Venezuelan Referendum: A Post-Mortem and its Aftermath

December 5, 2007 by 1 Comment

James Petras

Venezuela’s constitutional reforms supporting President Chavez’s socialist project were defeated by the narrowest of margins: 1.4% of 9 million voters. The result however was severely compromised by the fact that 45% of the electorate abstained, meaning that only 28% of the electorate voted against the progressive changes proposed by President Chavez.

While the vote was a blow to Venezuela’s attempt to extricate itself from oil dependence and capitalist control over strategic financial and productive sectors, it does no change the 80% majority in the legislature nor does it weaken the prerogatives of the Executive branch. Nevertheless, the Right’s marginal win does provide a semblance of power, influence and momentum to their efforts to derail President Chavez’ socio-economic reforms and to oust his government and/or force him to reconcile with the old elite power brokers.

Internal deliberations and debates have already begun within the Chavista movement and among the disparate oppositional groups. One fact certain to be subject to debate is why the over 3 million voters who cast their ballots for Chavez in the 2006 election (where he won 63% of the vote) did not vote in the referendum. The Right only increased their voters by 300,000 votes; even assuming that these votes were from disgruntled Chavez voters and not from activated right-wing middle class voters that leaves out over 2.7 million Chavez voters who abstained.

Diagnosis of the Defeat

Whenever the issue of a socialist transformation is put at the top of a governmental agenda, as Chavez did in these constitutional changes, all the forces of right-wing reaction and their (‘progressive’) middle class followers unite forces and forget their usual partisan bickering. Chavez’ popular supporters and organizers faced a vast array of adversaries each with powerful levers of power. They included: 1) numerous agencies of the US government (CIA, AID, NED and the Embassy’s political officers), their subcontracted ‘assets’ (NGO’s, student recruitment and indoctrinations programs, newspaper editors and mass media advertisers), the US multi-nationals and the Chamber of Commerce (paying for anti-referendum ads, propaganda and street action); 2) the major Venezuelan business associations FEDECAMARAS, Chambers of Commerce and wholesale/retailers who poured millions of dollars into the campaign, encouraged capital flight and promoted hoarding, black market activity to bring about shortages of basic food-stuffs in popular retail markets; 3) over 90% of the private mass media engaged in a non-stop virulent propaganda campaign made up of the most blatant lies – including stories that the government would seize children from their families and confine them to state-controlled schools (the US mass media repeated the most scandalous vicious lies – without any exceptions); 4) The entire Catholic hierarchy from the Cardinals to the local parish priests used their bully platforms and homilies to propagandize against the constitutional reforms – more important, several bishops turned over their churches as organizing centers to violent far right-wing resulting, in one case, in the killing of a pro-Chavez oil worker who defied their street barricades. The leaders of the counter-reform quartet were able to buy-out and attract small sectors of the ‘liberal’ wing of the Chavez Congressional delegation and a couple of Governors and mayors, as well as several ex-leftists (some of whom were committed guerrillas 40 years ago), ex-Maoists from the ‘Red Flag’ group and several Trotskyists trade union leaders and sects. A substantial number of social democratic academics (Edgar Lander, Heinz Dietrich) found paltry excuses for opposing the egalitarian reforms, providing an intellectual gloss to the rabid elite propaganda about Chavez ‘dictatorial’ or ‘Bonapartist’ tendencies.

This disparate coalition headed by the Venezuelan elite and the US government relied basically on pounding the same general message: The re-election amendment, the power to temporarily suspend certain constitutional provisions in times of national emergency (like the military coup and lockouts of 2002 to 2003), the executive nomination of regional administrators and the transition to democratic socialism were part of a plot to impost ‘Cuban communism’. Right-wing and liberal propagandists turned unlimited re-election reform (a parliamentary practice throughout the world) into a ‘power grab’ by an ‘authoritarian’ / ’totalitarian’ / ’power-hungry’ tyrant according to all Venezuelan private media and their US counterparts at CBC, NBC, ABC, NPR, New York and Los Angeles Times, Washington Post. The amendment granting the President emergency powers was de-contextualized from the actual US-backed civilian elite-military coup and lockout of 2002-2003, the elite recruitment and infiltration of scores of Colombian paramilitary death squads (2005), the kidnapping of a Venezuelan-Colombian citizen by Colombian secret police (2004) in the center of Caracas and open calls for a military coup by the ex-Defense Minister Baduel.

