There is a peculiar problem with the subaltern. Everyone is terribly fond of him/her until s/he turns up.
As long as s/he remains a theoretical creature — poor, dispossessed, structurally excluded and preferably appearing in a footnote — s/he enjoys enormous affection among progressive intellectuals. S/he can be studied, represented, interpreted and occasionally liberated over coffee. S/he becomes considerably more troublesome when s/he acquires a Facebook account, joins a political party or, worst of all, develops opinions different from those of the people who had previously volunteered to speak on his/her behalf.
This difficulty runs through Altaf Parvez’s recent essay in Protichinta, which examines what he sees as the right’s attempt to masquerade as the subaltern. It is an intelligent argument, furnished handsomely with Gramsci, Spivak, hegemony, passive revolution, organic intellectuals, corporatism and militarism. But beneath all that theoretical veneer sits a simple proposition…the subaltern may speak, provided s/he says the correct things.
Parvez begins on solid ground. “Subaltern” is not simply a fashionable synonym for poor. Gramsci used the concept to understand groups subordinated within political, economic, cultural and social structures, particularly those unable to convert their interests into autonomous political power. Spivak subsequently made matters more complicated by asking whether the subaltern could genuinely “speak” when dominant institutions and intellectual intermediaries continually translated his/her experience for him/her.
The trouble begins when Parvez converts a description of power into something approaching an ideological entrance examination. “When a marginalised person embraces right-wing thought,” he writes, “politically s/he becomes aligned with the dominant class.”
This is quite a leap. A factory worker may therefore be working class at breakfast, vote for a conservative party at lunchtime and apparently have joined the dominant class before dinner. His/her employer will presumably be delighted to hear it.
Class position and political consciousness are not identical things, even within the Marxist tradition from which much of Parvez’s argument originates. A worker does not acquire ownership of the factory by voting for its owner. A landless farmer does not acquire land because he embraces nationalism. A madrasa teacher does not enter the bourgeoisie because he holds conservative views about gender. People may support political programmes contrary to their material interests — assuming an analyst can confidently determine those interests — without thereby changing their position in the relations of economic and social power.
Otherwise class ceases to be analysis and becomes moral classification.
This is the first difficulty with Parvez’s argument. It is perilously close to being circular. The right is defined as the politics that protects hierarchy, domination, inequality, majoritarianism, authoritarianism and capital. It is then demonstrated that the right cannot represent the subaltern because it protects hierarchy, domination, inequality, majoritarianism, authoritarianism and capital.
The rabbit has been placed rather carefully inside the hat.
There is, of course, plenty of evidence that right-wing movements have protected entrenched interests, allied themselves with corporations, exploited nationalism and converted cultural anxiety into political power. One hardly needs Gramsci to discover that politicians occasionally persuade poor people to vote for rich people.
But this does not settle the question Parvez raises. It merely establishes that political identity cannot be inferred automatically from economic deprivation. The more interesting problem begins when poor people stubbornly refuse to behave as political theory expects them to.
Parvez argues that the right achieves influence among marginalized communities by displacing their “fundamental” problems — wages, housing, employment, healthcare, education, political representation — with culture wars involving dress, sculptures, shrines, music, religion and identity.
Sometimes this is plainly true. Culture wars are among politics’ great bargains. Redistribution costs money. Symbolism is practically free. A government unable to improve wages can always discover a statue requiring passionate discussion. But it does not follow that because politicians exploit cultural grievances, those grievances are fictitious.
People do not experience oppression through their payslips alone.
A garment worker can simultaneously want higher wages and believe her religious identity is treated with contempt. A madrasa student can resent unemployment and cultural condescension. A rural conservative may oppose a corporate land grab while caring intensely about religion. A woman can demand economic opportunity without adopting the social philosophy preferred by a Dhaka NGO. A minority citizen can care about discrimination, food prices, language and faith at the same time.
Human beings possess the irritating capacity to have several grievances simultaneously. The distinction between “real” economic grievances and “manufactured” cultural grievances therefore requires rather more caution than Parvez allows. Who decides which is which?
The worker says: “This matters to me.” The intellectual replies: “No. What really matters to you is your relation to the means of production.” One begins to understand why the relationship has occasionally become strained.
There is an old idea hovering over this argument…false consciousness. Parvez does not need to use the phrase explicitly because the mechanism is familiar. When marginalised people recognise economic exploitation and move towards progressive politics, they have correctly understood their condition.
When they embrace nationalism and religious conservatism as well as cultural grievance, the right has successfully imposed its hegemony upon them.
This is an extraordinarily convenient theory because it is almost impossible to lose with it. If the poor agree with you, their political consciousness has awakened. If they disagree with you, their consciousness has been manipulated. Either way, the theorist wins.
