Rethinking Contemporary Indian Realities with European Marxist Philosophers

My dear wife, Vaijayanthimala, and dearest daughter, Nandhini, have always been the sources of enthusiastic support and encouragement while this book was being conceived, written and edited.

I thank the editors, the editorial and production teams at Peter Lang for making this book possible. In particular, my special thanks are due to Ms Indrani Dutta, Acquisitions Editor (India), for her consistent support through the important stages of acquisition, copyediting and production.

30 January 2025

Gopalan Ravindran

The term ‘Western Marxism’ refers to a wide-ranging body of works which sought to leverage the site of culture, instead of a fixation with the political economy approach of classical Marxism. The works of Georg Lukacs (1923/1967 and 1978), Karl Korsch (1923/2012, 1937) and Antonio Gramsci (1947/1979) represent the first such move. The approach was given a boost by the works of the Frankfurt School philosophers such as Max Horkheimer (1944/2002), Ernest Bloch (1954/1986, 1955/1986, 1959/1986), Walter Benjamin (1935/1969, 1940, 1972/1999), Theodor Adorno (1944/2002, 1951/2005 and 1966/1973) and Herbert Marcuse (1958 and 1964). The next wave of such works was made possible by the pioneers of British cultural studies, notably, Richard Hoggart (1957), Raymond Williams (1958, 1961 and 1977), E. P. Thompson (1963) and Stuart Hall (2021). Thanks to their cultural rootedness, the New Left became a face of ‘Western Marxism’ in the United Kingdom. The New Left movement was nourished by a group of journals devoted to the cause of ‘Western Marxism’. They included Reasoner, The New Reasoner, Universities and Left Review. The latter two were made into a single publication, New Left Review in January 1960. Stuart Hall was its first editor. He was succeeded by Perry Anderson in 1962. Perry Anderson is a notable critic of ‘Western Marxism’ (1976). The contributions of French Marxists such as Merleau Ponty (1947/1969), who made possible the term, ‘Western Marxism’, to take roots in wider circles; Henry Lefebvre (1968/1995, 1974/1991), who brought alive the linkages between the everyday lives and the production of social spaces to show their capitalist orientations; Jean Paul Sartre (1960/1991), who sought to work as a critical conscience keeper of emerging French philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1969/1990, 1980/1987 and 1972/1977) and Michel Foucault (1966/1970 and 1969/1972) and the French version of ‘Western Marxism’; Louis Althusser (1965/2015 and 1971), who found himself as the second best critical reader of Marx’s works, after Marx; and Guy Debord (1967), who provided a new cultural framework with his notion of the ‘society of spectacle’ and an ideological platform for the situationists among Marxists, are stellar. The Western Marxists had ambivalent relationships with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their affiliates in different countries in Western Europe.

‘Western Marxism’ connotes divergent imageries, as its innards, particularly the more popular ones such as those represented by the works of Lukacs (1923/1967 and 1978) and Gramsci (Hoare and Geoffrey, 1971); the first-generation Frankfurt School philosophers; the pioneers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham: Richard Hoggart (1957), E. P. Thompson (1963), Raymond Williams (1958, 1961, 1977) and Stuart Hall (2021); Hardt and Negri (2000), besides a countless number of Marxists of Western Europe, who critiqued what emerged as a ceaseless turn of events during the Cold War period and the post-Cold War period. Their ‘subjective’ positions constituted eventually the objective reality of what came to be known as ‘Western Marxism’, whose objectivity, in turn, becomes a basis of the ‘subjective’ position of contemporary philosophers like Slavoj Zizek (1989 and 2012), who are burdened with the task of engaging with a few other legacies or ‘post’ events such as the post-Hegelian, post-Marxist, post-Freudian, post-Lacanian in a highly fused manner. The term, ‘neo-Marxists’, employed in this book refers to them all.

At this juncture, it is imperative to recall what Deleuze attempted in The Logic of Sense (1969/1990) to provide us a revamped conception of the conventional meanings of events with the inspiration provided by Stoics. The takeaways for this introductory chapter from Deleuze’s mode of revamping the conventional meanings of events are twofold. The distinction provided by him as regards substance and event is one dimension. The second dimension is about the distinction provided by him between events and ‘sense-events’. When I am saying that the works of neo-Marxists are ‘sense-events’, I am positing, like Deleuze, that there is a three-stage process in the works of these Marxists – two stages involve the corporeal bodies, and one stage involves an incorporeal body. The bodies of utterances and the bodies of reception are to be seen as the corporeal bodies. The meanings of the utterances are the sites of incorporeal bodies. The ceaseless circulation of ‘sense-events’, as regards ‘Western Marxism’, is the result of the ceaseless contestations of divergent and countless number of ‘sense-events’ flowing from the two temporal anchors of ‘sense-events’, the aion and the chrono (Deleuze, 1969/1990). The former is seen as virtual and the latter as actual or chronological. Moving beyond Deleuze, we should also be arguing for Nagarjuna’s (c.150 AD–250 AD) category of third time, a non-time, a time of void or emptiness, where the logic of terms such as ‘neo-Marxism’, post-Hegelian, post-Marxist, post-Freudian, post-Lacanian take a fatal dent.

