Radical Notes

Anti-Maoism, McCarthyism and the Indian State

August 26, 2008 by Radical Notes 2 Comments

Pratyush Chandra

Being the only “policeman” who “has ever risen to so much influence in India”, Indian National Security Adviser MK Narayanan seldom minces words in revealing the designs of the Indian State for “national security”. He recently pronounced the focus of the state’s strategy against leftist militancy in the country. In an interview to The Straits Times (1), he clearly emphasised that it is the intellectual appeal of the Maoists that is letting down the Indian state in its fight against the Maoists. “…[W]e haven’t been able to break their intellectual appeal that they seem to still have”.

Narayanan further adds that “large numbers of the intellectual elite and civil liberties bodies provide a backup to the movement in terms of agitprop and other activities”. The fact that the Maoists “are still able to get support of intellectual classes is disturbing. Unless we can divorce the two … [defeating the Maoists] is not that easy”.

When asked if the Maoists are getting outside support, he said, “we have not seen any kind of infusion of arms or ammunition”. However it is the “educated elite…that gives them a connection to the outside world”. Evidently, it is that “connection” which needs to be broken.

In order to sever this “connection”, the Indian state must find intellectual scapegoats (like the McCarthyite era in the US had the Rosenbergs and others) to terrorise the “educated elite”. Hence, we have Binayak Sen, Ajay TG… And the list is daily growing.

What is anyway McCarthyism? Truman, not a leftist by any means, defined it as “the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.”

So with the ideologies of Indianism/Hinduism and security defining every move of the Indian state, aren’t we in the same situation?

Should we be surprised by the National Human Rights Commission’s submission to the Supreme Court regarding Salwa Judum’s atrocities leaked to the Economic Times? The official human rights body “found that many of the allegations [against Salwa Judum] were based on rumours and hearsay, and devoid of facts. Again, many of the villagers whose names figured in the column comprising victims of Salwa Judum or the security forces were actually found to have been killed by Naxalites. FIRs had been registered in most of these cases and the state government had also doled out compensation to relatives of those killed. NHRC teams also discovered many of the villagers whose names figured in the list were actually Naxalites who had been killed in encounters with the security forces. A few other villagers were found to have died of natural causes, while yet another group of villagers whose names figured in the list of dead were actually found to be alive” (2). NHRC’s arguments here are quite clear and very logical –

if Salwa Judum or the security forces killed somebody, (s)he must be a naxalite; if (s)he was not a naxalite, then it’s obvious that (s)he was killed by the naxalites.

Isn’t this their “truth”, or Truman’s “corruption of truth”?

References:

(1) An interview with MK Narayanan, The Straits Times.

(2) NHRC gives thumbs-up to Salwa Judum movement, The Economic Times, August 26 2008.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Chhattisgarh, India, Politics, State Repression

Time is not any dog

August 25, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Avtar Singh Sandhu ‘Pash’

If not Frontier, read Tribune

If not Calcutta, talk about Dacca

Bring the clippings from

Organiser and Punjab Kesari

And tell me

Where are these eagles flying?

Who has died?

Time is not any dog

That can be chained and driven wherever you like

You tell us

Mao says this and Mao says that

I ask you, who is Mao to say anything?

Words cannot be pawned away

Time itself can speak

Moments are not speechless.

You sit in the Ramble

Or drink a cup of tea from a side stall

Speak truth or lie –

It doesn’t matter,

You may even jump over the corpse of silence

——-

And O rulers, ask

Your police and tell me

Whether I am imprisoned behind the bars

Or this policeman standing across?

Truth is not a whore of AIR

Time is not any dog.

Translated from Punjabi by Pratyush Chandra

Note: (1) Frontier, Tribune, Organiser and Punjab Kesari are names of weeklies and newspapers published in India. (2) AIR stands for All India Radio.

Avtar Singh Sandhu ‘Pash’ (1950-1988) was a celebrated revolutionary poet from Punjab (India). The above poem is taken from his collection Loh-katha (Iron-tale).

Filed Under: POETRY

Not a CIA agent but a Red-Baiter

August 24, 2008 by Radical Notes 1 Comment

Ravi Kumar

One can have criticisms of the way Indian Left has not defended the cause of the working class. But such a criticism could come only from someone committed to the working class struggle. However, there are many other forms of criticisms too. One such criticism has recently been forwarded by Ramachandra Guha, a respected intellectual.

A self besotted concluding line that “I run the risk of being labelled a CIA agent” demonstrates how Ramachandra Guha, in an Independence Day special issue of the magazine Outlook, operates within the discourse of labelling and counter-labelling. In the whole article he has not posed anything beyond the commonsensical right-to-centre arguments against the communist left, which we heard during the recent parliamentary discussions on the “Confidence Motion” – because the left and the right were opposing the same motion, hence they are the same.

Critiquing the politics of the Left after understanding its sources – the material conditions which gives rise to a certain form of politics – is another thing and making superficial and immature remarks is something else. His ‘analysis’ finds similarity with the superfluous analysis that we come across in favour of market, and the ideology that sustains and perpetuates the domination of market. He picks up statements and incidences and does a hasty analysis of the ‘apparent’.

In this piece what Guha does is that he makes far-reaching comments on the Indian Left as well as the Right. Often he equates the two by showing them as ultimately sharing similar understanding about the West or on issues such as culture.

He finds the Right and the Left talking in the same language and sums it up by saying that “There are statements issued by the Swadeshi Jagran Manch that could have come straight from the pages of People’s Democracy” (p.64). While commonality of opposition to liberalisation is understood, but one needs to understand the vantage point from which both the political forces approach the issue of liberalisation of Indian economy.

A general comment often made is that Indian left unreasonably attacks the West and it has been seen once again in the recent opposition to the nuclear deal. Guha advances such an argument when he conclusively points out that: “At any rate, the thinkers and activist of the Hindu Right and the Communist Left are united in thinking that the bulk of India’s problems were created or caused by the West”. Once again he fails to locate the analysis put forth by the Left in its opposition to imperialism or rampage by neoliberal capital. He forgets that its opposition, in most of the cases, have emerged against capitalist expansionism.

He tells us that the “for the Left, their political models too are wholly western – Marx and Engels and Lenin were as European as they come. Besides, their political practice has often been tailored to the needs of foreign (if not necessarily western) powers…” One cannot restrain oneself from calling this a slogan-mongering very similar to that of the rabid Right against the “Un-Indian” communist left.

The arguments of Guha emanate from the same place as the justifications for sustaining and expanding the rule of capital. He celebrates the spirit of individualism and fractures the system to pick up analytical categories that would further the idea that it is not the current order of things and its inherent character that creates problems but rather some components of the system. Hence, neoliberal capitalism never becomes responsible for growing inequality or widening income disparity, or it is not the global capitalism’s dynamics operationalised through its various agencies that sustain inequities and design ways and means to sustain capitalism in his argument. Flaws are attributed to individual Indians, individual ministers etc., who are not seen as influenced by others but rather seen as autonomous agents, who carry out actions on their own.

In fact his elitist (school-boyish) trivialization of arguments against neoliberal commodification is very typical – he opposed the Miss World contest because “cricket-illiterate young women” were seen in his favourite cricket ground. Further, “Indian classical music is now more popular than it was before liberalisation. The arrival of kfc has been contemporaneous with a rise in demand for tandoori chicken.” And Guha is satisfied.

Ultimately, Ramachandra Guha runs the risk of being labelled one among many trivial red-baiters, not a CIA agent. But we know he hardly cares…

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: India

Krugman’s “great illusion”

August 17, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Pratyush Chandra

Economist Paul Krugman in his latest column in NY Times (Aug 15, 2008) entitled “The Great Illusion” expresses his concern at the possibility that “the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first”. And it is the recent Russia-Georgia conflict that makes him say so. To be more explicit he goes on to explain that “our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.”

Krugman’s above statement clearly shows his lack of any historical sense. When was that “world of large-scale international trade and investment” free of (militarist) nationalism – a mechanism to protect that “large-scaleness”? And much of the “nationalism” which destroyed that world was in fact a revolt against that “large-scale” militarism. Yes, it destroyed the Pax Britannica – it was a war against the war monopoly.

On the one hand, Krugman seems to tell that national self-sufficiency at least with regard to “the current food crisis” is at last clearly shown to be not “an outmoded concept”. But he is in fact accusing nationalism of “many governments” for “leaving food-importing countries in dire straits”. He further finds that there is a rise of “militarism and imperialism” as “it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization”. Obviously, for him, “Russian energy” and Chinese big economy are the real threats as they have the capacity to manipulate world polities and economies to submission.

Then what is the Pax Americana? Is it not militarism, imperialism and manipulation, that we witnessed throughout the 1990s and afterwards? When did war-mongering and militarist build-up end during the “Pax Americana”? Increasing manipulative capacities of other countries and their political economy at the most demonstrate a globalization of “militarism and imperialism”.

Krugman rightly questions those analysts who “tell us not to worry: global economic integration itself protects us against war, they argue, because successful trading economies won’t risk their prosperity by engaging in military adventurism”. He thinks “the foundations of the second global economy” are solid than those of the first only “in some ways”, “[f]or example, war among the nations of Western Europe really does seem inconceivable now, not so much because of economic ties as because of shared democratic values”. So euro-centric Krugman, like Stiglitz, ultimately thinks the West not to be adventurist because of its democracy, but ah! “much of the world, however, including nations that play a key role in the global economy, doesn’t share those values”. So does he think the Pax Americana to which the West has submitted is about peace and democracy, which is now being threatened by the despotic Orient?

Krugman rightly concludes that “the belief that economic rationality always prevents war is an equally great illusion”. But like any other ordinary bourgeois he thinks economic rationality can prevent war when coupled with “democratic” values of the West. Obviously he can’t see the fact that economic rationality is about competition, representative democracy is about competition, and a war is competition par excellence. They are all ultimately the same – diverse moments in the life of “social capital”(1). Krugman refuses to recognize that capital whether protected by democratic regimes or not is at constant war against labour – which needs to be divided and controlled if it is to be exploited – and Western xenophobic megalomaniac nationalisms have always been nurtured for this reason. Where is the country in the West free from state-sponsored Ku-klux-klanesque policies and activism against migrants and “the other”? The neo-capitalist regimes have learned their lessons properly – obviously at the cost of threatening the established monopolies. It is not an end of globalization, as Krugman prognosticates, but a new stage – and a more barbaric stage – of capitalist globalization.

Note:

(1) “Here social capital is not just the total capital of society: it is not the simple sum of individual capitals. It is the whole process of socialization of capitalist production: it is capital itself that becomes uncovered, at a certain level of its development, as social power”. (Mario Tronti (1971), “Social Capital“)

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Economic Notes, Economy, Imperialism, International Relations

Book Review: Colombia, Laboratory of Witches

August 12, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

James Petras

Hernando Calvo Ospina’s recent book, Colombia, laboratorio de embrujos: Democracia y terrorismo de Estado (Colombia, Laboratory of Witches: Democracy and State Terrorism) is the most important study of Colombian politics in recent decades and essential reading in light of the Western media’s and politicians’ celebration of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Calvo Ospina’s study provides a wealth of historical and empirical data that highlights Colombia’s peculiar combination of electoral politics characteristic of a Western capitalist democracy and the permanent purge of civil and political society characteristic of totalitarian dictatorships.
book
Unlike most Latin American countries, Colombia has never experienced the modernization of its political system. Since the 19th century Liberal and Conservative parties run by urban and rural oligarchies have controlled the political process through violence and patronage.

Middle and working class ‘radical’ and center-left parties in Colombia have been violently repressed and marginalized, in contrast to the political differentiation, which took place in Chile and Argentina in the early 20th century. No labor or social democratic or Marxist parties were allowed to secure representation and legitimacy unlike the experience in Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia or elsewhere in Sough America. The ‘two party system’ based on oligarchic family elites were ill prepared to accommodate and accept the challenges of the burgeoning urban working class and rural peasant movements of the post-World War period. In Colombia resistance to plural social representation and to a multi-party system reflecting lower class interests took the form of civil war – la violencia – as the Liberal and Conservative Parties resorted to massive blood letting in the 1950’s to resolve which of the two factions of the ruling class would rule. The result was a bi-partisan pact to alternate the presidency between the two parties. The key theoretical point is that the unity of the Colombian elite was based on rule through mass violence, social exclusion and the monopoly of political power.

Colombia’s failed ‘transition to modernity’ was based exclusively on the selective introduction of Western institutions of counter-insurgency by a traditional oligarchy devoted to the politics of mass exclusion. The historical legacy of oligarchic party continuity and mass violence provides the framework for the contemporary practice of elections and death squads.

Calvo Ospina’s study provides detailed accounts explaining the pervasive influence of the US government in Colombian politics. The entire senior officer corps with command of troops and control of strategic intelligence agencies have passed through US military and indoctrination programs. In fact, attendance and certification by US military programs are a necessary step up the career ladder. Central to these training programs is ‘counter-insurgency’; training Colombian officials to violently repress any mass movements which challenge the Colombian oligarchy allied with Washington. The strategies taught by the US military instructors include the recruitment and arming of paramilitary death squads; ambitions junior military officers are pre-selected by the US military for their political loyalty to the US and aptitude for engaging in war against the Left and the mass movements led by their own compatriots. Calvo Ospina provides numerous ‘case studies’ of Colombian generals who follow this ‘career path’: From selection and training in the US ‘advanced’ military training schools, to command of troops, to protectors and promoters of death squads, to authors of multiple massacres against civilians, to recipients of numerous decorations from Colombian presidents and visiting US political and military dignitaries (page 213).

Calvo Ospina’s study synthesizes a wealth of testimony, documents, news reports, eye witness accounts and human rights investigations detailing the organic links between the Colombian government (including the Uribe cabinet) over 60 members of Colombia’s congress (allied to Uribe), right-wing governors and mayors and the 30,000 strong death squads, the principle of which was Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia ( United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). In fact, the rise of Uribe from Governor of Antioquia to the Presidency was linked to his ties with the death squads (page 235). Calvo Ospina’s study demolishes claims that the ‘death squads’ operate independently of the state. Not only are the death squads an arm of the state, but they also play a major role in linking the oligarchy and the political elite to the multi-billion dollar narcotics trade. The study provides us with a clear account of the complex network of inter-locking elites made up of the Colombian ruling class, the US imperial apparatus and the Colombian military. While the death squads played a major role in the killing of thousands of popular leaders and dispossessing 3 million peasants, they received the support of the Colombian oligarchy. Once the military and the regime, with $5 billion USD in US military aid, took possession of disputed regions from the guerrillas, the death squads were in part demobilized. The growth and decline of the death squads was clearly a result of US and Colombian policy: They were ‘tactical’ instruments designed to carry out the bloodiest tasks of purging civil society of popular, mass-based opposition. Calvo Ospina’s detailed survey of the horrific human rights record of the first 5 years of Uribe’s rule stands in stark contrast to the barrage of favorable propaganda showered on the macabre figure after freeing Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt by Bush, Sarkozy, Zapatero, Chavez, and Castro among others. During the first 3 years of the Uribe Presidency (August 2002- December 31, 2005) over one million Colombians were forcibly displaced, the great majority peasants violently uprooted and dispossessed of their land and homes by the death squads/military, who subsequently seized their land under the pretext of eliminating potential supporters of the FARC and other social movements. The peasants-turned-urban-squatters, who became local leaders, subsequently were assassinated by the regime’s secret political police (DAS) or death squads. Uribe’s regime has murdered over 500 trade union activists and leaders since coming to power in 2003. One trade union leader succinctly summed up the dismal political choices for Colombian activists: “In Colombia its easier to organize a guerrilla (movement) than a trade union. Anyone who doubts that should try to organize one at their workplace” (page 348). According to the European Union, more than 300 human rights activists were murdered by the Uribe regime in its first term of office (page 349). In the first two years of his regime, Uribe was responsible for the assassination or ‘disappearance’ of 6,148 unarmed civilians in non-combat circumstances.

The use of paramilitary death squads promoted/financed and protected by the Uribe regime to murder and ‘disappear’ popular leaders serves several strategic political goals: It allows the regime to lower the number of human rights abuses attributed to the Colombian Armed Forces; it facilitates the extensive use of extreme terror tactics – public amputation and display of dismembered corpses – to intimidate entire communities (psychological warfare); it creates the myth that the regime is ‘centrist’ – opposed by the ‘extreme left’ (FARC) and the ‘extreme right’ (death squads, especially the AUC). This claim is particularly effective in furthering the regime’s diplomatic relations in the US and Europe, providing a convenient alibi for liberals and social democrats who provide Colombia with military and economic aid.

Calvo Ospina’s study of US-Colombian relations provides useful insights into the mutual benefits to Colombia’s ruling class and the empire. The death squads (sicarios) were originally organized by the Colombian elites to destroy peasant movements pursuing agrarian reform. With the massive entry of $6 billion USD in US military aid and several thousands US Special Forces, the death squads expanded from scattered, decentralized local killers into centralized 30,000 strong extension of US and Colombian counter-insurgency forces. They were oriented exclusively to exterminating villages and social organizations in guerrilla-influenced regions. Calvo Ospina’s study highlights the central role of the Colombian ruling class as well as the US military in the growth of the totalitarian terrorist state. His study clearly rejects the simplistic view of many on the Left who see oppression, exploitation and terror simply as impositions by ‘outside forces’ (imperialism). The theoretical point is that the US military’s entry, expansion and influential role was possible because it coincided with the long-term, large-scale interests and needs of the Colombian ruling class.

The most important contribution of Calvo Ospina’s study of Colombian politics is his account of the construction and elaboration of a totalitarian terrorist regime, with the open collaboration and support of US, European and Latin American capitalist democracies.

The infrastructure of totalitarian terror defines the boundaries, content and participants of electoral politics. It includes: Rule by Presidential decrees suspending all constitutional guarantees (page 295); A nationwide secret police network of 1.6 million spies (page 296); Peasants forcibly recruited and forced to act as local military collaborators (“Soldiers of My People”) in 500 of Colombia’s 1,096 municipalities; 30,000 military-trained and armed death squad paramilitary forces; 300,000 active military forces, the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguidad – Security Administrative Department) – the secret police numbering in the tens of thousands. The private militias of landowners, bankers and business leaders involving private security agencies number over 150,000 gunmen.

Colombia is the most militarized country in Latin America. The Congress, electorate, judiciary and civil service exercise no effective control. The constitutional protections are totally non-existent. The scope and depth of human rights violations exceed those of any military dictatorship in recent Latin American history, including those in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia.

The totalitarian terrorist infrastructure of the state defines the political character of the political system. The electoral process serves exclusively as a façade facilitating ‘normal relations’ with liberal, conservative and social democratic regimes in Europe and North and South America. In effect their praise and support of Uribe in the aftermath of the Betancourt affair served to legitimize the terrorist regime. Their condemnation of the FARC was also a rejection of the anti-totalitarian and anti-terrorist left.

While Calvo Ospina’s study has deepened our understanding of the structure and practice of contemporary totalitarian terrorist regimes, there is a need to proceed further to examine the emerging mass base of support for the regime. Uribe mobilized over one million Colombians against the FARC in the spring of 2008 in support of his totalitarian regime, at a time when the mass media, the Colombian judiciary and former leaders of the death squads revealed that scores of pro-Uribe Congresspeople, Cabinet Ministers and Generals were linked to the AUC. In other words, hundreds of thousands of middle class Colombians knowingly embraced a totalitarian leader.

