This is a response to Partha Chatterjee, whose recent essay we had posted for further debate.

Partha’s work has been a central reference point for the work of many of us and his notion of ‘political society’ has provided an unprecedented opening, a possibility – that of thinking the ‘unthinkable’. I would go so far as to say that the enunciation of the idea of ‘political society’ has been one of the most important conceptual interventions of ‘postcolonial’ political theory – that is to say, political (and social theory) produced from/in the postcolonial world; an intervention in theory that for the first time brings in the postcolonial experience into its very heart. I shall even claim that the potential and possibilities of this concept are of far wider applicability than the geographical ‘third world’ and can provide a lens for looking at the so-called first world itself. But on that more later.

I want to underline that when the idea was first put forward, it appeared to many, including me, to provide a way to enter a world that is not amenable to the neat and sanitized categories of what goes in the name of political theory – and most certainly of political philosophy. Let us quickly recall some of the most significant points of this idea: political society is that which civil society is not; it is a domain where claims of its inhabitants can only be addressed in a language other than that of rights. It is the domain of not-yet citizens, those who are not modern, individuated citizens (in the specific sense this has come to acquire in western political and social theory) and whose imaginative world is governed by notions of community. I may venture to underline the mark of non-teleology that underwrites the concept: not-yet citizens are not on the way to becoming full-fledged citizens; they will most probably never be. If I may borrow and paraphrase an evocative expression by Ranabir Samaddar (made in another context): political society is peopled by those multitudes who are forever suspended in the space between the former (traditional) community and the not-yet citizen (Samaddar, Marginal Nation).

There is no teleology here for, even if they so desire, the denizens of political society will never become full and proper citizens. If any proof is required of this, one only has to look at what Hannah Arendt was at pains to point out to us: the figure of the ‘refugee’, the ‘boat people’ or ‘illegal immigrant’ as the direct product of the working of the idea of citizenship and the nation-state; of the idea of membership (with entitlements that can only accrue to members) in a political community. This illegal non-citizen is a ubiquitous figure of contemporary societies – not simply an external ‘infiltrator’. The ‘illegal migrant’ in late 20th and 21st century India (and in other parts of the world, I am sure) is not just the ‘Bangladeshi’ or the ‘Pakistani’. It includes the torrent of development refugees flooding the postcolonial city. These ‘development refugees’ – uprooted from their own habitats through mass displacements – have lately been labeled by the Supreme Court of India (Justices Ruma Pal and Markandeya Katju) as encroachers, pickpockets, and thieves. I shall desist from assimilating this story into the well-known fable of Marxist Wonderland – the Fable of Primitive Accumulation, apparently a historical process that necessarily accompanies (or lays the basis of? It can’t do both!) capitalist development. These development refugees are not a product of any historical process but of the active and planned attempt by the state elites to ‘become modern’, to usher in modernity. If capitalism is the sign of that becoming modern – especially the individual bourgeois right to property – then so be it. There are according to some estimates, roughly 21 million such development refugees in India today. Towns like Tehri and Harsud (not to speak of thousands of villages) that are now under water did not perish under the effect of some inexorable objective historical process such as primitive accumulation; they perished under a well-deliberated plan, codenamed desiring-modernity. No logic of governmentality worked to prevent their dispossession. In Kalyan Sanyal’s rendering (Rethinking Capitalist Development) such dispossession is an inevitable consequence of primitive accumulation. Sanyal here follows Marx and Partha agrees. My point however, is that quite apart from the claims made about primitive accumulation, the fact that it belongs to the pre-history of capitalism – precisely the closing decades of the 15th and early 16th century, before the rise of capitalism in England, can only imply a historically contingent relationship. In any case, such a clear correlation, even Marx admits (“it’s most classic form”, he says), exists only in England. Not even in other parts of Europe do we find such a replication. Now, according to Sanyal, these dispossessed people constitute the wasteland of capital but the specificity of postcolonial capitalism lies in the fact that these dispossessed must go through a process that he calls ‘de-capitalization’ and be re-united with their means of labour and will eventually constitute the informal sector. Sanyal calls this the sector of noncapital – a term I prefer to Partha’s non-corporate capital, though the precise dynamics of this domain still need to be worked out.

Let me elaborate a bit on what I mean by the ‘unthinkable’, in the context of the idea of political society. The idea clears a space and opens a window into the ‘other’ of civil society. This ‘other’ is not simply unthinkable; it is unthinkable because it is unrepresentable. In most modern, contemporary societies, there exist large sectors of the population who live a semi-legal or illegal existence. Some of them may ‘form organizations’ and associations and ‘make demands’ on the state and negotiate with the government but they often do not. Even those who do, lead a double existence – one ‘for the state’ and another, far away from its watchful gaze. James Scott called this the ‘hidden transcript’. His context was the relations between the dominant and the dominated in the village – the landlord and the poor peasant, for instance. I agree with Partha’s position that rural life in India has changed fundamentally in the last twenty-five years and the old kind of landlord does not exist any more. I also agree that gradually the lure of modernity and the city has transformed the imaginative horizons of the peasant but that is not the issue here. What is important is that these hidden transcripts operate in this world of other existence vis-à-vis the very government with whom they perforce interact and on whom they make demands. Not only peasants, we all live – to a greater or lesser extent – this same double existence, it is just that given the asymmetries and inequities of power, it is much more significant in subaltern life. Much more in subaltern life remains illegible before the gaze of the state.

