The starting point of a coherent deterministic theory of transition can be traced to Fredrick Engels (Olsen 2009). Taking inspiration from Engels, the rise of deterministic theories of transition was, as Olsen showed, coterminous with the evolution of the Mode of Production and Social Formation (MPSF) approach that in turn developed the philosophy of dialectical materialism and laid down the foundation of classical historical materialism (CHM). CHM was in turn deployed to explain the societal components and their connections, and more importantly for us, they helped chart the logic of transition of society that was teleological in character. While Stalinism helped popularize this approach globally, post-Stalinist trends (despite denunciations of Stalin and of orthodoxy) continued to flourish under the spell of variants of CHM.
Challenges to this approach appeared from within Marxism: Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mao Tse Tung, the Frankfurt School, Althusser and Hindess and Hirst were some of the detractors who dissented variedly and questioned the dominance of determinism in general and of economic/class determinism in particular. In what turned out to be a futile endeavor, Althusser and his disciples attempted to reform CHM by modifying the philosophy of dialectical materialism through the category of overdetermination even as the determination of society in the last instance by the economic was maintained. Challenges to CHM were also forthcoming from the Southern context, especially in connection with the issue of development (see the entry “Economic Development” in this volume).
Given the welter of competing theories of/in CHM, we focus here on depth at the cost of width. Rather than presenting the much-discussed couple of historical materialism and dialectical materialism, we unpack briefly G. A. Cohen’s (1978; 1988) defense of CHM, where he dismissed the idea of dialectical materialism as a viable conceptual frame for explaining transition from one stage to another. Instead, he crowned functional explanation (FE) with that privilege. Moreover, Cohen’s rendition of transition brings to the forefront basic features and criticisms that we believe can be commonly directed at CHM in general. Some of the criticisms give way to rethinking the relation of transition with Marxism in new directions, two of which we will cover subsequently.
Using Marx’s 1959 “Preface to A Critique of the Contribution to Political Economy” as containing a series of defendable truth claims, Cohen defines society or social totality as a holistic articulation of independent and compartmentalized levels related to one another in a hierarchical way: forces of production/FOP (consisting of material means of production and labor power), class relations of production/ROP (defined in terms of economic power1 with respect to means of production and labor power), superstructure (political [including state], law and cultural [education, etc.] aspects of society) and social consciousness (the site of subject formation). In his version of CHM, the Primacy Thesis is that the exogenously given FOP indexed by technological development determine the ROP and by default ultimately everything that appears subsequently. This is technological determinism. While class ROP could be multiple, society or the social formation is ultimately reduced to “dominant” production relations that will be historically selected to develop the FOP. Superstructure that appears depends on and is caused/explained by the class ROP. This is what we call class determinism, the fact that institutions, politics (particularly, class politics) and subjectivity get ultimately reduced to class ROP; and, since class ROP embody economic structure, economic determinism and class determinism coincide. Finally, because the structure (consisting of FOP, ROP and superstructure) also determines the subject/consciousness, we have structural determinism. It is deterministic epistemology that runs through the sinews of CHM.
Not only is there a primacy of FOP in the conceptualization of society, but FOP also enjoy privileged status in the transition of society. This is captured by the Development Thesis, the axiom that FOP develop progressively over time. But before proceeding to Marx’s theory of history, we need to discuss an issue of central importance.
Recall Marx’s observation in the Preface that “men enter into definite, necessary relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, ROP which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.” For Cohen, the term correspondence harbors a fundamental puzzle. On the one hand, it is claimed that FOP exist independently and are causally prior to ROP; they explain the existence of ROP. On the other hand, it is also claimed that ROP influence and control the FOP. How can both be true?
Making a decisive contribution to CHM, Cohen argues that this type of correspondence between the different structures recognized by Marx can only be consistently understood by functional explanation (FE), whereby the existence of the cause is explained in terms of its effect. Following FE, the following appears:
1) The level of development of productive power explains why certain relations and not others would advance productive power.
2) Relations which advance productive power obtain because they advance productive power.
It follows that
3) The level of development of productive power explains the nature of the productive relations.
Proposition 1 asserts which ROP, say of k type, would be appropriate to develop the FOP. Proposition 2 affirms that the fact that relations of type k facilitate the development of FOP explains why that type of relations obtain. Combining 1 and 2 gives proposition 3, which guarantees the primacy of the FOP over ROP even as ROP facilitate the development of the FOP. The puzzle is resolved.
The logic of FE likewise rationalizes correspondence among the other levels of society, culminating in the following propositions:
4) The economic structure explains the nature of the superstructure.
5) Economic structure and superstructure explain the social being and embedded consciousness (subject).
Finally, these propositions combine with the Development Thesis, declaring that
6) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history.
(3), (4), (5) and (6) would deliver a coherent and consistent explanation of CHM and its theory of history. Particularly, the roles of Primacy Thesis (3) and Development Thesis (6) are central to establish the underlying logic of transition in CHM.
Given this Development Thesis, the basic idea of transition in historical materialism is that the FOP “select” particular ROP that in turn will promote the development of the FOP as consistently explained through FE. Similarly, political and other cultural institutions/practices correspond to the ROP, and forms of social consciousness take shape around the received superstructure. If, at any point, ROP fetter the free development of the FOP, a condition of social crisis of historic proportion arises that can be resolved only with the advent of new ROP that will provide maximum scope for the productive use and development of the FOP. Evidently, the embedded rationality of people trying to overcome the state of material scarcity (always choosing superior ways of creating wealth at the expense of other options) will ensure that such an optimal relation of production obtains. Anything else (that is, choice of any other ROP) will be suboptimal, entailing irrational behavior of people. Inter alia, such suboptimal historical choices will be rejected and never adopted. The optimal change in economic structure in turn brings about a change in the superstructure, and the latter in turn brings about a change in forms of consciousness.
Does history follow a certain pattern that ties together the optimal change from one epoch to another? Here, Cohen (1978, 1–27, 175–215) draws upon a detailed correspondence between the images of history in Hegel and Marx. It is however the case, Cohen contends, that Marx’s materialism triumphs over Hegel’s idealism because, unlike Hegel’s, his is not just a philosophy of history but a theory of history that is able to contribute to a rigorous explanation of the inner dynamics of society and its transition. He also warns that what is valuable in Hegel’s concept of dialectics is its “descriptive residue” (not its explanatory feature), which, when one starts to explain Marx’s theory of history, emerges as good imagery to capture the ascent in the stages that Marx denotes.
The sequence can be discerned from the Hegelian triad of undifferentiated unity/affirmation, differentiated disunity/negation and differentiated unity/negation of negation. It transits in rank order. Adapting this imagery in CHM, history moves from undifferentiated unity (primitive communism) to differentiated disunity (slave, feudal and capitalist society, that is, societies divided by optimality crisis and class division/conflict), arriving finally at differentiated unity (communism or a materially abundant society with no optimality crisis and consequently no classes and no class conflict). This transition follows a series of sequential shifts in the ROP that, following FE, are historically selected by the level of FOP at each transition point.
Clearly, this stage-based way of looking at history embraces a predetermined underlying purpose guiding the movement of society in a definite direction. This inexorable logic of transition is historicist: a rational, ordered, progressive movement of society from a preordained origin to a predestined end. The rational element is the essence—here, the FOP; its development signals progress which is coterminous with a higher order of society. This progressive movement starts from a given point—primitive communism—and moves in a law-like and ordered fashion to end where history is destined to reach, finally: communism.2 “Progress” is judged by the proximity of a stage to communism. Each optimal choice in this direction is thus progressive. The class who makes it happen is revolutionary, and those vying to retain the old ROP and other suboptimal ROPs are reactionary or irrelevant. Can one skip stages? No way, answers Cohen. Till the time there is further room for the existing ROP to develop the FOP, the former will not perish. Attempts to bring about socialism before the time of capitalism is complete (as in erstwhile Soviet Union or Maoist China) are doomed to fail.
The medium of transitional change is class struggle. Class struggle is secondary in the sense that it appears at the level of “main events of that course [of history] and the surface relief of society” and is not the “fundamental explanation of the course of history and the structure of society” (Cohen 1988, 14). Unlike locating continuous class battle through strategic behavior (say, in a game theoretic situation as some argued), Cohen attributes the meaning of class struggle in Marx to class wars to settle transitional questions and also credits Marx for his thesis that the resolution of class wars depends on the “character of the FOP.” This explains the importance of class struggle qua class war in the transition of society, but its secondary presence to that of the fettering of the FOP by the extant ROP under the condition of the assumed inevitability of the development of FOP must not be forgotten.
We surmise that that if determinism is the undisputed logic of the social in CHM then historicism is the undisputed logic of transition; the two logics supplement one another. The essence (FOP) serves as the rational element whose inexorable growth also serves as the engine to explain the transition of society.
