Of Concepts and Methods "On Postisms" and Other Essays K

Of Concepts and Methods "On Postisms" and other Essays K. Murali (Ajith) Foreign Languages Press Foreign Languages Press Collection “New Roads” #9 A collection directed by Christophe Kistler Contact – [email protected] https://foreignlanguages.press Paris, 2020 First Edition ISBN: 978-2-491182-39-7 This book is under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” Karl Marx CONTENTS Introduction Saroj Giri From the October Revolution to the Naxalbari 1 Movement: Understanding Political Subjectivity Preface 34 On Postisms’ Concepts and Methods 36 For a Materialist Ethics 66 On the Laws of History 86 The Vanguard in the 21st Century 96 The Working of the Neo-Colonial Mind 108 If Not Reservation, Then What? 124 On the Specificities of Brahmanist Hindu Fascism 146 Some Semi-Feudal Traits of the Indian Parliamentary 160 System The Maoist Party 166 Re-Reading Marx on British India 178 The Politics of Liberation 190 Appendix In Conversation with the Journalist K. P. Sethunath 220 Introduction Introduction From the October Revolution to the Nax- albari Movement: Understanding Political Subjectivity Saroj Giri1 The first decade since the October Revolution of 1917 was an extremely fertile period in Russia. So much happened in terms of con- testing approaches and divergent paths to socialism and communism that we are yet to fully appreciate the richness, intensity and complexity of the time. In particular, what is called the Soviet revolutionary avant garde (DzigaVertov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Boris Arvatov) was extremely active during the 1920s. Some of them were artists who denounced (bourgeois sentimental) painting and for whom art was indistinguishable from artistic labour. They gave a call for the rejection of representation in favour of construction, privileging space and geometry, texture and tectonics. They were not some predictable leftists calling for “socialising aesthetics.” Nor were they calling for the depiction of labour or the working life in the theatrical stage or in art—which would take us to the logic of representation, to reformism. Thus Alexei Gan declared in 1922: “The proletarian revolution has bestirred human thought and has struck home at the holy relics and idols of bourgeois spirituality. Not only the ecclesiastical priests have caught it in the neck, the priests of aesthetics have had it too.”2 For Boris Arvatov, a work of art is now a practical object, like a piece of wood for the carpenter—palpable, geometric, rich in texture and form, non-representational, admitting of an almost elemental relationship 1 Dr. Saroj Giri teaches Political Science at the University of Delhi. He is a Marxist theorist whose most recent work is on the Buddhist philosopher-saint Vasubandhu. He has been a regular contributor in reputed journals and his writings are seen in several collections. 2 Alexei Gan, “From Speculative Activity of Art to Socially Meaningful Artistic Labour” (1922), in John E. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde: 1902-1934, Viking Press, New York, 1976, p. 223. 1 Of Concepts and Methods between the carpenter and wood.3 For the proletarian artist, a book does not just contain “ideas” about the coming victory of the working class, etc., but, as El Lissitzky famously declared, the book itself (as thing, as object) must be transformed. “It is my belief,” wrote Lissitzky in 1926,“that the thoughts we drink from the book with our eyes must be poured over every visible shape. The letters and punctuation marks, which introduce order to thoughts, must also be taken into account.” He proposed the “book of the future”: “There are today two dimensions to the word. As sound it is a function of time; as exposition, of space. The book of the future must be both. This is how to overcome the automatism of the contemporary book. A world-view which has become automatic ceases to exist in our senses, so we are left drowning in a void.”4 What took place was a powerful proletarian maelstrom in the world of objects and material, perhaps best captured in a memorable phrase used by Arvatov at the time: the “object as comrade.” One should not, however, assume that this transformation is all about objects and materials, to the exclusion of the self and the political subject. Indeed, it is as much about the political subject, the comrade or communist militant. As we will see here, this phrase and the immense practice behind it allows us to develop, a full hundred years later (!), a very specific and determinate idea of the revolutionary comrade—which we will term “comrade as object.” The Bolshevik “object as comrade” now gets conjugated with “comrade as object,” in a very determinate, concrete sense. This will have important implications for the question of agency, revolutionary subjectivity, the vanguard Party and so on. We will approach this question through an engagement with a real, living struggle today: the self-destitution and self-objectification of the Maoist revolutionary comrade in the Naxalbari armed struggle. This essay can therefore be read as a long meditation on the following observation by K. Murali (Ajith): “unlike the old communist movement, its (Maoist movement’s) founder leaders like Charu Mazumdar and Kan- 3 See Arvatov, Art and Production (1926), in John Roberts and Alexei Penzin, eds., Art and Production, Pluto Press, London, 2017. 