Each sector of the right-wing led counter-reform coalition focused on distinct and overlapping groups with different appeals. The US focused on recruiting and training student street fighters channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars via AID and NED for training in ‘civil society organization’ and ‘conflict resolution’ (a touch of dark humor?) in the same fashion as the Yugoslav/Ukrainian/Georgian experiences. The US also spread funds to their long-term clients – the nearly defunct ‘social democratic’ trade union confederation – the CTV, the mass media and other elite allies. FEDECAMARAS focused on the small and big business sectors, well-paid professionals and middle class consumers. The right-wing students were the detonators of street violence and confronted left-wing students in and off the campuses. The mass media and the Catholic Church engaged in fear mongering to the mass audience. The social democratic academics preached ‘NO’ or abstention to their progressive colleagues and leftist students. The Trotskyists split up sectors of the trade unions with their pseudo-Marxist chatter about “Chavez the Bonapartist’ with his ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ proclivities, incited US trained students and shared the ‘NO’ platform with CIA funded CTV trade union bosses. Such were the unholy alliances in the run-up to the vote.

In the post-election period this unstable coalition exhibited internal differences. The center-right led by Zulia Governor Rosales calls for a new ‘encounter’ and ‘dialogue’ with the ‘moderate’ Chavista ministers. The hard right embodied in ex-General Baduel (darling of sectors of the pseudo-left) demands pushing their advantage further toward ousting President-elect Chavez and the Congress because he claimed “they still have the power to legislate reforms”! Such, such are our democrats! The leftists sects will go back to citing the texts of Lenin and Trotsky (rolling over in their graves), organizing strikes for wage increases…in the new context of rising right-wing power to which they contributed.

Campaign and Structural Weakness of the Constitutional Reformers

The Right-wing was able to gain their slim majority because of serious errors in the Chavista electoral campaign as well as deep structural weaknesses.

Referendum Campaign: 1) The referendum campaign suffered several flaws. President Chavez, the leader of the constitutional reform movement was out of the country for several weeks in the last two months of the campaign – in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, France, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Iran) depriving the campaign of its most dynamic spokesperson. 2) President Chavez got drawn into issues which had no relevance to his mass supporters and may have provided ammunition to the Right. His attempt to mediate in the Colombian prisoner-exchange absorbed an enormous amount of wasted time and led, predictably, nowhere, as Colombia’s death squad President Uribe abruptly ended his mediation with provocative insults and calumnies, leading to a serious diplomatic rupture. Likewise, during the Ibero-American summit and its aftermath, Chavez engaged in verbal exchange with Spain’s tin-horn monarch, distracting him from facing domestic problems like inflation and elite-instigated hoarding of basic food stuffs.

Many Chavista activists failed to elaborate and explain the proposed positive effects of the reforms, or carry house-to-house discussions countering the monstrous propaganda (‘stealing children from their mothers’) propagated by parish priests and the mass media. They too facilely assumed that the fear-mongering lies were self-evident and all that was needed was to denounce them. Worst of all, several ‘Chavista’ leaders failed to organize any support because they opposed the amendments, which strengthened local councils at the expense of majors and governors.

The campaign failed to intervene and demand equal time and space in all the private media in order to create a level playing field. Too much emphasis was placed on mass demonstrations ‘downtown’ and not on short-term impact programs in the poor neighborhoods –solving immediate problems, like the disappearance of milk from store shelves, which irritated their natural supporters.
Structural weaknesses

There were two basic problems which deeply influenced the electoral abstention of the Chavez mass supporters: The prolonged scarcity of basic foodstuffs and household necessities, and the rampant and seemingly uncontrolled inflation (18%) during the latter half of 2007 which was neither ameliorated nor compensated by wage and salary increases especially among the 40% of self-employed workers in the informal sector.

Basic foodstuffs like powdered milk, meat, sugar, beans and many other items disappeared from both the private and even the public stores. Agro-businessmen refused to produce and the retail bosses refused to sell because state price controls (designed to control inflation) lessened their exorbitant profits. Unwilling to ‘intervene’ the Government purchased and imported hundreds of millions of dollars of foodstuffs – much of which did not reach popular consumers, at least not at fixed prices.