Dialectical Materialism tends to embrace Hegelian dialectics (which it merges with some purported laws of natural science) as an explanatory device (Olsen 2009). Through a law-like shift from the quantitative to the qualitative (signifying the point of contradiction between FOP and ROP being burst asunder to usher in new ROP) that moves through the schema of negation of negation, the inexorable development of FOP in each stage in history is guaranteed through a change in property/power relations of class and consequently the superstructure. As Althusser (1969) argued, in its popular version, dialectical materialism following Hegel reduces the complex society into a simple essence (say, FOP) and its transition into an auto journey of the same essence; through this expressive causality, its explanation of society and history simplifies what is otherwise complex, straightens in a somewhat Euclidean fashion what is otherwise full of curves, breaks and new articulations, renders transparent and certain what is otherwise uncertain, murky and contingent.
While dialectical materialism shares some of the main features of Cohen’s frame (such as determinism and historicism), Cohen rejects it as an inadequate logic for explaining transition. He debunks the idea of process, interpenetrability and laws of motion as asserted by dialectical materialism. Instead, he theorizes the components (FOP, ROP, superstructure and consciousness) as levels that must be defined as independent and autonomous of one another and whose relations are explained by FE. Interpenetration will only make the definitions murky and their roles/relations unclear; he faults Marxists for undertaking such sloppy theorization. Moreover, Cohen would dismiss the theory of dialectical materialism for delivering a philosophy of history and not a theory of history. “Negation of Negation” has no explanatory import as dialectical materialism often tends to convey. A theory of transition must explain the mechanism through which certain components rise and then fall, and in the process help locate and differentiate one stage from another; and on this issue dialectical materialism has a sloppy answer (with its somewhat vague inflexion point from quantitative to qualitative) and FE a very good one.
Interestingly, the importance of a non-Hegelian explanatory device that would resolve the above mentioned fundamental puzzle in CHM is also acknowledged at the level of mode of production and superstructure by Althusser (1969). He tries to resolve the primacy of the former and the important role of the latter through concepts such as “determination in the last instance” of the economic, “effectivity,” “relative autonomy” and “reciprocal action.” Cohen, of course, remains unfazed by this theorization, which, for him, is inadequate and inconsistent insofar as resolving the fundamental puzzle of CHM is concerned. If one adds to this the criticisms that structuralism now takes over the mantle of essence (Hindess and Hirst 1977) and that “determinism in the last instance” is still determinism, then the very purpose of Althusser’s critique of Hegelian dialectics and the creation of a reformed CHM is undermined (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 2).
Criticisms against CHM’s various determinisms (technologist, class, economic and structuralist, etc.) and teleology (historicism) were particularly fierce and well documented (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Resnick and Wolff 1987; Gibson-Graham 1996; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003; Ruccio 2011); so were charges of definitional and logical inconsistencies in mode of production and class analysis (Hindess and Hirst 1977; Hindess 1987).
Arguing against the Smithian explanation of growth-driven economic development to be pioneered by the individual economic actors trying to achieve greater productivity and hence efficiency, which he claimed is an approach shared by Dobb, Sweezy and Cohen’s CHM, Brenner (1986) emphasizes the political qua class struggle and the contingent nature of its outcome as against the economic/technologist imperative. Brenner’s attack is not directed at CHM per se, which he accepts with some modifications (such as defining class ROP in terms of property), but his bone of contention seems to be over the main causal factor of transitional change. Specifically, Brenner replaces the primacy of FOP with property relations such that the essential motor of transition of society is now class struggle over property relations rather than the FOP and their presumed development. But then, a question remains: is Brenner lapsing into political qua class essentialism as the major driver of transition? Moreover, given CHM, it may be argued that, in the long run, the development of society and the specific form of class struggle and, subsequently, its outcome will depend on the level of development of the FOP. If agreed, then, in the last instance, Brenner’s political emphasis of class struggle depends ultimately on the economic, thereby undercutting his critique of economic determinism.
An other Marx, Late Marx, when faced with the “Russian Road/Question” (as revealed in a correspondence with Russian Marxists regarding the route of the country’s transition that began in the 1870s and continued till his death), ended up challenging the very idea of “historical inevitability” and with it the stagist theory of history (Marx 1983; Bailey and Llobera 1981; Shanin 1983; Chakrabarti and Dhar 2010, ch. 6 and 7).
