Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism

This book engages with the diverse traditions within non-Western Marxisms, as they emerge across the Global South, positioning itself against calls for a “pure” Marxism. The author views Marxism as a conceptual “field,” similar to electromagnetic or gravitational fields, where bodies and objects impact other bodies and objects without necessarily coming in contact with them. So too, in the “field” of Marxism, people behave in specific ways and deploy languages and concepts with their own specific inflections and accents. While rejecting the view of Marxism as an inherently European and fully-formed doctrine that is corrupted by contact with alien contexts, Nigam simultaneously acknowledges the residual force of certain elements of the theory and the gravitational pull that the authoritative figures continue to have on the evolution of the field in non-Western contexts. He argues that since a large part of Marxism’s earthly journey was undertaken in the Global South, it is thatexperience that needs to be rendered legible, by setting aside the conceptual lens of Western Marxism that repeatedly misreads such experience. Ultimately, the book invites a fruitful and challenging re-examination of a variety of phenomena arising from the contemporaneous co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist social relations that have been an inextricable part of the majority of the world—what the author terms “untimely encounters.”

Aditya Nigam  was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India.