Partially because of lower profits and in large part as a key element in the anti-reform campaign, wholesalers and retailers either hoarded or sold a substantial part of the imports to black marketers, or channeled it to upper income supermarkets.

Inflation was a result of the rising incomes of all classes and the resultant higher demand for goods and services in the context of a massive drop in productivity, investment and production. The capitalist class engaged in disinvestment, capital flight, luxury imports and speculation in the intermediate bond and real estate market (some of whom were justly burned by the recent collapse of the Miami real estate bubble).

The Government’s half-way measures of state intervention and radical rhetoric were strong enough to provoke big business resistance and more capital flight, while being too weak to develop alternative productive and distributive institutions. In other words, the burgeoning crises of inflation, scarcities and capital flight, put into question the existing Bolivarian practice of a mixed economy, based on public-private partnership financing an extensive social welfare state. Big Capital has acted first economically by boycotting and breaking its implicit ‘social pact’ with the Chavez Government. Implicit in the social pact was a trade off: Big Profits and high rates of investment to increase employment and popular consumption. With powerful backing and intervention from its US partners, Venezuelan big business has moved politically to take advantage of the popular discontent to derail the proposed constitutional reforms. It’s next step is to reverse the halting momentum of socio-economic reform by a combination of pacts with social democratic ministers in the Chavez Cabinet and threats of a new offensive, deepening the economic crisis and playing for a coup.

Policy Alternatives

The Chavez Government absolutely has to move immediately to rectify some basic domestic and local problems, which led to discontent, and abstention and is undermining its mass base. For example, poor neighborhoods inundated by floods and mudslides are still without homes after 2 years of broken promises and totally inept government agencies.

The Government, under popular control, must immediately and directly intervene in taking control of the entire food distribution program, enlisting dock, transport and retail workers, neighborhood councils to insure imported food fills the shelves and not the big pockets of counter-reform wholesalers, big retail owners and small-scale black marketers. What the Government has failed to secure from big farmers and cattle barons in the way of production of food, it must secure via large-scale expropriation, investment and co-ops to overcome business ‘production’ and supply strikes. Voluntary compliance has been demonstrated NOT TO WORK. ‘Mixed economy’ dogma, which appeals to ‘rational economic calculus’, does not work when high stake political interests are in play.

To finance structural changes in production and distribution, the Government is obligated to control and take over the private banks deeply implicated in laundering money, facilitating capital flight and encouraging speculative investments instead of production of essential goods for the domestic market.

The Constitutional reforms were a step toward providing a legal framework for structural reform, at least of moving beyond a capitalist controlled mixed economy. The excess ‘legalism’ of the Chavez Government in pursuing a new referendum underestimated the existing legal basis for structural reforms available to the government to deal with the burgeoning demands of the two-thirds of the population, which elected Chavez in 2006.

In the post-referendum period the internal debate within the Chavez movement is deepening. The mass base of poor workers, trade unionists and public employees demand pay increases to keep up with inflation, an end to the rising prices and scarcities of commodities. They abstained for lack of effective government action – not because of rightist or liberal propaganda. They are not rightists or socialist but can become supportive of socialists if they solve the triple scourge of scarcity, inflation and declining purchasing power.

Inflation is a particular nemesis to the poorest workers largely in the informal sector because their income is neither indexed to inflation as is the case for unionized workers in the formal sector nor can they easily raise their income through collective bargaining as most of them are not tied to any contract with buyers or employers. As a result in Venezuela (as elsewhere) price inflation is the worst disaster for the poor and the reason for the greatest discontent. Regimes, even rightist and neo-liberal ones, which stabilize prices or sharply reduce inflation usually secure at least temporary support from the popular classes. Nevertheless anti-inflationary policies have rarely played a role in leftist politics (much to their grief) and Venezuela is no exception.

At the cabinet, party and social movement leadership level there are many positions but they can be simplified into two polar opposites. On the one side, the pro-referendum dominant position put forth by the finance, economy and planning ministries seek cooperation with private foreign and domestic investors, bankers and agro-businessmen, to increase production, investment and living standards of the poor. They rely on appeals to voluntary co-operation, guarantees to property ownership, tax rebates, access to foreign exchange on favorable terms and other incentives plus some controls on capital flight and prices but not on profits. The pro-socialist sector argues that this policy of partnership has not worked and is the source of the current political impasse and social problems. Within this sector some propose a greater role for state ownership and control, in order to direct investments and increase production and to break the boycott and stranglehold on distribution. Another group argues for worker self-management councils to organize the economy and push for a new ‘revolutionary state’. A third group argues for a mixed state with public and self-managed ownership, rural co-operatives and middle and small-scale private ownership in a highly regulated market.

The future ascendance of the mixed economy group may lead to agreements with the ‘soft liberal’ opposition – but failing to deal with scarcities and inflation will only exacerbate the current crisis. The ascendance of the more radical groups will depend on the end of their fragmentation and sectarianism and their ability to fashion a joint program with the most popular political leader in the country, President Hugo Chavez.

The referendum and its outcome (while important today) is merely an episode in the struggle between authoritarian imperial centered capitalism and democratic workers centered socialism.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With:

A Review of “The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays”

November 13, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Manish Kumar Shrivastava 

Utsa Patnaik, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays , Three Essays Collective, New Delhi, 2007. ISBN: 81-88789-33-XX, pp. 232, Price (PB): Rs. 250.

“It is necessary for development…..some people have to pay the price for the time being……Once we are developed and become superpower everybody would be benefitted.”

There can be different reactions to this statement. For somebody following the development discourse from a people’s perspective, this kind of argument doesn’t come as a surprise. Rather, a routine reaction follows—oh, here comes another neo-liberal. But one has to take it with pinch of salt if it comes from a 12 year old boy in a small town of Madhya Pradesh. This boy was arguing in favor of large dams, Sardar Sarovar in particular. The argument then went further, supporting all sorts of displacements of people due to so-called ‘development’ projects. His argument was supplemented by more than a dozen other boys and girls of his age who were visibly excited by the idea of becoming a ‘superpower’ one day. They were convinced that only dams and shopping malls mean development and unless Indian has them it cannot become a superpower. There were also a handful boys and girls, little younger, who didn’t seem convinced with this idea of development and tried to articulate their concerns and doubts, but they certainly lacked the language and information. They could not understand how the electricity produced at the dams would improve the lives of those who have been displaced. Those who don’t have houses anymore wouldn’t need that electricity in the first place. They lost the battle of words despite applying their minds to an extent their parents don’t expect them to (or may even don’t want them to). Those who were dumb otherwise parroted what is available in plenty in electronic and print media, won the battle.

The incident is not about the half baked arguments and big words coming out of little mouths. It indeed is a miniature of a much larger issue that faces the progressive politics. The biggest lacuna of progressive politics, today, at least in India, is the lack of a language which can communicate with the majority of population whose thinking process has been enslaved by the neo-liberal propaganda. The words—development and growth—have become a holy cow which cannot be questioned even when thousands of farmers continue to  commit  suicide and more than 70 % of the population is living at less than Rs. 20 per day. The essays collected in the volume ‘The Republic of Hunger’ come across as an attempt to fill in for the lack of a language that would enable even a non-expert to argue with the so-called ‘experts’ writing and shouting continuously in the media. In these essays, Utsa Patnaik has tried to sort the threads of wool called economics.

One very easy explanation for the underdevelopment that catches the public imagination instantly is the growing population. Media and policy makers keep on harping what a monster population is for developing countries. That it puts immense pressure on scarce natural resources and it cannot be sustained. People are dying because there is not enough food and so on. Such a simplistic logic, which is nothing but a truism, gets easy acceptance among those who have no access to information and who genuinely believe in what the governments say in media. Utsas Patnaik unfolds this argument and shows that access to food or any other facility is not primarily a question of limited supply but it is essentially a question of politics, which in order to safeguard the interests of powerful creates and constructs such economic systems where less powerful are forced to give up their resources even at the cost of compromising with their own basic minimum needs.

