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Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Inclusive Growth: A Lacanian Reading

Pranab Kanti Basu

To cite this article:Pranab Kanti Basu (2016) Inclusive Growth: A Lacanian Reading,Rethinking Marxism, 28:2, 255-262, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2016.1168243

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Inclusive Growth

: A Lacanian Reading

Pranab Kanti Basu

Until the 1970s, mainstream development theory and the practice of international economicorganizations put total faith in a trickle-down approach, refusing to conceive any special

policy for those excluded from the gains of modern development. Gradually, both theory and

practice are veering toward the mainstream

s

inclusive growth.

The authors ofWorld of

the Third and Global Capitalism conceptualize exclusion and subsequent inclusion as twosides of the same coin that can be theorized through the Lacanian couple of foreclosure/foregrounding. The authors propose a practice of counterhegemony grounded in ethicalprinciples born of the encounter of the working class of the rst world and the modes ofbeing and producing of the third world, which are excluded from hegemonic discourse.Many powerful insights are provided by this Lacanian reading of exclusion/inclusion indevelopment theory and practice, but this reading cannot accommodate the role of livedexperience and may generate another end of history.

Key Words: Displacement, Ethics, Foreclosure, Foregrounding, Postdevelopment

World of the Third and Global Capitalism(Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg2012; hence-

forth referred to as CDC) cannot be evaluated without bringing in its companion piece,

Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third

(Chakrabarti and Dhar2009; henceforth referred to as CD).There are a lot of continu-

ities, and some of the ideas in the later volume had been elaborated in the earlier book.

So I will begin with a discussion ofDislocation and Resettlement in Development: From

Third World to the World of the Third.

Dislocation and Resettlement in Development

In the earlier book, Chakrabarti and Dhar argue that capitalist development necessarily

results in dislocation. This is a more encompassing term than displacement and

includes economic displacementcaused by income deprivation resulting from capi-

talist progress apart from the direct loss of habitat owing to industrial expansion.

Dislocationalso captures the noneconomic aspects of displacement and resettlement.

It emphasizes not just a question of the loss of geographical space but also that of

thought space, of the cultural symbols that constitute life. The world of the thirdisa term the authors coin to indicate those representations of the world inhabited by

the actually or potentially dislocated (refugees of development), who are shut out by

the hegemonic discourse of development. The third world is a synonym of less

developed countries, developing countries, and so on, and it is frequently used in

RETHINKING MARXISM, 2016

Vol. 28, No. 2, 255262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2016.1168243

2016 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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development literature and to denote the economic-geographic space that, for allegedly

structural reasons, resists modernization.

CD agrees with postdevelopment theorys position that mainstream development

discourse in a way constitutes the mentality of third-world subjects who acquiesce inthe rule of global capital through unquestioning acceptance of the meaning of progress

as touted by the mainstream. But CD critiques this school for valuing the third world as

natural. This naturalization paradoxically shuts out all counterhegemonic represen-

tation. On the one hand, we have the homogeneous local, which is natural and

hence not represented; on the other we have the economic representation of global

capital, which characterizes the local as the necessarily lacking prior stage of capitalism.

This position held by postdevelopment economics is unable to handle the changes in

mainstream development literatures position or to understand the hierarchies, exploi-

tative relations, and generally, the differences that prevail within the world of the third.The ruling paradigm of development argued (and still argues) that the only path of

development for the poverty-procreating traditional third world is through policy-

engineered intensive capitalocentric growth. Since the 1970s (but most clearly articu-

lated in policy since the late 1990s), this position has been supplemented with the rec-

ognition that such policies may cause dislocation and resulting poverty in the short run.

This has to bemanaged. The excluded are included as the objects of benevolence. This

inclusioncannot be theoretically accommodated by either postdevelopment theories

or activists. How does one differentiate between the third world that is included in

mainstream discourse as an object of benevolence and the localthat is excluded?

CD contends that local societies (the plural is important), which may be conceptual-

ized with internal cohesion and systems of reproduction, are excluded from the discur-

sive eld of development economics. Posited instead is a homogeneous, lacking (in

terms of modernity and the inherent possibility of transformation into a capitalist

order) third world. The excluded conceptualizations are named as constituting the

world of the third. The process of their exclusion is called foreclosure. The

process of inclusion of the third worldinto development discourse, as the properrep-

resentation of the excluded, is called foregrounding.

