised on global capitalism and a development model based on rural-to-urban migration face a serious meltdown in the postpandemic period. The systemic instability amid an ongoing economic depression has invited a respon...

Book Description While Marxian theory has produced a sound and rigorous critique of capitalism, has it faltered in its own practice of social transformation? Has it faltered because of the Marxian insistence on the hyper-secularization of political cultures? The history of religions – with the exception of some spiritual traditions – has not been a...

In the backdrop of the rise of capitalism that led to a crisis in old care, this paper advances a theory of old care based on Amartya Sen’s analytical frame of capability and freedom. It unpacks the dimensions of care and characterizes old care from these in terms of aging. The definition and dimensions of old care are produced in a scenario where...

What happens when a thinker and practitioner of transformative politics claim to be imagining and doing socialism from a perspective drawn from the resources in the East? We show how Gandhi seeks to shape an Indianized version of non-violent socialism consistent with what is claimed to be Marx’s basic principle of communism: “To each according to h...

This book pursues a Marxist approach with an emphasis on class to reflect on Marx’s Capital in the context of the East. It critically reassesses some of the familiar concepts in Capital and teases out issues that are at its periphery. In various essays, it explores this borderland to promote new concepts and modes of analysing Marx’s treatise in th...

The article seeks to develop a class focused theory of development induced internal migration in the context of-India's economic transition. Through a critical interrogation of the hegemonic development approach, it (a) problematizes the norms and telos that underscore a presumption of migration as an inevitable journey from the rural to urban as p...

The article seeks to develop a class focused theory of development induced internal migration in the context of India's economic transition. Through a critical interrogation of the hegemonic development approach, it (a) problematizes the norms and telos that underscore a presumption of migration as an inevitable journey from the rural to urban as p...

After disinterring the conventional approaches to poverty, we deploy a class focused Marxian theory to highlight a novel approach to poverty, delivering insights that have hitherto been demoted or ignored. Specifically, we show that class process of performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labor has serious implications for p...

Though the justification for a heterodox approach from a normative point of view is valuable, we try to build a more robust thesis that theorizing the economy cannot but be heterodox. To think otherwise is delusional. Our defence centres on interrogating two interrelated philosophical questions – ‘What is theory?’ and ‘What distinguishes one theory...

Abstract: Even as India’s new economic map pioneered by global capitalism under neoliberalism has shown remarkable success by standards of high growth and income poverty reduction, it has sown seeds of contradictions that revealed themselves in the form of structural, income and social inequalities, force and violence of primitive accumulation, slu...

We seek to analyze the changing rationale and character of Indian state in the backdrop of the post-planning Indian economic transition. It is held that the Indian economy has transited into the triad of neoliberalism, global capitalism and inclusive development. It is argued that the India state was both a creator of this triad and also the site o...

Taking off from Nikolai Bukharin’s and Aimé Césaire’s work on imperialism, I deploy a class-focused approach to rethink the relevance and particularity of imperialism in the era of neoliberal-globalisation and global capitalism. My approach to theorising imperialism is auto-critical, in the sense that the elaboration of this category contains its c...

While the justification for heterodox approach from a normative point of view is valuable, we try to build a more robust thesis that theorizing the economy cannot but be heterodox. To think otherwise is delusional. Our defense centers around interrogating two interrelated philosophical questions: 'what is theory' and 'what distinguishes one theory...

Taking cognisance of India's long-run economic transition in the post-planning era, it is argued that the triad of neo-liberal globalisation, global capitalism and inclusive development has come to constitute the new order of things in the Indian economy. This article explores the appearance of each, and the roles they played in reshaping the India...

Taking off from Nikolai Bukharin’s classic Imperialism and World Economy, we integrate some of his insights into a class-focused Marxian framework to rethink the relevance and particularity of imperialism as a category in the contemporary. Bukharin’s long lasting contribution is methodological as Lenin suggests. The ‘colonial valve’ that Bukharin i...

Is there a hidden aspect of historical inevitability, a teleology, inscribed in Marx’s Capital? One could argue that there is, and that would certainly qualify as one reading of Capital. In this paper, however, we invoke the writings of ‘late’ Marx to produce a different reading-of Capital, the book, and ‘capital’, the concept-a reading that in tur...

Building on Tagore's critique of " politics, " an English term Tagore does not translate into rajneeti (thus retaining its foreignness), the paper moves to Tagore's turning away from nationalism as largely an " abstract being " or a symbolic form, and his turning, instead, to the question of dharma (as the dialectic between askesis, a la Foucault,...

Title of the Book: "Rabindranath Tagore on Economy, Politics and Society - Contemporary Discourses" Editor: Sebak K. Jana ISBN: 81-93221-41-X Publisher: Dey Book Concern, Office: 15, Shyamacharan De Street, Kolkata - 700073 About the Book: Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most talented, versatile and perceptive writers of the modern world. The wo...

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,...

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,...

Taking cognisance of India’s long-run economic transition in the post-planning era, it is argued that the triad of neo-liberal globalisation, global capitalism and inclusive development has come to constitute the new order of things of Indian economy. This article explores the appearance of each, and the roles they played in reshaping the Indian ec...

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 e...

(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Dhar, and Stephen Cullenberg 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...

A unique Marxian theory of development is unpacked and defended. This Marxian theory has three essential features that are otherwise absent in competing Marxian and non-Marxian approaches. First, it foregrounds the necessity of a theory of outside in the form of world of the third, as distinguished from third world. Second, the epistemology of deve...

Three different theories of transition are unpacked. The first is a critical examination of the Classical Historical Materialism (CHM) approach through GA Cohen’s rendition as containing a deterministic and teleological theory of transition. This characterization of transition is also exhibited by another family of CHM approach that follows dialect...

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,...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Indian-Economy-Transition-Globalization/dp/1107076110 This book theorizes India􀀒s economic transition in the post-liberalization period (1991􀀛2014). First, it builds on a critical and post-Orientalist Marxian theory and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, thus addressing the fundamental, but generally demoted, question 􀀫what...

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),...

This short paper looks critically at the history of the category of peasantry, the difficulty encountered by various scholars in defining it and accounting for it in a historical plane.

Tagore on Imperialism and Politics

This article discusses a possible dialogue between Marxism and psychotherapy based on the letters between Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, exchanged between 1963 and 1969. This dialogue forms the ground for a dialogue between what has come to be known as the “critical tradition” and the “clinical tradition” which, in turn, becomes the ground for...

This article looks into a particular philosophical problem that haunts both Sociology and Marxism, and where D P Mukerji's perspective may be seen as relevant. There has been much ado in sociology over the debate between hermeneutic and positivist approaches. Drawing insights from D P Mukerji, we see his intervention as an attempt to find a way out...

India needs less Government and more Governance (Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, 2014) Neo-liberalism, like 'globalization' in the early 1990s, is a term that has come to hog much of Indian intellectual space. The term however needs a much clearer positing. Moreover, the term needs to be understood in the context of its appearance and evolu...

The tendency of the mind is economical: it loves to form habits and move in grooves which save it the trouble of thinking anew at each of its steps. Ideals once formed make the mind lazy. It becomes afraid to risk its acquisitions in fresh endeavors. It tries to enjoy complete security by shutting up its belongings behind fortifications of habit "....