The postists

In the wake of the events of 1989, we were invited to – in Eduardo Galeano’s words – “the world burial of socialism”. The fact that in Nepal, in 1994, the first-ever democratic elections were swept by the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) hardly mattered. This capitalist triumphalism was lent an academic aura by a host of disciplines preaching an age of posts – post-modernism, post-Marxism, post-industrialism, post-nationalism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism and what not.

‘Metanarratives’ (by implication Marxism) were declared dead. Besides their attack on reason and truth, what united these disciplines was their universal submission to Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and Jacques Lacan’s deconstruction as theoretical gadgets. How ironic! The critics of Marxist metanarratives ended up universalising Foucauldian and Lacanian metanarratives.

Uniting all these disciplines was another universal ‘theoretical’ bond – their hostility to Marxism. That their theoretical prophets, including Foucault, had flirted with Marxism in their youth made it easy to selectively appropriate Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg. However, both Gramsci and Rosa are decontextualised to the extent that graduate students at metropolitan campuses shake their heads in disbelief when somebody claims that the former was the founding father of the Communist Party of Italy and the latter was a central leader of the German communist party.

In the age of sound bites and infotainment, this should not surprise anyone. The god of market can easily harness Marx or Lenin in the service of capitalism. Consider, for example, an ad depicting portraits of ‘history’s most ambitious leaders’ (including Lenin) next to a gleaming bottle of Coca-Cola. The caption reads: ‘Only one launched a campaign that captured the world’.

While Che’s iconic image has been recycled by a host of marketing gurus, Crystal Bartolovich, in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, draws our attention to the promotional letter to market the publication of the 1996 World Development Report: From Plan to Market. The promo enlightens us about the “challenges” and “expanding opportunities” Eastern Europe provides for “policymakers …scholars…and global investors”. At the outset, the letter quotes the Communist Manifesto: “all that is solid melts into air”. It goes on: “that’s how Marx and Engels described the arrival of capitalism in the nineteenth century, and it’s no less true of the economies in transition at the close of [the] twentieth”.

A stupefied Bartolovich points out that there is no suggestion that the Manifesto (which is never named) is a text that advocates “an association [of workers], in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

This is what academics spearheading the age of posts continue to do. The strategy is to sound radical. An expression of this radical hullaballoo is to attack the Eurocentrism of Enlightenment, liberalism, and Marxism.

The end in mind, however, is to deradicalise. In between the strategy and the aim, the tactic employed is the mystification of discourse to spread confusion. Hence, unintelligible narratives are churned out which may sound academic but explain nothing – and end up just compounding confusion.

In Punjabi, a siana banda (wise man) is one who is able to explain complicated matters in an uncomplicated way. The job of mathematicians and philosophers, to paraphrase Chomsky, was to solve puzzles for the rest of society to comprehend them. Our ‘postists’ instead aristocratise, complicate, mystify and finally confuse. Confusion is central to their tactics.

This is because confusion inoculates status quo since confused people reluctantly act. How can one act when truth is fragmented, reality is complicated and incomprehensible while identities are multiple in an age of globalisation whereby the difference between local and global has metamorphosed into glocal? Most importantly, when every ‘theory’ (most notably Marxism) is inadequate.

It is true that this world is complicated. Moreover, to quote Allama Iqbal, Sabat ik taghiar ko hay zamany main (change is the only permanence), truth and reality are relative subjects. A comprehensive theory that addresses all global issues does not exist.

But this is how it has always been. From slave revolts to the Cuban revolution and Hugo Chavez’s experimentation with ‘21st century socialism’, the human race has acted in light of inadequate theories to improve living conditions for millions who lack the luxury of PhDs in ‘Hegemony without Power’.

Furthermore, there are certain metanarratives and identities that are not as complicated as our postists want us to believe. For instance, capitalism all over the world always operates with the logic of profit. And it also always competes. Workers all over the world form trade unions to defend themselves. Similarly, the case of multiple identities or definitional complexities regarding local and global are easy to settle in certain cases, if not all the time.

When the US, in league with its North European cousins invades Iraq, an entire ‘Third World’ country becomes local. Chained in misery, billions across the globe know that another world is necessary. Any ‘counter-metanarrative’ to draw a wedge within working class internationalism is tantamount to complicity with imperialism in its contemporary guise known as globalisation.

The writer is a freelance contributor. Email: mfsulehria@hotmail.com