The subaltern himself becomes the only participant in the conversation who cannot provide authoritative evidence about what he actually thinks. That is not a small problem for an argument drawing inspiration from Spivak.
Nor is economic class the only hierarchy operating in a society such as Bangladesh. Parvez’s distinction between “vertical” conflict and “horizontal” conflict is elegant: the left directs anger upwards towards owners, corporations and bureaucracies; the right redirects it sideways towards other workers and cultural adversaries.
Again, there is truth in it. But reality has been inconsiderate enough to produce more than one vertical axis.
Money is hierarchical. So is language. Education is hierarchical. So are accents. Geography matters. Cultural taste matters. Family background matters. The school printed on a CV matters. English fluency matters. The neighbourhood one comes from matters. Knowing which fork to use at a diplomatic dinner may matter rather less, but certain parts of Dhaka have spent decades heroically pretending otherwise.
Pierre Bourdieu supplied a useful vocabulary for precisely this problem: cultural and social capital. An elite reproduces itself not merely by owning factories. It reproduces itself through schools, universities, professional networks, surnames, marriages, language, clubs, media institutions, cultural codes and the ability to define what counts as intelligence, moderation, sophistication and respectable opinion.
Bangladesh is hardly an exception.
Its postcolonial public sphere has long contained people who speak eloquently about inclusion while inhabiting remarkably exclusive social worlds. The poor appear frequently in policy papers, documentaries, election speeches and development seminars. They appear rather less frequently as the people deciding what the seminar is about.
This is where examples of Hasnat Abdullah and Shadik Kayem are useful…not probably as the centre of the argument but as illustrations of it.
One is the son of a mason; the other emerged from a madrasa education in Khagrachhari and has described English as his third language. Neither biography historically represented the standard route into Bangladesh’s Anglophone machinery of prestige. Yet after the July uprising, both found themselves speaking at the Oxford Union.
One need neither admire their politics nor certify them as permanent members of the subaltern club to recognise what happened. An extraordinary political rupture created routes into institutions that conventional social mobility might not have provided.
That they possess influence now does not prove that the earlier barriers were imaginary. It proves that barriers can be crossed. A miner who becomes a union leader does not retroactively become the son of a duke.
Nor does a person remain subaltern forever merely because he began life outside elite structures. Yesterday’s outsider can become tomorrow’s gatekeeper. Revolutions are particularly efficient at this. History is full of insurgents who discovered, after storming the palace, that the upholstery was surprisingly comfortable.
The interesting question is therefore not whether a person is or is not subaltern as though the term described blood type. The question is how power is acquired and exercised. And also reproduced. This matters because Parvez treats power as simultaneously sophisticated and strangely one-dimensional.
He correctly notices economic power. Banks, corporations, pharmaceutical companies, supply chains and wealthy entrepreneurs appear prominently in his account. He argues that right-wing movements increasingly protect these interests while presenting themselves as victims of an intellectual establishment. There are obvious examples where this description fits.
But power is plural.
A political movement can possess electoral strength while lacking cultural prestige. A community can have wealthy businessmen while remaining poorly represented in universities. A religious constituency can mobilise millions of voters while finding its worldview treated as embarrassing in elite cultural institutions.
Conversely, an ideological tendency can repeatedly lose elections while exercising disproportionate influence in academia, publishing, arts, NGOs or media.
Economic dominance does not automatically produce cultural dominance. Cultural marginality does not automatically produce economic marginality. The same person may even occupy dominant and subordinate positions in different fields.
A wealthy provincial businessman may dominate his employees economically while being regarded as a vulgar outsider by an old metropolitan elite. A female corporate executive may possess enormous class privilege while experiencing gender discrimination. Real societies are inconveniently intersectional in precisely this sense.
Declaring “the right” to be a single class allied with “the elite” therefore conceals as much as it reveals. Which is right? Which elite? Which institution? Which form of capital?
Bangladesh’s businessmen have demonstrated a magnificent ideological flexibility over the years. Capital has survived nationalists, secularists, Islamists, military governments, democrats and governments whose principal ideology appeared to be remaining in government.
Corporatism is promiscuous.
The businessman who prospers under one regime usually discovers sound philosophical reasons to prosper under its successor. To treat accommodation with capital as a peculiar pathology of the right therefore risks mistaking one of politics’ most universal habits for an ideological monopoly.
The same caution applies to militarism.
Parvez offers the striking image of a rickshaw puller threatened with eviction from Korail becoming persuaded that the country should buy missiles and submarines rather than address housing. The implication is that nationalism has displaced his authentic material interest. Perhaps. Or perhaps the rickshaw puller wants a house and a navy.