The Lacanian termsforeclosureandforegroundingneed some elaboration. Foreclosure

is a term used in the sense of exclusion through the nonsymbolization of essentialelements, called nodal signiers, that are necessary for holding together the discursive

structure of what is excluded. Foregrounding is the obverse of foreclosure. Foreground-

ing and foreclosure are symbiotically connected. Foreclosure, while structurally neces-

sary for constituting the discursive space, also constitutes an outside of the discursive

universe. Discourse is aware of this lack, this incompleteness. It tries to hide this hole

by foregrounding within the domain of discourse certain substitute signiers that serve

as domesticated, therapeutized representations of the foreclosed. This is not an undis-

puted interpretation of foreclosure/foregrounding. Ajit Chaudhury, in his introduction

to CDC, in fact contests this issue. We will come back to it.CD introduced two other signicant conceptual tools into the discourse of develop-

ment critique. First was the class-process approach of the Rethinking Marxism school,

initially developed by Resnick and Wolff (1987); second was the ethics of counterhege-

mony. The class-process approach fragments the national economy, or what the tra-

ditional Marxist approach calls the mode of production of the country, into the

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microprocesses in which the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus

occur. Class processes, such as processes of production, appropriation, distribution,

and the receipt of surplus labor, can take various forms. Processes of production and

appropriation of surplus constitutefundamental class processes, while processes of distri-bution and receipt of already appropriated surplus constitute subsumed class processes.

Capitalist, feudal, communistic, and so on refer to various forms of fundamental

class processes. The signal contribution of this group has been to show that economies

that are grossly referred to as capitalist contain signicant segments wherein the pro-

duction processes are noncapitalist fundamental class processes. The reverse is true for

economies that are normally termed as noncapitalist. Briey, this logic of decentering

informs this particular variant of Marxist political economy. Thus, the societal wholeis

recognized as a contingent propositionhere of mainstream development discourse

based on forced closures, like all modernist discursive closures. The class-processapproach challenges the very naming of a national economy through its fragmentation

into class processes. The meaning of transition (from one mode of production to

another) thus also becomes suspect. Both the rst and the third world become hetero-

geneous entities. If history loses its teleology, then no transition is inevitable. There is

no objective or scientic meaning of progress, and so the need for ethics, of value

judgments, of deciding what path to espouse. This is the most daring contribution of

CD: the elaboration of the need for and meaning of an ethics based on Marxist

principles.

Here is where CD makes a denitive intervention. It denes the ethically justiable

outcome with respect to three kinds of justice:productivejustice (from each according to

ability);appropriativejustice (surplus should be appropriated by the surplus producers);

anddevelopmentjustice (distribution of social surplus according to the principleto each

according to need). To elaborate this ethical position, total surplus is divided into pro-

ductive and social surplus. Productive surplus is the part of the surplus that is utilized

for expansion of existing class processes, and social surplus is the residue. Obviously,

the division of total surplus into its components is not a logical process but a conict-

ridden social process. Productive justice and appropriative justice are dened with

respect to productive surplus, while development justice is dened with respect to

social surplus. The concept ofneed, used to dene development justice, is then givena radical tweak by abandoning the physical/physiological, or what CD calls the technical

denition, in order to propose need as right.

Having dened an ethically desirable counterhegemonic position, there remains the

big question of the subject who will undertake this counterhegemonic venture. This

involves a defamiliarization of the familiar hegemonized subject positions produced

through the hegemony of mainstream discourse. The process of the constitution of

the counterhegemonic subject position consists of both a turning away from within

(the within being the centre, the hegemonic symbolic) outwardand a turn to the fore-

closed outside (of class and world of the third) so as to inaugurate within, the return ofthe foreclosed outside(Chakrabarti and Dhar2009, 103).

Immense theoretical problems remain to be elaborated. Is the turning spontaneous?

If not, then what about the question of leadership once the concept of class as physical

existent (noun) position is abandoned in favor of class as a qualier of a particular

World of the Third 257

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process, as CD, following Resnick and Wolff (1987), advocates? How does the foreclosed

return? How do you turn outward from within? Is that possible?