In the essays collected in this volume, Utsa Patnaik has tried to explain the phenomenon of wide-spread hunger in the developing countries. Her analysis focuses on Indian case but she also generalizes it by citing cases of other Asian, Latin American and African countries. The central claim of this volume is that the wide spread hunger in the developing and under-developed countries is an inherent constituent of the centre-periphery relationship among the West and the rest of the world. Patnaik argues that the present day situation is nothing but a re-incarnation of the colonial era where the high standards of living in the West are maintained at the cost of declining nutrition levels and incomes in the developing countries (p.25). In her analysis, she equates the end results of colonial rule and free trade.  She argues that the inability of the West to produce a wide range of agricultural products due to climatic reasons necessitates their need to get free and easy access to the agricultural products of Tropical countries. This leads them to have either a direct political control over the resources of developing countries, as they did during the colonial period or an indirect economic control through the propagation of free trade dogma. She argues that the theoretical exercises done by Smith and Ricardo and many more contemporary neo-liberals, to show that free trade is equally beneficiary to all parties are fallacious as they overlook the uneven distribution of productive capacities.

One striking aspect of this volume is the similarities it draws between the colonial period and the present times. The similarity in the mechanisms through which per capita food grain output as well as availability declines in the colonies, which are now developing countries, shows that the exploitation of these countries has not stopped by any means, only its form and articulation has changed. The pattern of agricultural activity today is similar to that of colonial times. The agricultural sector is witnessing a shifting cropping pattern away from domestic food grain requirements and a focus on export of primary products, which were also the critical component of colonial policy in India and other countries. Another critical similarity between colonial rule and present neo-liberal rule is the steep decline in the purchasing power of the masses through deflationary policies—a complete withdrawal of the government from the social expenditure.

One of the conclusions that Patnaik draws in her work is that the complete trade liberalization, withdrawal of price support and subsidy cuts mean that the “protection of mass livelihoods and guarantee of subsistence have ceased to be the aim of state policy.” It is important, however, to note here that if one looks at the role of state the state policy seems to be more concerned about its people in the West as against this absolutely ‘callous’ attitude of the state in developing countries. Patnaik has repeatedly highlighted that the developed countries have not only maintained subsidies to their farmers but have, in fact, improved the protection while the developing countries have been following blind deflationary policies.

The second conclusion that Utsa Patnaik arrives at concerns loss of food security in the developing countries. She argues that the misery of Third World is necessary for the economic and social stability of capitalism in the developed world (p.89) and the material gains of the capitalist system that the West has achieved can be sustained only by squeezing the rights and livelihoods of the Third World population.

Consequent to this is her third conclusion, which is about the necessity to reject the capitalist model in order to ensure the food security for all. She demonstrates with the help of two examples – through the consequences emanating out of the shift from a socialist planned economy to a capitalist economy after the debacle of USSR and the second being the peasant resistance in the Chiapas region of Mexico against the neo-liberal policies. She argues that after the collapse of USSR, the social security went completely haywire as unemployment and mortality rates shot through the roof due to blind privatization of public sector. On the other hand, after Mexico became a part of NAFTA and imposed the neo-liberal policies, the impoverished peasants in Chiapas province rose in revolt against NAFTA. They forced the Mexican government to setup a ‘National Commission for Integral Development and Social Justice for Indigenous People’ and also drew up their own plans for the ‘restoration of land to campesino, abolition of debts…[and] have set up new organizational forms of cooperation among the diverse groups in the area’ (p.95). In other words, she argues that the neo-liberal model of privatization, deflationary policies and export promotion inevitably leads to the break-down of social security which forces the masses to revolt against it and set up a cooperative system against the dogma of competition.


Manish Kumar Shrivastava is a research scholar with the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Filed Under: COMMENTARIES, REVIEWS

Venezuela: Between Ballots and Bullets

November 13, 2007 by Leave a Comment

James Petras

Venezuela’s democratically elected Present Chavez faces the most serious threat since the April 11, 2002 military coup. Violent street demonstrations by privileged middle and upper middle class university students have led to major street battles in and around the center of Caracas.  More seriously, the former Minister of Defense, General Raul Isaias Baduel, who resigned in July, has made explicit calls for a military coup in a November 5th press conference which he convoked exclusively for the right and far-right mass media and political parties, while striking a posture as an ‘individual’ dissident.

