Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 20:57:11 -0800
From: azfar-AT-wsu.edu (Azfar Hussain)
Subject: Lenin (and Spivak), Political Economy, and (Post)colonialism



I suspect this post might sound terribly odd to many pomo-poco folks on
this massive--rather "global"--listserve. But I'll take the risk--the risk
of sharing a few things, particularly with those who might be interested in
political economy in the Marxist-Leninist sense(s) of the field. Please
forgive me for trying your patience with this rather long note.

I'm currently working on my article tentatively titled "Lenin, Political
Economy, and (Post)colonialism" for the Bengali journal called _Anushtup_.
I advance several arguments about Lenin's usefulness in the contemporary
crtico-political contexts, while particularly contesting some pomo readings
of the mediatized and even mythologized Lenin(s) in the metropolis.

That Lenin is elitist; that Lenin is all empiricism; that Lenin is
positivist and essentialist; that Lenin is deaf or blind to questions of
nationalism and colonialism, and so on and so forth--all such formulations,
informed and inspired by what Garcia Marquez interestingly calls "the
hermeneutical delirium" of some pomo-poco enterprises, have been contested
by way of looking at Lenin's engagements with "political economy." I
argue--through a re-reading of Lenin's _Imperialism_ and other texts--that
it was Lenin who first nuanced and povocatively "put under erasure" the
"possible Enlightenment linearism" supposedly inherent in Marx's famous
circuit of Capital-- M--C--M' -- in ways in which Lenin still enables us to
conceptualize "globalization"--particularly its political economy on the
"glocal" scale even today.  Baudrillard's jubilant and repeated
declarations of the death of Marxist political economy in favor of the
birth of his (Baudrillard's) "new" (?) political economy of signs,
simulations, and simulacra don't simply fly, of course if Lenin is brought
back to show that the very logic of the "C" in the circuit of M--C--M'
transforms "signs" themselves into commodities or even into finance capital
(read multinational capital also), depending on the nature of the specific
geo-historical site(s) from which--or within which--those signs keep
circulating.  After all, signs do not fall from the skies!

I also argue that Lenin does not necessarily underwrite any singular logic
of capital (of course some orthodox Marxists do), while he seems
theoretically alive to the differential, uneven, genealogical (even in the
"Nietzschean-Foucauldian" sense of being multiplily branched--not in the
sense of being "originary"), and  "invisible" ("spectral") movements of
"capital"(s) [mark the plural here] at different historical conjunctures.
My use of the "spectral" here is not meant to be understood as a tribute to
the pun(k)ster Derrida's formulation of "spectro-capitalism" as such,
simply because the "spectral" in Derrida marks a decisive move in the
direction of de-materializing both capitalism and marxism, while the
"spectral" in Lenin is specifically historicized and materially grounded,
all "semiotic playfulnesses" of the circuit of M--C--M' notwithstanding.

I further argue that the kind of political economy Lenin envisages and
engages is not merely the political economy of capitalism as such but also
the political economy of colonialism (or colonialist capitalism or
capitalist colonialism, to use Lenin's own terms here)--something from
which Frantz Fanon himself takes his cues and clues in _The Wreteched of
the Earth_.

Now this Lenin, as I keep arguing, is certainly not positivist, not
essentialist! (An aside: the notion of "strategic essentialism," however,
comes straight from Lenin and subsequently gets taken up by Gramsci in his
"Notes", while Spivak's return to it, without any acknowledgement of Lenin
of course,  raises some important political questions in the face of the
semioclastic dance of signifiers and simulacra in today's pomo "world").

But please don't get me wrong! By no means am I trying to "postmodernize"
Lenin. I am only suggesting that at a time when "globalization-talks" are
copiously circulating in terms of "globalization"'s
semiological-cultural-discursive implications and effects without any
rigorous engagement with political economy as such, it might be
theoretically and politically useful to bring back Lenin--yes, I emphasize
this point with full force--bring back the kind of Lenin who does not
merely "think State" (as Spivak, however, would have us think in her most
recent book _A Critique of Postcolonial Reason_) but thinks differential
movements of capital and (neo)colonial productions on both local and global
scales--rather in terms of the "glocal." And of course Lenin thinks and
re-thinks that very political economy in the service of various kinds of
anti-capitalist movements (not merely socialist-class-struggles but also
"decolonization" and "national" movements).

While foregrounding Lenin in the face of some hip pomo-poco attempts to
pooh-pooh him with relish or with their "pleasures of the text" (just think
of the Michael Ryan of _Marxism and Deconstruction_, whose reading of Lenin
seems to be sinking into an idiocy that has no past!), I also draw
attention to what I wish to call contemporary culturalist "Gramsciology" or
("Gramsci-mania"?) that brutally wipes all traces of "Leninism" off
Gramsci's formulations. As if, like those working-class folks so
instructively described by Garcia Marquez in his _One Hundred Years of
Solitude_, "Lenin didn't exist."

Of course, Gramsci the "superstructuralist" or Gramsci the non-foundational
and non-positivist cultural theorist is more than welcome in the privileged
metropolitan theoretical spaces but, as they say (the "your-most-trulys" of
some pomo-poco industries), the Leninist Gramsci of political economy or
for that matter the Leninist Gramsci of programmatic, organized, and
organic socialist struggles must be killed in their deep, dense discursive
jungles. I can't simply hip-hip-hooray for their
writing-degree-zero-kind-of-adventures with Gramsci--a Gramsci brutally
yanked from his Leninism.

As I was working on the Leninist analytics of political economy (on which
I've to work more of course), I thought I should read Spivak's _A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason_. I did. I found this work absolutely fascinating,
profoundly disturbing, and certainly problematical. As I say this, I should
not be taken to endorse that metropolitan academic "Marxist" --Terry
Eagleton--who had already proven his own kind of Frankfurt-schooling in
Marxism. Eagleton's sweeping and over-generalizing review of Spivak is also
a classic instance of his gruff, glib, gossipy Marxism.

That Spivak is a sell-out or that she has completely succumbed to the
captalist logic of commodification or that she is fashioning and packaging
her discourses and languages in response to the demand-and-supply curves
dictated by the capitalist markets and so on and so forth don't simply wash
with me, because Spivak herself is rigorously forging and re-forging
theoretical spaces of resistances within by way of tracking the itinerary
of what she calls "the native informant." Spivak's work also exhibits a
tremendous amount of what Gramsci calls "critical elaboration," part of
which is of course well-exemplified in her continuous self-questioning--in
her continuous awreness of the complicitous metropolitan sites (dangerous,
tempting, trapping sites indeed) in which she is implicated and from which
she produces her discourses. But of course that doesn't mean that one
should let Spivak off the hook when it comes down to the question of her
complicity. That doesn't mean that Spivak begins to share the spaces
inhabited by landess peasant women in Bangladesh. No, really. In fact
Spivak herself moves towards that very zone of "No" time and again--without
the least bit of dramatics--in her book in ways in which the singular
essentialist logic of commodification itself gets strategically and
repeatedly deconstructed in the service of anti-capitalist moves.

But what about Eagleton? The questions that he raises about Spivak can be
raised about Eagleton himself, no? If Spivak is a sell-out, what the fuck
is Eagleton doing? Bringing about revolution? (maybe he's not televizing
it, right?) Or spelling out decisive deaths to capitalist markets? Well, I
think I shouldn't harp on these strings here because those are the
Eagletonesque questions themselves, but I can't help noticing that Eagleton
simply ends up spitting out his shit against many of the crucial issues
Spivak is trying to raise in her book.

Of course, in her book, Spivak rehearses some of her earlier and
by-now-familiar formulations (the "subaltern," the category of the "native
informant" itself, telematic-electro-postfodist capital, liberal
multicultural academy, and so on). There are also extensions of those
formulations, while there is a massive traversal across a range of
discourse-zones and figures from the "great" German classical
transcendental metahysicist Kant through Spivak's favorite Marx down to (I
see that my own colleagues from Bangladesh are engaged here) Farhad Mazhar
and Farida Akhter.

I've a number of local disagreements with Spivak, particularly (if not
exclusively) vis-a-vis Bangladesh (I'm preparing an essay to talk about
those disagreements), but I must say that I find Spivak's reading of
Marx--in particular--quite significant in that she goes back to one of the
most problematical areas in Marxist theory--the Asiatic mode of production.
Also, Spivak's plea for foregrounding political economy (particularly with
regard to another productively problematical area in Marxist
theory--"value") in both Marxist cultural theory and postcolonial studies
(generally indifferent as they are to the analytics of political economy,
as I keep arguing these days) is entirely salutory. In fact I must say that
of the trinity of the metropolitan poco theorists--Said-Spivak-Bhabha--it
is Spivak who appeals to me most, particularly for the kind of active
interest she demonstrates in Marxist political economy. (On the other hand,
both Said and Bhabha have no fucking clues about that kind of political
economy).

But the analytics of political economy in Spivak's hands, as I can see, do
not give a rap about the concrete political histories of Marxisms in the
"Third World." I feel terribly uncomfortable here. Also, while inserting
"ruptures" into the chain of value-codings (or into the linear logic of
production or political economy) via her provocative readings of those
texts of Marx which have hitherto remained relatively unheeded, Spivak's
theorizing of political economy evinces rather "eltist" and "pomo"-kinds-of
leaps by way of bypassing Lenin, as if Lenin, like Garcia Marquez's
"plantation workers in Macondo," "didn't exist!"  In her entire book, Lenin
receives half a line and Stalin another half: "Lenin thinks State, and
Stalin Nation" (83). And that's it.

Lenin thinks State, eh? What about his own ruptures inserted into the chain
of value-codings when Lenin speaks of the subtle slips-and-slides as well
as the deluge of "financial capital" that give rise to breakages as well
configured blocs of all sorts in various geo-historical spaces?

Finally, in her Marxist-yet-deconstruction-infected political-economic
move, when Spivak reaches Bangladesh and tries to point up--condescendingly
of course--the radicalism of "Prabartana" (which is again a kind of NGO in
Bangladesh, an organization which, despite its occasionally lefty
rhetorical clap-traps, is not immune to developmentology-syndromes as
such). Mark what Spivak says here: "As a result of the foreign direct
investement related to the international garment industry, the long
tradition of Bangladeshi handloom is dying. Prabartana not only subsidizes
and "develops" the weavers' collective, but also attempts to undo epistemic
violation suffered by the weavers by rcognizing them as artists" (414).

Ah, that's is news to me. I wonder if Spivak here is paying attention to
the political economy of the production of the weavers and also the
specific "production relations" between "Prabartana"--run by
middle/upper-middle class educated Bengali folks occasionally funded by
white donors--and the weavers themselves. "Attempts to undo epistemic
violation" on Prabartana's part, eh? Just when the middle-class folks,
having the sanctioned taste for the "artistic," recognize the weavers as
"artists" (condescendingly or not), the "undoing of epistemic violation"
begins, eh? This formulation appears both hasty and heavy for me; for the
matter of "undoing" is decisively a matter of organic struggle--not just an
upper-class posture, as Bengali Marxists like Badruddin Umar and
Akhtaruzzaman Elias kept telling me (Does Spivak know them?).

By the way, Spivak time and again uses terms like "epistemic violence" or
"epistemic violation" and I time and again keep thinking of Fanon. But
Spivak's engagement with Fanon? Virtually nil in her book.

Sorry, I can see that I simply couldn't resist the temptation of writing
quite a long note. I'd certainly appreciate more discussions on political
economy and postcolonialism. Thanks very much for your time.

Regards,

Azfar




Azfar Hussain
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
USA
Phones: 509-335-1331 (office)
        509-332-3344 (home)
E-mail: azfar-AT-wsu.edu




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