To begin with, it is worth recalling the exuberance of the triumph of global capitalism that Marx and Engels had forwarded earlier in The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie ... compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
(Marx and Engels 2005, 34)
Looking back at history, while Marx’s description of capitalism going global is truly of the contemporary, there is enough reason to cast doubt on the ability of the bourgeoisie to impose its stamp over the entire world, in all relationships and in all spaces as described in the Manifesto; one can even have doubts regarding whether the bourgeoisie wants to do it at all so long as the capitalist organization of exploitation is secured from challenges. There is certainly also a triumphant inevitability attributed to this imagery in Marx, in which the (White Western) bourgeoisie personifying this historicist logic plays a “revolutionary” role. This seems to substantiate the claim of historical inevitability in the stage-based sequence in Cohen’s rendition and in fact generally in CHM.
When quizzed over the question of whether or not backward Russia should inevitably take the path of capitalist development as it had unfolded in England and other Western European countries, Marx became skeptical. Reacting against Mikhailovskii, who emphasized the aspect of teleology in his work, Marx hit back that he certainly did not propose “to metamorphose our historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to eventually attain this economic formation which, with a tremendous leap of the productive forces of social labour, assures the most integral development of every industrial producer.” (Marx in Shanin 1983, 59) Taking up the specific case of historical inevitability for “backward” Russia, he harped on the possibility of many alternative paths, including to post-capitalist directions. His argument opens the space for contingency in history, thereby casting doubt on the idea of teleology, as highlighted by Cohen. Again, taking up the case for the Russian land commune and pointing to the astronomical costs of following blindly a supra-historical logic, Marx writes in the following remarkable passage:
At the same time as the commune is being bled and tortured and its land made barren and poor, the literary lackeys of the “new pillars of society” refer ironically to the wounds which have been inflicted on the commune as symptoms of its spontaneous decrepitude. They claim that it is dying a natural death and the kindest thing would be to put an end to its agony. Here we are no longer dealing with a problem to be solved, but quite simply with an enemy who must be defeated. In order to save the Russian commune there must be a Russian revolution. And the Russian government and the “new pillars of society” are doing their best to prepare the masses for such a catastrophe. If the revolution takes place at the right time, if it concentrates all its forces to ensure the free development of the village commune, the latter will soon emerge as the regenerative force in Russian society and as something superior to those countries which are still enslaved by the capitalist regime.
(Marx in Marx and Engels 1970, 161; originally written by Marx in late February and early March 1881)
Marx turns the historicist logic and its claimed scientific inevitability tied to the origin and so-called progressive evolution of capitalism and industrial society upside down. He also unveils in the process the “masked political character” of capitalism and the “hidden hostility” of the modern West to Other Worlds and possibilities (no longer seen as passé or regressive) that can be derived from it. The aspect of being “torn asunder” deemed as revolutionary in the Manifesto is here projected as violent, retrograde and catastrophic. Late Marx thus overturns Cohen’s Marx and indeed the whole history of CHM.
The implication is far reaching. Once we break away from the teleological theory of transition there is no need to be enslaved to capitalism in thinking the transitional paths. Rather, the path itself becomes open to multiple possibilities. In the process, it opens up the very question of transition and the concept of “progress” as theoretical categories. We must again ask the question: what then is transition in a Marxian frame?
Persuaded by a substantial body of arguments against CHM and a big-bang approach to transition it proposes, the second account of transition takes off from a class-focused Marxian approach to advocate a non-deterministic displacement of the disaggregated class structures of a society (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003). The fundamental difference between the two approaches is based on a methodological departure imposed by the commitment to non-determinism and non-teleology in the class-focused approach.
Depicting the class-focused reality as the combined effects of an infinite number of mutually constituting class and non-class processes (where change in each affects and changes the others), transition of this overdetermined and contradictory reality cannot be reduced to any deeper-level essence with predetermined rationale (such as FOP) and hence with no underlying purpose (say, as in Development Thesis in CHM) in driving the movement of society. Instead, the contradictory pulls and pushes guarantee that change is multidirectional, uneven and unpredictable. Being in a state of such flux, societal transition cannot be rationally ordered and tied to any predestined end.