The entire international and local private mass media has played up Baduel’s speeches, press conferences along with fabricated accounts of the oppositionist student rampages, presenting them as peaceful protests for democratic rights against the government referendum scheduled for December 2, 2007. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC News and the Washington Post have all primed their readers for years with stories of President Chavez’ ‘authoritarianism’. Faced with constitutional reforms which strengthen the prospects for far-reaching political-social democratization, the US, European and Latin American media have cast pro-coup ex-military officials as ‘democratic dissidents’, former Chavez supporters disillusioned with his resort to ‘dictatorial’ powers in the run-up to and beyond the December 2, 2007 vote in the referendum on constitutional reform.  Not a single major newspaper has mentioned the democratic core of the proposed reforms – the devolution of public spending and decision to local neighborhood and community councils.  Once again as in Chile in 1973, the US mass media is complicit in an attempt to destroy a Latin American democracy.

Even sectors of the center-left press and parties in Latin America have reproduced right-wing propaganda.  On November the self-styled ‘leftist’ Mexican daily La Jornada headline read ‘Administrators and Students from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) Accuse Chavez of Promoting Violence’.  The article then proceeded to repeat the rightist fabrications about electoral polls, which supposedly showed the constitutional amendments facing defeat.

The United States Government, both the Republican White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress are once again overtly backing the new attempt to oust the popular-nationalist President Chavez and to defeat the highly progressive constitutional amendments.

The Referendum:  Defining and Deepening the Social Transformation

The point of confrontation is the forthcoming referendum on constitutional reforms initiated by President Chavez, debated, amended and democratically voted on by the Venezuelan Congress over the past 6 months.  There was widespread and open debate and criticism of specific sectors of the Constitution.  The private mass media, overwhelmingly viscerally anti-Chavez and pro-White House, unanimously condemned any and all the constitutional amendments.  A sector of the leadership of one of the components of the pro-Chavez coalition (PODEMOS) joined the Catholic Church hierarchy, the leading business and cattleman’s association, bankers and sectors of the university and student elite to attack the proposed constitutional reforms.  Exploiting to the hilt all of Venezuela’s democratic freedoms (speech, assembly and press) the opposition has denigrated the referendum as ‘authoritarian’ even as most sectors of the opposition coalition attempted to arouse the military to intervene.

The opposition coalition of the rich and privileged fear the constitutional reforms because they will have to grant a greater share of their profits to the working class, lose their monopoly over market transactions to publicly owned firms, and see political power evolve toward local community councils and the executive branch.  While the rightist and liberal media in Venezuela, Europe and the US have fabricated lurid charges about the ‘authoritarian’ reforms, in fact the amendments propose to deepen and extend social democracy.

A brief survey of the key constitutional amendments openly debated and approved by a majority of freely elected Venezuelan Congress members gives the lie to charges of ‘authoritarianism’ by its critics. The amendments can be grouped according to political, economic and social changes.

The most important political change is the creation of new locally based democratic forms of political representation in which elected community and communal institutions will be allocated state revenues rather than the corrupt, patronage-infested municipal and state governments. This change towards decentralization will encourage a greater practice of direct democracy in contrast to the oligarchic tendencies embedded in the current centralized representative system.

Secondly, contrary to the fabrications of ex-General Baduel, the amendments do not ‘destroy the existing constitution’, since the amendments modify in greater or lesser degree only 20% of the articles of the constitution (69 out of 350).

The amendments providing for unlimited term elections are in line with the practices of many parliamentary systems, as witnessed by the five terms in office of Australian Prime Minister Howard, the half century rule of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the four terms of US President Franklin Roosevelt, the multi-term election of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in the UK among others.  No one ever questions their democratic credentials for multi-term executive office holding, nor should current critics selectively label Chavez as an ‘authoritarian’ for doing the same.

Political change increasing the presidential term of office from 6 to 7 years will neither increase nor decrease presidential powers, as the opposition claims, because the separation of legislative, judicial and executive powers will continue and free elections will subject the President to periodic citizen review.

The key point of indefinite elections is that they are free elections, subject to voter preference, in which, in the case of Venezuela, the vast majority of the mass media, Catholic hierarchy, US-funded NGO’s, big business associations will still wield enormous financial resources to finance opposition activity – it is hardly an ‘authoritarian’ context!

The amendment allowing the executive to declare a state of emergency and intervene in the media in the face of violent activity to overthrow the constitution is essential for safeguarding democratic institutions.  In light of several authoritarian violent attempts to seize power recently by the current opposition, the amendment allows dissent but also allows democracy to defend itself against the enemies of freedom.  In the lead up to the US-backed military coup of April 11, 2002, and the petroleum lockout by its senior executives which devastated the economy (a decline of 30% of GNP in 2002/2003), if the Government had possessed and utilized emergency powers, of Congress and the Judiciary, the electoral process and the living standards of the Venezuelan people would have been better protected.  Most notably, the Government could have intervened against the mass media aiding and abetting the violent overthrow of the democratic process, like any other democratic government.  It should be clear that the amendment allowing for ‘emergency powers’ has a specific context and reflects concrete experiences:  the current opposition parties, business federations and church hierarchies have a violent, anti-democratic history.  The destabilization campaign against the current referendum and the appeals for military intervention most prominently and explicitly stated by retired General Baduel (defended by his notorious adviser-apologist, the academic-adventurer Heinz Dietrich), are a clear indication that emergency powers are absolutely necessary to send a clear message that reactionary violence will be met by the full force of the law.

The reduction of voting age from 18 to 16 will broaden the electorate, increase the number of participants in the electoral process and give young people a greater say in national politics through institutional channels.  Since many workers enter the labor market at a young age and in some cases start families earlier, this amendment allows young workers to press their specific demands on employment and contingent labor contracts.

The amendment reducing the workday to 6 hours is vehemently opposed by the opposition led by the big business federation, FEDECAMARAS, but has the overwhelming support of the trade unions and workers from all sectors.  It will allow for greater family time, sports, education, skill training, political education and social participation, as well as membership in the newly formed community councils.  Related labor legislation and changes in property rights including a greater role for collective ownership will strengthen labor’s bargaining power with capital, extending democracy to the workplace.

Finally the amendment eliminating so-called ‘Central Bank autonomy’ means that elected officials responsive to the voters will replace Central Bankers (frequently responsive to private bankers, overseas investors and international financial officials) in deciding public spending and monetary policy.  One major consequence will be the reduction of excess reserves in devalued dollar denominated funds and an increase in financing for social and productive activity, a diversity of currency holdings and a reduction in irrational foreign borrowing and indebtedness.  The fact of the matter is that the Central Bank was not ‘autonomous’, it was dependent on what the financial markets demanded, independent of the priorities of elected officials responding to popular needs.

As the Chavez Government Turns to Democratic Socialism:  Centrists Defect and Seek Military Solutions

As Venezuela’s moves from political to social transformation, from a capitalist welfare state toward democratic socialism, predictable defections and additions occur.  As in most other historical experiences of social transformation, sectors of the original government coalition committed to formal institutional political changes defect when the political process moves toward greater egalitarianism and property and a power shift to the populace.  Ideologues of the ‘Center’ regret the ‘breaking’ of the status quo ‘consensus’ between oligarchs and people (labeling the new social alignments as ‘authoritarian’) even as the ‘Center’ embraces the profoundly anti-democratic Right and appeals for military intervention.

A similar process of elite defections and increased mass support is occurring in Venezuela as the referendum, with its clear class choices, comes to the fore.  Lacking confidence in their ability to defeat the constitutional amendments through the ballot, fearful of the democratic majority, resentful of the immense popular appeal of the democratically elected President Chavez, the ‘Center’ has joined the Right in a last ditch effort to unify extra-parliamentary forces to defeat the will of the electorate.

Emblematic of the New Right and the ‘Centrist’ defections is the ex-Minister of Defense, Raul Baduel, whose virulent attack on the President, the Congress, the electoral procedures and the referendum mark him as an aspirant to head up a US-backed right-wing seizure of power.

The liberal and right wing mass media and unscrupulous ‘centrist’ propagandists have falsely portrayed Raul Baduel as the ‘savior’ of Chavez following the military coup of April 2002.  The fact of the matter is that Baduel intervened only after hundreds of thousands of poor Venezuelans poured down from the ‘ranchos’, surrounded the Presidential Palace, leading to division in the armed forces.  Baduel rejected the minority of rightist military officers favoring a massive bloodbath and aligned with other military officials who opposed extreme measures against the people and the destruction of the established political order.  The latter group included officials who supported Chavez’ nationalist-populist policies and others, like Baduel, who opposed the coup-makers because it radicalized and polarized society – leading to a possible class-based civil war with uncertain outcome.  Baduel was for the restoration of a ‘chastised’ Chavez who would maintain the existing socio-economic status quo.

