- Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Murzban Jal
Indian Institute of Education, Centre for Educational Studies, Faculty Member
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The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and understand his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for a critical questioning of the postulates in the modern sciences that deal with the... more
The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and understand his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for a critical questioning of the postulates in the modern sciences that deal with the ‘mind’ question. For Marx, there is nothing called the ‘mind’ especially nothing called the mind that is independent of the body. Instead there is the human essence (das menschliche Wesen). The problem is that the modern sciences have an unexamined base, namely the structure of estrangement and the logic of capitalism. These ‘modern sciences’ of the mind range from brain sciences and behaviour psychology which reduce humanity to ‘things’ in a way not very different from the way that Stalin had transformed humanity into ‘things’. This essay is a consequent examination of Marx’s dialectical materialism with the claim of the necessity of transcending both Old Materialism and Old Idealism. The inability to not involve these double transcendences would lead to the sighting of the ghosts of the past which weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
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The ‘mind’, one could say, is a dangerous thing, dangerous not only in terms of Kant’s ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’, but a dangerous ‘thing’ as in Marx’s concept of reification. According to the concept of reification, there is a... more
The ‘mind’, one could say, is a dangerous thing, dangerous not only in terms of Kant’s ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’, but a dangerous ‘thing’ as in Marx’s concept of reification. According to the concept of reification, there is a personification of things with the consequent depersonification of human life. Apply this theory of reification to the ‘mind’ and what we get is the theory of the ‘mind’, where the ‘mind’ is depicted as having some sort of uncanny life of its own, doing magical things. Consequently, the ‘mind’ could mean everything and yet mean nothing. This essay keeps the mind in two forms: in inverted commas and not in inverted commas. Thus we have the ‘mind’ and the mind. One must understand this radical difference. This essay further claims that while there are idealistic conceptions of the mind, so too does one have biologist ideas of the mind developed by what is now called ‘brain sciences’, generously funded by the corporate world. In contrast to idealism, biologism and the brain sciences, contemporary studies that interface philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience offer newer possibilities on what the human mind means. Here the ‘mind’ has not to be understood as either in the form of ‘spirit’ or ‘thing-matter’, but in the form of historicism and humanism, where humanity as a species being is defined by labor. This essay analyzes whether there can be a real dialectical materialist theory of the mind, and how this new theory needs a critical humanist and naturalist grounding. It claims that there is a radical difference between this critical and humanist Marxism and the Marxism of post-Marx Marxism.
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The Indian Maoists are a small but influential group in the neo-liberal era of class struggle. Declared as a terrorist party by the Indian state, they operate underground. Based in the densely forested areas of Central India they yet... more
The Indian Maoists are a small but influential group in the neo-liberal era of class struggle. Declared as a terrorist party by the Indian state, they operate underground. Based in the densely forested areas of Central India they yet stick to the analysis of semi-feudal China of the 1930s. This essay is an analysis of Maoism in India from a Žižek inspired Freudo-Marxist philosophical perspective. It claims that the urge of the Maoists for violence is to be understood as a type of messianic violence that not only wants to blow open the continuum of history (as Walter Benjamin once put it), but also wants to blow up history itself. This essay reads Mao as an anti-dialectician who converted dialectics into sophistry, nihilism and cynicism. It is in this nihilism that the contemporary Indian Maoists re-play the theater of anarchism.
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This essay is on Marxist theory of violence, keeping in mind Marx's idea of Gewalt that he first drew in his 1843–1844 critique of Hegel. Gewalt, an almost untranslatable term, is translated as force, sometimes also as violence. But... more
This essay is on Marxist theory of violence, keeping in mind Marx's idea of Gewalt that he first drew in his 1843–1844 critique of Hegel. Gewalt, an almost untranslatable term, is translated as force, sometimes also as violence. But Marx's Gewalt is immediately related to humanity in ferment, which is in the grips of revolutionary theory. Gewalt becomes an ethical idea, a revolutionary categorical imperative. Later Marx in Capital brings in again the idea of Gewalt, this time as the midwife of revolutions. We are taking these two readings of Gewalt and attempting to understand whether Gewalt as revolutionary violence has meaning in the contemporary era of the imperialist Empire, or whether the Stalinist and imperialist counter-revolutions devour this revolutionary repertoire. In the background of this problem we are also reflecting on Marx's idea of the human essence as also psychoanalytic deliberations on these themes, deliberations carried out in the epochs of Lenin's reading of imperialism and Negri's understanding of the New Imperial World Order: the (dis)order of Empire-ism where the warfare economy has monopolized politics and henceforth rendered unnecessary the process of critical and revolutionary thinking.
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The phrase ‘outside the worthless commodity’ is actually Schopenhauer’s, a phrase that Theodor Adorno used in his In Search of Wagner. Marx had his own rendering of the critique of the commodity, in fact a revolutionary critique of the... more
The phrase ‘outside the worthless commodity’ is actually Schopenhauer’s, a phrase that Theodor Adorno used in his In Search of Wagner. Marx had his own rendering of the critique of the commodity, in fact a revolutionary critique of the commodity which was not ‘outside the worthless commodity’, but in ‘confronting the worthless commodity’, a confrontation that begins with his celebrated Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and then which went to the Grundrisse, the three volumes of Capital, the three parts of Theories of Surplus Value and Notes on Adolf Wagner. Marx discovered a new site that lay beyond the commodity principle which he christened ‘a community of free individuals’. Two hundred years after Marx’s birth we remember him as the seeker of these free individuals. We also remember him as the trenchant critique of all class societies, nationalism and of human alienation in general. However, we also remember him as the one who wrote the dirge of Stalinism well before Stalin was born, the elegy of the myth of ‘socialism in one country’ and mainly the requiem of the horrible myth of the socialist commodity (both which were the core parts of the ideology of Stalin and the Soviet Union, of Mao and Maoist China and which is now the principal myth of China). This essay is about going beyond the worthless commodity and how humanity needs to understand the transcendence of this worthlessness. Marx’s critique of political economy and his theory of value is a critique of the worthless commodity. And it is in this site of the critique of political economy that his idea of revolutionary philosophy emerges.
