Prabhat Patnaik on Slavoj Zizek: The Limits of National Allegory

Last week, on the 26th of July 2017 - The Wire - a progressive political journal, interviewed
Prabhat Patnaik a renowned Marxian economist and professor emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehuru
University1. While I would commend the publication for its efforts, I want to highlight what is
unfortunately emerging as a tendency within the academic establishment in India, even from
those sections that would characterize themselves as being left of center. Here I refer to the
adoption of increasingly xenophobic, and since we are speaking of economists - might I add,
protectionist stances vis-a-vis their counterparts in the ‘First World’. The section quoted is, I
think representative of a predominant tendency which employs the ‘West’ as a ‘boogey man’
representative of the ills of ‘globalization’ and the social evil of its doing. A tendency which, I
must say with some disappointment, is merely imitative of the rhetorical strategies of the very
fascist forces which Professor Patnaik would go on to condemn.

“Interviewer: People like you talk about (the) delinking of countries like India from globalisation. But
a number of Left intellectuals from the First World, like Slavoj Zizek, are fearful of such a delinking
of Third World countries from globalisation. They think that such a delinking is a retreat from
modernity and a return to pre-modernity and parochialism. Why should Third World countries be
delinked from globalisation?

Prabhat Patnaik - In a society like ours, linking with so-called modernity, which is neoliberal policies
and globalisation, is responsible for the emergence of fascism. In other words, I do not see fascism
as separate from neoliberalism. I see fascism as pro-communal liberalism. [Prime Minister
Narendra] Modi is carrying out the neoliberal agenda far more actively than many have done before
him. In a society like ours, we have a peculiar combination of globalisation on the one side and the
most backward, obscurantist, reactionary, communal, fascist agenda on the other side.

These two are not separate. Globalisation is not fighting against it. On the contrary, globalisation is
sustaining it. They sustain globalisation. They will do Hindu pujas and the rest of it, but will also
push for globalisation. I think people like Zizek, who actually talk about globalisation as being the
harbinger of modernity, are not looking at the comprehensive impact of globalisation on a society
like ours. Modernity in a society like ours came with anti-colonial struggle, and the anti-colonial
struggle was delinking from the British Empire. People like Zizek are not aware about the
complexities of Third World societies.’’

A careful reader will immediately notice a substitution of terms by Dr Patnaik; being asked about
globalization in the Indian context he begins by speaking of a ‘so-called modernity’. This, while
seemingly diverging from the question does however bring to focus what in many ways is India’s
fundamental antagonism today. How does a nation on the threshold of becoming an economic
and military superpower reconcile the fact that it has summited such scales at the price of
leaving behind the essential agrarian sector which yet provides the means of employment for an
absolute majority of the population? Furthermore, with the efforts of the present BJP
government strengthening the communal forces within the nation, political representation is
increasingly being hegemonised within the ambit of a Hindu nationalistic framework.

I am certain that Professor Patnaik is not unaware of this, yet the question that we should ask is
why would he then choose to deploy a leading intellectual of our era, Savoj Zizek as a straw
man that figures as all allegorical representative of the very ignorance which he explicitly
combats? Allow me to furnish some evidence - In his touring lectures in Hyderabad and Delhi,
Slavoj Zizek clarifies that he is under no illusions of the complicity of traditional values, Hindu or
otherwise - in sustaining the authoritarian capitalist order that has entrenched itself in the

1https://thewire.in/159148/prabhat-patnaik-interview-capitalism/
country. Going back as early as February 2015, an article in the Financial Times clarifies that
this has indeed been Zizek’s position2. Drawing from journalistic sources within the country,
Professor Patnaik would do well to note that Live-Mint, a site that deals almost elusively with
business and financial news published this stanza in a report on the article cited above -

“Referring to India’s embrace of the market through economic liberalization post-1991, he argues
that traditional cultural values have proved to be greater enablers of market capitalism than such
increasingly nebulous concepts as “freedom”—which has historically been the glue that has held
capitalism and democracy together in the West. And these traditional values—such as deference to
elders, for instance—work better for capitalism today because they lean toward the authoritarian
rather than the democratic pole of the social and cultural spectrum.”