The emergence of mass-based totalitarianism, replacing the traditional authoritarian oligarchy, is part of the emergence of new virulent right-wing politics in Latin America. In Bolivia, the far-right Santa Cruz ruling class has combined a mass middle class base with its own ‘para-military’ shock forces in pursuit of ‘autonomy’ (secession) and control over the massive oil and gas revenues accruing from partnerships with foreign multinationals. In Argentina, the hard right in the provinces has built a mass base of several hundred thousand in defense of huge commodity profits. In Venezuela, the hard right can put several hundred thousand in the street and engages its own paramilitary shock troops.

The emergence of the totalitarian right coincides with the inability of the ‘center-left’ and the left to capitalize on the commodity boom to finance structural changes and organize the working and rural poor into ‘fighting forces’.

In Colombia, the center-left (Polo Democrático) has generally sided with the Uribe right against the FARC – and in the process given a powerful impetus to the regime’s attraction of the mass urban middle class. The ‘center left’ regimes’ embrace of agro-mineral export strategies in the rest of Latin America have immobilized the masses and vastly increased the power of the new totalitarian right and encouraged their use of ‘direct action’ tactics. Far from Uribe’s Colombia being the ‘exception’ to a ‘progressive wave’ in Latin America, it is more realistic to view him as emblematic of the new totalitarian leaders who combine elections and political terrorism.

Colombia, as Calvo Ospina describes it, is indeed the ‘Laboratory of the Extreme Right’. Uribe’s success spells danger for the workers, peasant and popular movements of Latin America.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Colombia, Latin America, State Repression

Chhattisgarh and the danger of dissent

August 6, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Paramita Ghosh

If Ajay TG had been smart enough to know where to point his camera, his films might have been showing in Osian today. As it stands, he is in Durg jail, 40 km from Bhilai, where his uncle would sell tea and his father would sell chickens near the steel plant. He started making films 7-8 years ago, photographing, as he says, in a statement, “daily life, festivals and rituals of Durg and particularly my own neighborhood, an old village now surrounded by urban growth.” He would also make posters of poems and put them up in banks and other public places “to reach a wider public than that reached by poetry books.”

In Chhattisgarh, these are acts of terrorism.

This week, www.releaseajaytg.in, a website, was set up by a committee for his release. Playwright Habib Tanvir, activist Aruna Roy, professor Dr Kamal Chenoy, director ActionAid India, Harsh Mander, law expert Usha Ramanathan, journalist Siddharth Vardharajan, among others, are its members. Renowned film-maker Mrinal Sen who signed the petition condemning Ajay’s arrest, says: “I wish I was 30 years younger, so that I could have physically joined you all in this campaign.” “Chhattisgarh was always a peaceful place and it is a great shame that artists, film makers and journalists are being targeted in this state,” said Tanvir. “The voice of a creative person is being silenced again.”

There is a reason why Ajay TG’s story started moving in this direction.

His camera angles, to start with, were wrong. British photographer Margeret Dickinson who taught him the use of the camera, notes that, “even as a student, Ajay instinctively tended to opt for a non-authoritarian point of view when developing a film”. For example, when he made a short on malaria prevention, the story Ajay told was not from the point of view of a health campaigner but from that of village children confronted with a friend’s illness. This is a man who joins campaigns against child labour and has strong views on violence.

Ajay joined the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) in Bhilai, a leading civil rights organisation, as a voluntary member. Dr Binayak Sen, is its general secretary. Ajay starts making films on human-interest stories: on old-age homes, health, the politics of power in two adivasi melas. He also makes a film on Binayak Sen.

Are these crimes?

National Award winning cinematographer Rajan Palit asks whether the decision to investigate state terrorism creatively is enough to be branded a Maoist. “For the last 20 years, even civil society efforts in Chhattisgarh to protect land, water, culture and livelihood have been attacked,” agrees film-maker maker Amar Kanwar, who put together the committee for the film-maker’s release. “The message the police is sending out is — if you see something wrong with the system, do not make films about it. They are making sure, what people see, are not told.”

The objective of Ajay TG’s arrest is not Ajay TG. It is to tell everybody else that if you film and if you write, this is what will happen to you. It is to tell the local journalist, the local film-maker and the local poet to look elsewhere and clear out of the way.

paramitaghosh@hindustantimes.com

(This report was filed in Hindustan Times, 20th July. After 93 days in jail, film-maker Ajay TG who was released from Durg jail late Tuesday (August 5) evening, begins a life outside it – under constant watch.)

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Chhattisgarh, India, Paramita Ghosh, State Repression

Kosambi and the discourse of civilization

July 30, 2008 by Radical Notes 1 Comment

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

The polymath’s most enduring and wide-ranging contribution to the interpretation of Indian history was his approach to the idea of India as a civilization.

D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was a polymath who made original contributions in diverse areas including pure mathematics, quantitative numismatics, Sanskrit studies, and ancient Indian history. But he is remembered today chiefly for his work as a historian. That is not without reason. That is where he made an enduring impact even if some details of his findings and observations may be open to question in the light of later research. If we try to situate his contribution to the interpretation of history, the most enduring and wide-ranging in significance appears to be his approach to the idea of India as a civilization.

When he wrote in 1965 his last major work, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, he gave a central place to the notion of civilization. He began with the question: what unifies Indian civilization amidst cultural diversities within? He goes on to ask: what explains “the continuity we find in India over the last three thousand years”? He underlines the importance of the “material foundation for Indian culture and civilization” and, in the concluding chapter, explores the reason why, in his judgment, the ancient civilization was destined to stagnate.

In posing such wide-ranging questions about the civilization in India, Kosambi differed from the general run of academic historians of his times for they rarely engaged in the discourse of civilizations. He was swimming against the current. The specialised and fragmented view in the academic historians’ professional writings did not usually add up to that vision of totality that the notion of civilization demands. The fact that Kosambi was never given his due by them in his lifetime can be, arguably, ascribed to their disdain for a non-professional who was not only an avowed Marxist, but also given to talking about a dubious entity called ‘civilization.’

On the other hand, when Kosambi talked about the Indian civilization, he entered a discourse of civilization that was developed by some of the most creative minds of twentieth century India, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The questions that engaged such minds were roughly the same as those Kosambi grappled with. What kept India together as a civilization through the millennia? Was it a Hindu civilization, as some would have us believe? Is it possible to discern a continuity in this civilization from the prehistoric to colonial times? How does a notion of an ‘Indian civilization’ accommodate the immense diversities in the constituent communities and cultures? Is it necessary, even if it were possible, to talk of an ‘Indian civilization’? How did Kosambi’s intervention relate with the nationalist discourse of civilization?

It is interesting to recall that about two years after the birth of Kosambi (July 31, 1907), M. K. Gandhi, not yet the Mahatma, published his very first political tract, Hind Swaraj (1909). It was an unusual political tract in that it was mainly about India’s civilization. “It is my deliberate opinion that India is being ground down not under the English heels, but under that of modern civilization” (chapter VII). In a chapter entitled ‘What is civilization’ Gandhi poses a choice between what he considered to be true Indian civilization and the ‘materialistic’ civilization of Europe, for that choice would determine the outcome of the clash between the two. Gandhi virtually subordinates the political agenda before India to the cultural agenda and goes so far as to say our goal was not the expulsion of the English: “We can accommodate them. Only there is no room for their civilization” (chapter XIV).

Gandhi’s denunciation of Europe and idealisation of the non-materialistic tradition in India was, of course, distant from Kosambi’s emphasis on the material basis of India’s attainment of a high level of civilization. On the other hand, consider the fact that throughout the text of Hind Swaraj Gandhi never talks of a Hindu civilization. He talks of an Indian civilization. And the seminal notion of syncretism as the key to comprehending Indian civilization is already there in this very first piece of political statement by Mahatma Gandhi. He speaks of India’s “faculty of assimilation.”

Between this approach and Kosambi’s there are close parallels. Kosambi begins his treatise on The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India with the statement that India displays “diversity and unity at the same time.” And he deploys the notion of syncretism in Indian civilization in explicating the absorption of peripheral tribal groups into the mainstream, “their merger into general agrarian society,” in terms of the accommodation of their religious belief systems within the Brahmanic scheme of things. He saw a “process of syncretism” in the absorption of “primitive deities,” a “mechanism of acculturation, a clear give and take,” which allowed “Indian society to be formed out of many diverse and even discordant elements” (chapter 7).

The idea of a syncretism in the construal of India’s civilizational unity was of crucial importance in the nationalist discourse. The absence of the European concept of nationhood in the pre-colonial past, despite the substantial evidence of the existence of an indigenous notion of patriotism at the regional and sometimes also at the supra-regional level, was undeniable. The intellectual response to this perception was the idea of India’s civilizational unity, cutting across and over-riding all diversities.

Shortly before Gandhi wrote famously of India as a civilization, Rabindranath Tagore articulated the idea of syncretism in some less-known essays. “We can see that the aim of Bharatavarsha has always been to establish unity amidst differences, to bring diverse paths to a convergence, and to internalize within her soul the unity within severalty, that is to say to comprehend the inner unity of externally perceptible differences — without eliminating the uniqueness of each element.” Tagore wrote thus and much more in that vein in 1902 in an essay, ‘History of Bharatvarsha,’ which was reproduced many times during the Swadeshi agitation in Bengal from 1905. More prominent in the public mind were of course the pronouncements of the nationalist leadership.

While Kosambi shared this perception, while he underlined the unity within apparent diversity, he went on to make a point that was not often made in the nationalist discourse of civilization. “The modern Indian village gives an unspeakable impression of the grimmest poverty and helplessness,” he writes in 1965 in the book cited earlier (chapter 1). “The surplus taken away from people who live in such misery and degradation nevertheless provided and still provides the material foundation for Indian culture and civilization.” This evaluation was a radical departure from the oft-heard paeans of praise of the civilization.