He may be wrong about the appropriate defence budget. Economists, generals and taxpayers can argue about that. But believing that poor people cannot independently care about national security without having been manipulated by militarists is a curious form of democratic condescension.
Apparently rich people may possess geopolitical opinions. Poor people merely possess symptoms. This brings us to the most interesting part of Parvez’s essay: organic intellectuals.
Gramsci understood that classes generate intellectuals capable of articulating their experiences and building a political worldview around them. Parvez argues, reasonably, that Bangladesh’s marginalised communities need more such intellectuals to resist elite and right-wing hegemony. But there is a delicious problem.
What happens when the organic intellectual turns out to be conservative? What happens when the madrasa produces its own intellectual rather than waiting for one to arrive from the university? What happens when the provincial lower-middle class develops a political language rooted in religion, community, national identity or resentment towards metropolitan cultural authority?
What happens when the subaltern reads something other than the reading list prepared for him/her?
Apparently, at that moment, s/he ceases to be organic and becomes evidence of right-wing penetration. This reduces “organic intellectual” to a rather curious category: an intellectual who emerges naturally from the lower classes and reaches the conclusions that established progressive intellectuals had already reached on their behalf.
Gramsci deserves better.
There is no theoretical law guaranteeing that subordinate groups, once politically conscious, will become progressive in the contemporary sense. History demonstrates almost embarrassingly otherwise. Working classes have produced socialists, communists, Christian democrats, Islamists, nationalists, populists, fascists and combinations for which political scientists have yet to invent satisfactory labels.
Democratisation does not mean that previously excluded people begin thinking like the people who advocated democratisation. It means they get to think for themselves. This is why the contemporary fashion for victimhood, which Parvez correctly identifies, needs a different response. The right certainly exploits victimhood. So does virtually everybody else.
Billionaires complain of being silenced to audiences larger than the populations of small countries. Political majorities describe themselves as persecuted minorities. Governments with armies describe themselves as resistance movements. University professors with permanent columns announce that nobody is allowed to say what they have just said for the fifteenth time that month.
Victimhood has suffered inflation. The answer is not to establish an ideological copyright office for oppression. It is to examine particular claims.
Does the person possess economic power? Cultural power? Institutional access? Political representation? Was he historically excluded? Is s/he currently excluded? Does s/he dominate one sphere while remaining marginal in another? Has his/her political success changed his/her class position? Is his/her grievance genuine, exaggerated, instrumental or entirely fabricated?
These are empirical questions. “The right cannot be subaltern because the right represents domination” is not an empirical answer. It is a definitional shortcut.
And it creates a final paradox.
Parvez worries that the right is stealing the language of the subaltern in order to deceive marginalised people. It is a legitimate concern. Powerful people routinely dress themselves in the clothes of the powerless. Politicians with motorcades have an astonishing ability to discover persecution shortly before elections.
But preventing that deception cannot require intellectuals to become licensing authorities for authentic marginalisation.
For then somebody must determine which grievances are genuinely subaltern, which are merely cultural, which political choices demonstrate consciousness, which demonstrate manipulation, which intellectuals are truly organic and which poor people have forfeited their membership by thinking incorrectly.
We arrive, by an unexpectedly scenic route through Gramsci, at precisely the problem Spivak warned about…mediation. The subaltern speaks, but somebody else determines what his speech really means.
If s/he demands higher wages, we hear his/her authentic voice. If s/he demands cultural recognition, somebody explains that corporations have put the words into his mouth. If s/he embraces progressive politics, s/he has discovered agency. If s/he embraces conservative politics, s/he has succumbed to hegemony.
This grants the marginalised person a wonderfully generous freedom. S/he may choose anything s/he likes, provided he chooses correctly.
Perhaps the genuinely radical proposition is less comfortable: poor and historically excluded people possess the same capacity for wisdom, prejudice, generosity, intolerance, rational calculation, tribal loyalty, material self-interest, religious conviction and spectacular political stupidity as everybody else.
They do not become authentic by being left-wing. Nor do they cease being socially marginalised by being conservative. Their political ideas should be challenged when they deserve challenging. Their leaders should be scrutinised when they acquire power. Former outsiders who become oppressors deserve no sentimental immunity merely because they once stood outside the gates.
But neither should the gates be declared imaginary simply because the people who finally passed through them turned out to have the wrong politics. That would turn “subaltern” from a description of power into an honorific bestowed upon suitably behaved poor people. And Spivak’s famous question would acquire a modern answer.
Can the subaltern speak?
Certainly. S/he just has to pass the ideology test first.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa