Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Inclusive Growth: A Lacanian Reading

Pranab Kanti Basu
To cite this article: Pranab Kanti Basu (2016) Inclusive Growth: A Lacanian Reading,
Rethinking Marxism, 28:2, 255-262, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2016.1168243
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2016.1168243

Published online: 28 Jun 2016.

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RETHINKING MARXISM, 2016

Vol. 28, No. 2, 255262, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2016.1168243

Inclusive Growth: A Lacanian Reading

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Pranab Kanti Basu

Until the 1970s, mainstream development theory and the practice of international economic
organizations put total faith in a trickle-down approach, refusing to conceive any special
policy for those excluded from the gains of modern development. Gradually, both theory and
practice are veering toward the mainstreams inclusive growth. The authors of World of
the Third and Global Capitalism conceptualize exclusion and subsequent inclusion as two
sides of the same coin that can be theorized through the Lacanian couple of foreclosure/
foregrounding. The authors propose a practice of counterhegemony grounded in ethical
principles born of the encounter of the working class of the rst world and the modes of
being and producing of the third world, which are excluded from hegemonic discourse.
Many powerful insights are provided by this Lacanian reading of exclusion/inclusion in
development theory and practice, but this reading cannot accommodate the role of lived
experience and may generate another end of history.
Key Words: Displacement, Ethics, Foreclosure, Foregrounding, Postdevelopment

World of the Third and Global Capitalism (Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg 2012; henceforth referred to as CDC) cannot be evaluated without bringing in its companion piece,
Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third
(Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009; henceforth referred to as CD). There are a lot of continuities, and some of the ideas in the later volume had been elaborated in the earlier book.
So I will begin with a discussion of Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From
Third World to the World of the Third.

Dislocation and Resettlement in Development

In the earlier book, Chakrabarti and Dhar argue that capitalist development necessarily
results in dislocation. This is a more encompassing term than displacement and
includes economic displacement caused by income deprivation resulting from capitalist progress apart from the direct loss of habitat owing to industrial expansion.
Dislocation also captures the noneconomic aspects of displacement and resettlement.
It emphasizes not just a question of the loss of geographical space but also that of
thought space, of the cultural symbols that constitute life. The world of the third is
a term the authors coin to indicate those representations of the world inhabited by
the actually or potentially dislocated (refugees of development), who are shut out by
the hegemonic discourse of development. The third world is a synonym of less
developed countries, developing countries, and so on, and it is frequently used in
2016 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

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development literature and to denote the economic-geographic space that, for allegedly
structural reasons, resists modernization.
CD agrees with postdevelopment theorys position that mainstream development
discourse in a way constitutes the mentality of third-world subjects who acquiesce in
the rule of global capital through unquestioning acceptance of the meaning of progress
as touted by the mainstream. But CD critiques this school for valuing the third world as
natural. This naturalization paradoxically shuts out all counterhegemonic representation. On the one hand, we have the homogeneous local, which is natural and
hence not represented; on the other we have the economic representation of global
capital, which characterizes the local as the necessarily lacking prior stage of capitalism.
This position held by postdevelopment economics is unable to handle the changes in
mainstream development literatures position or to understand the hierarchies, exploitative relations, and generally, the differences that prevail within the world of the third.
The ruling paradigm of development argued (and still argues) that the only path of
development for the poverty-procreating traditional third world is through policyengineered intensive capitalocentric growth. Since the 1970s (but most clearly articulated in policy since the late 1990s), this position has been supplemented with the recognition that such policies may cause dislocation and resulting poverty in the short run.
This has to be managed. The excluded are included as the objects of benevolence. This
inclusion cannot be theoretically accommodated by either postdevelopment theories
or activists. How does one differentiate between the third world that is included in
mainstream discourse as an object of benevolence and the local that is excluded?
CD contends that local societies (the plural is important), which may be conceptualized with internal cohesion and systems of reproduction, are excluded from the discursive eld of development economics. Posited instead is a homogeneous, lacking (in
terms of modernity and the inherent possibility of transformation into a capitalist
order) third world. The excluded conceptualizations are named as constituting the
world of the third. The process of their exclusion is called foreclosure. The
process of inclusion of the third world into development discourse, as the proper representation of the excluded, is called foregrounding.
The Lacanian terms foreclosure and foregrounding need some elaboration. Foreclosure
is a term used in the sense of exclusion through the nonsymbolization of essential
elements, called nodal signiers, that are necessary for holding together the discursive
structure of what is excluded. Foregrounding is the obverse of foreclosure. Foregrounding and foreclosure are symbiotically connected. Foreclosure, while structurally necessary for constituting the discursive space, also constitutes an outside of the discursive
universe. Discourse is aware of this lack, this incompleteness. It tries to hide this hole
by foregrounding within the domain of discourse certain substitute signiers that serve
as domesticated, therapeutized representations of the foreclosed. This is not an undisputed interpretation of foreclosure/foregrounding. Ajit Chaudhury, in his introduction
to CDC, in fact contests this issue. We will come back to it.
CD introduced two other signicant conceptual tools into the discourse of development critique. First was the class-process approach of the Rethinking Marxism school,
initially developed by Resnick and Wolff (1987); second was the ethics of counterhegemony. The class-process approach fragments the national economy, or what the traditional Marxist approach calls the mode of production of the country, into the

