Viren Murthy - Reflections on Tamil Marxism, Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Identity Politics
Channel: Nathan Hill
Date: 2022-02-28

Viren Murthy (University of Wisconsin Madison) - Back to the Future: Reflections on Tamil Marxism, Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Identity Politics
Friday 25 Feb, 4.30-5.30pm :

Marxism in Tamil Nadu emerged in a concrete context, where authors and activists constantly argued about the relationship between caste and class. In this presentation, I emphasize how a recent discussion in Tamil Marxism converges with a global problematic concerning a politics of time and different understandings of capitalism. The Marxists I will examine here, N. Muthumogan and N. Gunasekaran are both affiliated with the Communist Party India-Marxist (CPIM) and are prolific in print and on the internet. In 2010, Muthumogan wrote an essay entitled “Peasant India and Communists,” which was originally a lecture delivered at conference celebrating the 85th anniversary of the Indian Communist Party and the essay was eventually published in January, 2011 in a journal called, “Our Library (ungal nuulagam).” In this essay, Muthumogan argued for an alliance between Tamil identity, Dalit identity and a class-based movement against capitalism. Against this, N. Gunasekaran wrote a series of rebuttals arguing that identity politics runs fundamentally counter to the Marxist project. He contends that “the perspective of identity politics is narrow and therefore one cannot construct a class politics on this base.” This debate overlaps with an opposition Marxism between those engage in a politics of tradition, identity and time and those who argue that any type of identity politics reproduces capitalism and more specifically neo-liberalism. I contend that we can situate the above-mentioned debate in relation to Marxists stress the dominance of the value form, who downplay the relevance of anti-imperialist or Third World Marxism and those who emphasize the incompleteness of capitalist subsumption. Muthumogan draws on arguments similar to those who stress the formal or incomplete subsumption of capital to highlight the continuing relevance of Tamil traditions for socialism. 

Viren Murthy is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. in 2007 at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and has published articles on Chinese and Japanese intellectual history in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, and elsewhere. He has a forthcoming book entitled, The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future (Routledge, 2022) and he is currently completing a monograph tentatively entitled Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolutions, which examines how philosophies of resistance intersect with visions of transnational identity and hopes for an alternative future.