There is a ‘curious intellectual confidence’ among Bangladesh’s self-styled leftists. They have the confidence of someone who has read three-quarters of a European theorist—probably in a Bangla translation from Kolkata’s once-thriving leftist publishing industry—and now feels equipped to explain an entire country.
Well, the country in question—Bangladesh—itself may object. It may contain 20 crore people, several religious traditions, a peasant society transformed by migration and remittances, a liberation war, military rule, political Islam, NGOs, microcredit, Gulf money, colonial inheritances, village patronage, Facebook, madrasa networks, garment factories, indigenous communities and a middle class that can be culturally conservative in the morning and ferociously capitalist by lunch.
None of this is an insurmountable difficulty. Somewhere, usually on a book on a battered bookshelf of these self-styled leftists who keep translated versions of Alain Badiou’s books side by side with Anisul Haq’s Ma,” there is apparently a theory for it. Then the theory is opened, Bangladesh is inserted. When Bangladesh refuses to fit, Bangladesh is declared theoretically ‘defective.’
Now the problem is not that they read Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu, Spivak or whoever happens to be fashionable this semester. They should. A political culture with less reading would hardly be an improvement. The problem begins when reading ceases to be a method of inquiry and becomes a substitute for it.
Social theory is supposed to help us understand social reality. Social reality is under no obligation to behave politely so that theory may remain elegant.
That distinction ought to be obvious. Physics expects an electron in Bangladesh to behave roughly like an electron in Belgium. Sociology cannot make the same demand of a Bangladeshi voter and a Belgian one. Social theories concern human beings embedded in history, institutions, religions, kinship systems, economies, memories and structures of authority.
Their explanatory power therefore depends on context. A concept that illuminates one society may require substantial modification in another; another may prove useless altogether.
Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu, whom academics invoke with almost supernatural regularity, insisted upon locating social phenomena in their specific historical, local, national and relational contexts. His concept of the “field” was a method for examining the particular social space in which power operated, not a command that every society reproduce twentieth-century France.
Yet in Dhaka ‘intellectual’ life, theory sometimes acquires the status normally reserved for religious scripture. The great irony is exquisite. People who pride themselves on having escaped dogma can become exceptionally dogmatic about the correct interpretation of a French philosopher!
The procedure is familiar. An event occurs. Ordinary people look at it and ask: what happened? Bangladesh’s self-styled leftist theoretician asks: which chapter does this resemble?
Soon somebody discovers hegemony. Somebody else finds false consciousness. A third announces that symbolic violence is occurring. Someone who has recently encountered Bourdieu identifies cultural capital. Someone who has recently encountered Spivak discovers a subaltern. By evening, the original event has vanished beneath a small mountain of terminology.
This is, in all good senses, not merely an intellectual eccentricity. It helps explain the strange fate of the Bangladeshi left itself. Historically, the left was anything but irrelevant. Communists participated in the Language Movement, student politics, cultural organisations, the democratic struggles of East Pakistan and the Liberation War. They helped establish progressive youth organisations and participated in the Jukto Front; communist and leftist politicians once possessed meaningful electoral and organisational weight.
That history makes their present ‘marginality’ more striking.
Haider Akbar Khan Rono, one of Bangladesh's most important communist figures, acknowledged years ago that the organised left had become weak. Some parties in the left alliance, he observed with admirable economy, consisted practically of a leader without a second leader. It is difficult to imagine a better miniature of Bangladeshi left politics…two factions arguing over revisionism, each requiring a CNG to transport its entire central committee.
The decline has many causes. Repression mattered. The Cold War mattered. The Sino-Soviet split mattered. Bangladesh's brutal post-independence politics mattered. Factionalism mattered enormously. The rise of political Islam, the dominance of the Awami League and BNP, patronage politics, global capitalism and the collapse of the Soviet model all mattered.
A recent study of Bangladesh's left describes precisely those historical and ideological conflicts, while contemporary assessments continue to find left-wing parties struggling for relevance in a political system dominated by money, patronage and larger organisations.
But there is another failure that receives less attention…the failure to manufacture concepts from Bangladesh itself. Consider how odd this is. Bangladesh ought to be a social theorist's paradise.
Where else does one find industrial capitalism conducted by millions of women emerging from deeply patriarchal rural communities? Where else has the NGO become almost a parallel institution of modernity? Where else do remittances from Gulf monarchies reshape village class structures while migration simultaneously alters religious culture?
Here is a country where madrasa graduates enter the best universities and helm the student bodies there, villagers become expatriate entrepreneurs, women garment workers transform household authority, Islamist organisations operate banks and hospitals, secular elites possess inherited cultural capital but sometimes little electoral constituency, and supposedly marginal religious actors may command formidable organisational networks.
One could spend several academic careers inventing concepts to describe this. Instead we sometimes receive another Facebook seminar on Gramsci.
The Bangladeshi self-styled left has often been talented at producing ideological correctness without corresponding institutional power. Its history contains repeated divisions over which international communist centre, revolutionary strategy or theoretical interpretation represented the authentic line.
The broader history of left politics here records factionalism stretching back through Cold War realignments; by the late 1960s, communist organisations had already fractured along Moscow-Peking lines. Bangladesh, meanwhile, continued inconsiderately being Bangladesh.
The successful moments of left politics were often precisely those when activists did the opposite: when they interpreted local circumstances imaginatively. The radical strain within Bengali nationalism, for instance, developed around specific questions of linguistic domination, regional economic inequality, peasant exploitation and Pakistani state power.
Research on Jashod's origins similarly shows that its early appeal grew from attempts to construct socialist politics around the actual conditions of post-1971 Bangladesh, drawing participation from workers, peasants and lower-middle-class activists. In other words, the left was most interesting when it was least scholastic.
But nonetheless, somehow Bangladeshi ‘intellectual debate,’ especially on Facebook suffers from a rather peculiar prestige economy in which citation can substitute for observation. One does not merely say that powerful people determine which ideas become respectable. One invokes Foucault. One cannot simply observe that taste signals class position; Bourdieu must be summoned from the dead. There is nothing wrong with any of these references when they sharpen the argument. The trouble begins when the reference is the argument.
Then debate becomes an academic scavenger hunt. Someone makes an observation about Bangladesh. His opponent disappears into the library and returns triumphantly carrying a quotation written in Europe in 1974, as though he has obtained CCTV footage of the event. The quotation, frankly, is irrelevant.
Common sense is not the enemy of theory. It is the enemy of Bangladesh’s self-styled leftists who forget that common sense is the customs officer through which theory should pass before entering the country.
The deeper problem is intellectual dependency. If every important category through which Bangladesh understands itself must arrive from Marx's Germany, Gramsci's Italy, Foucault's France, Bourdieu's France, Spivak's American academy and the wider Western university system, then something has gone badly wrong.
Post-colonial scholarship can itself become curiously colonial when the post-colony is permitted to provide only case studies while the metropolis retains the franchise for producing concepts. Then the translation can be simply made that Bangladesh supplies the peasants. Europe supplies the nouns. Ironically, that ‘division of intellectual labour’ should trouble the left more than anyone.
This does not require abandoning European theory. That would be equally foolish. Marx remains useful because capitalism exists in Bangladesh. Bourdieu is useful because social capital and cultural distinction plainly matter. Gramsci is useful because consent and ideological leadership matter. Spivak is useful because representation matters.
But usefulness is not ‘universality.’ The question should never be: where can I find Bourdieu in Bangladesh? It should be: what is happening in Bangladesh, and can Bourdieu help explain part of it? The direction of travel matters.
Otherwise theory becomes a mould and society the substance being poured into it. Anything spilling over the sides is dismissed as an anomaly. Eventually the self-styled scholar possesses a perfectly shaped theoretical object bearing little resemblance to the country outside his window.
That habit may also explain why political developments repeatedly surprise sections of Bangladesh's self-styled ‘progressive’ intelligentsia. Economic class here is expected to generate predictable political consciousness, after which actual workers inconveniently vote, pray and organise in ways the textbook did not authorise.
When reality persistently refuses to confirm a theory, there are two possibilities. The theory needs revision. Or 20 crore Bangladeshis need ideological correction. Too often our intellectuals appear tempted by the second.
The result is increasing political obscurity. People do not normally join political movements because somebody has correctly diagnosed their location within the relations of production. They join because movements understand their fears, aspirations, humiliations, faith, livelihoods, families and ideas of justice.
The old left once understood this better. Its historical involvement in the Language Movement, anti-autocratic struggles, peasant politics, cultural movements and the Liberation War was rooted in concrete political life rather than seminar-room taxonomy. Its contemporary weakness cannot simply be blamed on insufficient ideological purity. Bangladesh hardly suffers from a shortage of ideological purity.
What it lacks is a left capable of describing Bangladesh in language Bangladesh recognises.
That requires going into villages without arriving there theoretically in advance from Dhaka University hall after having trouble in digesting substandard foods. It requires studying madrasa society rather than treating it as an unfortunate deviation from secular modernisation. It requires understanding why political Islam can offer belonging and mobility as well as doctrine.
It requires examining garment capitalism, migration, remittance economies, gender, climate displacement, urbanisation, digital politics and the peculiar class formation produced by four decades of NGO-led development. Above all, it requires the intellectual humility to discover something for which there is not already a quotation.
Bangladesh's social reality is not a failed manifestation of European social theory. It is material from which theory ought to be made.
The genuine intellectual task is therefore neither to reject Marx nor to genuflect before him; neither to discard Spivak nor to discover a true “theoretically moulded” subaltern.It is to treat theory as equipment rather than revelation. In plain words, use Marx where Marx works. Use Bourdieu where Bourdieu works. Use Spivak when Spivak clarifies something. And when none of them work, have the courage to say so.
Perhaps even invent something.
That, after all, is how every theorist now treated as canonical became a theorist in the first place. They looked at the societies around them and tried to understand what they saw. They did not spend their lives anxiously checking whether nineteenth-century Bengal had behaved according to instructions issued by an eighteenth-century philosopher.
Bangladesh's self-styled left could begin with the same revolutionary act. It could look out of the window.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa