Praxis in world of the third contexts

Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean

Minimum support price (MSP) is posed as a remedial response to the distress condition of Indian farmers. This essay dissects MSP and the debate regarding it from the class-focused theory of surplus...

A Class-Focused Theory of Minimum Support Price and Agricultural Distress in India

What happens when a thinker and practitioner of transformative politics claim to be imagining and doing socialism from a perspective drawn from the resources in the East? We show how Gandhi seeks to shape an Indianized version of non-violent socialism consistent with what is claimed to be Marx’s basic principle of communism: “To each according to his need, from each according to his capacity.” His framework challenges any claim to violence as a necessary condition for the praxis of socialism. He seeks to end capitalism without putting an end to the ‘capitalist subject.’ This dialogue of Gandhi with Marx’s Capital on socialism gathers further steam when we unpack the former’s conceptual contour that underpins non-violent socialism—labor, capital, capitalist, capitalism, property, industrialization—in order to set up its encounter with the fundamental point of Marx’s critique of political economy foregrounded in his book Capital—modes of surplus labor appropriation and its specific form in (capitalist) exploitation. Our analysis reveals that, when made to confront surplus and exploitation, Gandhi’s insistence on a non-violent relationship with the ‘capitalist subject’ even as capitalism is supposed to be withering away is inconsistent in terms of his own framework. Likewise, any asserted Marxian claim of socialism as necessarily epitomizing material development and abundance and which is to be arrived at through class violence is rendered problematical by Gandhi. These insights then open up the possibility of further exchanges about post-capitalist futurities.

Non-violent Socialism: Marx and Gandhi in Dialogue

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to ‘survive well’, securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place-based cooperatives while other things connect them: an Earth unsettled by climate change and extractivist/capitalist interventions. Both cooperatives transform place in practice by engaging similar survival strategies and non-exploitative forms of cooperation. In this paper we seek to articulate the transformative nature of these places and practices in a way that goes beyond easy binaries of local/global, while enabling recognition of different affiliations between lands, related climate crisis and sustainable and shared surviving mechanisms. We develop a ‘two-thirds’ perspective building upon Bruno Latour's third attractor, the Terrestrial, together with another third, Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg's idea of the World of the Third (WOT). Their interventions open our thinking to the ecological particularities, uncertainties, and postcapitalist possibilities of surviving well in place. 

Shared survival and cooperation in India and Australia

. Ist der Fachbereich Katholische Theologie

Praxis in world of the third contexts

Citations

Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean

A Class-Focused Theory of Minimum Support Price and Agricultural Distress in India

Non-violent Socialism: Marx and Gandhi in Dialogue

Shared survival and cooperation in India and Australia

Praxis

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