Violence toward the indigenous Baka people of southeastern Cameroon is carried out by both conservation and trophy-hunting guards. This visual essay examines the effects of violence and its relationship with the enclosure of the forest by conservation entities, trophy-hunting outfits, and a logging company. Photographic images provide a textured and embodied experience to the themes of violence and enclosures. Drawing from René Girard’s work on violence and sacrifice, Alice B. Kelly's work on conservation and primitive accumulation, and Kalyan Sanyal’s analysis of primitive accumulation and postcolonial capitalism, this essay explores how the forest becomes a production machine for capital accumulation, one that is continually maintained through violence.

Marx’s analysis of the capitalist class process reveals that the process of selfexpansion of value or capital occurs under the condition where the market is the sphere of equivalent exchange. There is no exploitation in the market. What it does is facilitate through exchange value (whose monetary form is price) the distribution of value in the circulation process, a condition that is necessary for the productive capitalists to appropriate in money form the surplus labour performed by productive workers in production. Different varieties of market structure can be and has been historically associated with capitalist organization of surplus value. However, with the later development of capitalism in which the state increasingly played an important role in structuring the capitalist system, Marxists have shown, among other things, the significance of the connection of the market with capitalism in the process of subjugating the working class (the composite of productive and unproductive labourers). This chapter focuses on control and subjugation of the working class, particularly through concerted state policies on market designed to achieve that outcome. Even the crisis of capitalism is dealt with in a manner that secures this outcome. The discussion is organized around Perelman’s (2011) work that explores this connection in great detail.

It is by now a commonplace argument that the trade union movement in general and the Indian trade union movement in particular is, at best, under strain and, at worst, in a state of crisis (Thomas, 1995; Tulpule, 1996; Munck, 2002; Hariss, 2003). The following conversation between Luis Anderson (a leading Latin American trade unionist of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) and Bruno Trentin (a leading Italian trade unionist) that was recorded in the mid-1990s by Munck points directly to the heart of the problem: The objective of representing informal work in our countries implies a true cultural revolution and, yes, it would be a bit like going back and confronting situations, conditions and strategies similar to those the trade union movement confronted when it was born. We need to broaden the base of representativity, widen it to include new categories or workers, to include and offer representation to those not enrolled. This would reinforce the representativity and democratic nature of the union. We speak of a cultural revolution, because it means changing completely the horizon of trade union strategy and to change, at the same time, the forms of representation which the trade union had adopted for a whole century (Anderson and Trentin in Munck, 2002: p. 127).

Who is the ethical subject of humanism? The misadventures of international communism might teach us something about the violent consequences of imposing the most fragile part of Marx, the predictive Eurocentric scenario, upon large parts of the globe not historically centred in Europe.

Marxism and poverty have always had a contradictory existence. In the South, Marxists have been in the forefront of many colonial struggles for political independence. They were often caught in the crossfire of trying simultaneously to fulfil two objectives: building socialism while, at the same time, eradicating poverty. While socialism/communism’s ethical imperative aspires to create a non-exploitative society, poverty eradication has been concerned with overcoming the material threat to people’s livelihoods. An exploitation-free world does not necessarily mean the eradication of poverty, while the eradication of poverty does not automatically entail the erasure of exploitative relations.

In this chapter, we argue that the rationale for the existence of the Indian state has undergone a fundamental displacement since the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP henceforth). This displacement is in alignment with the re-articulation of the Indian economic cartograph into the mutually constitutive triad of neoliberalism, global capitalism and inclusive development that form the Order of Things (a la Foucault) at present. India’s economic transition now must take this historical conjecture as its point of reference and departure. In this regard, the theory of the Indian state must contend with (i) why and how it helped create this triad, (ii) what this triad entailed for its own existence and (iii) how the state encounters and negotiates with new-fangled contradictions emanating from the triad and thereby transforms itself or gets transformed in the process. State as a transformative entity must thus be understood in relation to the new Order of Things in whose creation it plays a central role and which in turn affects it. There is one important thread that runs through the changes that has materialized with respect to Indian state in the last two decades: the rationale for the existence of the Indian state has changed which implies in turn a different philosophy of governance.

In its efforts to rethink postcapitalist praxis from the global South, this article turns to the outside; not just to the empirical outside, but to the rethought conceptualization of the ‘outside’. The urgency of rethinking an outside to (global) capitalism stems from the need for critical reflection on two sets of ideas incumbent upon Marxism: one set marked by globality and the other marked by a continuum of terms such as “local,” “third world,” “underdeveloped,” “backward,” and “pre-capital.” Such a critical reflection on what Spivak designates ‘third worldism’ brings the postcolonial and the postdevelopmentalist desire of accounting for an outside to dialogue with the given script of (historical materialist) Marxism. To facilitate this rethinking of Marxism from the outside, we reengage with advanced Marxian reflections on questions of “hegemony”1 and psychoanalytic exegeses on questions of “foreclosure” (verwerfung) and the “missing signifier” (verworfen) (Lacan, 1997; 2006; 2017: pp. 132-139).2 Critical examination of extant theorizations on largely hegemony and partly foreclosure lead both to more concrete reflections on “global capitalism” and its outside: the “world of the third.” Other than defamiliarizing the given script of (global) capitalism, this move, we feel, has the potential to open up new avenues to think of an outside to (global) capitalism; such an outside help us rethink the question of the ‘political’ and the postcapitalist geography of the ‘subject’ from the outside” (Callari, 2016: p. 268). It also helps us connect “what is” (the new economic cartography; building on a deconstruction of the ‘economy,’ a taking apart of the givenness of the economy) with “what ought” (the postcapitalist possibility) (West, 2008: p. 15).3

Since the emergence of capitalism in its overtly globalized form, the orientation of the World Bank has, in tandem with allied organizations such as IMF, ILO and WTO, shift ed towards a more global approach to poverty. Such an approach brought in its wake a global convergence in the language and conceptual tools of poverty-related programmes, exemplified by the rise of a new family of categories, such as targeting, cost-benefit, risk management, social protection, inclusion, community, social capital, etc. (Standing, 2007). A global approach to poverty departs from traditional treatments of poverty in three directions. First, there is foregrounding of a universal standard of conceiving and implementing poverty-related projects (cost-benefit, targeting, etc.), with the intent of persuading/directing national agencies to follow this standard; rather than centralization, the ideal universal standard seeks decentralization. Second, poverty eradication is treated as a management problem, i.e. as materializing through top-down supervision and control of the given category ‘poor’, who are in turn seen as constitutionally vulnerable and stuck in backwardness. Third, it seeks to open a new-fangled process of subjectification 1 by shift ing the conditions in which subjects of poverty make decisions; thus there is now a growing awareness in treating subjects as active rather than docile. The second and third points seem to indicate both an ambiguity and a paradox. While presuming docile subjects, the management approach opens a conduit of participation to incite activeness in the otherwise docile poor. We will exploit this ambiguity and paradox to unpack the relation between the model of poverty management and its subject.