PROVINCIALIZING MARX
While Marx's corpus of writings remains formative and generative for left theory and praxis, the universality of its conceptualization of political economy, capital's deep structure, and capitalist dynamics has been questioned almost from its birth. For instance, an extraordinarily rich body of scholarship in the field of agrarian studies has long posed knotty questions about the 'nature' of capitalist development in at least three registers: ‘nature' as external world ('environment', 'ecology'), ‘nature' as internal world ('human nature', subjectivity) and ‘nature' as foundation or ontology (what 'is' the being of capital?). There is also a rich body of scholarship around the ‘social question'--the question of how to think the ‘rights' of marginal social groups: not just the proletariat, but landless laborers, lumpenproletariat, peasants, Dalits, blacks, and other minorities. These groups have at best a tenuous claim to the two sets of rights that constitute liberal democracies--the egotistical "rights of man" grounded in private property, and the "rights of citizen" they formally possess. And the marked differences in the tenuous relations of these various groups with the two sets of rights raises difficult questions about Marx's conceptions about the sociality of capital, or of resistance to it.
The agrarian question and the social question are symptomatic of fundamental puzzles about how we might theorize the dynamics of capitalist development, capital's articulations with and parasitic existence on other logics, the 'outsides' and 'limits' to capital, capital in the ‘peripheries' (as contrasted to the ‘core'), and the political forms (progressive and conservative) that emerge in the interplay with capital's solvent forces.
This seminar asks how tarrying with "the agrarian question" and with "the social question" puts Marx and Marxist political economy in 'crisis', and what this ‘crisis' demands from theory. After this crisis, how should we think about the geographies and temporalities -- indeed, the constitution -- of 'capital' (and its dialectical other, 'labor')?
The seminar will be co-taught by Professors Vinay Gidwani (Geography and Global Studies) and Ajay Skaria (History and Global Studies). You may enroll for it in either Geography (GEOG 8980) or History (HIST 5960/8960) with prior permission of the relevant instructor. Format will be a mix of lecture and discussion. Students must be prepared to engage closely with challenging texts, and think cooperatively and generously. While a reading list is yet to be finalized, texts are very likely to include long excerpts from several of Marx's or Marx & Engels' writings, as well as selections from Locke, Kant, Kautsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Ambedkar, Arendt, Fanon, Shanin, Wolpe, Laclau, Hall, Derrida, Spivak, Balibar, Castels, Federici, Moten, Hartman, Karatani, Ranciere, Chakrabarty, Tomba, and van der Linden.