In the spirit of responsible critique, it is necessary that we acknowledge that there is a certain
degree of in-transparency in such maneuvers, what however would such steps be
representative of? This is the principled question to ask if we are to characterize such measures
as a tendency rather than a mere aberration. At such a juncture I would like to state that such
obfuscations are irresponsible at best and ill spirited at worse and the project of communism
cannot be reduced to a ploy at hamstringing an intellectual adversary.

What makes this entire episode quite comical is the fact that even in their own words, Prabhat
Patnaik and Slavoj Zizek seem to be in agreement as to what the ‘shape’ of contemporary
capitalism will be; the title of the article from which I quoted Zizek proclaims that ‘Capitalism has
broken free of it Democratic Shackles’ and while Professor Patnaik would prefer to frame this as
the emergence of ‘authoritarian’ capitalism it is nakedly clear that there isn’t a major
contradiction between their positions.

Or is there? Prior to launching into the rather facile dismissal of Slavoj, Professor Patnaik states
that

‘capitalism always requires some kind of exogenous support to keep its accumulation going. For a
very long time, colonial relations provided the exogenous support. In the inter-war period, this
disappeared and in the post-war period, you have the state providing the exogenous support.
Financial capital does not like state intervention, it wants to directly stimulate investment to
generate employment and growth.’

Here it is essential to ask what precisely does Professor Patnaik mean when he speaks of the
‘exogenous support’ required by Capitalism? And more importantly, exogenous to what?
Because what closetly seems to be smuggled in is an implied theory of interiority and exteriority,
of territory as domains of political control, for the circumstances in India are such that the
regressive backlash of Hindutva fundamentalists has led to a situation where the social and
economic boycott of all that is demarcated to be un-Indian (read anit-conservative) be it
Hollywood, condoms or Classical art are targeted by a moral police not unlike the Fascist
squads that patrolled Mussolini’s Italy (Bajarang Dal etc). Paradoxically however, India yet
remains a growing market for such articles in a scenario not unlike the scene in Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis where after the Islamic Party is elected into power, youngsters secretly buy
Iron Maiden and Pink Floyd CD’s, indulging in the now illicit indulgence against the Islamic
government voted in. The exception of course to such a nationalist situation is yet institutions
such as JNU where Professor Patnaik is an honorary emeritus. Though with the present
government such old bastions of the left are too succumbing to pressures from the center.

2https://www.ft.com/content/088ee78e-7597-11e4-a1a9-00144feabdc0
All the while, how are we to read Professor Prabhat choice of ignoring the fact that even within
the agrarian sector in India, beef exports overseas now place the country within the top three
meat providers in the world. 3 Also ignoring the fact that in 2016 India signed a deal with Ukraine
to ship 250000 tonnes of corn to combat hunger and the rising price of food grains. 4 It this light,
it is negligent and concealing on Professor Patnaik’s part to frame ‘globalization’ as merely a
scaffold for the extraction that capital in India depends on as it invisiblizes the institution of the
free market itself which we chose to venture into after liberalization in 91, and the crucial
markets, services and goods that it has provided us.

Of less immediate yet more potent concern however is Professor Patnaik’s reading of Marxism
in general and his misreading of Marx’s revolution in the history of causality in particular. This is
of prime importance as it is here that we can actually unpack what Professor Patnaik’s
characterization of Capital’s necessary ‘exogenous’ scaffolding may be obscuring. For this task,
Louis Althusser’s theory of causality sheds some light on Marx’s own thinking and what is often
lost in translations, it is also, I believe, a very fruitful detour and of such significance for
Contemporary Theory that it is worth quoting at length: -

“The epistemological problem posed by Marx's radical modification of Political Economy can be expressed
as follows: by means of what concept is it possible to think the new type of determination which has just
been identified as the determination of the phenomena of a given region by the structure of that region?...In
other words, how is it possible to define the concept of a structural causality?...Very schematically, we can
say that classical philosophy...had two and only two systems of concepts with which to think effectivity. The
mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity,
could not be made to think the effectivity of a whole on its elements, except at the cost of extraordinary
distortions (such as those in Descartes' "psychology" and biology). But a second system was available, one
conceived precisely in order to deal with the effectivity of a whole on its elements: the Leibnitzian concept of
expression. This is the model that dominates all Hegel's thought. But it presupposes in principle that the
whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, of which the elements of the whole are then no more than
the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle of the essence being present at each point in the
whole, such that at each moment it is possible to write the immediately adequate equation: such and such an
element (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc., in Hegel) = the inner essence of the whole. Here
was a model which made it possible to think the effectivity of the whole on each of its elements, but if this
category - inner essence/outer phenomenon was to be applicable everywhere and at every moment to each of
the phenomena arising in the totality in question, it presupposed that the whole had a certain nature, precisely the
nature of a "spiritual" whole in which each element was expressive of the entire totality as a "pars totalis". In other words,
Leibnitz and Hegel did have a category for the effectivity of the whole on its elements or parts, but on the absolute
condition that the whole was not a structure ...The third concept of effectivity, that of structural' causality,) can be entirely
summed up in the concept of "Darstellung", the key epistemological concept of the whole Marxist theory of value, the
concept whose object is precisely to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects, and therefore to
designate structural causality itself....The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and
alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside
them. The absence of the cause in the structure's "metonymic causality" on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of
the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the
structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-
existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the
structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole
existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short, that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its
peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.”5

3http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-is-worlds-third-
biggest-beef-exporter-fao-report/articleshow/59820316.cms
4http://in.reuters.com/article/india-corn-idINKCN0WG1TU
5Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. "Reading Capital, trans." Ben Brewster, London: NLB
(1970).
In re-framing what is perhaps most essential to recognize in Capitalism at large and capital in
particular, we may posit the following three hypothesis which in my view are self evident to any
Marxist worth their salt.

1. Capital is foremost, before its congelation into the money form and as an accumulation of
wealth, a social relation.

2. Colonialism, Neo-Liberalism and Imperialism are names for the structures which facilitate the
extraction of surplus produced by labor power, which constitutes the essence of Capitalist
accumulation.

3. Globalisation hence, is hardly external to Capitalism, whether we are speaking of capitalism

in India, Pakistan, China or the U.S. It designates merely the effects of how the regions subject
to capitalism express the form which contemporary social relations arrive at.

A critique of capitalism is hence necessarily also a critique of contemporary social relations.

This is the the crucial underpinnings of the development of the forces of production – the
relations of production, and it is here that Althusser’s psycho-analytically informed symptomatic
reading is of value. This is the essential dialectical step that is so often missing in identity
politics which are assuming an increasingly clannish character in India. The horizon of their
political will is the securing of reservations in parliamentary elections, whether they be Jaats or
Daalit agitations. There is not one among these new champions of the masses with the foresight
and will to see that a reservation necessitates forms of internal exclusion that perpetuate the
very form of oppression that it may have been designed to counteract. The schism between the
‘creamy’ layer who have benefited from affirmative action and the others in a social group are
testament to this.

It is within these coordinates that we must begin thinking how we can usher in a community that
is free from the kinds of social oppression that much of this land grapples with. Historically,
Communism has been the name of this effort, yet its realization would require us to do more
than merely speak in a name. The preliminary steps undertaken here constitute my modest
efforts at introducing some transparency in the assumption of a leading Marxist in India, Prabhat
Patnaik regarding our fellow comrade Slavoj Zizek. It is also a plea for the necessity of Marxian
Theory to reach beyond the situatedly stale domain of parliamentary politics, a predicament
which yet unfortunately characterizes most of the Indian Left.