World of the Third and Global Capitalism

CDC mostly elaborates the theoretical propositions of CD. In particular, it elaborates

two points raised by CD: the foreclosure of world of the third/foregrounding of third

world and the question of justice and ethics. It takes off from the discursive dislocation

of the world of the thirdthe violence of the discourse of development.

The elaboration of the foregrounding of the other of global capitalism as the third

world is a strong point of CDC. As I indicated earlier, the ideas of foreclosure

and foregrounding are taken from Lacan. Whether CDC is faithful to the text ofLacan is a moot point that Ajit Chaudhury raises in his introduction to the book.

He contends that what the authors present as foreclosure is actually repression.

However that may be, the eshing out of foregrounding is innovative and provides

many insights into the process of the cultural subjugation of the other of global

capitalism.

The capitalocentric narrative of development constructs its discourse as a closed

space. But as postmodernism has shown, this closure is never complete. At this

point, CDC introduces the Lacanian idea of foreclosure. The idea of foreclosure is

built on the notion of structural necessity. In constituting itself as a closed system,

any modernist narrative must elaborate a well-dened and in that sense closed sym-

boliceld. The symbolic space necessarily excludes a eld that violates its rules of con-

stitution. This excluded eld is not a logical or homogeneous space but is simply the

space of what cannot mean anything within the discursive space of the given narration.

This is the Real.This constitutive exclusion is what Lacan calls foreclosure. There are

various positions on what is the Real and whether the return of the Realthat CDC

proposes as a counterhegemonic strategy is at all possible. This is reected in the con-

troversy raised in the introduction by Ajit Chaudhury, who contends that such a return

is an impossibility according to Lacans text.

The discursive recognizes that there is an outside. This generates unease or what hasbeen vividly named a sense of being haunted by what is outside. To cope, the discursive

deploys various strategies. Let us go straight from this theoretical digression to the text

of CDC.

One of the ways in which the discourse of development tries to cope with the outside

(the world of the third) is to pretend benevolence. The Real is includedas the lacking

otherthe third worldthat requires the benevolence of World Banktype largesse

to develop. This, CDC terms as realvictim. But the outside resists and threatens to disrupt

the closure of the mainstream development discourse (and this closure ishegemony).

The threatening, unspeakable, unthinkable outside, which Lacanians call the Real, isdisplaced into the thinkable threat that CDC calls realevil. Obvious examples of this

are ethnic terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and so forth. According to CDC,

there is a third displaced representation of the Real that development discourse con-

structs to domesticate the perceived threat of the Realrealutopian, the dark continent

of soothsayers, tribal norms, and the like (such as that of the Gandhis and Tagores)

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that is at best able to conceive a very localized socioeconomic structure and, therefore,

is utopian in the context of the modern nation-state.

The real (and not the Real) of CDC is based on the exclusion of certain nodal

signiers and, correspondingly, of the discursive eld constituted by them. The restitu-tion of these rejected nodal signiers, then, isthe returnof the real. The particular nodal

signier on which CDC grounditsreal is the class process.Class processes are neces-

sarily excluded from the discourse of development. This is because while development

discourse is modernist, and hence centered (specically capitalocentric), the class

process (as elaborated by Resnick and Wolff) as nodal signier constructs a decentered

social space. It is arguable that Chaudhurys critique of foreclosure as used in CDC,

though denitely textually sustainable, does not apply to foreclosure as interpreted

by CDC. While foreclosure for CDC is the exclusion of some discursive eldsinclud-

ing the counterhegemonic (the exclusion of the real, that is)

the foreclosure thatChaudhury argues is properly Lacanian consists of nonsymbolization: the exclusion

of the Real from the discursive. As Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012, 91)

note, The Realis theunspeakable remainder. The realon the other hand is the unspo-

ken of the hegemonic.

CDC argues that the class process is necessarily excluded from the discursive

domain of development literature. Its restitutionis the return of the realthat challenges

the hegemony of global capitalism. The counterhegemonic strategy that CDC proposes

is constituted by this return. The infusion of the class process as a nodal signier also

recasts development narrative. CDC details this reworking with relation to the agricul-

tural sector and the so-called informal sector in India.

