Lefty Prof's List: Book reviews and announcements

• Ours is a time of welcome political ferment, but the long hollowing out of the institutions of the Left has meant that, among radicals, Marxism is far from being considered commonsense. Few would disagree that one of our important tasks, today, is to clear away the detritus that years of academic exile have heaped on the flag of radicalism, and to win today’s activists back to our camp. Here, Chibber comes to the rescue. And I don't mean this hyperbolically. In my several years of reading Marx and Marxists, I cannot think of a book that is as clear in its explication of the analytical foundations of our project.

  • Reminds me of my graduate school experience 20 years ago. At the time, it was Aijaz Ahmad's book In Theory that came in as a breath of fresh air, unrelenting in its critique of postcolonial theory, and defending Marxism unapologetically.
• Chibber’s book suggests that the substance of Subaltern Studies' differences with Marxism lies in six interrelated arguments. For our purposes, two of these are more pivotal than the rest.
• First, Subaltern Studies originally attributed the peculiarly undemocratic trajectory of Indian (and/or non-European) politics to the timidity of its national bourgeoisie. Whereas in England and France, the great bourgeois revolutions toppled feudal forms of domination and ushered in political liberalism, if not democracy, their Indian counterparts hesitated to lead subalterns in a similar assault on pre-capitalist institutions.

  • This does seem like a simplistic rendering of Guha.
• Ramchandra Guha

  • Ranajit Guha
• Second, Subaltern Studies argued that the political culture of India has evolved differently from the West's. Not only in the sense that the bourgeoisie has ruled in this more openly illiberal way, but also because the failure of this bourgeoisie's historic mission had implications for subaltern politics, too. The bourgeois revolutions in the West weaseled their way into the consciousness of Western subalterns. The language of liberalism constituted Western subjects as individuals with rights. In India, however, the bourgeoisie's unwillingness to see their mission to fruition left Indian subalterns analogously untransformed. As a result, they don't think about their interests or their needs in quite the same way. Instead, Indian subalterns draw on a pre-bourgeois, often community-oriented culture--when they mobilize, they don't do so as individuals, or in defense of their individual interests.
• To the orienting charge--that Marxism as once formulated needs tweaking in the Indian case because of the Indian bourgeoisie's diffidence--Chibber responds with a crisp overview of the recent historiography of the bourgeois revolutions. He shows that Subaltern Studies has ignored a flood of scholarship demonstrating that bourgeois timidity was normal, even in the Western experience.
• First, they weren't heroically antifeudal.
• Second, capitalists never led cross-class coalitions.
• And third, the political order these revolutions produced was oligarchic and prone to violence--no liberal, democratic peace prevailed.
• the doyens of Subaltern Studies are professional academics, many of them historians, yet even they seem to have missed the revisionist memo that the concept of a courageous bourgeoisie is about as passé as smallpox and the Atikins Diet.
• we need a new explanation of whether and how India's path has diverged.
• Chibber supplies this, in the subsequent chapters of the book. But--and this can be taken as a criticism, if you like--he does so through an argument about capitalism's universalizing drive that understates, to my mind, the extent of his contribution to a 'universalizing' social science (more on this later).
• Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts.
• That claims about human behavior across time and space can trigger mass palpitation in a tradition that brought us 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle' is a sad sign. A Marxist without transhistorical commitments is a bit like the Pope in a world without God--feel free to go through the motions, but forgive the rest of us if we can't take you very seriously.
• This, then, is Marxism: an approach which is unabashed in its use of universalizing categories, which grounds this universalism in transhistorical expectations about individual agents, and which does it all for a good reason.
• The Problem of Difference
• India is, after all, very different from the West. How is the fact of deep difference intelligible, if we're deploying categories that are universal?
• Chibber's retort is careful, but decisive. India is of course different from the West, he agrees, but these differences are of two types.
• First, there are those differences between India and the West that are beyond the pale of historical materialist explanation: the fact that certain forms of bodily exclamation are profane in India but not in the West, say, or that Indians eat with their hands and Westerners with their forks.
• as a general fact, there's little question that bourgeois democracy has been better 'civilized' in the West than in the non-West.
• Chibber grants this, but offers an explanation rooted in a universal: it's the relative success of subaltern agitation in the West, he argues, that explains this divergence.
• Generally, the relative sanity of the societies forged by Western subalterns reflect both the greater class capacities and larger social product associated with a longer and more successful history of development.

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• In part it’s a deft survey of post-9/11 art, from its fiction and nonfiction (Mr. Kumar appears to have read everything) to its foreign films and obscure works of performance art.
• At its heart, however, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb” — the excellent title is a riff on the title of Edmond Jabès’s 1993 book, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book” — is about the ordinary men and women, brown-skinned in general and Muslim in particular, who have had their lives upended by America’s enraged security apparatus.
• “Rightly or wrongly, I’m caught by the drama of the displaced provincial, the impoverished youth finding himself in the house of wealth,”
• The unpalatable truths in Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead,” a memoir of the Persian Gulf war, make that book more important and eye-opening, he writes, “than anything written by the likes of Noam Chomsky and the rest of the admirable antiwar brigade.”
• “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb” carries in the crook of its own arm Mr. Kumar’s plaintive appeal. If we’re to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Mr. Kumar writes, “to acknowledge that they exist.” This angry and artful book is a first step.

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