Here, I also want to point to another aspect of this life. This aspect is encapsulated in the figure of the ‘pirate’ – a pervasive figure of our times, the nightmare of corporate capital and a product of post-fordist information capitalism in particular. Recent work done by colleagues in Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum for instance, illustrates the world of this newly resurrected character. It shows that the simple pleasures of sharing – from seeds and everyday medicinal knowledge to music – can in one fell swoop (through a definitional fiat) be transformed into the illegal and thus pushed into the netherworld of civil society. If large populations in the postcolonial world live this double existence and if the second realm remains always beyond the possibility of representation, articulation and expression, then the idea of political society needs to be conceptualized differently.

Unfortunately, it is precisely these explosive possibilities that are not incorporated by Partha into his exposition of political society. They are all relegated to the ‘outside’, thus domesticating and taming political society and making it palatable for liberal tastes. What logical justification do we have to relegate a vital part of this civil society’s ‘other’ to the outside of political society? What if, one might ask, political society itself were the outside, the constitutive outside – of civil society? What if – and here we step into the domain of the truly unthinkable – political society were the constitutive outside of all government and state? Why would there be anything like governmentality, were everything to be legible and rationally orderable into clear-cut principles of rule? Governmentality only makes sense because there is something that escapes the high principles of rule and threatens them. What if, in that case, government and state were not the decisive element but this outside that determines the structural limits and possibilities of all government? Let me push this question a bit further. What if one were to extend this logic into the domain of capital and noncapital? That is to say, what happens if we see noncapital as the constitutive outside of capital and capitalism? In other words, what I am suggesting here is that we see both the domains of state/government and capital not as enclosed totalities but as incomplete ‘structures’ that confront this outside (political society, noncapital) as externalities. In other words, I am resisting here the dominant modes of understanding capital and capitalism that see all forms of noncapital as merely functional appendages of capital.

This kind of theorization has held and continues to hold sway over our understanding of capital – though it is true that neither Partha Chatterjee nor Kalyan Sanyal hold such a position. In such a theorization, once free labour was seen as essential to capitalism. However when dealing with slavery and the color line in the modern working class, it encounters no difficulty in claiming that slave labour ‘is also essential’ in some sense to capitalist profit. Everything from the sixteenth century on is seen part of this capitalist world-economy because integrated into a world market. If the different social and economic forms had not, despite centuries become capitalist in their organizational structure and had not been fully incorporated into the logic of accumulation, there was always the unhappy theory of the ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ to come to the rescue. The simple fact that I wish to underline here is that despite two centuries of colonialism and another sixty years of independent capitalist development, fifteen years of frantic ‘globalization’, India still remains a predominantly agricultural country and still not fully incorporated into the logic of accumulation. The same holds for most of Asia and Africa, even South America. Neither colonial ‘rule of property’ (Ranajit Guha) nor the passive revolution of capital have made these parts of the world capitalist. I agree with Partha that we need a new conceptual framework and also think that the intervention made by Sanyal is of critical importance in explaining the inability of capitalism to develop ‘fully’ in the postcolony. Sanyal’s notion of de-capitalization or the ‘reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation’ through governmental interventions provides an important lens through which to see the continuous reproduction of the ‘informal sector’ (or noncapital) through the very workings of capitalism and governmentality. However, what we need to also account for is the fact that in India and most of the world, the predominant forms of noncapital are not reversals of primitive accumulation; they are continuations of other forms of life reinvented and reconstructed to deal with or survive in the world of capitalism but continuations nevertheless.

This is a problem that has worried many ideologues of capitalism. The entire activity of IMF and the World Bank, after all, is geared towards implanting bourgeois institutions including the individual property right in all parts of the world. That was their brief and we could say with confidence that it has not succeeded. More recent theorizations of property by the ideologues of capital point to something very interesting. In a strangely perverse way, they give us an insight into the contemporary crisis of capital as well as to the difficulties of instituting bourgeois property rights as the sole form of ownership. I am thinking here of Hernando de Soto, whose work has provided new impetus to institutions the IMF and the World Bank as well as to a whole new range of NGOs, obsessed with the idea of instituting formal property titles and ‘documenting’ all property into deeds and individual entitlements. The Title of Hernando de Soto’s book is telling: The Mystery of Capital – Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. As the title itself shows, the book investigates what is sees as capitalism’s colossal failure (‘failed everywhere’). What de Soto means by this ‘failure’ of course, is precisely that the bourgeois property form has failed to take root everywhere, frustrated by the modes of living and being in the Third World. Let me quote him:

‘Imagine a country where the law that governs property rights is so deficient that nobody can easily identify who owns what, addresses cannot be systematically verified, and people cannot be made to pay their debts. Consider not being able to use your own house or business to guarantee credit. Imagine a property system where you can’t divide your ownership in a business into shares that investors can buy, or where descriptions of assets are not standardized.’

