The committed intellectual: reviving and restoring the National Project

[Im The Truth]

The committed intellectual: reviving and restoring the National Project
Yash Tandon (2008-05-29)
Pambazuka News

A man or woman with no passion has no heart; one with no power of reasoning has no mind, writes Yash Tandon. It is the combination of heart and mind that produces the balanced person who uses their mind to pursue their passion. Let us speak truth to power, but let us also speak the existential truth of our people’s world to the negotiated truth of the diplomatic world. Our collective efforts, he continues, will lead to a new vision of a better world, one that is fair, just, peaceful and bountiful to all the peoples of the world.


The National Project began before countries in the South achieved their independence from colonial rule, continued for several years after political independence and then, in the era of globalisation, died a sudden death. It needs to be revived.

However, let me first address the issue of what I call the ‘South intellectual’. Is it artificial to describe certain scholars and intellectuals by their geographical domain? We talk about ‘an Indian scholar’, ‘an African intellectual’, or a ‘Caribbean scholar’. Does it make sense to go beyond the nation and the region? Is there something distinctive about a ‘South scholar’ or a ‘South intellectual?’[1]

My answer is yes. There was something in the writing and engagement of Caribbean scholars and writers – such as Norman Girvan, Arthur Lewis, M.G. Smith, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Walter Rodney and Clive Thomas – with which those of us at universities in East Africa in the 1970s easily identified. Something in common pulsated in our hearts. How else could we in East Africa have resonated so ardently with intellectuals thousands of miles away in the Caribbean? Of course, the writing of many others from Asia, Africa and Latin America contributed to our lively debates. All these scholars were trying to define the specificity of peoples who had gone through the colonial experience.

Intellectuals were only a small part of the National Project. Political leaders such as Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Manley, and Nyerere were the real inspiration. Politicians and intellectuals alike sought answers to some critical questions of self-identity and collective destiny: Who are we as a ‘nation? What do we do with our hard-won independence? How do we build our nation in ways that answer to the needs of our own peoples rather than those of colonising powers? In challenging the claims of neo-classical economics and neo-liberal policies to universal validity, Professor Girvan writes, significantly, that the objective of ‘policy autonomy’ in the South is self-determination [2]. This, in my view, is the crux of the National Project: self-determination.

What does the National Project mean for the engagement of Southern intellectuals today? In my view, three passions should steer or motivate their intellectual creativity: to critique the dominant imperialist ideology, to critique the dominant structures of power (speaking truth to power), and to provide ideas for a future vision of global society. I will first address the larger question of the relationship between ideas and political practice, and then outline an alternative vision or strategy to the dominant neo-liberal paradigm. Finally, I will take one aspect of this strategy, which is close to my heart, and that is integration in the regions of the South as a counterweight to globalisation. CRITIQUE OF THE DOMINANT IMPERIALIST IDEOLOGY

The language of discourse of the dominant imperialist ideology is economics. Economics has an aura of the scientific, although we know that its scientific pretensions are based on make-believe (much of it self-motivated) rather than rigour. Furthermore, when economics is bolstered with mathematics and graphics, it acquires an added aura of ‘authority’, which is often quite spurious. Does it then follow that the language of counter-ideology must also be economics? Our own economists have answered the orthodox economic theory of mainstream economists and trade theorists with what is called ‘heterodox’ economic theory. Like its adversary, this is largely an abstraction from the reality of power and politics; substantial political analysis is lacking. None of the heterodox economists that I know deal with the issue of imperialism; it is not in their vocabulary. Furthermore, I am not sure what real impact heterodox economics has made on the ground. Even in the realm of ideas it has not made as much impact as it might have.

I do not want to be misunderstood. I think that heterodox economics has provided a valuable and necessary critique of orthodox economics. In my own writings I find that, among some audiences, quoting Joseph Stiglitz or Dani Rodrick gives me a better punch than all my efforts to rally data and evidence on behalf of my arguments. My point is that heterodox economics is good up to a point but that it is not good enough. It must move beyond the realm of economics to the realm of political economy. In other words, I endorse the theme of this conference – ‘Reinventing the Political Economy Tradition of the Caribbean’.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER AND A REALITY CHECK FOR THEORY

I shall start this discussion with a quote from none other than the late Michael Manley:

‘Those who have to face the challenge of action may make mistakes. Meantime, those who reside permanently in the world of ideas, alone and untested, do not help anyone when they refuse that reality is more complex than theory’ [3].

I must say that I sympathise, even empathise, with Manley. Academics can speak truth to politicians, but when do politicians get an opportunity to challenge the academics with a reality check? We who research, write and critique have an obligation to speak truth to power – to say how things are and how they should be, from the vantage point of some distance from political power and authority. That vantage point is extremely important: it gives a larger perspective to the drama of daily politics. At the same time, however, we cannot escape the question of what we would have done were we in power at the time that difficult decisions had to be made. Theoreticians speak truth to power. Politicians, in return, provide theory with a reality check. The coin has two sides.

The challenge is how political leaders and theoreticians meet and work together when it matters rather than after the event. When there is a separation between, as it were, the philosopher and the king, how do we create a synthetic ‘philosopher-king’? The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, gave a partial answer to this question in his concept of the ‘organic intellectual’. For Gramsci, an organic intellectual arises as part of society and in the midst of struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation. An organic intellectual is always in the midst of struggle, always on the move, drawing strength from history and from the society in which they are embedded and that nurtures them.

Let me go a step beyond Gramsci. There is also an ‘organic institution’, held together by a shared vision of society and long-term strategy among a group of organic intellectuals. Both organic intellectuals and organic institutions are involved in daily struggles, not from the privilege of distance, as academics do, but in the heat of battle. There are many research and academic institutions in the South, but they mostly remain on dry ground. Organic institutions, on the other hand, have to swim in the middle of the ocean.

SPEAKING ‘EXISTENTIAL TRUTH’ TO ‘DIPLOMATIC TRUTH’ AND THE ROLE OF THE SOUTH CENTRE

Truth, of course, has many dimensions. The kind of truth that we at the South Centre deal with on a daily basis is what I call ‘diplomatic truth’, or truth as negotiated between asymmetrical power relationships, in our case between the North and the South.

Let me give an example of diplomatic truth. Globalisation is defined in the course of negotiations between contending political forces in a particular context. Africans might argue, for example, that they have seen few benefits from globalisation; that they have only seen its negative consequences. They would present it as a “challenge”. On the other hand the North might argue that many of the benefits of globalisation have not permeated Africa because of problems with internal governance and corruption, and the failure to create the conditions for investments to flow; that globalisation is an “opportunity” that Africans have missed. The “negotiated” or “diplomatic” truth about globalisation is thus a compromise between these views and presented as both an opportunity and a challenge. This compromise camouflages huge differences in ideology and policy that obscure the reality on the ground.

As organic intellectuals and organic institutions we have a moral obligation to speak truth as we know and experience it to the diplomatic truth that is negotiated by our governments in the forced circumstances in which they find themselves. In the South Centre we have often taken positions against those that some of our governments have been compelled to take because of the pressures put on them by powerful forces in the North.

The trade negotiations in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are a case in point. Ever since the WTO was formed, the countries of the South, especially the smaller and vulnerable ones, have been subjected to enormous pressures to conform to agreements entered into by the bigger trading powers such as the USA and the European Union. These powerful trading blocs divide and rule the South. To the poorer countries of the South they offer ‘technical assistance’ and incentives such as ‘quota-free’ and ‘duty-free’ acce