Another new note struck by Kosambi was that stability of a civilizational unity was secured at the cost of stagnation and subjection to a regime of superstition and primitiveness. In this regard he follows Marx’s tendency of thought and at one point he even quoted Marx on ‘the idiocy’ of rural existence. Kosambi argues that syncretism allowed the admission of many a “primitive local god or goddess” and religious beliefs into the ancient Brahmanic system, along with the merger of different social groups with their own belief-systems and cultures. But he adds: “Brahmanism thus gave some unity to what would have been social fragments without a common bond. The process was of crucial importance in the history of India, first in developing the country from tribe to society and then holding it back, bogged down in the filthy swamp of superstition.”

His notion of the ‘primitive’ and the implicit idea of progression to ‘higher’ stages may be open to question today. In fact that approach is not so pronounced in his earlier essays on this theme, for example Myth and Reality (1962). However, the point for the present is that, contrary to the usual nationalist position with regard to the virtues of syncretism, he was critical of the consequences in terms of the obscurantism that enveloped the Indian mind.

The most famous exposition of the theme of the unifying Indian civilization in Kosambi’s lifetime was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946). Nehru commences with the question, “what is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects?” (p.36) He goes on to hazard a bold generalisation: in India’s past “disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to attempts to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization.” He returns to this theme through the entire work time and again. He ends the book with reflections on the same question: India is “a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads…She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive” (p. 378).

The idea that India was held together by bonds of unity rooted in the past of Indian civilization was not of course new. What was new was its assertion at a time when that unity was threatened by a communal divide that was soon to bring about the Partition of 1947. In the face of the threat, Nehru speaks of a dream of Indian unity. In early 20th century that unity appeared as an undeniable reality to Gandhi or Tagore; to Nehru in 1946 it was a dream, although it was in some ways also a reality. To Kosambi that unity possibly appeared as an enduring fact of history.

But when Kosambi reviewed this book, in Science and Society, he did not comment upon this aspect of it. Actually he found Nehru to be a poor historian so far as ancient India was concerned; he added however that he was “an admirer of the author” and he could see how difficult it was for Nehru, sitting in jail, to get the sources he needed. His critique was directed mainly against Nehru’s failure to attempt class analysis in understanding modern developments in India (Exasperating Essays, 1957). In this regard Kosambi was consistent in that he made class analysis the basis of his analysis of changes and continuities in Indian civilization when he turned to that theme in 1965.

That raises finally another question. What explanatory weight is to be assigned to Kosambi’s Marxian method in our effort to understand and contextualise his approach to the civilizational discourse? In a letter to his old friend Daniel Ingalls, an Indologist at Harvard, he wrote in 1953: “The world is divided into three groups: (1) swearing by Marxism, (2) swearing at Marxism, (3) indifferent, i.e. just swearing…I belong to (1), you and your colleagues to (2).” Perhaps Kosambi’s adherence to Marxism was to its use as a method, not as a source on par with empirical sources of knowledge.

He allowed that in some respects there was a poor fit between Indian history and the classical Marxian scheme. But he consistently used Marx’s method as a tool. Hence his scorn for ‘theological’ tendencies in Marxism. In his Introduction to Exasperating Essays he writes: “Indian Official Marxists hereafter called OM” were often displeased with him but he could not but protest their “theological emphasis on the inviolable sanctity of the current party line, or irrelevant quotations from the classics.” In using Marxist method in his own lights, in his effort to construe the civilization in India, in the convergences and divergences between his approach and the nationalist discourse of civilization, D.D. Kosambi has left much for us to try and understand and evaluate.

(Dr. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research and a former Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. This article is based on his Kosambi Birth Centenary Address at the University of Mumbai.)

Courtesy: The Hindu

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: History, India, Marxism

The king is gone, long live the kingdom’s old ways

July 29, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Siddharth Varadarajan

By abandoning the principle of consensus in favour of arithmetical machinations, Nepal’s discredited establishment is betraying the aspirations of the young republic.

When the people of Nepal cast their votes in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in April, they did so not merely in order to abolish the monarchy. What they wanted was an end to the era of manipulated democracy in which political parties and politicians swung this way or that for no reason other than to grab or hold on to power. That is why they delivered a crushing blow to the two establishment parties most associated with this brand of crass parliamentarianism — the Nepali Congress and the Unified Marxists-Leninists. If the voters sealed the fate of the Shah dynasty by choosing candidates who were formally committed to the republic, they also sent a stern message to that lesser Nepali dynasty, the Koiralas, by defeating the daughter and virtually every close relative of its patriarch, Girija Prasad, barring one. As for the UML, there was no better measure of the public’s contempt for its opportunism of the past few years than the defeat handed out to its leader, Madhav Kumar Nepal, from both the constituencies he contested.

By voting in the Maoists as the single largest party, the electorate also sent a clear message that it favoured the new. But voters tempered this message by denying the former rebels an absolute majority of their own. Under the rules of Nepal’s interim constitution as it stood at the time of the election, a two-thirds majority was needed for any major decision, including the election of Prime Minister and President. By giving the Maoists a little more than one-third of the seats in the 601-strong house, the electorate said it wanted the Maoists to keep alive the principle of consensus that had served Nepal’s parties so well in the struggle against the monarchy. And also that it considered the party’s manifesto to be so important to the constitutional development of Nepal that its views could not be ignored by the CA, even if the Old Establishment were to gang up against them.

Sadly for democracy, peace and the immediate future of the young republic, however, this fine balance that the electorate struck has now been cynically subverted by reactionary elements in the NC and the UML.

By stitching together an unprincipled coalition together with the UML and the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum of Upendra Yadav, the NC managed to get one of its leaders, Ram Baran Yadav, a Madhesi politician, elected President. As part of the same bargain, the MJF’s Parmanand Jha was elected Vice-President. In both cases, the Maoist-backed nominees for President and VP — the independent Madhesi activist and intellectual, Rama Raja Prasad Singh, and the independent legislator, Shanta Shrestha, respectively — were defeated.

Sequence of betrayal

Once it was clear that the Maoists had emerged as the largest party in April, the NC and the UML more or less conceded that the party would have the right to lead the new government. At the same time, they kept raising procedural and policy obstacles in the way of the Maoist leader, Prachanda, becoming Prime Minister. In particular, they said the Maoists might never leave power if the two-thirds majority rule were not replaced by a simple majority. Mr. Prachanda warned that such a change would destroy the principle of consensus and bring in the power-play of majority and minority, but his concerns were brushed aside.

Even after amending the interim constitution to allow the President and Prime Minister to be chosen (and removed) by a simple majority, the political stalemate persisted. For the better part of the past two months, the question of who would become the republic’s first President paralysed the entire process of government formation. After initially staking a foolish claim for both the prime ministership and the presidency, the Maoists had quickly backed off from the latter and expressed their willingness to nominate any prominent non-political personality for the job of ceremonial head of state. But this proposal was immediately rejected by the NC, which proposed, instead, that the caretaker Prime Minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, be elevated to President and none else. Given Mr. Koirala’s age and indifferent health, as well as the well-founded fear that he would use the job to create an alternative power centre, the Maoists baulked at his nomination.

With deadlock at that end, the Maoists asked the UML to nominate someone other than Mr. Nepal — whom they judged to be unsuitable given that he lost both the seats he contested in the April elections — for the presidency. This time, it was the UML’s turn to be adamant. The party rejected the Maoist suggestion that its senior leader, Shahana Pradhan, or any woman, Dalit or janajati from its ranks be made President, and insisted instead that it wanted only Mr. Nepal for the job.

Rebuffed by the intransigence of both parties, the Maoists then turned to the fourth-largest formation in the CA, the MJF, with an offer they thought no self-respecting Madhesi group could refuse: the nomination of Rama Raja Prasad Singh as President. The MJF was unhappy with the choice of Mr. Singh but could not afford to openly reject him. So it insisted that one of its members be made Vice-President, something the Maoists were unwilling to accept since they had imagined the top four posts of President, VP, Prime Minister and Speaker would be equitably divided among different sections of the population in such a way that Madhesis, women, Pahadis and janajatis would all feel they had a stake in the new set-up.

As the Maoist agreement with the MJF broke down, the NC and the UML rushed to field their own Madhesi nominees for President. For two months, these parties had refused to come up with any names other than those of their top leaders. But now that it seemed the political stalemate could be broken in such a way as to isolate the Maoists, the two Establishment parties promptly withdrew their insistence on nominating Mr. Koirala or Mr. Nepal. With the MJF on board, a carve-up was effected wherein an NC leader with no credibility in the struggle of Madhesis became President (the UML helpfully withdrew its nominee, Ramprit Paswan), an MJF leader became the Vice-President and the UML’s Subhash Nemwang was chosen to be Speaker of the CA.

At the best of times, such unprincipled politics should have no place in a democracy. What makes the recent drama more sordid is that it is taking place in a country that has just freed itself from the yoke of monarchy and is trying to usher in a constitutional system that would genuinely empower its citizens.

Having demonstrated the viability of their unholy coalition, the NC and the UML are now saying they have no objection to the Maoists forming the government. It is clear, however, that any Maoist-led government would be subject to constant blackmail by the Old Establishment. That is why Mr. Prachanda has said he is still willing to enter and lead the new government but only on the basis of an understanding with all the parties in the CA about the broad policies to be followed and about the new set-up not being destabilised.

The present stalemate presents both an opportunity and a dilemma for the Maoists. By staying out of power and insisting that the Old Establishment run the country as it sees fit, the party will almost certainly ensure an even bigger vote share for itself when elections are next held. But staying out of power will vitiate the constitution writing process and perhaps even fatally imperil it. It will also raise questions about the smooth implementation of the peace process, since any NC-UML led government is unlikely to pursue the promised integration of the Peoples’ Liberation Army with the Nepal Army.