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This essay deals with the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to power in the 2014 National Elections, a party that is fundamentally anti-secularist and anti-democratic whose aim is to convert secular and democratic India... more
This essay deals with the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to power in the 2014 National Elections, a party that is fundamentally anti-secularist and anti-democratic whose aim is to convert secular and democratic India into a Hindu Kingdom. It deals with the crisis of secularism in India and the Revolutionary Marxist response to this crisis. The methodology that it follows is the Marxist one. The leitmotiv of this paper is rather startling—Marx was not a secularist as one has hitherto imagined. It claims that a new theoretical problematic has to be sought in understanding the dilemma haunting secularism: the discourse and practice of secularism are important, and yet Marx (the exemplary humanist and revolutionary) was not a secularist as one imagines it. What we have done is a terrain shift in our study of secularism, especially on the question of the thesis of the separation of religion and the state. This essay consequently makes a distinction between ‘secularism as we know it’, or liberal secularism, and communist secularism. Besides this, the essay grounds the discourse in material social formations in India that are determined by the Asiatic mode of production and along with this mode, the caste formations that are inherent in the Indic variant of the Asiatic mode of production. By and large, the entire discourses of secularism and the rise of fascism in India determined by the ideologies of liberalism and Stalinism ignore the caste question. Thus along with the caste question, the Asiatic mode of production is also brought in, a mode of production that mainstream Marxists have almost ignored, thereby implanting Eurocentric understandings of secularism in India. We thus discover certain methodological guidelines where we develop new terms and conditions to understand an authentic ‘people's secularism’. This essay deals with the question of secularism in India as rooted in the conflict between ‘secularism from above’ that was grafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and the upper caste elites in the freedom movement against British colonialism and ‘religious politics from above’ that formed the contours of elite politics in India since 1947. In contrast to ‘secularism from above’ (or liberal secularism) and ‘religious politics from above’, this essay argues for ‘secularism from below', which shall serve as the revolutionary critique of Indian fascism.
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This essay is on a re-conceptualisation of the Marxist theory of ideology from the perspective of the Freudo-Marxist problematic of Ideology Critique. Based on Marx's historicism and humanism, it locates the problematic of ideology... more
This essay is on a re-conceptualisation of the Marxist theory of ideology from the perspective of the Freudo-Marxist problematic of Ideology Critique. Based on Marx's historicism and humanism, it locates the problematic of ideology from Freud's ‘repressed unconscious’ and Georg Lukács's ‘reification of consciousness’, to the recent understanding of the sublime character of ideology by Slavoj Žižek. Ideology Critique is not to be confused with the philosophical infantiles, the best examples being Gilles Deleuze's concept of ‘philosophy as a sort of buggery’, where the post-structuralist, in his academic fantasy, conceives of a hallucinated form of guerrilla warfare, where philosophical reason is devalued as ‘a violent encounter between heterogeneous forces’, such that philosophy is represented as a form of sadomasochistic sodomy. Nor is Ideological Critique to be confused with the academic socialism of the Frankfurt School. This essay on the Marxist critique of ideology is something more than the Deleuze reading or that of the Frankfurt School. What then is this ‘something more’?
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If Lenin had said that without understanding Hegel it was impossible to understand Marx in the context of the international proletariat revolu tion, 1then one can say in the Indian context that without understanding caste, it is... more
If Lenin had said that without understanding Hegel it was impossible to understand Marx in the context of the international proletariat revolu tion, 1then one can say in the Indian context that without understanding caste, it is impossible to understand India. The understanding of the dynamics of caste is the clue to the understanding of lndian history, its dominant ideology: Hinduism, and the mode of production in India with special reference to the Asiaticmode of production that Marx highlighted not only in his 1850s essayson India, but also in the Grundrisse,Capital, and The Ethnological Notebooks.
This book studies the role of serious philosophizing in everyday life and looks at how authoritarianism negates philosophical and public reason. It sheds light on how philosophy can go beyond its life as a discipline limited to an... more
This book studies the role of serious philosophizing in everyday life and looks at how authoritarianism negates philosophical and public reason. It sheds light on how philosophy can go beyond its life as a discipline limited to an esoteric group of academia to manifest itself via radical discursive practices in public life which enable us to understand and resolve contemporary socio-political challenges. It studies philosophy as a discipline which deals with one's orientations based on experience, the logic of reasoning, critical thinking, and most of all radical and progressive beliefs. The book argues that the contemporary rise of capitalism in modern society, resonating Émile Durkheim’s cautions on "anomie", has favoured individualism, differentiation, marginalization, and exploitation, balanced on an eroding collective consciousness and a steady disintegration of humanity and reason. Taking this into consideration, it discusses how philosophy, both mainstream and marginal, can revive democracy in society which then is able to confront global authoritarianism led by the figure of the imbecile. Finally, it also provides a range of new perspectives on the questions of civic freedom, hegemony of language, social justice, identity, invisible paradigms, gender justice, democracy, multiculturalism, and decolonization. This book is an invigorating compilation of essays from diverse disciplines, engaging the need to create a humanistic public philosophy to transcend the state of imbecility. It will be of great interest to students, scholars and researchers of philosophy, contemporary politics, history, and sociology, as well as general readers.