One can argue that the fatal attractions of Marxism, and its multiple variants, lie in the notion of totality. Marxism is not the first site of totality. Ancient and medieval religions and non-religions made themselves as sites of fatal attractions with this notion. Buddhism that emerged after Buddha’s death and Jainism that emerged after the death of the last tirthankara,2 Mahavira, are more like Marxism in trying to project a totalising logic of the relevance of their principles to the followers. As sites of inspirations for the ‘sense-events’ of their followers and detractors, they have been existing as three possibilities, temporally. Their three temporal possibilities are in conditions of aion, chrono and non-tripartite time. The conditioned are the effects of the condition. The conditioned can also become a condition, according to Deleuze (1969/1990). What are the spatial possibilities of condition and conditioning? Deleuze does not address them in his conception of ‘sense-events’.

Marx, Engels and a host of neo-Marxists addressed not the ‘sense-events’, but the events made possible by economic and social relationships, which were seen as evolving from the process of historical materialism. These events have their contexts in the conceptions of class struggles, processes of hegemony and the eventual triumph of communism. Marxism, like religions and commercial films, has an ultimate vision of totalising the events, the main actors of the events and sub-events and the co-actors of the events and sub-events (more like the plots and sub-plots of narrative films in getting the positive end to the unfolding cycles of events). The end cannot be to the disliking of the followers of events. The actors and co-actors eventually become followers of events in their contemporary temporal contexts. Here, we can invoke the Deleuzian logic of aion and chrono, besides Nagarjuna’s (c.150 AD–250 AD) conception of non-tripartite time as a condition of reality. The conditioned realities, the events and sub-events and their progression and end, are because of the spatial and temporal conditions of events, sub-events and their human interlocutors. The spread of meta-religions such as the three Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, Jainism and the vedic and their non-vedic contestants, are on account of the countless number of events, sub-events as well as the ‘sense-events’, which are outside the radars of both classical Marxism and neo-Marxism.

The arguments against ‘Western Marxism’ are flawed in the context of the above. The arguments against ‘Western Marxism’ question, for instance, the exclusion of Engels while discussing the need for new approaches to the problematic of ‘base and superstructure’ (if we factor in the case of Stuart Hall’s [2021] work in this regard). But what is the relevance of a totality such as Marxism or its variants such as ‘Western Marxism’, when the particulars are populating themselves in a universe and only one particular, Engels, is ignored, marginalised or misread in another universe of particulars, which constitute another totality such as ‘Western Marxism’?

The contexts of the universes of the particulars are as heterogeneous and unmappable as the contexts of the universes of the totalities, solely because they feed on each other. Otherwise, they are the conditions of the conditioned realities as regards the totalities of Marxism and ‘Western Marxism’ and their subjects – the philosophers and scholars who act as the interlocutors and the subjects – the people ranging from the proletariat, unemployed, unemployable and the bourgeois. Important among the conditions are the spatial and temporal conditions of conditioning workers and their exploitation, the condition and conditioning of capital and their promotion, circulation and expansion. The spatial contexts are posited as macro sites such as the sites of production (factories), commodification (marketing and sales outlets) and consumption (homes of consumers). The temporal conditions are not as straightforward on account of the Deleuzian categories of time, aion and chrono and Nagarjuna’s (c.150 AD–250 AD) category of non-tripartite time. Together, they constitute three kinds of realities which are seldom factored in by both classical Marxism and the divergent versions of neo-Marxism.

For the sake of clarity, I would like to engage with three threads of arguments that are relevant to our understanding of reality as well as totality. The first is rooted in the Sangam age Asivakam philosopher, Kanian Poongundran’s (c.600 BC–300 AD) exposition in his verse (Purananuru, 192).

To us all towns are our own, everyone is our kin.

Life’s good comes not from others gifts, nor ill.

Pains and pain’s relief are from within.

Death’s no new thing, nor do our bosoms thrill,

when joyous life seems like a luscious draught.