India’s capitalist economy refutes Jameson’s First-Third World binary.

Evidence

Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is nostalgically rehashed on US television screens in copious series every few months, but the India of today has all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalized commodity production, vigorous and escalating exchanges nor only between agriculture and industry but also between Departments I and II of industry itself, and technical personnel more numerous than those of France and Germany combined. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism, and the conditions of life for over half the Indian population - roughly four hundred million people - are considerably worse than what Engels described in The Condition of the Working Class in England. But India’s steel industry did celebrate its hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the fastest-growing in the world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. This economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie since Independence in 1947, a record quite comparable to the length of Italy’s modern record of unbroken bourgeoisdemocratic governance, and superior to the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of the oldest colonizing countries. … This parliamentary republic of the bourgeoisie in India has nor been without its own lawlessnesses and violences, of a kind and degree now nor normal in Japan or Western Europe, bur a bourgeois political subjectivity has been created for the populace at large. The corollary on the Left is that the two communist parties (CPI and CPI-M) have longer and more extensive experience of regional government, within the republic of the bourgeoisie, than all the Eurocommunist parties combined, and the electorate that votes ritually for these two parties is probably larger than the communist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world. … So - does India belong in the First World or the Third? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa? And ? Bur we know that countries of the Pacific rim, from South Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastestgrowing region within global capitalism. The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary opposition which Jameson constructs between a capitalist First World and a presumably preor non-capitalist Third World is empirically ungrounded in any facts. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 389

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s tracing of postcolonial discourse-first analysis obscuring material class structure — Ahmad uses the India case to ground his materialist critique of Jameson’s Third World literatures category. — connects to: Jameson’s First-Third World binary is empirically ungrounded against real economies. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 387; India is empirical counter-evidence to the Third World’s non-capitalist definition. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 388; India is already a capitalist country despite its colonial past — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 158 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The world cannot be compartmentalized into discrete First, Second and Third zones #corroborates (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 36
• Jameson’s First-Third World binary is empirically ungrounded against real economies. #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 387
• India is already a capitalist country despite its colonial past #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 158
• India is empirical counter-evidence to the Third World’s non-capitalist definition. #corroborates (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 388
• Scientific and ethical appraisal of capitalism are compatible, contrary to Jameson #complicates (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 492