SAJJAD AKHTAR, AASIM; ASHA AMIRALI.

THE DIALECTICS OF POLITICS

AND CULTURE: MARXIST PRAXIS IN THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD

Marxist praxis in the postcolonial world has suffered greatly from an ethnocentric
epistemological bias. In other words, analyses of and hence political strategy in
postcolonial countries has been heavily coloured by preconceived notions of linear
'development' in which 'pre-capitalist' economic regimes would be subsumed under
capitalist regimes and thereby also usher in new cultural and political forms. While the
problem of 'articulation of modes of production' has attempted to grapple with the fact
that concrete postcolonial social formations have not evolved in the same way as the
advanced capitalist countries, there has been no comparable attempt to consider
cultural and political forms in the postcolonial countries. In most cases, cultural and
political forms are understood to be derivative of explicit economic forms.
This paper will seek to underline why the present resurgence of radicalism in Latin
America is based principally on a rejection of this orthodoxy and suggests - with
reference to examples from Pakistan - why similar innovations need to be undertaken
in Asia and Africa.