4 El Lissitzky, “The Future of the Book” (1926), New Left Review (Jan-Feb 1967), p. 41. 2 Introduction hai Chatterjee had an unwavering orientation of going to the bottommost levels of society, integrating with them and leading their struggle for the seizure of political power.” What is at stake here is the nature of revolutionary subjectivity of the comrade, of the communist militant: what we will term, the “comrade as object.” But we cannot talk about the subject without the object: hence we will enter into this theme of political subjectivity, viz., “the comrade as object,” through the quintessential communist/Bol- shevik idea (and practice) of “the object as comrade.” We will also see that the communist notion of “object as comrade” allows us to better appreciate some strands of the debates during the Chi- nese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s: in particular, the extremely crucial question of the material conditions for the reproduction of a new bourgeoi- sie internal to “socialism,” and which destroys the Revolution from within. This pertains to the perennial question about Revolution vs. Counter-Rev- olution, pointing towards a Marxist understanding of the capitalist resto- ration in China. It will be seen that Mao’s extremely rich notion of contradiction provides the theoretical arsenal to address some of the challenges to social theory posed by contemporary movements like the Black Lives Matter, from within the milieu of revolutionary Marxism. The “Cheeseness” of Cheese The idea of the “object as comrade” is attributed to Boris Arvatov who disagreed with the views of the “Marxist friend,” Leon Trotsky, as expressed in the latter’s well-known 1923 essay called “What is Proletarian Culture and Is It Possible?”5 Arvatov’s response is the essay, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” where he makes an indirect reference to Trotsky’s supposed abandonment of historical materialism.6 Arvatov turns his attention to ordinary items like a cigarette lighter, a coat holder, an umbrella, the use of glass and steel in buildings—the everyday world of things, objects and humans(assemblage) that we inhabit. We use and consume such objects or commodities. This involves the exchange of money 5 Leon Trotsky, “What is Proletarian Culture and Is It Possible?” (1923), posted at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/art/tia23c.htm. 6 Boris Arvatov, “Everyday life and the culture of the thing,” October, Vol. 81 (Sum- mer, 1997), pp. 119-128. 3 Of Concepts and Methods and goods. A socialist society must however ask the question: How can you use the objects or commodities in such a way that you “directly” consume the use value without replicating what Marx called the fetishistic powers of the object or commodity?7 Posing this question provides a glimpse of other possibilities that can take us beyond the logic of capitalist commodity production. This is one way in which Arvatov’s “object as comrade” enters the picture—as challenging the “power of the commodity,” a kind of Brech- tian re-functioning (umfunktionierung) of the (pre-socialist) object.8 Keti Chukrov explains the “object as comrade”: In this [proletarian]economy, the object became the tautologi- cal realisation of its idea—as if it were possible to imagine the chairness of a chair or to wear the coatness of a coat. Interest- ingly, this applied even to food, which had to be healthy, but deprived of any specific gourmet features, meaning that one had to eat the cheeseness of cheese—i.e., one kind of it, not its varieties.9 What we have is this: consuming the cheeseness of cheese without getting distracted by the “brand” or the flash value, by the “varieties.” The “object” or “thing” lucidly speaks to the cooperative activity through which it is brought to life—which is directly connected with the “cheeseness of cheese.” The commodity now does not exude fetishistic powers that serve to suppress the cooperative production process from view and push the “social” to the unconscious. 7 See K. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Part One—in particular the discussion on “commodity fetishism.” 8 Brecht’s notion of ‘refunctioning’ can be understood as transformation or radical change through inciting internal possibilities or immanent tendencies.

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