Transition and Development in India

Beyond the prism of rural to urban and voluntary-involuntary in India: A class focused theory of migration

“…As an illustration of the multi‐faceted class nature of an economy and society, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg () and Chakrabarti, Dhar and Dasgupta (, chapter 1) had described a picture of class differentiation within Indian economy and of its transition. Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Majumdar (2020) have used the data pertaining to employment status to highlight the point that India's working population exceeds those involved in {5, 17} related capitalist economy by a vast number (Table ).…”

“…Subsequently, the failure of state capitalism to stimulate sustainable economic growth needed to raise per capita income and reduce mass poverty was criticized by reformers. (Bhagwati & Srinivasan, ) The barrage of criticisms along with the deepening of India's economic crisis in late 1980s led to a change in its development strategy from 1990s onward (Chakrabarti & Cullenberg, ). Abandoning centralized planning and adopting competitive market economy in a global set up as the primary mechanism to allocate resources, a new system was proposed that fixed the private global capitalist version of class set {17} as the center of an otherwise decentered and disaggregated Indian economy.…”

“…Luckily, there is by now a substantial literature that has further developed and even displaced the class focused approach toward a critical engagement with development theory, both mainstream and radical, and in the process opened up new areas, novel interventions and techniques of analyzing the space of development (Chakrabarti & Dhar, ; Klein & Morrero, ; Ruccio, ). Scholars have tried to provide an alternative interpretation of the Indian economy and of its theories of transition and development (Basu, ; Chakrabarti & Cullenberg, ; Chakrabarti, Dhar, & Dasgupta, ). We deliver now a summarized view of this recasted class focused theory in the context of a critical engagement with development and then interrogate its position on migration, with a focus on India.…”

“…State enterprises are not necessarily anti‐market. We may very well have state enterprises of the form {5, 17} as long as the appropriator of surplus value is the state even as the commodity form is market based (see Resnick & Wolff, , Chapter 16 and Chakrabarti & Cullenberg, , Chapter 9 for details). There also remains little doubt that the historic emphasis on {5, 17} has been on its private form of appropriation.…”

The Althusser-Lacan Correspondence as Ground for Psycho-social Studies

“…This is a question because, on the one hand, historicist, identitarian and/or economistic Marxism (Marxism not menaced by the Lacanian Real or what Parker called the “three kinds of antagonisms that bear on work in the clinic”; Parker, , p. 178), would find it difficult to relate to psychoanalytic psychotherapy; and, on the other hand, behaviourist, cognitivist, and/or medical forms of psychotherapy marked by psychologisation, pathologisation, ego‐centrism, adaptationism, and pharmaceutical remedies would find it difficult to relate to post‐metaphysical Marxian questions of ethico‐politics, subject‐production, and change/transformation as revolutions in subjectivity. It would also find it difficult to relate to Marxism marked at the same time by non‐essentialist understandings of class (Resnick & Wolff, ), deconstructive understandings of capitalism (Gibson‐Graham, 1996), and non‐teleological interpretations of transition and development (Chakrabarti & Cullenberg, ; Chakrabarti & Dhar, ; Chakrabarti, Dhar, & Dasgupta, ). This is also because the positivist versions of both Marxism and psychotherapy could find something in common – for example, ideals of objectivity, neutrality – but imaginations of each premised on a critique of metaphysics, secular theology, and positivism would give to each a shape that would be difficult to reconcile with the metaphysical, secular, theological, or positivist version of the other.…”