While the introduction of the nodal signier of class process breaks up the founda-

tional ideas of capitalocentric development, transition, and the lacking third world,

the imaging of socioeconomic alternative(s) and the strategic requirements for its

attainment need the supplement of an ethical dimension to the class process entry

point.

The ethics that World Banktype development discourses espouse is not an ethic at

all, because the journey to the absolute universal (global capital) is a fated journey, so

there is no question ofchoosing, which is the unavoidable ground of ethical decisions. In

general, a closed discursive structure does not allow positing the question of ethics inany signicant sense. You are bound to act after a certain fashion because the logic of

the system so compels youor leastways, irrespective of your actions the cunning

of history must prevail. At the opposite end of the so-called ethics of benevolence of

the World Bank (which is not ethical at all) is the position that any ethics that seeks

adiscursive articulation must benot ethics. So we ought to strive for the unspeakable

ethics of the Real. This is the ethical position of the postdevelopment school. CDC,

on the other hand, proposes a World of the Third (WOT) Marxist ethics. It is an

ethics of the foreclosed, as interpreted by the foreclosed. To construct this, we need

to set up an encounter with the real(mark: not Real). This is where the language ofclass becomes pertinent, as this language has been foreclosed.

The outlines of this position are in CD; CDC elaborates the nuances. The ethical

position is built on a class perspective plus a derivative perspective on need. A class

perspective exhorts us to replace exploitation with nonexploitation. A need perspective

focuses on the desirability of working toward a more fair distribution of output.


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Productive justice, appropriative justice, and distributive justice together constitute the

idea of expanded communism. CDC claims that its perspective on ethics is built on

WOT Marxism: on class-focused analysis and on postdevelopment theorys insight

on the exclusion/inclusion of the other of global capitalism. So the ethics that CDCespouses favors taking from each according to ability (productive justice); the appro-

priation of surplus by those who laborcommunitic and communistic fundamental

class processes (appropriative justice), and ultimately a classless conguration; and to

each according to need (distributional justice). But the perspective on need has to be

changed to a counterhegemonic perspective. Granted that the perception of universally

dened need works in the service of hegemony, the question of subjective preference

cannot be avoided. CDC proposes analysis of the relation between the subject and the

signier. This opens up the question of the link between the subject and the symbolic,

and also to the presymbolic. It therefore connects with the problematic of the consti-tution of the hegemonic symbolic and to the need for understanding foreclosure/

foregrounding.

Contextualizing

CDC is, no doubt, a most provocative and welcome addition to the postcolonial and

development critique literature. It deserves the serious attention of scholars because

of the many theoretical innovations that it introduces and also because of its avowedlyneo-Althusserian Marxist focus.

There is continuity between much of the discussion on postcolonial political eco-

nomic literature in India (including CD/CDC) that often remains unstated. In spite

of the many disclaimers, we are haunted with a sense of dj vu. It is as if the subaltern

has spoken and the theoreticians have heard. Spivaks(1988) Can the Subaltern Speak?

remained a big problem with subaltern historians.1 The question continued to haunt

postcolonial Indian development literature through the various twists and turns of

hegemony (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarty 2000) and governmentality (Chatterjee

2011; Sanyal2007)

the two nodal concepts that have dominated most of postcolonialdiscourse in India.

Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg are explicit that theirworld of the third is one

possible world of the third. It is not the return of the Real on which they base their

ethics but the return of the world-of-the-third Marxist real. While this provides an

analytical answer to Chaudhurys charge (that the Real cannot return), the subaltern

or the world of the third remains a construct trapped within a particular paradigm

here, a version of Marxism.

To see the continuity of CD/CDC with the project of postcolonial scholarship in

India, let us recall a sentence from a book written more than a decade ago, of which

1.. A school of historiography that emerged from India in the early 1980s, which critiqued most history

writing, including class- (as noun-) based Marxist history, as elitist. This school instead proposed the

need to rewrite history from the perspective of subalterns, or those whose position had been excluded

from elitist history or had been included from an instrumentalist position. Most of their essays have

been published in the ten volumes ofSubaltern Studies.