The presence of the MJF in the coalition alongside the NC and the UML will also open up a dangerous frontline. The latter two parties are reluctant federalists who embraced the concept of an inclusive Nepal only because the Maoists placed it squarely on the national agenda. Will they end up appeasing the more extremist elements of the MJF and provoke a backlash of the kind that has already started, thanks to Mr. Parmanand Jha taking his oath of office in Hindi rather than in his constitutionally-recognised mother tongue of Maithili? Or will the Pahadi chauvinists amongst their ranks prevail and push for a polarisation of the polity on ethnic lines?

Though the Maoists have every right to feel betrayed and cheated, they must make one last attempt to foster a consensus. For better or worse, the former rebels are the only party with the ability to manage the contradictions and faultlines which lie at the base of Nepali society. A government that is not led by them will find it hard to negotiate its way through the next 20 months during which the rising and sometimes contradictory aspirations of Nepal’s people must be bound together in the emerging Constitution.

Even at the eleventh hour, it is essential that democratic elements in the NC and the UML put an end to the dangerous course their parties have embarked upon. President Yadav should immediately invite Mr. Prachanda to form a government, swear him in and give him one month to demonstrate he has the support of the CA. Nepal has a unique opportunity to showcase its spirit of republicanism and peace at the SAARC summit in Sri Lanka next week. There can be no better way of doing so than for Kathmandu to be represented by Prime Minister Prachanda.

Courtesy: The Hindu

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Nepal

Indian State enumerates “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas”

July 25, 2008 by Radical Notes 1 Comment

Ravi Kumar

[Government of India (2008, April) Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, Report of an expert group to Planning commission, Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi]

It may seem surprising that the Indian state and its ruling political elite constituted a committee to study the radical left movement in the country. However, beyond this apparent incongruity, it is essentially a stocktaking exercise in order to design the initiatives for undermining class politics and mass upsurge against the free rule of capital unleashed under neoliberalism.

It is no longer a surprise that we have today a ‘powerful’ voice in the country, categorised as ‘democratic’, ‘pro-people’, ‘progressive’, and ‘secular’, but certainly not pro-working class, which has substituted the class based analysis. The report, which is being discussed here in brief, is also an addition to that burgeoning non-class, pro-people, humane capitalism framework of analysis. In this sense, one may read the report not only in terms of a response to radical left politics, but to any political movement which demands an alternative to capitalism.

The Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance, when it came to power in the year 2004 made an effort to portray itself as ‘sympathetic’ to the radical left movement when it expressed its concern for the “the growth of extremist violence and other forms of terrorist activity in different states” and stressed that it was “not merely a law-and-order problem, but a far deeper socio-economic issue” (see the Common Minimum Programme of the United progressive Alliance).

But in due course, as the government supported by the dominant Left steered itself through years, a marked change in the approach of the Indian state was seen. Different agents of capital, such as the Prime Minister of India, belonging to the Congress Party, as well as leader of the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), started rejecting radical left politics quite unequivocally as the most significant security problem. L.K. Advani of the BJP said in 2006 that the “communist extremism not only endangers India’s national security and our democratic system, but also our precious cultural and spiritual heritage. The rabidly anti-Hindu propaganda of naxalites must be noted in this context”. The Prime Minister, in 2007, was concerned with the threat to spiritual and cultural heritage from communists but categorised the “Left Wing Extremism” as “probably single biggest security challenge to the Indian state. It continues to be so and we cannot rest in peace until we have eliminated this virus”. He appealed for a well-concerted response to this ‘virus’. He asserted, “we need to cripple the hold of naxalite forces with all the means at our command. This requires improved intelligence gathering capabilities, improved policing capabilities, better coordination between the Centre and the States and better coordination between States and most important, better leadership and firmer resolve. Improving policing capabilities requires better police infrastructure, better training facilities, better equipment and resources and dedicated forces”.

In the background of such a vocal and militant stance of the ruling class against the issue of radical left politics the constitution of committee acquires more interest. In the month of April 2008 a group of “experts” comprising of retired bureaucrats, intellectuals, and “activists”, brought together by the Government of India as an “expert group”, submitted a report to the Planning Commission entitled “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas”. Those who participated are recognised as belonging to the ‘progressive’ fraternity, which possesses a great deal of concern about the issues confronting the Indian masses. And the writers of the report have made at least one significant contribution by suggesting that “…the governments have in practice treated unrest merely as a law and order problem” (p.30) and that it should not be treated as such.

But the report has to deal with this dilemma of being an Expert Group constituted by an oppressive state (which remains silent on the issue of organisation and state patronage to private militias against the left) while ironically the members are also conscious of their ‘progressive tags’. It is from this dilemma the rejection of the political demand of the radical left emerges in the report. It says that “it has to be recognised, however, that no State could agree to a situation of seizure of power through violence when the Constitution provides for change of government through electoral process” (p. 59). Thus, without making an analysis of the politico-ideological basis of the support of such forces the report not only denies such ideologies a legitimate place but also assures the state that there is no alternative to it except that some improvements would make the world a better place. Due to such an orientation the report also fails to reflect on the character of the state as it has been in those areas where the movements are very strong. Its ‘coercive’ form (in Gramscian sense) or the extensive use of the Repressive State Apparatuses (in Althusserian sense) does not figure with prominence.

Rather the report proceeds further with its allegiance to capital, when it writes that “strengthening and reorientation of the law enforcement apparatus is a necessity to ensure justice and peace for the tribal…. The law enforcement machinery in the affected areas would need to be strengthened” and among the many measures they suggest setting up of “additional police stations / outposts in the affected areas; filling up the police vacancies and improving the police-people ratio”; and “sophisticated weapons for the police” (p. 59).

If one looks at the content of the report, it has nothing new to offer in terms of analysis or information. Its ‘sympathetic’ content has already been a part of the public discourse in the country. For instance, it tries to tell us with the help of government statistics and with the help of other works by intellectuals working on Dalits that the condition of Dalits (or Scheduled Castes) and the Scheduled Tribes has been quite dismal. They are poor, socially discriminated and politically powerless. It highlights the issue of displacement due to development projects as well. And the report attributes this to the poor governance among other things. But where is the newness in this, except that it is coming from a Planning Commission report? It is only in this context that the report deserves some amount of commendation.

Reiterating what has already been said by many social scientists the report recognises that “the inequalities between classes, between town and country, and between the upper castes and the underprivileged communities are increasing. That this has potential for tremendous unrest is recognized by all. But somehow policy prescriptions presume otherwise. As the responsibility of the State for providing equal social rights recedes in the sphere of policymaking, we have two worlds of education, two worlds of health, two worlds of transport and two worlds of housing, with a gaping divide in between” (p. 1).

When it comes to talking about the causes of discontent, the report fails to get into the actual reasons or analyses of those causes. By not getting into why inequities become part of a social and economic system, and hence, political as well as cultural systems, the report overall makes an extremely superficial analysis of the situation. Inequity or discrimination that emerges is innate to the order of things in capitalism or where the motivation of the system/capital is towards maximisation of surplus through whatever possible means. Such a system by its very nature would pave way for discontentment of this kind and mobilisation of people in different forms. And that’s why the politico-ideological aim of the movements cannot be rejected flimsily and need to be seen as an intrinsic and indispensable part of the movements. By denying the movements their agency, by stripping them of their political understanding and goals what the report does is that it works towards delegitimising the actual ideological and political aims of an anti-systemic movement.

Nobody disagrees with its arguments such as “the genesis of discontent among Dalits lies in the age-old caste-based social order, which condemns them to a life of deprivation, servility, and indignity” (p.7) or that issues of land and wage are significant determinants which generate frustration and hence motivate people to organise. But it fails to get beyond these obvious reasons and also tends to make generalised and quite isolated conclusions, such as in the context of tribes it says that “apart from poverty and deprivation in general, the causes of the tribal movements are many: the most important among them are absence of self governance, forest policy, excise policy, land related issues, multifaceted forms of exploitation, cultural humiliation and political marginalisation. Land alienation, forced evictions from land, and displacement also added to unrest. Failure to implement protective regulations in Scheduled Areas, absence of credit mechanism leading to dependence on money lenders and consequent loss of land and often even violence by the State functionaries added to the problem” (p. 9). Nobody disagrees with these reasons but there are larger questions which any dialectician would raise such as how far is it possible to remain isolated, insulated, or without any exploitation when the present avatar of capital (i.e., neoliberalism), which determines the development and the character of the system, remains in command of governance. It is not the tragedy of such discourses that they mistakenly do such an analysis forgetting the interrelatedness of things, but it is the ploy of the dominant discourse to further such arguments. And the report quite successfully does so.

At one level, no one doubts its statements that emergence of militant movements “is linked to lack of access to basic resources to sustain livelihood” (p.11). Neither does one discount its argument that “the politics has also been aligned with” the dominant social segment “which constitutes the power structure in rural and urban areas since colonial times. It is this coalition of interests and social background that deeply affect governance at all levels” (p.22). It also rightly argues that “the benefits of this paradigm of development have been disproportionately cornered by the dominant sections at the expense of the poor, who have borne most of the costs” (p.29). But the report pretends innocence when it talks about how the dominant sections of society, i.e., the ruling class, cornered the benefits of the development paradigm. I call it pretentious ‘innocence’ because an analysis of the origins and then the trajectory of development paradigms in India would reveal how, as in other capitalist nations, such paradigms are intrinsically suited to the interests of the ruling classes and capital. The very notion of development is never class neutral, hence the way the benefits of development are “cornered” by certain sections is built-in the very design of the paradigm of development. There is nothing to be shocked about how it operates and what consequences it produces. It is a natural outcome of the rule of capital. The only way out is to oppose it and lay threadbare its dynamics, which the welfarist pangs of the report fails to achieve.

