Anjan Chakrabarti
Biographic Data
| ID | 4195049 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anjan Chakrabarti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anjan |
| FAMILY NAME | Chakrabarti |
| SIGNATURE | CHAKRABARTI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Calcutta |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5229-6398 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Rethinking Marxism: India from a Class Perspective
A Post-Colonial Critique of Economic Dualism and its Politics
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Gravel in the Shoe: Nationalism and World of the Third
Perhaps the time has come to take stock of the costs of the nation-state system and the nationalism that sustains it. Such stock-taking may not alter the past but it may lead towards a redefinition of the concept and functions of the state, at least in this part of the globe.
Revisiting China’s Agricultural Experiments (1949–1984): Class Transformation Beyond Teleological Narrative
This article offers a nonteleological, class-focused Marxist analysis of China’s agricultural transition from 1949 to 1984. It argues that this period was not a single, cohesive movement but a series of decentralized, often contradictory, experiments driven by the push and pull of local initiatives and Communist Party plan and guidance. This approach reveals a complex landscape of both exploitative and nonexploitative class structures of surplus …
Need
Political Economy of Emerging Urban and Peri-urban Spaces in India: A Roadmap Towards Environmental and Social Sustainability
Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability: Perspectives from Northeast India
Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability: Perspectives from Northeast India
World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud
World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud
Rethinking the Formation of Public Distribution System: A Class-Focused Approach
Using the methodology of overdetermination, class process of surplus labor as the entry point and socially determined need of food security, we deliver an alternative class-focused rendition of the public distribution system (PDS) in India. We first surmise our theoretical framework to infer that the overdetermined and contradictory relation of class and social needs matter for PDS. Beyond the reasoning of being pro-poor, fair, or wasteful, we de…
Contours of Value Capture: India's Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development
Taking off from a class-focused perspective, Satyaki Roy's book, Contours of Value Capital: India’s Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development, dissects the global network of value added by labor power during production to reveal a process of value capture by global capitalists in the Global North. Thus, even when sites of production may have moved to the South, the surplus value being performed continues to be appropriated and distributed primari…
Pluralism in Economics and Neoclassical Economics
This review of Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics centers on a claim made by mainstream economics to have surpassed the narrow horizon of neoclassical economics, understood as general equilibrium or Walrasian economics, having differentiated into a pluralist field. Through a detailed study of neoclassical economics, Madra distills the misplaced nature of this claim and disputes the propositions that neoclassical economics is nothing but Wa…
‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx
Praxis in world of the third contexts
Lacan foregrounds the ‘theft, abduction and stealing’ of the ‘slave’s know-how’, through the maneuvers of the Master in Plato’s dialogues; the episteme is, as if, premised on the extraction of the essence of the know-how of craftsmen, of serfs, of women working in households; theoretical knowledge or what Aristotle calls theoria in its historical function is this extraction, of the slave’s know-how, in order to obtain its transmutation first into…
Beyond the prism of rural to urban and voluntary-involuntary in India: A class focused theory of migration
The article seeks to develop a class focused theory of development induced internal migration in the context of India's economic transition. Through a critical interrogation of the hegemonic development approach, it (a) problematizes the norms and telos that underscore a presumption of migration as an inevitable journey from the rural to urban as part of the logic of capitalist development and (b) showcases the novelty and importance of class und…
(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside
The essay’s focus is on 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 the South: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection takes the essay to a rethinking of the given script of Marxism from the outside, reengaging with advanced Marxi…
Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spirituality with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
This conversation with the fourteenth Dalai Lama—the spiritual-political inspiration of the displaced Tibetan community—revolves around questions of why a practitioner of the Buddha Dharma would like to call himself Marxist, and also his views on the violence of both Marxist praxis and religion. The Dalai Lama splits Marxism into, on the one hand, violent paranoid statecraft, and, on the other, the moral principle of equal distribution. He aligns…
Marxism asAsketic, Spirituality asPhronetic: Rethinking Praxis
This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth—the cognitive notion of truth—and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possi…
The Question Before the Communist Horizon
This commentary regards the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. It highlights several points of departure having to do with “the communist horizon,” the Lacanian Real as the register of the foreclosed (and not just the register of the remainder, the Impossible, or the inassimilable), the philosophy and ethico-politics of transformation (as against transition), and the theorization …
Transition and Development in India
According to Nehru, the transition from a backward agricultural society to a modern industrialized society was the only road for India to progress. So, for the past few decades, India has focused its transitional development around movement away from a state-controlled economy toward that of a free market economy. Transition and Development in India challenges the current basis of this theory of development, laying the groundwork for an entirely …
Remarx: The Indian Communist Movement at a Crossroads: A Marxian Assessment
Faced with the assault of neoliberal globalization and internecine struggle, the Indian communist movement is shown to be facing a series of inherent contradictions and an identity crisis that has dented its influence and stifled its growth. Maoism and mainstream communist trends functioning with different goals and strategies exhibit a common commitment to state-centric politics and a vanguardist party structure that comes at the expense of adva…
Gravel in the Shoe: National ism and World of the Third
This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging …
The Making and Unmaking of the (In)formal Sector
Using class-focused Marxist theory we examine the received category of the informal sector in order to demonstrate two results. First, we explicate the process of 'making' the informal sector in terms of the formal sector. Derived from a centrist logic that shapes the mainstream development paradigm, this involves a process of its devaluation in terms of the norm of the formal sector. Moreover, attempts to introduce heterogeneity within an alread…
Global order and the new economic policy in India: The (post)colonial formation of the small-scale sector
Using a class focused Marxist approach, we elucidate the adopted position of Indian small-scale sector as a devalued other within the adopted development paradigm that accords primacy to Capital and West. In the background of this understanding of small-scale sector, we demonstrate how the New Economic Policy in the era of globalization could be theorized as a tool to obtain the (post) colonial hegemony of capital over the small-scale sector.
Marxist economists and the market economy: Through the lens of a housewife
The Question Before the Communist Horizon
This commentary regards the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. It highlights several points of departure having to do with “the communist horizon,” the Lacanian Real as the register of the foreclosed (and not just the register of the remainder, the Impossible, or the inassimilable), the philosophy and ethico-politics of transformation (as against transition), and the theorization …
Gravel in the Shoe: National ism and World of the Third
This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging …
Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore's Ideas on the Cooperative Principle
This paper rediscovers Rabindranath Tagore as delivering an innovative understanding of economy and a critique of the mainstream ideas of development and capitalism. Demonstrating that capitalism appears through the logic of development, his intervention finds fault with individualism, income fetishism, progress, capitalist ideological apparatuses, and bourgeois subjectivity. In contrast, he lays down an alternative idea(l) of ethical economy fou…
(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside
The essay’s focus is on 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 the South: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection takes the essay to a rethinking of the given script of Marxism from the outside, reengaging with advanced Marxi…
Marxism asAsketic, Spirituality asPhronetic: Rethinking Praxis
This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth—the cognitive notion of truth—and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possi…
The Making and Unmaking of the (In)formal Sector
Using class-focused Marxist theory we examine the received category of the informal sector in order to demonstrate two results. First, we explicate the process of 'making' the informal sector in terms of the formal sector. Derived from a centrist logic that shapes the mainstream development paradigm, this involves a process of its devaluation in terms of the norm of the formal sector. Moreover, attempts to introduce heterogeneity within an alread…
Can the Sa(va)ge Speak
Marxist economists and the market economy: Through the lens of a housewife
Revisiting Transition and Development in India
We begin by thanking the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and critiques of our attempt to recast Marxist theories of transition and development. More broadly, we took on the rather ambitious
Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore's Ideas on the Cooperative Principle
This paper rediscovers Rabindranath Tagore as delivering an innovative understanding of economy and a critique of the mainstream ideas of development and capitalism. Demonstrating that capitalism appears through the logic of development, his intervention finds fault with individualism, income fetishism, progress, capitalist ideological apparatuses, and bourgeois subjectivity. In contrast, he lays down an alternative idea(l) of ethical economy fou…
Rethinking Poverty: Class and Ethical Dimensions of Poverty Eradication
Marxism and poverty have always lived a contradictory existence, especially in the global South. While socialism/communism's ethical imperative aspires to create a nonexploitative society, poverty eradication has been concerned with overcoming the material threat to people's livelihoods. An exploitation-free world does not necessarily mean the eradication of poverty, while the eradication of poverty does not automatically entail the erasure of ex…
Global order and the new economic policy in India: The (post)colonial formation of the small-scale sector
Using a class focused Marxist approach, we elucidate the adopted position of Indian small-scale sector as a devalued other within the adopted development paradigm that accords primacy to Capital and West. In the background of this understanding of small-scale sector, we demonstrate how the New Economic Policy in the era of globalization could be theorized as a tool to obtain the (post) colonial hegemony of capital over the small-scale sector.
The Making and Unmaking of the (In)formal Sector
Using class-focused Marxist theory we examine the received category of the informal sector in order to demonstrate two results. First, we explicate the process of 'making' the informal sector in terms of the formal sector. Derived from a centrist logic that shapes the mainstream development paradigm, this involves a process of its devaluation in terms of the norm of the formal sector. Moreover, attempts to introduce heterogeneity within an alread…
Gravel in the Shoe: National ism and World of the Third
This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging …
Remarx: The Indian Communist Movement at a Crossroads: A Marxian Assessment
Faced with the assault of neoliberal globalization and internecine struggle, the Indian communist movement is shown to be facing a series of inherent contradictions and an identity crisis that has dented its influence and stifled its growth. Maoism and mainstream communist trends functioning with different goals and strategies exhibit a common commitment to state-centric politics and a vanguardist party structure that comes at the expense of adva…
Transition and Development in India
According to Nehru, the transition from a backward agricultural society to a modern industrialized society was the only road for India to progress. So, for the past few decades, India has focused its transitional development around movement away from a state-controlled economy toward that of a free market economy. Transition and Development in India challenges the current basis of this theory of development, laying the groundwork for an entirely …
The Question Before the Communist Horizon
This commentary regards the exchange between Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference. It highlights several points of departure having to do with “the communist horizon,” the Lacanian Real as the register of the foreclosed (and not just the register of the remainder, the Impossible, or the inassimilable), the philosophy and ethico-politics of transformation (as against transition), and the theorization …
(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside
The essay’s focus is on 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 the South: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection takes the essay to a rethinking of the given script of Marxism from the outside, reengaging with advanced Marxi…
Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spirituality with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
This conversation with the fourteenth Dalai Lama—the spiritual-political inspiration of the displaced Tibetan community—revolves around questions of why a practitioner of the Buddha Dharma would like to call himself Marxist, and also his views on the violence of both Marxist praxis and religion. The Dalai Lama splits Marxism into, on the one hand, violent paranoid statecraft, and, on the other, the moral principle of equal distribution. He aligns…
Marxism asAsketic, Spirituality asPhronetic: Rethinking Praxis
This paper departs from the hegemonic notion of truth—the cognitive notion of truth—and arrives at four other notions of truth in Marx, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Foucault. It puts the four to a possible dialogue. It argues that one can get a glimpse of the cusp of Marxism and spirituality in the dialogue among the four. The work at the cusp, in turn, renders Marxism asketic and the spiritual phronetic. Thinking at the cusp also inaugurates the possi…
‘Capital’ in the East: Reflections on Marx
Praxis in world of the third contexts
Lacan foregrounds the ‘theft, abduction and stealing’ of the ‘slave’s know-how’, through the maneuvers of the Master in Plato’s dialogues; the episteme is, as if, premised on the extraction of the essence of the know-how of craftsmen, of serfs, of women working in households; theoretical knowledge or what Aristotle calls theoria in its historical function is this extraction, of the slave’s know-how, in order to obtain its transmutation first into…
Beyond the prism of rural to urban and voluntary-involuntary in India: A class focused theory of migration
The article seeks to develop a class focused theory of development induced internal migration in the context of India's economic transition. Through a critical interrogation of the hegemonic development approach, it (a) problematizes the norms and telos that underscore a presumption of migration as an inevitable journey from the rural to urban as part of the logic of capitalist development and (b) showcases the novelty and importance of class und…
Pluralism in Economics and Neoclassical Economics
This review of Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics centers on a claim made by mainstream economics to have surpassed the narrow horizon of neoclassical economics, understood as general equilibrium or Walrasian economics, having differentiated into a pluralist field. Through a detailed study of neoclassical economics, Madra distills the misplaced nature of this claim and disputes the propositions that neoclassical economics is nothing but Wa…
Rethinking the Formation of Public Distribution System: A Class-Focused Approach
Using the methodology of overdetermination, class process of surplus labor as the entry point and socially determined need of food security, we deliver an alternative class-focused rendition of the public distribution system (PDS) in India. We first surmise our theoretical framework to infer that the overdetermined and contradictory relation of class and social needs matter for PDS. Beyond the reasoning of being pro-poor, fair, or wasteful, we de…
Contours of Value Capture: India's Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development
Taking off from a class-focused perspective, Satyaki Roy's book, Contours of Value Capital: India’s Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development, dissects the global network of value added by labor power during production to reveal a process of value capture by global capitalists in the Global North. Thus, even when sites of production may have moved to the South, the surplus value being performed continues to be appropriated and distributed primari…
World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud
World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud
Political Economy of Emerging Urban and Peri-urban Spaces in India: A Roadmap Towards Environmental and Social Sustainability
Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability: Perspectives from Northeast India
Indigeneity, Development and Sustainability: Perspectives from Northeast India
Political Economy and Marxism (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Neoclassical economics (8 works)