Benedict Anderson was in Delhi recently to deliver a lecture on his latest work. He “is one of the first and original theorists of nations and nationalisms. His pathbreaking work ‘Imagined Communities’ is an exploration of how various peoples have at a certain juncture in history imagined themselves into nations. An anthropological explorer of various national-liberation movements in East and Southeast Asia, Prof Anderson sees the rise of nationalism as being closely connected with the growth of printed books and with the technical development of print as a whole”. Paramita Ghosh interviewed Anderson for Hindustan Times. FOR THE FULL TEXT
Q:As a man of the Left, what is the future of Marxism in south Asia and in India?
A: Communism has taken a beating in the last 20 years. But it won’t go away if underlying problems in society don’t go away. There has to be new ways to revive it. However, one framework which Marx never anticipated was how the atomic tests would destroy civilisation. The limits of resources are not there in Marxist vocabulary, it comes from Thomas Robert Malthus and it has to be grappled with.
India has three kinds of Communisms. The established left, the CPI M-L and the new Naxalites who are no longer led by college students. They go to the bottom of society.
Q:One of our living realities is the competition between Indian and China amid the babble of economic cooperation. How can Third World solidarity be revived?
A: What solidarity can there be to speak of? There was never a leftist government in India. The Cold War put China on one side and India played a role in between…. Both are rapidly expansionist, they are bound to get in each other’s hair. But it is in everyone’s interest to reduce the power of America.
China wants a ring of friendly countries around it, but it won’t occupy them. It’s not clear what China wants in Africa. I don’t know whether they intend to stay. If the Chinese start moving there, then it might get interesting.
There is, I think, however, a growing acceptance that war will not get you more territory. What threatens nation-states are not external states, but internal collapse. It has happened in Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia. It may happen in India. States can’t get any bigger, but they can get smaller.
The experiences of the global south have revealed that the growth-driven modernization projects have left in their wake a trail of marginalization, dispossession, disempowerment, and the displacement of segments of the population. How is a growth process that leads to exclusion legitimized and how are the citizen/subjects governed through organized practices? How do the excluded population reproduce the economic and social conditions of their existence? How can the process of development through accumulation-oriented growth be critically evaluated? And, what are the prospects, if any, of alternative forms of development beyond accumulation? A panel discussion examines these issues in the context of two of the fastest growing economies in the world—China and India. The panel is part of a project to examine the theme development beyond accumulation from a Third World perspective.
Participants: Partha Chatterjee, professor of political science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York. His works include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and its Fragments (1993), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2003), and The Politics of the Governed (2004).
Duncan Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research. His works include Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory (1986), Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital, and Land in the New Economy (2002), and Adams Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (2006).
David Harvey, distinguished professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Among his many books are The Limits to Capital (1982; new edition 2007), The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), The New Imperialism (2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006), and Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009).
William Milberg, professor of Economics, New School for Social Research, will chair the session. He has authored The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (1996, with Robert Heilbroner), The Making of Economic Society (2006, with Robert Heilbroner), and edited The Megacorp and Macrodynamics (1992), and Labor and the Globalization of Production (2004).
This event is hosted jointly by the Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, and the India China Institute (ICI) of The New School, and is organized under the broad rubric of the theme of Prosperity and Inequality of the India China Institute. New School faculty member and ICI Fellow Lopamudra Banerjee is organizing the event.
This panel is part of a larger initiative by a working group of economists to examine the theme Development Beyond Accumulation from a Third World perspective. The theoretical and empirical studies carried out by the group are informed by the contemporary development experiences in China and India.
1) Stagnant industrial (especially manufacturing) wages for the last three decades;
2) An urban-biased approach to development leading to a “prolonged ‘limitless’ supply of labour”.
By bankrupting the rural economy, China has pumped up its urban industrial growth, trade surplus and financial capital.
This is how China lured global capital, even from other East Asian economies, which consequently put China at the helm of East Asian capitalism. But the same strategy has made China dependent on the ups and downs of the global (esp., American) economy. Cheap labour and rural bankruptcy, which constitute the basis of Chinese growth, cannot provide a viable domestic demand structure for the growth to sustain during a global recession. Further, the rise of the Coastal bourgeoisie and their cohorts within the Communist Party will not allow demand stimulus which brings about structural changes challenging their political-economic hegemony.
The “capitalist roaders” in China are fully entrenched within the State and Party, so “class struggle within the party” will not be enough, a new full-fledged Chinese Revolution is what is called for.