At a more fundamental level, the report seems ill-equipped to even examine the land relations in rural India that have conditioned the nature of rural struggles (including the element of violence). Sitting in the high towers of the state sponsored machinery and seeing the issues and the politics of people through administrative eyes, the bureaucrats and state-aligned intellectuals cannot go beyond perceiving resistances as effects of some laxity in social engineering. They can only lament for the “excesses” and call for playing by the rules. In statements like the following they demonstrate their ignorance of the political economic dynamics of rural society and ensuing conflicts, which could never be bound within the legal administrative framework imposed by the Indian state –

“Equity and law require that all lands of the owners having less than ceiling should be handed back to the owners subject to prevailing laws. Excesses of the Naxalites in this regard are not only unjustified but deserve utmost censure” (p.46).

Let’s look at a scenario in the violence affected Central Bihar’s Arwal district, where the “marginal/small farmers” (characterised by the size of landholdings rather than by land relations) from the Bhumihar caste were among the most vocal members of the militia of the landed, i.e., Ranvir Sena. In such a situation, how does one address the issue of class-ification and hence, drawing of the battle lines. It is not a question of whether the report is right or wrong in making such appeals but it is about the caution that one needs to exercise when analysing movements, which base themselves on class terms and call for radical political transformation.

The report paints a different picture of movements which are overtly political and which demand a change of political power as the only way of weeding out poverty, discrimination and exploitation. It seeks to deny them their actual aims and deprive them of their political orientation. Not only this but what it does is to make suggestions which can minimise the political influence of the radical left in the country through cosmetic humanisation of capitalism. Hence, one need not be surprised when the writers of the report say that “it is evident from the report that, excluding ideological goal of capturing State power through violence, the basic programmes of the Extremists relate to elimination of poverty, deprivation and alienation of the poor and the landless (p. 70). The understanding of class and the role of state as the agent of capital, intrinsic to the left movement (with different shades of debate around the mode of production), has been ignored and hence, capitalism as the enemy escapes our attention as responsible for large scale displacement, deprivation, exploitation and deaths. Inbuilt in this whole exercise is an effort to delegitimise politics of the left as a whole. Like any other safety valve mechanism, it is ultimately an attempt of capitalism in moulding, manipulating and destroying praxis of resistance.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Agrarian Question, Economy, India, Politics

The spectre of socialism for the 21st century

July 11, 2008 by Radical Notes Leave a Comment

Michael Lebowitz

The following is the keynote address to the annual meeting of the Society for Socialist Studies, Vancouver, June 5, 2008. It was originally titled “Building socialism for the 21st century”. To hear an audio recording of the speech, click HERE.

A spectre is haunting capitalism. It is the spectre of socialism for the 21st century. Increasingly, the characteristics of this spectre are becoming clear, and we are able to see enough to understand what it is not. The only thing that is not clear at this point is whether the spectre is real – i.e., whether it is actually an earthly presence.

Consider what this spectre is not. It is not the belief that by struggling within capitalism for reforms that it is possible to change the nature of capitalism — i.e., that a better capitalism, a third way, can suspend the logic of capital (except momentarily). Nor is it a focus upon electing friendly governments to preside over exploitation, oppression and exclusion — i.e., to support barbarism with a human face. Indeed, this spectre does not accept the premise that you can challenge the logic of capital without understanding it. Very simply, the spectre of socialism for the 21st century is not yesterday’s liberal package — social democracy. Further, this spectre is not a focus upon the industrial working class as the revolutionary subjects of socialism, a privileging whereby all other workers (including those in the growing informal sector) are seen as lesser workers, unproductive workers, indeed lumpenproletariat. Nor does it suggest that those industrial workers by virtue of the difference between their productivity with advanced means of production and their incomes (i.e., the extent of their exploitation) have a greater entitlement to the wealth of society than the poor and excluded.

In the conception of socialism for the 21st century, socialism is not confused with the ownership of the means of production by the state such that (a) it is thought that all that is necessary for socialism is to nationalise and (b) that everything not nationalised is an affront. Indeed, this spectre does not emphasise the development of productive forces without regard for the nature of productive relations (such that gulags, dictatorship and indeed capitalism can all be justified because they develop the productive forces and thereby move you closer to socialism and communism).

Nor, for that matter, does it think of two post-capitalist states, socialism and communism, separated by a Chinese wall; in the concept of socialism for the 21st century, there is no separate socialist principle of “to each according to his contribution’’ which must be honoured. Rather, there is simply the recognition that the development of the new society is a process and that this process necessarily begins on a defective basis — in other words, with defects such as self orientation. Precisely for this reason, this recognition of existing defects, the battle of ideas — an ideological battle against the old world — is central to the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Finally, socialism for the 21st century is not based upon democracy in the classic sense. By that, I mean that it is not based upon the concept of representative democracy — that institutional form in which rule by the people is transformed into voting periodically for those who will misrule them. All these fall into what I call yesterday’s socialist package.

Marx and the centrality of human development

So, if the spectre of socialism for the 21st century differs from yesterday’s liberal and socialist packages, what is it?

First of all, it is a stress upon the centrality of human development. In this respect, it is a restoration of the focus of 19th century socialists. It is the vision of a society with the goal (according to Saint-Simon) of providing to its members “the greatest possible opportunity for the development of their faculties’’, a goal to which Louis Blanc referred as ensuring that everyone has “the power to develop and exercise his faculties in order to really be free’’ and of a society in which, according to Friedrich Engels, “every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society’’. This vision of human development which is central to socialism for the 21st century was unquestionably Marx’s vision (Lebowitz, 2006: 53-60)

The Young Marx envisioned a “rich human being’’ — one who has developed their capacities and capabilities to the point where they are able “to take gratification in a many-sided way’’ — “the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses’’ (Marx, 1844: 302). “In place of the wealth and poverty of political economy’’, he proposed, “come the rich human being and rich human need’’ (Marx, 1844: 304). But, it was not only a young, romantic, so-called pre-Marxist Marx who spoke so eloquently about rich human beings. In the Grundrisse, Marx returned explicitly to this conception of human wealth — to a rich human being — “as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations’’; real wealth, he understood, is the development of human capacity — the “development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption’’ (Marx, 1973: 325).

Could anything be clearer? This is what Marx’s conception of socialism was all about — the creation of a society which removes all obstacles to the full development of human beings. He looked ahead to that society of associated producers, where each individual is able to develop her full potential — i.e., the “absolute working-out of his creative potentialities’’, the “complete working out of the human content’’, the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself’’ (Marx, 1973: 488, 541, 708). In contrast to capitalist society in which we are the means to expand the wealth of capital, Marx in his book Capital pointed to that alternative society, “the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’’ (Marx, 1977: 772).

The workers’ own need for development — there is the spectre, there is the impulse for a new society. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx projected that in the cooperative society based upon the common ownership of the means of production, the productive forces would have “increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’’ (Marx, 1875: 24). As he described it in the Communist Manifesto, our goal is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 202-5). Our goal, in short, cannot be a society in which some people are able to develop their capabilities and others are not; we are interdependent, we are all members of a human family. Thus our goal must be the full development of all human potential.

`These ideas live today’

There’s more here than a 19th century view. That these ideas live today can be seen very clearly in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela. In its explicit recognition (in Article 299) that the goal of a human society must be that of “ensuring overall human development’’, in the declaration of Article 20 that “everyone has the right to the free development of his or her own personality’’ and the focus of Article 102 upon “developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society’’ — this theme of human development pervades the Bolivarian Constitution.

Further, there is something there that you don’t find in the liberal conceptions of human development underlying the UN Human Development Index. This constitution also focuses upon the question of how people develop their capacities and capabilities — i.e., how overall human development occurs. Article 62 of the Bolivarian Constitution declares that participation by people in “forming, carrying out and controlling the management of public affairs is the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective’’. The necessary way. And, the same emphasis upon a democratic, participatory and protagonistic society is present in the economic sphere, which is why Article 70 stresses “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms’’ and why Article 102’s goal of “developing the creative potential of every human being’’ emphasises “active, conscious and joint participation’’.

This focus upon practice as essential for human development was, of course, Marx’s central insight into how people change. It’s not a matter simply of spending more on education, health and social services. Remember Marx’s early comment on Robert Owen’s conception that what was needed to change people was to change the circumstances in which they exist. Marx (1845) emphatically rejected the idea that we can give people a gift, that if we just change the circumstances in which they exist they will be themselves different people. You are forgetting, he pointed out, that it is human beings who change circumstances. The idea that we can create new circumstances for people and thereby change them, he insisted, in fact divides society into two parts — one part of which is deemed superior to society. It is the same perspective that Paulo Freire (2006: 72) subsequently rejected in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the concept that “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing’’.

In contrast, Marx introduced the concept of revolutionary practice — “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’’ — the red thread that runs throughout his work. He talked, for example, of how people develop through their own struggles — how this is the only way the working class can “succeed in ridding itself of the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’’. And he told workers that they would have to go through as much as 50 years of struggles “not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power’’. And, again, after the Paris Commune in 1871, over a quarter of a century after he first began to explore this theme, he commented that workers know “they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes, transforming circumstances and men’’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 179-84).

Always the same point — we change ourselves through our activity. This idea of the simultaneous change in circumstances and self-change, however, is not limited to class struggle itself. It is present in all activities of people — i.e., every process of activity has two products — i.e., joint products — the change in circumstances and the change in the actor. This obviously applies in the sphere of production as well. As Marx commented in the Grundrisse, in production “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, …new needs and new language’’. Here, indeed, is the essence of the cooperative society based upon common ownership of the means of production — “when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’’.