In order to unpack the potentially multifaceted class nature of society and the simultaneity in its movement, we take recourse to the idea of class sets as laid down in the entry on economic development in this volume. We identify class sets in terms of the performance and appropriation of surplus labor (FCP), which is of three types, namely, self-appropriation, exploitative appropriation and collective appropriation. Distribution takes the form of commodity and non-commodity, while workers’ remuneration appears in two forms, wage and nonwage. The combination of these three elements help create 24 class sets, which represent the multifaceted institutional settings in which any class structure may exist in an economy. As decentered and disaggregated, the economy cannot be reduced to a capitalist sector, which itself is now disaggregated into various class set types (including state and private forms). Furthermore, non-capitalist forms are, by definition, differentiated into various types (slave, feudal, communist, communitic and independent). Considering further conditions of existence of these class sets such as the subsumed class conditions referring to distribution and receipt of surplus, property structure, power structure, income distribution, etc. will only reveal the deepened state of heterogeneity of the class structures and hence of the decentered class-focused economy.3
By focusing on these class sets, a picture of the class differentiation within an economy can be gleaned and transition theorized in terms of an uneven, disaggregated and interconnected series of distinctive changes in the types and forms of class structures (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003). Transition may transpire when there would a direct change in the type (say, from capitalist to communist) or form (say, from state capitalist to private capitalist) of class sets or when any of the conditions of existence of the class sets affect the class sets. Class and non-class processes affect one another, continually producing in turn their heterogeneous, fluid and simultaneous movement and thereby placing social reality in a state of flux and indeterminacy.
The ceaseless process of transition due to overdetermination4 and contradiction of social processes produces not a chaotic theory of history, as is often mistakenly understood, but rather a theory of history (held together by the discursive focus point of class and the class-focused economy) that is able to describe societal movement in all its chaotic dimensions. What is lost, however, in this approach to transition is the eschatological, teleological ordering of societies according to some linear notion of “progress.”
The decentered and disaggregated economy opens the door to rethinking transition that need not be capitalist or seen through the lens of capitalism. The class-focused Marxian approach to transition is not agnostic or indifferent to the direction of societal change it favors. In other words, it recognizes that the trajectory of transition is not just a struggle over what one means by transition (say, big bang versus micro-multilayered), but also over the desirable and actual trajectory of transition from within a decentered and disaggregated economy. In this context, Marxian justice criteria criticize all exploitative types (feudal, slave, capitalist, CA communitic) and would defend the adoption of communist and AC communitic class structures for their non-exploitative features.5 It would also defend distributive justice and development justice. These just criteria would constitute the Marxian standpoint.
What the above discussion means is that the synchronic simultaneity of class sets movement (pointing to the way the class-focused economy changes) is supplemented by a somewhat weakened diachronic nature of class sets movement as well (pointing to the kind of change that actually does or could transpire at the micro level). In CHM, the former is reduced to the latter and that too in a deterministic way. Here, transition proceeds through the combined effects of the two and in which neither of the arms can be taken as a priori, predictable or definitive in any way. Rather than to be seen as a sign of weakness, this in turn opens the alternative door to enact actual and possible socio-political transformation through intervention at the micro level plateau of the class-differentiated economy on grounds of Marxian justice. From a Marxian standpoint, transition is not “anything goes” but a transition whose character of change (progressive or regressive) can be identified and actively intervened upon to give it direction.
The important point to note is that the meaning of progress and development has no originary, teleological or evolutionary bias in this theory of transition. It rejects the argument that says that the evolution of society follows some pre-given pattern, implying a definitive movement towards a non-exploitative and relatively “fair” society. What it says, in contrast, is that it is a desirable solution and one should advocate and struggle for it when the situation demands and possibilities arise. But struggling for it, of course, does not guarantee that it is going to materialize. Furthermore, even if we assume that such a social state of affairs is achieved, the combined effects of the overdetermined and contradictory processes prevent that scenario from being taken as permanent. Some class structures might move back to exploitative forms and the social distribution of wealth may again become extremely “unfair.” In other words, a permanent state of a society without any exploitation and with a relatively “fair” distribution of income as the definite end of history is not guaranteed (however desirable it may seem) in this theory. Rather, the class and non-class struggle for transition from the standpoint of Marxian justice considerations is a permanent struggle. This is in contrast to the CHM idea of class struggle to maintain concept(s) of progress that is linked to the driving forces (say, FOP) underlying the linear evolution of society and whose resolution is a foregone conclusion in the last instance. This ideal of progress acts both as the essence of societal development and the telos of the transition process, something that is rejected in the class-focused theory of transition.