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microprocesses in which the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus

occur. Class processes, such as processes of production, appropriation, distribution,
and the receipt of surplus labor, can take various forms. Processes of production and
appropriation of surplus constitute fundamental class processes, while processes of distribution and receipt of already appropriated surplus constitute subsumed class processes.
Capitalist, feudal, communistic, and so on refer to various forms of fundamental
class processes. The signal contribution of this group has been to show that economies
that are grossly referred to as capitalist contain signicant segments wherein the production processes are noncapitalist fundamental class processes. The reverse is true for
economies that are normally termed as noncapitalist. Briey, this logic of decentering
informs this particular variant of Marxist political economy. Thus, the societal whole is
recognized as a contingent propositionhere of mainstream development discourse
based on forced closures, like all modernist discursive closures. The class-process
approach challenges the very naming of a national economy through its fragmentation
into class processes. The meaning of transition (from one mode of production to
another) thus also becomes suspect. Both the rst and the third world become heterogeneous entities. If history loses its teleology, then no transition is inevitable. There is
no objective or scientic meaning of progress, and so the need for ethics, of value
judgments, of deciding what path to espouse. This is the most daring contribution of
CD: the elaboration of the need for and meaning of an ethics based on Marxist
principles.
Here is where CD makes a denitive intervention. It denes the ethically justiable
outcome with respect to three kinds of justice: productive justice ( from each according to
ability); appropriative justice (surplus should be appropriated by the surplus producers);
and development justice (distribution of social surplus according to the principle to each
according to need). To elaborate this ethical position, total surplus is divided into productive and social surplus. Productive surplus is the part of the surplus that is utilized
for expansion of existing class processes, and social surplus is the residue. Obviously,
the division of total surplus into its components is not a logical process but a conictridden social process. Productive justice and appropriative justice are dened with
respect to productive surplus, while development justice is dened with respect to
social surplus. The concept of need, used to dene development justice, is then given
a radical tweak by abandoning the physical/physiological, or what CD calls the technical
denition, in order to propose need as right.
Having dened an ethically desirable counterhegemonic position, there remains the
big question of the subject who will undertake this counterhegemonic venture. This
involves a defamiliarization of the familiar hegemonized subject positions produced
through the hegemony of mainstream discourse. The process of the constitution of
the counterhegemonic subject position consists of both a turning away from within
(the within being the centre, the hegemonic symbolic) outward and a turn to the foreclosed outside (of class and world of the third) so as to inaugurate within, the return of
the foreclosed outside (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, 103).
Immense theoretical problems remain to be elaborated. Is the turning spontaneous?
If not, then what about the question of leadership once the concept of class as physical
existent (noun) position is abandoned in favor of class as a qualier of a particular

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process, as CD, following Resnick and Wolff (1987), advocates? How does the foreclosed
return? How do you turn outward from within? Is that possible?