How far, of course, this is from the idea that what you have to do is build up the productive forces and thereby transform the conditions in which people exist, transforming their being and their consciousness! But what other inferences flow from these principles — the focus upon human development and upon revolutionary practice, that simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change? Let me suggest that these two principles constitute the “key link’’, the key link we need to grasp (in Lenin’s words) if we are to understand the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Consider, for example, what this means for the process of production. If people are prevented from using their minds within the workplace but instead follow directions from above, you have what Marx described as the crippling of body and mind, producers who are fragmented, degraded, alienated from “the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’’. There’s no surprise that Marx looked forward to the re-combining of head and hand, the uniting of mental and physical labour — i.e., to a time when the individual worker can call “his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain’’. But, more than a simple combination of mental and manual labour within the sphere of production is needed. Without “intelligent direction of production’’ by workers, without production “under their conscious and planned control’’, workers cannot develop their potential as human beings because their own power becomes a power over them (Marx, 1977: 450, 173).

`Protagonistic’ democracy

What kind of productive relations, then, can provide the conditions for the full development of human capacities? Only those in which there is conscious cooperation among associated producers; only those in which the goal of production is that of the workers themselves. Clearly, though, this requires more than worker-management in individual workplaces. They must be the goals of workers in society, too — workers in their communities.

After all, what is production? It’s not something that occurs only in a factory or in what we traditionally identify as a workplace. When we understand the goal as that of human development, we recognise that production should not be confused with production of specific use-values; rather, as Marx noted, all specific products and activities are mere moments in a process of producing human beings, who are the real result of social production. And, that points to the importance of making each moment a site for the collective decision making and variety of activity that develops human capacities.

Implicit in the emphasis of the concept of socialism for the 21st century upon human development and how that development can occur only through practice is our need to be able to develop through democratic, participatory and protagonistic activity in every aspect of our lives. Through revolutionary practice in our communities, our workplaces and in all our social institutions, we produce ourselves as ‘rich human beings’ — rich in capacities and needs — in contrast to the impoverished and crippled human beings that capitalism produces.

In contrast to the hierarchical capitalist state (which Marx understood as an “engine of class despotism’’) and to the despotism of the capitalist workplace, only a revolutionary democracy can create the conditions in which we can invent ourselves daily as rich human beings. This concept is one of democracy in practice, democracy as practice, democracy as protagonism. Democracy in this sense — protagonistic democracy in the workplace, protagonistic democracy in neighbourhoods, communities, communes — is the democracy of people who are transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects.

How else but through protagonistic democracy in production can we ensure that the process of producing is one which enriches people and expands their capacities rather than crippling and impoverishing them? How else but through protagonistic democracy in society can we ensure that what is produced is what is needed to foster the realisation of our potential?

If there is to be democratic production for the needs of society, however, there is an essential precondition: there cannot be a monopolisation of the products of human labour by individuals, groups or the state. In other words, the precondition is social ownership of the means of production: this is the first side of what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has called the “elementary triangle’’ of socialism: (a) social ownership of the means of production, which is a basis for (b) social production organised by workers in order to (c) satisfy communal needs and communal purposes.

Let us consider each element in this particular combination of distribution – production – consumption.

A. Social ownership of the means of production

Social ownership of the means of production is critical because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals or state bureaucrats. Social ownership is not, however, the same as state ownership. Social ownership implies a profound democracy — one in which people function as subjects, both as producers and as members of society, in determining the use of the results of our social labour.

B. Production organised by workers

Production organised by workers builds new relations among producers — relations of cooperation and solidarity. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. And, if workers don’t make decisions in the workplace and develop their capacities, we can be certain that someone else will. Protagonistic democracy in the workplace is an essential condition for the full development of the producers.

C. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes

Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes focuses upon the importance of basing our productive activity upon the recognition of our common humanity and our needs as members of the human family. Thus, it stresses the importance of going beyond self-interest to think of our community and society. As long we produce only for our private gain, how do we look at other people? As competitors or as customers — i.e., as enemies or as means to our own ends; thus, we remain alienated, fragmented and crippled. Rather than relating to others through an exchange relation (and, thus, trying to get the best deal possible for ourselves), this third element of the elementary triangle of socialism has as its goal building a relation to others characterised by our unity based upon recognition of difference; through our activity, then, we both build solidarity among people and at the same time produce ourselves differently.

And, this concept of solidarity is central because it is saying that all human beings, all parts of the collective worker, are entitled to draw upon our “communal, social productivity’’. The premise is not at all that we have the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, that we recognise the centrality of “the worker’s own need for development’’. Further, our claim upon the accumulated fruits of social brain and hand is not based upon exploitation. It is not because you have been exploited that you are entitled to share in the fruits of social labour. Rather, it is because you are a human being in a human society – and because, like all of us, you have the right to the opportunity to develop all your potential.

At the same time as a human being in a human society you also have the obligation to other members of this human family — to make certain that they also have this opportunity, that they too can develop their potential. As a member of this family you are called upon to do your share — a concept also present in the Bolivarian Constitution: Article 135 notes “the obligations which by virtue of solidarity, social responsibility and humanitarian assistance, are incumbent upon individuals according to their abilities’’.

Look at the direction that this key link — human development and the simultaneous changing of circumstance and self-change takes us:

– to democratic decision making in the workplace and the community

– to a focus upon building solidarity and new socialist human beings rather than relying upon exchange relations and material self-interest (which Che Guevara — whose 80th birthday would have been today — warned us leads to a blind alley)

– to a new conception of the state as one which is not over and above civil society (i.e., a state of the Paris Commune-type) — i.e., a state which Marx wrote is our own “living force’’, our own power, rather than a power used against us

– and, for that matter, this key link of human development and revolutionary practice leads us to recognise the need for a political instrument which respects the creative energy and revolutionary practice of masses rather than substitutes its own wisdom. In short, a political instrument which embraces the revolutionary pedagogy of Rosa Luxemburg when she argued: “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn in the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.’’

Is the spectre real? Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

The outlines of the spectre, socialism for the 21st century, become increasingly clear. The question remains, however, is the spectre real? Does it have an earthly presence? Especially, since this vision of the spectre draws so much upon the discourse of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, it is important to ask what the reality is there.

Certainly, socialism for the 21st century has been explicitly on the agenda in Venezuela since Chavez’s closing speech at the January 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when he surprised many people by saying, “We have to re-invent socialism.’’ At that time, Chavez emphasised that “It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.’’ Capitalism has to be transcended, he argued, if we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world. “But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.’’

Without question, there has been progress in this direction. Starting in 2004, oil revenues from the newly recaptured state oil company were directed to new missions which have been providing people with basic prerequisites for human development — education, health care, adequate and affordable food. Important steps, too, have been taken to develop each side of the elementary socialist triangle:

A. Social property: There has been an expansion of state property, which can be a threshold to socialist property (because it is possible to direct state property to satisfy social needs). In addition to the expansion of state sectors in oil and basic industry, to last year’s acquisition of strategic sectors such as communications, electric power and the recovery of the dominant position for the state in the heavy oil fields has been added this year so far a major dairy company and most recently the steel company (SIDOR) that had been privatised by a previous government. Further, the offensive against the latifundia has resumed with several land seizures (or “recoveries’’), and new state companies (including joint ventures with state firms from countries such as Iran) have been created to produce means of production like tractors.

B. Social production: While the government has continued to seek ways to encourage worker-management, in particular by supporting cooperatives and recovered factories, this side of the triangle is the least developed so far. In part, this is because of opposition within the state to worker-management in strategic sectors such as oil and energy, and in part because of opposition from traditional trade unions to co-management structures and workers’ councils. What has been happening is a continued search for forms, and the government has moved from exploring cooperatives as the desired form, to EPS, companies of social production (which made commitments to workers and communities), and now to the exploration of the concept of socialist companies. Everyday, I hear of new ideas in this direction. At this point, this aspect is a work in process. However, it does appear that a previous model of 51% state ownership and 49% ownership by a workers’ cooperative is being replaced by focus upon 100% state ownership with workers’ control. Progress in this area, unfortunately, has been held up by the chaos and intense battles between Chavist trade union currents, and that has been a source of incredible frustration for many — including Chavez. In this process, Chavez continues to exhort the working class to play a leadership role. After this year’s takeover of the dairy producer Los Andes, he argued that “workers’ committees must be created, socialist committees, in order to transform the factory from inside. The workers must know what is happening in the company, participate in decision-making in the firm.’’ And, after the decision to nationalise SIDOR, he announced that the government was a government of the working class. At this very point, the nationalisation of SIDOR after major struggles by the steel workers has re-animated the organised working class; and our institute (Centro Internacional Miranda) has organised roundtables between tendencies and currents that would not have been possible several months ago.

C. Production for social needs: Throughout the country, there are many experiments attempting to link producers and consumers directly — especially in the sphere of agricultural products and in local trading with local currencies. To be able to identify social needs, though, continuing social institutions are required; and the most significant advance that has occurred is the development in 2006 of the new communal councils which are able to identify the needs of their communities. These councils are an extraordinary experiment in bringing power to people in their neighbourhoods — creating an institutional form in which they can diagnose their needs collectively and determine the priorities for their communities. Of course, the idea of participatory diagnosis and budgeting is not unique to Venezuela; that is occurring in a number of communities elsewhere (and the most famous example is Porto Alegre in Brazil). But what is unique in Venezuela is the size of the units in question. Communal councils are formed to represent in urban areas 200-400 families (which can be 1000 people) and in rural areas as few as 20 families. It means that the councils are choosing not distant representatives but, rather, their neighbours, people they know well — and not as representatives but as voceros, spokespersons for the ultimate decision-making body, the general assembly (which, of course, meets in the neighbourhood, thus allowing everyone to participate). In the communal councils you have the embryo for a new state from below. And that was recognised explicitly by Chavez last year when he proclaimed “All Power to the Communal Councils’’. Now, of course, the communal councils are small, and the problems of society go well beyond those that can be resolved at the neighbourhood level. That is understood, and Chavez has called the councils themselves the cell of a new socialist state. They are seen as the building blocks — essential because they are allowing people to develop confidence and capacities in dealing with problems they understand. (Observing the sense of pride in these communities is very moving.) However, it is obviously necessary to begin to combine the communal councils into larger associations in order to deal with larger problems. And that is precisely what is happening now with the creation of pilot projects to combine some of the more advanced groups of councils into socialist communes. The process envisioned is very clearly one of trying to build a new state from below.