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Chakrabarti was one of the authors: In other words, the West overowsalbeit its

inner voice turning on itself, the rebellious other within itinto the unknown to

meet its comrades outside in that eternal dusk where all cats are gray and all men

are savages

(Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti2000, 52

3). The context was a critiqueof Spivaks various positions on the possibility of the subaltern speaking. Chaudhury,

Das, and Chakrabarti summarize what they claim are the two positions that can be read

out of Spivak. Look at the similarities. The rebellious other within it [the West]can be

read as the working-class position: the ground of the ethics of appropriative justice in

CD and CDC. Its comrades outside in the eternal duskcan be read, without stretch-

ing the point at all, as the world of the third. So we have the world-of-the-third Marxist

position of CD/CDC as continuing from a position of the subaltern historians. The

difference is that the reading of Lacan on which the elaboration of the world of the

third is based is categorically precise so that the ambiguities are absent. But this pre-cision comes at a cost.

The reading of Lacan is very topographical. This reduces the space of the other to a

cartographical space. The Borromean knot is pedagogically very useful for illustrating

Lacan but has the tendency to reduce the Real, the imaginary, and the symbolic to

spacial segments. Its repeated use in CDC suggests a certain inclination in the

authorsreading of Lacan. My specic unease is that this robs the text of the possibility

of action and reaction between the force elds of the Real, the imaginary, and the sym-

bolic. Given such segmentation, while the exposition gains in clarity, the world of the

third is ultimately just another construct from a very denitetheoreticalground. Logi-

cally, to address questions of mobilization, the role of the initiatedthose trained to

understand the various kinds of justiceof Party bosses,and so on, with the attend-

ant evils, may return in spite of the genuine concern of CDC for democracy, shared

environment, and communitic values.

The pronounced commitment to nonexploitation as a constitutive principle of the

justice that CD and CDC espouse marks their signal difference from the sophistry

that characterizes much of postcolonial socioeconomic studies. But there is a serious

ambivalence in this stance. The authors propose ethics from a (world-of-the-third)

Marxist position. But their intellectual heritage (subaltern, margin of margin,

outside, etc.) effectively blocks any consideration of the role of the modern workingclass in their project.

In spite of the intellectual tradition that is espoused, there is a tendency toward the

commonly received writ of Marx and hence of modernity to inltrate. There is more

than a hint of an end of history. This is another fallout from taking a topographic

model of the relation between the outside and the discursive space. Let us elaborate

this with reference to a lack in the concepts of need and surplus as adopted in these

texts. We are told that in the just society there will be no surplus as there is no class

process (of production and appropriation of surplus). True enough in a certain

sense. But the technical need for growth and therefore production beyond thecurrent consumption needs of society will remain. And when individuality is dissolved

in fellow feeling, this surplus will appear as a need of the shared future: the community

not only of those who share the common environment today but also a communion

with those who will inherit this space tomorrow.


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But when we talk in the idioms of community, needs do not relate to the individuals

who make up the community now and further, it does not relate to the present only.

The community thinks of its own future as also of the future of its children (Basu

2008, 150). This struggle to reign in individuality and establish community is aprocess without end. Need, therefore, is not only culturally conditioned but is to

be an object of continuous struggle. Topographically assigning a denitely bounded

space for critique blocks the potency of experience. Experience is a eld wherein the

lines between discourse and the out there are blurred. What seems lacking in our

postcolonial/critical-development theory is a serious attempt to encounter this eld.

References

Basu, P.2008.Globalisation: An anti-text. New Delhi: Aakar Books.

Chakrabarti, A., and A. Dhar. 2009. Dislocation and resettlement in development: From third

world to the world of the third. London: Routledge.

Chakrabarti, A., A. Dhar, and S. Cullenberg.2012. World of the third and global capitalism.

Delhi: Worldview.

Chatterjee, P.2011.Lineages of political society. New York: Colombia University Press.

Chaudhury, A., D. Das, and A. Chakrabarty.2000.Margin of margin. Kolkata: Anushtup.

Sanyal, K.2007. Rethinking capitalist development: Primitive accumulation, governmentality and

post-capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.

Spivak, G.1988. Can the subaltern speak? InMarxism and the interpretation of culture, N. Cary

and L. Grossberg. London: Macmillan.

Resnick, S., and R. D. Wolff.1987.Knowledge and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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inclusive growth a lacanian reading

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