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World of the Third and Global Capitalism

CDC mostly elaborates the theoretical propositions of CD. In particular, it elaborates
two points raised by CD: the foreclosure of world of the third/foregrounding of third
world and the question of justice and ethics. It takes off from the discursive dislocation
of the world of the thirdthe violence of the discourse of development.
The elaboration of the foregrounding of the other of global capitalism as the third
world is a strong point of CDC. As I indicated earlier, the ideas of foreclosure
and foregrounding are taken from Lacan. Whether CDC is faithful to the text of
Lacan is a moot point that Ajit Chaudhury raises in his introduction to the book.
He contends that what the authors present as foreclosure is actually repression.
However that may be, the eshing out of foregrounding is innovative and provides
many insights into the process of the cultural subjugation of the other of global
capitalism.
The capitalocentric narrative of development constructs its discourse as a closed
space. But as postmodernism has shown, this closure is never complete. At this
point, CDC introduces the Lacanian idea of foreclosure. The idea of foreclosure is
built on the notion of structural necessity. In constituting itself as a closed system,
any modernist narrative must elaborate a well-dened and in that sense closed symbolic eld. The symbolic space necessarily excludes a eld that violates its rules of constitution. This excluded eld is not a logical or homogeneous space but is simply the
space of what cannot mean anything within the discursive space of the given narration.
This is the Real. This constitutive exclusion is what Lacan calls foreclosure. There are
various positions on what is the Real and whether the return of the Real that CDC
proposes as a counterhegemonic strategy is at all possible. This is reected in the controversy raised in the introduction by Ajit Chaudhury, who contends that such a return
is an impossibility according to Lacans text.
The discursive recognizes that there is an outside. This generates unease or what has
been vividly named a sense of being haunted by what is outside. To cope, the discursive
deploys various strategies. Let us go straight from this theoretical digression to the text
of CDC.
One of the ways in which the discourse of development tries to cope with the outside
(the world of the third) is to pretend benevolence. The Real is included as the lacking
otherthe third worldthat requires the benevolence of World Banktype largesse
to develop. This, CDC terms as realvictim. But the outside resists and threatens to disrupt
the closure of the mainstream development discourse (and this closure is hegemony).
The threatening, unspeakable, unthinkable outside, which Lacanians call the Real, is
displaced into the thinkable threat that CDC calls realevil. Obvious examples of this
are ethnic terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and so forth. According to CDC,
there is a third displaced representation of the Real that development discourse constructs to domesticate the perceived threat of the Realrealutopian, the dark continent
of soothsayers, tribal norms, and the like (such as that of the Gandhis and Tagores)