So, is this spectre of socialism for the 21st century, with its focus upon human development and practice, real? Clearly, it is not just words. There is truly an attempt to make socialism for the 21st century real. But, can it succeed?

Can socialism for the 21st century succeed?

You might wonder, why am I even posing this question — given evidence that the desire is there and knowledge that the great oil revenues available provide the means!

Three years ago, I gave a talk in Venezuela called “Socialism doesn’t drop from the sky’’, which has been very widely circulated in Venezuela (largely because Chavez has talked about it a number of times on television); it is also a chapter in my book, Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. One aspect of the title of that essay refers to the obvious point that socialism obviously is necessarily rooted in particular societies — which is to say that it must be developed in societies with particular histories. To understand the possibilities for success in Venezuela, you have to know something about the nature of that society.

Now, I can’t give you a complete, balanced account of Venezuela in the time left. So, I’ll just stress just some of the characteristics which suggest significant obstacles to building socialism for the 21st century in Venezuela.

When you talk about Venezuela, you have to begin with oil. Not only the effect of oil exports upon the hollowing-out of the economy such that local manufacturing and agriculture effectively disappeared as the result of an exchange rate which made it much cheaper to import everything rather than to produce it domestically. It’s an extreme example of what is called the “Dutch disease’’: despite rich agricultural land, Venezuela was importing 70% of its food. So, massive migration from the countryside to live in the cities, e.g., in the hills surrounding Caracas — 80% of the population is urban, maybe 10% engaged in agriculture. And as for industry, it was largely import processing — processing food, assembling cars and assorted other import-related sectors. Oil production itself doesn’t generate many jobs, so we have to think about unemployment, an informal sector (about 50% of the working class) and poverty — extreme social debt and inequality.

Add to that economic effect, the effect upon state and society. Unlike the classic picture of a state resting upon civil society, upon the social classes, in Venezuela, civil society rests upon the state. Contrary to Engels’ sneers at Tkachev, in Venezuela the state indeed has been suspended in mid-air — or, more precisely, suspended upon an oil geyser. Thus, the state has been the supreme object of desire — or, more precisely, access to the state for the purpose of gaining access to oil rents has been a national preoccupation. And, in this orgy of rent seeking within a poverty-stricken society — a culture of corruption and clientalism, parasitic capitalists who don’t invest, a labour aristocracy with trade union leaders who sell jobs, a party system which functions as an alternating transmission belt for elections and access to state jobs, a state which mostly does not work because it is filled with incompetent sinecurists but, when it does, is completely top-down. These are just a few characteristics worth mentioning.

All of this was present in Venezuela when Chavez was elected in 1998. And, you would have to be truly naïve to think that it disappeared when Chávez came to office. On the contrary, it pervades Chavism — the corruption, the clientalism, the nature of the state, the nature of the party (including the new party – PSUV — currently being built), the gap between the organised working class and the poor in the informal sector — it’s all there! And, you will recognise that it is entirely contrary to everything in the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

Socialism doesn’t drop from the sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. And, these two souls which currently beat in the breast of Venezuela are clearly at war. Chavez often cites [Italian Marxist Antonio] Gramsci about how the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born (although he leaves out the part about how a great many morbid symptoms appear at that time). Precisely because of these two opposed tendencies, when I write about Venezuela, I always stress the internal struggle within Chavism as the main obstacle to the success of the Bolivarian Revolution. Obviously, it is not the only obstacle — there is the existing oligarchy, the latifundists (who are the most reactionary and violent part of the opposition), the existing capitalists in their enclaves of import processing, finance and the media (which has been their main weapon) and, of course, US imperialism. Not only was the US complicit in the 2002 coup which briefly removed Chavez and in the oil lockout and sabotage later that year, but it also funds and trains the opposition, orchestrates the international media blitz against Venezuela (currently with the assistance of magical laptop computers produced by its Colombian clients), and it is in the process of bringing the US navy back to patrol the waters off Venezuela.

Imperialism is no paper tiger. And, clearly, solidarity with the Bolivarian process is essential by those outside the country who value the concepts and developments I have described. However, I stress the internal obstacles to socialism within Chavism — the emerging new capitalists (the “bolibourgeoisie’’), the high officials (both from military and vanguardist traditions — it is difficult to see the distinction) who are opposed to power from below in workplaces and communities (and, thus opposed, in this respect, to human development and revolutionary practice), the party functionaries and nomenklatura. Why do I stress this? Because I consider this the ultimate contradiction of the revolution; and, I think the struggle between this “endogenous right’’ (the right from within) and the masses who have been mobilised is the ultimate conflict which will determine the fate of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Who will win?

Who will win? I have to tell you honestly that I don’t know. My daily mantra in Venezuela is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’’. I can tell you that Venezuela is no place for a revolutionary who suffers from bipolar disorder. There are the days of depression and despair; there are the days of manic exultation. In the end, it will all depend upon struggle, class struggle, and when it comes to class struggle, there are no guarantees.

But let’s assume a worse-case scenario — that the process in Venezuela degenerates, that it proceeds to demoralise its supporters, is defeated in one way or another by defectors, domestic capitalists, the military or imperialism. Let’s assume, in other words, that this particular earthly manifestation of the spectre of socialism for the 21st century is no more.

What will be left? A spectre — but one with much more substance than Marx and Engels could write about in the Communist Manifesto in the mid-19th century. A spectre — but one which is capable of becoming a material force by grasping the minds of masses. A spectre — but one which is absolutely essential to our survival because of another spectre.

Think about this concept of socialism for the 21st century. About the focus upon human development as the goal, upon a democratic, participatory, protagonistic society as the necessary way for the complete development of people, individually and collectively. Think about the idea of communal councils in which people can collectively decide upon their needs, where they simultaneously change circumstances and themselves. Think about democracy in the workplace, about ending the divide between thinking and doing and being able to draw upon the tacit knowledge of workers to be able to produce better. Think in general about this concept of revolutionary democracy which is central to the concept of socialism for the 21st century.

This is not a concept just for Venezuela or Latin America or for the poor of the South. Why is this not a spectre that can appeal to Canadians in their communities and workplaces? Why is there not the potential for a political instrument here that can focus upon these aspects, that can put forward a vision and that can be a medium for coordinating these struggles from below?

I suggest that this is not just a nice wish — it is a necessity. Because there is another spectre out there — a spectre which is haunting humanity, the spectre of barbarism.

Think about capitalism. Its very essence is the drive to expand capital. The picture is one of capital constantly generating more surplus value in the form of commodities which must be sold, constantly trying to create new needs in order to make real that surplus value in the form of money. That constant generation of new needs, Marx noted already in the mid 19th century, is the basis of the contemporary power of capital.

Thus, a growing circle — a spiral of growing alienated production, growing needs and growing consumption. But how long can that continue? Everyone knows that the high levels of consumption achieved in certain parts of the world cannot be copied in the parts of the world which capital has newly incorporated into the world capitalist economy. Very simply, the Earth cannot sustain this — as we can already see with the clear evidence of global warming and the growing shortages which reflect rising demands for particular products in the new capitalist centers. Sooner or later, that circle will reach its limits. Its ultimate limit is given by the limits of nature, the limits of the Earth to sustain more and more consumption of commodities, more and more consumption of the Earth’s resources.

But well before we reach the ultimate limits of the vicious circle of capitalism, there inevitably will arise the question of who is entitled to command those increasingly limited resources. To whom will go the oil, the metals, the water — all those requirements of modern life? Will it be the currently rich countries of capitalism, those that have been able to develop because others have not? In other words, will they be able to maintain the vast advantages they have in terms of consumption of things and resources — and to use their power to grab the resources located in other countries? Will newly emerging capitalist countries (and, indeed, those not emerging at all) be able to capture a “fair share’’? Will the impoverished producers of the world — producers well aware of the standards of consumption elsewhere as the result of the mass media — accept that they are not entitled to the fruits of civilisation? How will this be resolved?

The spectre of barbarism is haunting humanity. And, what is the alternative to it? Yesterday’s liberalism — social democracy — has never understood the nature of capital and offers, accordingly, only barbarism with a human face. And, yesterday’s socialist package, with its promise of more rapid development of productive forces, its privileging of industrial workers and, its premise of a stage based upon a principle that we all must get in accordance with our contribution — this is no alternative to the crisis humanity faces.

Whatever the ultimate fate of the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, its principal contribution has been to restore hope; it has done this by revealing that there is an alternative to neoliberalism and the logic of capital. The alternative offered by socialism for the 21st century points to the need to understand that, regardless of the luck of our birthplaces or our own past contributions, the accumulated fruits of social brain and hand belong to us all. Internationally, its alternative is ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which has created links between Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia based upon solidarity rather than exchange relations. At the core of the alternative offered by socialism for the 21st century is the idea of building a society based upon relations of solidarity — solidarity between producers, e.g., in formal and informal sectors, solidarity between those of the North and those of the South. At its core is the idea of producing consciously for communal needs and purposes and thereby building a society in which the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each.

So, let me conclude with a point that is completely unoriginal but which, so significantly, is being heard more and more these days: the choice before us is — socialism or barbarism.

Let me add, though, that socialism doesn’t drop from the sky — you have to struggle to make it real.

Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and director of the Centro International Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.

Bibliography

Freire, Paulo. 2006. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum).

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2003. Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2006. Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Marx, Karl. 1844. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels (1975b), Collected Works, Vol. 3.

Marx, Karl. 1845. ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx and Engels (1976), Collected Works, Vol. 5.

Marx, Karl. 1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels (1962), Selected Works, Vol. II.

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books).

Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books).

Courtesy: Links

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: Marxism, Venezuela, Working Class