The third model sees transition as an out-and-out political question (and not a historical or a technological question). In a somewhat autocritical vein, transition is theorized as a question of the “politics of time” and the “politics of space”—as also a question of the politics of interpretation and the politics of transformation (Chakrabarti, Dhar and Dasgupta 2015).
Because Model I reduces heterogeneous experiential temporalities in both the West and the non-West—temporalities tied to non-capitalist (not pre-capitalist) class processes and class sets—into either capital-centric or modernity-centric imaginations of time, time is in the process (s)tilted; time is also rendered linear and step-ladder. Gibson-Graham (1996) through her critique of capitalocentrism (which reduces the Other’s temporalities and experiences—especially the non-capitalist ones—to the time-language-logic of capital) cracks the inviolability of the delusion of capital as essence and telos of all transition. The delusion also helps silence, render “unutterable” and “unknown,” “shroud,” and “hide” class exploitation, the violence of primitive accumulation, and world of the third as the non-capitalist outside to the circuits of global capital (see the previous chapter on economic development in this volume).
Because Model I drags heterogeneous orderings of space in both West and non-West in terms of class processes into the advanced/developed/modern first world and the backward/lacking/lagging/pre-modern third world, it is an Orientalist representation. Late Marx resists—as we have seen above—both capitalocentrism and Orientalism. This theory, premised on a critique of the politics of time and politics of space in Model I—and a critique of capitalocentrism and Orientalism in CHM and in developmental thinking and practice, as also building on Model II, works its way through a Model III of transition, a model that sees transition as not simply change (whether as diachronic or as synchronic simultaneity described earlier) but as a dialectic of the changed and the unchanged, as also a dialectic of the expressed and the secret (Derrida calls it crypted [1986]), where it is the unchanged in transition that is kept secret and it is the changed that is rendered expressed.
Transition, then, is about the “unchanged face of change” and the “changing phases of the unchanged.” Do the phases hide the face? Do the phases work as a mask? We would like to mark the distinction between face and phase rather sharply; face is character-logical, which tells us what or who one is—what capitalism cannot be without: exploitation and primitive accumulation—while phase is temporal, something that is in passing or could pass. One could move from the “welfare state” or “developmental state” to “neoliberal globalization”; one can move from a strong foregrounding in-charge in-control kind of state to a state that is slowly backgrounding itself and handing over power and authority to the competitive market economy. The overdetermination of the changing phase (say, within and between capitalism[s]) and of the unchanged face (say, exploitation and primitive accumulation) is how we are setting up the “transition question” vis-à-vis capitalism.
Integrating this insight into our proposed theoretical perspective, Marx is seen as interested in the connection of class process and class struggle with the transition of economy/society, which in our case would mean an alteration from one form of exploitation to another. The organization of exploitation as it appears across history (from slavery to feudalism to capitalism) marks transitional phases, which, among other things, are different variations of an embodied system of class exploitation; one need not draw any other inference regarding chronology or valuation of time and space in this representation, something that—as we explained earlier—Late Marx seemed to move away from. The phases of transition span the changing forms of exploitation even as the aspect of exploitation per se remains intact. It is as if the forms of exploitation are changing even as the content of exploitation is static. The static in movement is the secret of transition, whose crypting is what keeps the transition (of phases) going and alive. Transition thus encapsulates both change and no change, a redefinition that changes the political contour. Class struggle to preserve class organization of exploitation (even when changing its form) and class struggle with the objective to dissolve class organization of exploitation became fundamentally dissimilar. Transition through class struggle is transition in class exploitation. Transition of class-divided society is to cross the horizon of class exploitation. It also means that, for Marx, the struggle against capitalism for a post-capitalist future of non-exploitation (and for making primitive accumulation nonexistent) is simultaneously a struggle to transcend transition. Class struggle for a post-capitalist future must be a struggle for a post-transition future (Chakrabarti et al. 2015, ch. 5).
The question of transition thus becomes a political question between the delusional hope around expressed changes on the one hand and the inertia or the staticity of the crypted on the other. The crypt (Abraham and Torok 1986) is our theoretico-political shorthand for the experience and phenomenon of the “secret” in transition; it signifies the unchanged in the changing phases; it is the secret static under the condition of apparent and incessant movement. We would like to argue, for example, that the crypt of current global capitalist transition is:
1 class as processes pertaining to surplus labor,
2 world of the third (and not third world) as the outside to the circuits of global capital and
3 primitive accumulation.
