请将“The democratic state form also influences the shape taken by class struggle itself. On the one hand, it dissolves exploited classes into (juridical) individuals, and — further — into voting individuals (individual voters), who are then re-aggregated into various non-class groups on the basis of well-cultivated non-class identities. Electoral success needs numbers. By giving opportunities for full expression to religious, indigenous, racist, casteist, ethnic, and regional identities, the 
democratic form of the state fragments the exploited classes into members of electoral groups (or, vote banks), and into supporters of this or that party (or fractions thereof). Deliberately ignored are their class position and interests. This process weakens the power and agency of common people as classes. Given the inability of the crisis-prone capitalist system to meet the needs of people, the politics of identity from the top (i.e. politics of identity of the majority community) are deployed by the fascistic forces as foot soldiers of reactionary capitalism. Currently, democracy has enabled the landowning class and elements of the bourgeois class to ‘capture’ specific parts of the state through liberal democratic elections. In parts of the periphery, therefore, proprietors are still able to compel the poor to vote as the politicians of the exploiting classes would like them to. Through their control over specific parts of the state — especially at the local/regional level — property owners appropriate the resources allocated by the state to the poor. On the other hand, by ensuring a limited degree of free association and speech, and through electoral procedures and the ‘rule of law’, the state in its democratic form has indeed allowed rural and urban workers (who form the majority of the population) to voice some opposition to political domination. Within limits, they are permitted to exert pressure on the capitalist state to create conditions for an egalitarian development pattern. The democratic state form has allowed competition between political parties, including the parties of the Left,39 and this has contributed in varying degrees to the politicization of lower classes (as voters) and to the limited implementation of policies on their behalf. Yet the liberal democratic state form itself is a barrier to class politics from below in the periphery as well as the core.
7	Class contradictions of development and threat to peripheral state’s legitimacy
From the standpoint of exploited classes, the colonial state did not discharge a developmental role; in part, therefore, the post-colonial state gained a degree of ideological legitimation from its promise to foster economic development, a break with the approach of the colonial state. About this Partha Chatterjee (1993: 203) observes:
The new state represented the only legitimate form of the exercise of power because it was a necessary condition for the development of the nation . . . (it) acquired its representativeness by directing a program of economic development on behalf of the nation.
Like the colonial state, however, the current neoliberal post-colonial state is not fulfilling a developmental role. Hence the development process no longer discharges for the state the legitimizing role to the same extent it did earlier, in the more optimistic decades following Independence.40 This is certainly true of the way the state is ‘seen’ by ‘those below’ in those areas where there exist very strong radical militant organizations of the rural poor (e.g. the Maoist movement in Asia). There the relative paucity of spending by the neoliberal state on anti-poverty policies — a process termed as ‘the selective retreat of the state’ — has indeed eroded its legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of the rural population in terms of promoting development. For lower classes, therefore, the state is not perceived as a ‘caring’ state to the same extent it was earlier, both materially and discursively.
Of additional relevance is that the ideological illegitimacy of the colonial state derived from its being ‘other’ economically: that is, it was seen as serving the external (‘foreign’) interests in furtherance of which it licensed the exploitation of workers and peasants. The ideological legitimacy of the post-independence state, and a central emplacement of the nationalist discourse, emanated from the fact that it would be independent of an international capitalism. Hence the legitimacy of the state, say in India, ‘had to flow from the nationalistic criticism of colonialism as an alien and unrepresentative power’ and from the expectation that ‘an independent state . . . would promote national development1 as ‘the historical necessity’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 205; italics added).41
But what is the post-colonial state doing? It is prostrating itself before the imperialism of the IMF, the World Bank, MNCs, and international ‘aid’ agencies. This is an imperialism that is justified and sold to ordinary people through the discourse of development and progress. The post-colonial neoliberal state itself has become a mechanism of new imperialism. The point is that now, as during colonial times, the state, as mentioned earlier, is creating the conditions for the transfer of profits to the foreign capital: indeed, the neoliberal state is actively encouraging international capital to exploit its own lower classes, a process in which domestic capitalists — urban and rural — are invited to participate. The nationalistic dream — the idea that there is a nation and what the state does is good for the nation — may be on the way out. Hence, there is a new national question for the masses: how to transcend the ongoing impact of imperialism which is predominantly practised through economic mechanisms and ultimately backed up by the threat of force?42
If the concept of nation has any significance, it must, first of all, be the ‘nation’ of workers and small-scale producers, yet the neoliberal-capitalist peripheral state is increasingly alienating itself from this ‘nation’. And this is why, and given that the ‘collaboration’ of the peripheral ruling class with imperialism makes anti-imperialist nationalism an empty slogan, there is a need on the part of the ruling classes of the periphery to construct an alternative nation (and nationalism), one that is based on religious, racial, and ethnic identity. This strategy creates phoney internal enemies of the fake nation (the enemies being the religious and racialized minorities, people defending democratic rights and communists/Marxists). As a result, the real nation, the nation of workers and small-scale producers exploited by the ruling classes and subjugated by imperi-alism, is divided and weakened, and it fails to concentrate on the real enemies of the nation (i.e. capitalists, large-scale landowners, and imperialist forces). But this strategy of encouraging fascistic divisive tendencies however can contribute to delegitimization of (the democratic form of) the state.
