Worldly Marxism

Abstract

How can Marxism, a theory and practice that emerged from the European experience, speak to contexts outside that experience? Recent scholarship has returned to the moment of the 1960s and 1970s to examine how political movements in the global South that embraced Marxism grappled with this question, aiming to reformulate Marxist theories and categories of analysis for postcolonial realities. Whereas this scholarship focuses on the writings of intellectuals, in this article, the authors supplement prose with oral history and ethnography to also identify the theory immanent in practice. They show how the translation of Marxist theory for political practice in the peripheries instantiated what the authors call a worldly Marxism: that is, a Marxism that is constantly renewed as it exceeds its origins in Europe and attends to the specificities of settler-colonies, (post-)colonies and metropoles. Worldly Marxism thus entails theorizing in the conjuncture, that is, from a particular historical moment, and involves arranging multiple conceptual elements to clarify and understand the political task at hand. The authors illustrate how such worldly Marxism was produced in Pakistan by examining the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the country's historically largest communist party, as it engaged with agrarian transitions, religion, and gender.

Red Maulanas: Revisiting Islam and the Left in twentieth‐century South Asia

“…In the postcolonial period, Maulana Bhashani, leader of the National Awami Party and a major political figure and Muslim pir (Sufi saint) of the subcontinent, called on his disciples to destroy capitalism and establish Islamic Socialism (Uddin, 2016). Similar practices were later seen in Punjab and the Frontier Provinces in the early 1970s (Ali & Raza, 2022; Raza, 2022).…”

“…Recent studies, reflecting broader scholarly interests, move away from elite agency and text‐centred discourses to focus on Islamic Socialism as part of subaltern religio‐political movements and praxis (Caron & Dasgupta, 2016; Caron, 2016; Uddin, 2016, 2021, forthcoming; Raza, 2022; Ali & Raza, 2022). Uddin examines the politics of Maulana Bhashani, a popular peasant and worker leader in colonial South Asia, in particular his development of a subaltern and Third Worldist Islamic Socialism, which threatened state actors and the Jama'at‐i‐Islami in Pakistan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.…”

“…Both are said to offer comprehensive political programs that respond to existential and ethical questions about the “role of man” in the universe, and share a militant dedication to “human salvation” (Dussel et al., 2009; Rodinson, 2015). Some claim more specifically an “equivalence” between Marxism and Islam (Ali & Raza, 2022; Raza, 2022). M.N Roy, an Indian Marxist intellectual, argued that the transcendental and abstract God in Islam opened up the possibility of “doing without him entirely”, affording Muslims the agency to shape the world in ethical ways.…”

Conjugated Universalism

“…Indeed, it was Maoism's commitment to a vernacular-driven universalism-an implicit opposition, that is, to the unconjugated universalism the Comintern has been criticized for promoting during the interwar period (e.g., Chatterjee 2016)-that facilitated its global travels (Lovell 2019). Maoism, in other words, was a "worldly Marxism" (Ali and Raza 2022).…”

“…11. Male MKP members in the 1970s similarly worried about the reputational costs of confronting patriarchy, a position that women activists in the party criticized strongly (Ali and Raza 2022). 12.…”