The political question in transition thus resides in whether the change is brought about by protecting the crypt, or whether it is change to protect the crypt (for example, change from national capitalism to global capitalism protects the crypt of capital-in-transition), or is the change unfolding following incessant struggles over the crypt (for example, where the given of capitalist transition itself is put to question, as Late Marx did in the context of the Russian commune). We would like to ask: are current transitions then about changes in capitalism and not of capitalism, changes in capitalism, that in turn keep the crypt protected? Therefore, while much of the economic, political, cultural, even natural landscape changes, what does not change is the crypt. Some questions like the question of class as process, some perspectives like the perspective of world of the third as the outside and not the third worldish underside of the circuits of global capital, some experiences like the experience of class exploitation, the experience of outsided-ness, and the experience of violence-violation in the context of primitive accumulation remain buried, forgotten, crypted, even as the world goes into frenzy regarding transition. Some signifiers, like class, world of the third and primitive accumulation remain tabooed in the varied new and old discourses that circulate. Some other signifiers like competition, profit, growth, third world, etc. are instead foregrounded, and “incitement to discourse” around transition is organized around such foregrounded signifiers. Transition is, then, marked by both movement, i.e., movement in foregrounded signifiers, and invariance, i.e., invariance of tabooed signifiers. The Marxian politics of transition hence lies in questioning and transforming that which is invariant.
This theorization seeks a move from an obsession with transition in much of Marxism and progressivist and developmental thinking to transformation. Would that mean a conceptual transition from what is to what it is to be? In other words, would it be a conceptual transition from mere description to the ought, to the ethic of transition? Marxism is not mere description of the delusional veil called transition of surfaces; Marxism is also transformative praxis in just and desirable directions. Hence one needs to engage with what is discursively buried, hidden, in the transparent script of transition. The loss of the elements of the crypt in the language of transition and the non-mourning for such loss—as if the elements are stashed away in a secret vault, only to be forgotten—is a political condition that needs to be undone. What is at stake (in politics) is what takes places secretly (i.e., that which deludes) or takes a secret place (i.e., that which is foreclosed), in order to keep the crypt safe (Derrida 1986, xv).
The imagination of the political has hitherto been colonized by the concept of “transition.” In classical Marxism, it is not called transition, however. It is called “historical materialism.” Much of the Marxian imagination has been unnecessarily colonized by the concept, language and framework of transition qua historical materialism. Historical materialism is a sophisticated theory of transition, but it is a ridiculously naive and banal theory of transformation. For example, Soviet society did transit from private capitalism to state capitalism (Resnick and Wolff 2002), but it hardly underwent Marxian transformation in terms of transformation in the logic-language-ethos of surplus exploitation as also new subject-formation. In other words, there were changes in foregrounded signifiers, but there was no fundamental change in the crypted signifiers. The question of transition hence must turn into a movement where the crypt itself becomes the object of political inquiry, and not where political change is circumscribed, wittingly or unwittingly, by the preservation of the crypt. This is a subtle but profound difference that this theorization of transition unpacks. Thus, even “radical” politics—Marxian and non-Marxian—may ultimately never get to the point of reorienting themselves to the objective of transformation, notwithstanding previous and ongoing attempts to the contrary. In other words, while the crypt even if secret is very much alive/real, politics addressing it is absent or muted. On the other hand, Marx’s idea of the political is envisioned in terms of transformation of the crypt. Transformation could then perhaps be the logic-language-ethos of a post-transition imagination of transition; a transition imagination not reduced to historical materialism or liberal gradualism.
The conjecture is the following: let us not be slaves of transition. Let us be sculptors of transformation. Let us not just look for alternative transitions. Let us look for alternatives to transition.
1 Others define class ROP fundamentally in terms of property rather than power. Notably, since the basic structure of CHM remains intact, the transition logic hardly changes when such internal adjustments happen.
2 There is a controversy within Marxism regarding the validity of Asiatic as a mode of production, but we must shelve that issue for the moment.
3 Each class set pertains to a specific class structure that is a conceptual site of the combined effects of class and non-class processes, including the aspects included in the definition of class set.
4 In this case, the aspect of “determination in the last instance by the economic” (which we saw being retained in Althusser 1969) in the definition of overdetermination is given up (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 2). Overdetermination is the mutual constitutivity of ceaselessly changing processes, none more important than the other.
5 For definitions of AC and CA communitic class process, see the previous chapter on economic development in this volume.
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