Rethinking Postcapitalist Praxis

What the paper says

In its efforts to rethink postcapitalist praxis from the global South, this article turns to the outside; not just to the empirical outside, but to the rethought conceptualization of the ‘outside’. The urgency of rethinking an outside to (global) capitalism stems from the need for critical reflection on two sets of ideas incumbent upon Marxism: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” “underdeveloped,” “backward,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection on what Spivak designates ‘third worldism’ brings the postcolonial and the postdevelopmentalist desire of accounting for an outside to dialogue with the given script of (historical materialist) Marxism. To facilitate this rethinking of Marxism from the outside, we reengage with advanced Marxian reflections on questions of “hegemony”1 and psychoanalytic exegeses on questions of “foreclosure” (verwerfung) and the “missing signifier” (verworfen) (Lacan, 1997; 2006; 2017: pp. 132-139).2 Critical examination of extant theorizations on largely hegemony and partly foreclosure lead both to more concrete reflections on “global capitalism” and its outside: the “world of the third.” Other than defamiliarizing the given script of (global) capitalism, this move, we feel, has the potential to open up new avenues to think of an outside to (global) capitalism; such an outside help us rethink the question of the ‘political’ and the postcapitalist geography of the ‘subject’ from the outside” (Callari, 2016: p. 268). It also helps us connect “what is” (the new economic cartography; building on a deconstruction of the ‘economy,’ a taking apart of the givenness of the economy) with “what ought” (the postcapitalist possibility) (West, 2008: p. 15).3