Postcolonial Perspectives on a Revolutionary Concept

Podiumsdiskussion mit Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Moderation: Felix Fiedler

[English below]

Der indische Historiker Dipesh Chakrabarty ist einer der profiliertesten Theoretiker postkolonialer Kritik. In Europa wurde vor allem seine Studie “Provincializing Europe” breit diskutiert. Chakrabarty untersucht darin, wie “Europa im historischen Wissen als stillschweigender Maßstab fungiert”: Die politischen Begriffe und Bilder des “alten Kontinents” beherrschen noch immer den globalen Diskurs, und schreiben so die koloniale und imperialistische Macht Europas fort: Gemessen am europäischen Standard von Bürgerlichkeit, Aufklärung, Liberalismus, Staat und Kapitalismus erscheinen nicht-europäische Gesellschaften meist als defizitär und zurückgeblieben.

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RETHINKING WORKING CLASS

Postcolonial Perspectives on a Revolutionary Concept

Key note and discussion with Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty is one of the leading exponents proponents of postcolonial critique. In Europe, he is most widely known for his book “Provincializing Europe”. The study investigates how the “old continent” served as a “silent referent in historical knowledge”: European political theory and imagery still dominate the global discourse, he argues, thus perpetuating Europe’s colonial and imperialist supremacy. Against the implicit European standard of modernity – of republicanism, liberalism statehood and capitalism – all non-European societies appear deficient and backward.

Does this criticism also apply to the concept of class – the focus of this year’s Marx Autumn School?

For Marx, as for the socialist regimes of the 20th century, class division was the fundamental source of contention within any given society. Liberation had to be achieved through class struggle. Yet as a dogma, the primacy of class itself became a tool of suppression. It reenforced the hegemony of the state socialist party apparatus and obscured other modes of domination beyond the stereotypical “contradiction of capital and labor”: colonial exploitation, nationalism, racism, antisemitism, patriarchal gender regimes, and other ideologies of inequality.

Since the 60s and 70s, poststructuralist and postcolonial authors have highlighted those very modes of subjugation, citing conceptual and political shortcomings of orthodox Marxism. The collapse of state socialism after 1989/90 has given this criticism a new spin: While deepening social divisions, the triumph of neoliberal capitalism has further deteriorated any notion of class. And there seems to be no prospect of a new theoretical and political synthesis. Under these problematic premises, Dipesh Chakrabarty embarks on a new reading of the once revolutionary concept of class.