This, in de Soto’s view, is the general picture of life in the ‘developing world’, home to five-sixths of the world’s population. He believes that life in these parts of the world shows how, contrary to the Western perception that sees capitalism as the answer to global underdevelopment, it hasn’t even been tried here yet. For, ‘in a capitalist economy, all business deals are based on the rules of property and transactions which do not even exist in the Third World. Their property systems exclude the assets and transactions of 80% of the population, cutting off the poor from the global capitalist economy as markedly as apartheid once separated black and white South Africans.’

This last bit might lead us to believe, as it has misled many well meaning NGOs, that the intention here is to draw the poor into the charmed circle of development. The assets of the poor can also be legally titled and the potential capital trapped inside can be released, he says. Nothing of the sort is actually intended. The real problem, it seems, is that capitalism has entered a serious crisis, largely because, in most of the world it does not have the kind of ‘market’ it wants. This is a very specific market; not a market of consumer goods.

This is best understood in de Soto’s own rendering. Some years ago, Hernando de Soto was invited by the Indonesian government to advise it on identifying the assets of the overwhelming majority of Indonesians living in the ‘extralegal sector’ – said to account, according to him, to close to 90 percent of the population. Though no expert on Indonesia, he says, as he strolled though the rice fields of Bali, he noticed that a different dog would bark as he entered a different property. The dogs knew very well which assets their masters controlled. To determine who owned what in Indonesia, he advised the Cabinet to begin by ‘listening to the barking dogs.’ One of the Ministers responded, he says, by exclaiming: ‘Ah, jukum adat—the people’s law.’

Indonesia represented to de Soto all that is wrong with the third world economies. It was the great merit of capitalism in the West, he believes, that governments adapted the “people’s law” into uniform rules and codes that all could understand and respect. ‘Ownership once represented by dogs, fences, and armed guards is now represented by records, titles and shares.’ This was what transformed the entire logic of capitalism in the West. With titles, shares and property laws, houses were no more mere use-value (as shelter); they could now be used as capital (security for credit to start or expand a business). (From “The Hidden Architecture of Capitalism”).

This is of capital importance. It is not enough to own individual or family property. If it remains simple use-value, it is simply ‘dead capital’. Every bit of property should be able to live a double life – as credit security, as share and such like. The astute eye of de Soto is quick to realize that

‘(T)hroughout the Third World and the formerly communist countries, neighborhoods buzz with hard work and ingenuity. Streetside cottage industries have sprung up everywhere, manufacturing anything from footwear to imitation Cartier watches. There are workshops that build and rebuild machinery, cars, even buses. In many countries, unauthorized buses, jitneys, and taxis account for most public transportation. Often, vendors from the shantytowns supply most of the food available in the market, from carts on the street or from stalls in buildings they built themselves. The new urban poor have created entire industries and neighborhoods that have to operate on clandestine connections to electricity and water (De Soto, Citadels of Dead Capital. But alas! All this remains dead capital till it is brought within the fold of the formal economy.

To conclude, it will be worthwhile to reflect briefly on the words ‘dead capital’ a bit. To be sure, from de Soto’s own descriptions, this capital is anything but ‘dead’. It is very much alive and happens to provide livelihood for millions of people across the globe. More importantly, this ‘capital’ is a source of constant anxiety for both ‘formal capital’ and the state, though for different reasons. To ‘formal capital’ it poses a threat to its profits, especially in the figure of the ‘pirate’ that has now become a pervasive metaphor for the illegal, the unruly and the unregulated. The pirate today is one who copies, multiplies and distributes or sells with scant respect for the original except as object of consumption. The pirate produces the ‘copy’ or the ‘fake’ and throws it alongside the ‘original’ into the market, duping the original branded producer. Often, though, s/he who is called the pirate, merely shares information and products with others. ‘Intellectual property’, copyright and trade mark have thus become the new banners of capitalist aggression – as it stands threatened by such pirate or contraband capital – its own cheap copy. To the state, it poses another kind of threat by depriving it of what it believes are its legitimate revenues – all the transactions in this domain being completely ‘off the record’.

Given all this, such contraband capital can be considered to be dead only in that by being outside the pale of the formal economy, it eludes the mechanisms of disciplining and policing that are put in place by state elites in countries like India in order to bring the entire ‘economy’ within the domain of the ‘formal’. It is not simply a question, I submit, of ‘managing non-corporate capital’ as Partha puts it. Political society and noncapital, must certainly be seen as analogous and even overlapping domains, but precisely for that reason, always threatening to government and civil society.