Another contributory factor in this delegitimization process is that action by the neoliberal state is perceived to lack rationality. The colonial state was exporting food to the UK when in the colonies the population did not have sufficient food to eat. In a similar vein, the neoliberal state is now seen as irrational in promoting the production of luxury commodities (such as flowers, shrimps, and animal feed) or minerals and energy for export to imperialist/ rich countries, when millions are malnourished/hungry at home and/or are without regular supply of energy and other industrially produced necessaries throughout the year. The state is under pressure from nationally operating and multi-national agribusiness to crush small-scale producers, which has been prompting mass protests. The state-promoted export of these commodities is itself based on cheap labour and cheap land. ‘Cheap’, however, hides the ecological and social conditions under which these commodities are produced by peasants and workers. Cheapness is not a characteristic innate to a country in the periphery, either to the (tattered) bodies of its workforce or to its (degraded) nature, both of which are deployed by neoliberal capitalist accumulation.
The perceived difference between the colonial state and its post-colonial counterpart — a crucial ideological one — thus no longer holds.43 This is because the state is no longer able to sustain even the fiction of carrying out policies designed to benefit large swathes of the polity — the ‘people’ who form ‘the nation’, in other words. The failure is more drastic with the turn to neoliberalism and to right-wing politics associated with the rise of right-wing parties (e.g. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party or National People’s Party and Bolsanaro’s Social Liberal Party of Brazil). In fact, the neoliberal state form and state intervention (the state’s relative withdrawal from welfare provision and a certain degree of control over the business class) were justified on the basis that the neoliberal state is good for the masses, but this has turned out to be a lie. Neoliberalization has hurt the masses, including by dispossessing them of their small-scale property, so the neoliberal form of the state does not have the legitimacy in the minds of the ordinary people.44
Apart from the differences/contradictions between the colonial state and the post-colonial state, there are important differences/contradictions between the pre-neoliberal state and the neoliberal state. While the personnel of the state before the onset of neoliberalism, often drawn from lower strata of society (e.g. petty-bourgeois strata), maintained some distance between them and the capitalist class, now the personnel of the state revel in their connections with, and take pride from their work for, the business class. The social legitimacy of the state clearly is at stake because the state, at least, has to give the appearance that it is neutral, that it is for everyone, for all classes. But maintaining such an appearance is difficult because of a distinctive change in the class character of the personnel of the state. Prabhat Patnaik (2010) eloquently describes this pre-neoliberal process: ‘The State was a bourgeois State, laying the foundations for capitalist development. But the motivation, the ideological inclinations, and the class background of the State personnel ensured that the State had a degree of autonomy both vis-à-vis imperialism and also vis-à-vis the domestic capitalists’.45 This autonomy was there in the sense that state actors, drawn from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie, ‘were generally skeptical about, and even to a degree hostile to, the capitalist class and were committed to State capitalism which they also saw as a means of self-advancement in the new situation of de-colonization’ (ibid.). However, something has changed with the turn to neoliberalism. Patnaik (2010) explains:”翻译为中文