Rahul Banerjee is an Indian activist whose work on agrarian sustenance forms the frontiers of agrarian transformations in India, offering a register globally for re-imagining agriculture. His inspiring work offers new ways of conceptualizing agriculture, ecosystems, and Indigenous lifeworlds. He is alum of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where I received my pedagogy in agricultural engineering and came away disenchanted because of its anti-people forms of pedagogy. Rahul develops his work on agrarian transformation from amidst his journey among the Indigenous community of the Bhils in central India. He builds a way of thinking about agriculture that is the urgent need of our times amidst global climate change and large-scale commoditization of food systems. It was therefore an honor when he asked to read a copy of my book, "Communication, Culture, and Social Change" and offered his critique of it. Sharing here is critique that he generously shared on Facebook.
"Marxists have generally been utopian lotus eaters drinking the heady wine of revolution without bothering to analyse why revolution after revolution has got derailed. But one among them, Antonio Gramsci, was more perspicacious and spent his long years in prison in the 1930s pondering over the longevity of capitalism and came to the conclusion that Capitalists do not just use their economic and military power to control society but also control the minds of the masses through culture, education and media. This he called hegemony. So he said that there was a need to counter this hegemony through conscious cultural and educational work in addition to political and economic mobilisation if capitalism was to be overthrown. He said that all human beings are thinking individuals and so intellectuals. As opposed to the capitalists, the oppressed classes must produce their own intellectuals, whom he called organic intellectuals, who would develop the emancipatory ideology to fight the hegemony of capitalism.However, not many Marxists and especially not the lotus eaters, paid much heed to Gramsci and so the Marxist emancipatory project went on degenerating and is now close to extinct. But later in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, originally of the Frankfurt School, began theorising after going to America about the way in which media and consumerism had been used by Capitalism to drug the masses into complacency. He provided the ideological muscle to the youth protests of the late 1960s in the USA and France. Of course eventually nothing came of these protests mainly because the consumerist hold of capitalism on the minds of the masses was too strong and it became universal across the world. It was reinforced by such powerful institutions as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and various development foundations promoted by Multinational Corporations. Academics and intellectuals from the developing countries were brainwashed into promoting western ideology all over the world.
Thus, communication, the conveyance of ideology to the masses, has been dominated by western capitalist consumerist culture whether in the media or in academia or in the development sector. This is something that we in India in the mass movements have witnessed continuously. The NGO sector has been totally dominated by the western discourse as the indigenous ideology of Gandhi has been completely marginalised. Even in the mass movements apart from some iconic movements like the Chipko or the Narmada Bachao Andolan, there has been little original independent production of ideology and communication to challenge the western discourse. Whatever, critique of western consumerism has been there by the mass movements, most notably by Vandana Shiva and Medha Patkar, has had little impact on the mainstream media, academia and ideology.
Under the circumstances it is refreshing to read a trenchant criticism of western communication and its overt and covert promotion of capitalism by my fellow alumnus from IIT Kharagpur, who like me is an apostate from engineering, Mohan Dutta (https://www.amazon.in/Communication-Culture.../dp/3030264696). He has not only critiqued western communication theory and practice but has also come up with an alternative which he calls Culture Centred Approach (CCA) to communication. He says that while the Capitalist communication is top down and hegemonic, Marxist communication is also top down even if it professes to be emancipatory and the rhetoric of participatory development that came into vogue from the 1990s and continues to dominate the NGO sector, he argues, is bottom up only in form but in content it pushes the capitalist agenda. After this critique Mohan goes on to say that the CCA is truly emancipatory by being bottom up both in form and content, drawing inspiration from indigenous cultural and knowledge traditions. He has given examples from people's movements from across the world and India to bolster his thesis. He has waged a lonely battle against the westeरn communication behemoth and has been able to establish the validity of his approach in academia and the development set. He has fused the boundaries between academia, media and activism and conducts very effective practical dialogues between theoreticians and practitioners of culture centred communication through his Centre for Culture Centred Approach to Research.
However, radical as his methodology is, he has not been able to emancipate himself from the straight jacket of academic publishing and so his voluminous writings in journals and in this book are in the typical verbose academic format that is so very anti-people in form!!! It is heavy reading that only another Phd or Phd aspirant will be able to plough through. In fact even my own Phd thesis is equally anti-people in its writing style even though its content is radical!!"