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that is at best able to conceive a very localized socioeconomic structure and, therefore,
is utopian in the context of the modern nation-state.
The real (and not the Real) of CDC is based on the exclusion of certain nodal
signiers and, correspondingly, of the discursive eld constituted by them. The restitution of these rejected nodal signiers, then, is the return of the real. The particular nodal
signier on which CDC ground its real is the class process. Class processes are necessarily excluded from the discourse of development. This is because while development
discourse is modernist, and hence centered (specically capitalocentric), the class
process (as elaborated by Resnick and Wolff) as nodal signier constructs a decentered
social space. It is arguable that Chaudhurys critique of foreclosure as used in CDC,
though denitely textually sustainable, does not apply to foreclosure as interpreted
by CDC. While foreclosure for CDC is the exclusion of some discursive eldsincluding the counterhegemonic (the exclusion of the real, that is)the foreclosure that
Chaudhury argues is properly Lacanian consists of nonsymbolization: the exclusion
of the Real from the discursive. As Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012, 91)
note, The Real is the unspeakable remainder. The real on the other hand is the unspoken of the hegemonic.
CDC argues that the class process is necessarily excluded from the discursive
domain of development literature. Its restitution is the return of the real that challenges
the hegemony of global capitalism. The counterhegemonic strategy that CDC proposes
is constituted by this return. The infusion of the class process as a nodal signier also
recasts development narrative. CDC details this reworking with relation to the agricultural sector and the so-called informal sector in India.
While the introduction of the nodal signier of class process breaks up the foundational ideas of capitalocentric development, transition, and the lacking third world,
the imaging of socioeconomic alternative(s) and the strategic requirements for its
attainment need the supplement of an ethical dimension to the class process entry
point.
The ethics that World Banktype development discourses espouse is not an ethic at
all, because the journey to the absolute universal (global capital) is a fated journey, so
there is no question of choosing, which is the unavoidable ground of ethical decisions. In
general, a closed discursive structure does not allow positing the question of ethics in
any signicant sense. You are bound to act after a certain fashion because the logic of
the system so compels youor leastways, irrespective of your actions the cunning
of history must prevail. At the opposite end of the so-called ethics of benevolence of
the World Bank (which is not ethical at all) is the position that any ethics that seeks
a discursive articulation must be not ethics. So we ought to strive for the unspeakable
ethics of the Real. This is the ethical position of the postdevelopment school. CDC,
on the other hand, proposes a World of the Third (WOT) Marxist ethics. It is an
ethics of the foreclosed, as interpreted by the foreclosed. To construct this, we need
to set up an encounter with the real (mark: not Real). This is where the language of
class becomes pertinent, as this language has been foreclosed.
The outlines of this position are in CD; CDC elaborates the nuances. The ethical
position is built on a class perspective plus a derivative perspective on need. A class
perspective exhorts us to replace exploitation with nonexploitation. A need perspective
focuses on the desirability of working toward a more fair distribution of output.

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Productive justice, appropriative justice, and distributive justice together constitute the
idea of expanded communism. CDC claims that its perspective on ethics is built on
WOT Marxism: on class-focused analysis and on postdevelopment theorys insight
on the exclusion/inclusion of the other of global capitalism. So the ethics that CDC
espouses favors taking from each according to ability (productive justice); the appropriation of surplus by those who laborcommunitic and communistic fundamental
class processes (appropriative justice), and ultimately a classless conguration; and to
each according to need (distributional justice). But the perspective on need has to be
changed to a counterhegemonic perspective. Granted that the perception of universally
dened need works in the service of hegemony, the question of subjective preference
cannot be avoided. CDC proposes analysis of the relation between the subject and the
signier. This opens up the question of the link between the subject and the symbolic,
and also to the presymbolic. It therefore connects with the problematic of the constitution of the hegemonic symbolic and to the need for understanding foreclosure/
foregrounding.

Contextualizing
CDC is, no doubt, a most provocative and welcome addition to the postcolonial and
development critique literature. It deserves the serious attention of scholars because
of the many theoretical innovations that it introduces and also because of its avowedly
neo-Althusserian Marxist focus.
There is continuity between much of the discussion on postcolonial political economic literature in India (including CD/CDC) that often remains unstated. In spite
of the many disclaimers, we are haunted with a sense of dj vu. It is as if the subaltern
has spoken and the theoreticians have heard. Spivaks (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak?
remained a big problem with subaltern historians.1 The question continued to haunt
postcolonial Indian development literature through the various twists and turns of
hegemony (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarty 2000) and governmentality (Chatterjee
2011; Sanyal 2007)the two nodal concepts that have dominated most of postcolonial
discourse in India.
Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg are explicit that their world of the third is one
possible world of the third. It is not the return of the Real on which they base their
ethics but the return of the world-of-the-third Marxist real. While this provides an
analytical answer to Chaudhurys charge (that the Real cannot return), the subaltern
or the world of the third remains a construct trapped within a particular paradigm
here, a version of Marxism.
To see the continuity of CD/CDC with the project of postcolonial scholarship in
India, let us recall a sentence from a book written more than a decade ago, of which
1.. A school of historiography that emerged from India in the early 1980s, which critiqued most history
writing, including class- (as noun-) based Marxist history, as elitist. This school instead proposed the
need to rewrite history from the perspective of subalterns, or those whose position had been excluded
from elitist history or had been included from an instrumentalist position. Most of their essays have
been published in the ten volumes of Subaltern Studies.

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Chakrabarti was one of the authors: In other words, the West overowsalbeit its
inner voice turning on itself, the rebellious other within itinto the unknown to
meet its comrades outside in that eternal dusk where all cats are gray and all men
are savages (Chaudhury, Das, and Chakrabarti 2000, 523). The context was a critique
of Spivaks various positions on the possibility of the subaltern speaking. Chaudhury,
Das, and Chakrabarti summarize what they claim are the two positions that can be read
out of Spivak. Look at the similarities. The rebellious other within it [the West] can be
read as the working-class position: the ground of the ethics of appropriative justice in
CD and CDC. Its comrades outside in the eternal dusk can be read, without stretching the point at all, as the world of the third. So we have the world-of-the-third Marxist
position of CD/CDC as continuing from a position of the subaltern historians. The
difference is that the reading of Lacan on which the elaboration of the world of the
third is based is categorically precise so that the ambiguities are absent. But this precision comes at a cost.
The reading of Lacan is very topographical. This reduces the space of the other to a
cartographical space. The Borromean knot is pedagogically very useful for illustrating
Lacan but has the tendency to reduce the Real, the imaginary, and the symbolic to
spacial segments. Its repeated use in CDC suggests a certain inclination in the
authors reading of Lacan. My specic unease is that this robs the text of the possibility
of action and reaction between the force elds of the Real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Given such segmentation, while the exposition gains in clarity, the world of the
third is ultimately just another construct from a very denite theoretical ground. Logically, to address questions of mobilization, the role of the initiatedthose trained to
understand the various kinds of justiceof Party bosses, and so on, with the attendant evils, may return in spite of the genuine concern of CDC for democracy, shared
environment, and communitic values.
The pronounced commitment to nonexploitation as a constitutive principle of the
justice that CD and CDC espouse marks their signal difference from the sophistry
that characterizes much of postcolonial socioeconomic studies. But there is a serious
ambivalence in this stance. The authors propose ethics from a (world-of-the-third)
Marxist position. But their intellectual heritage (subaltern, margin of margin,
outside, etc.) effectively blocks any consideration of the role of the modern working
class in their project.
In spite of the intellectual tradition that is espoused, there is a tendency toward the
commonly received writ of Marx and hence of modernity to inltrate. There is more
than a hint of an end of history. This is another fallout from taking a topographic
model of the relation between the outside and the discursive space. Let us elaborate
this with reference to a lack in the concepts of need and surplus as adopted in these
texts. We are told that in the just society there will be no surplus as there is no class
process (of production and appropriation of surplus). True enough in a certain
sense. But the technical need for growth and therefore production beyond the
current consumption needs of society will remain. And when individuality is dissolved
in fellow feeling, this surplus will appear as a need of the shared future: the community
not only of those who share the common environment today but also a communion
with those who will inherit this space tomorrow.

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But when we talk in the idioms of community, needs do not relate to the individuals
who make up the community now and further, it does not relate to the present only.
The community thinks of its own future as also of the future of its children (Basu
2008, 150). This struggle to reign in individuality and establish community is a
process without end. Need, therefore, is not only culturally conditioned but is to
be an object of continuous struggle. Topographically assigning a denitely bounded
space for critique blocks the potency of experience. Experience is a eld wherein the
lines between discourse and the out there are blurred. What seems lacking in our
postcolonial/critical-development theory is a serious attempt to encounter this eld.

References
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Chatterjee, P. 2011. Lineages of political society. New York: Colombia University Press.
Chaudhury, A., D. Das, and A. Chakrabarty. 2000. Margin of margin. Kolkata: Anushtup.
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post-capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.
Spivak, G. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, N. Cary
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Resnick, S., and R. D. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.