Within the Chavez government, Baduel represented the anti-communist tendency, which pressed the President to ‘reconcile’ with the ‘moderate democratic’ right and big business.  Domestically, Baduel opposed the extension of public ownership and internationally favored close collaboration with the far-right Colombian Defense Ministry.

Baduel’s term of office as Defense Minister reflected his conservative propensities and his lack of competence in matters of security, especially with regard to internal security. He failed to protect Venezuela’s frontiers from military incursions by Colombia’s armed forces.  Worse he failed to challenge Colombia’s flagrant violation of international norms with regard to political exiles.  While Baduel was Minister of Defense, Venezuelan landlords’ armed paramilitary groups assassinated over 150 peasants active in land reform while the National Guard looked the other way. Under Baduel’s watch over 120 Colombian paramilitary forces infiltrated the country.  The Colombian military frequently crossed the Venezuelan border to attack Colombian refugees.  Under Baduel, Venezuelan military officials collaborated in the kidnapping of Rodrigo Granda (a foreign affairs emissary of the FARC) in broad daylight in the center of Caracas.  Baduel made no effort to investigate or protest this gross violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, until President Chavez was informed and intervened.  Throughout Baduel’s term as Minister of Defense he developed strong ties to Colombia’s military intelligence (closely monitored by US Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA) and extradited several guerrillas from both the ELN and the FARC to the hands of Colombian torturers.

At the time of his retirement as Minister of Defense, Baduel made a July 2007 speech in which he clearly targeted the leftist and Marxist currents in the trade union (UNT) and Chavez newly announced PSUV (The Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela).  His speech, in the name of ‘Christian socialist’, was in reality a vituperative and ill-tempered anti-communist diatribe, which pleased Pope Benedict (Ratzinger).

Baduel’s November 5 speech however marks his public adherence to the hard-line opposition, its rhetoric, fabrications and visions of an authoritarian reversal of Chavez program of democratic socialism.  First and foremost, Badual, following the lead of the White House and the Venezuelan ‘hard right’, denounced the entire process of Congressional debate on the Constitutional amendments, and open electoral campaigning leading up to the referendum as ‘in effect a coup d’etat’.  Every expert and outside observer disagreed – even those opposed to the referendum.  Baduel’s purpose however was to question the legitimacy of the entire political process in order to justify his call for military intervention.  His rhetoric calling the Congressional debate and vote a ‘fraud’ and ‘fraudulent procedures’ point to Baduel’s effort to denigrate existing representative institutions in order to justify a military coup, which would dismantle them.

Baduel’s denial of political intent is laughable – since he only invited opposition media and politicians to his ‘press conference’ and was accompanied by several military officials.  Baduel resembles the dictator who accuses the victim of the crimes he is about to commit.  In calling the referendum on constitutional reform a ‘coup’, he incites the military to launch a coup.  In an open appeal for military action he directs the military to ‘reflect of the context of constitutional reform.’  He repeatedly calls on military officials to ‘assess carefully’ the changes the elected government has proposed ‘in a hasty manner and through fraudulent procedures’.  While denigrating democratically elected institutions, Baduel resorts to vulgar flattery and false modesty to induce the military to revolt.  While immodestly denying that he could act as spokesperson for the Armed Forces, he advised the rightist reporters and potential military cohort that ‘you cannot underrate the capacity of analysis and reasoning of the military.’

Cant, hypocrisy and disinterested posturing run through Baduel’s pronouncements.  His claim of being an ‘apolitical’ critic is belied by his intention to go on a nationwide speaking tour attacking the constitutional reforms, in meetings organized by the rightwing opposition.  There is absolutely no doubt that he will not only be addressing civilian audiences but will make every effort to meet with active military officers who he might convince to ‘reflect’…and plot the overthrow of the government and reverse the results of the referendum.  President Chavez has every right to condemn Baduel as a traitor, though given his long-term hostility to egalitarian social transformation it may be more to the point to say that Baduel is now revealing his true colors.

The danger to Venezuelan democracy is not in Baduel as an individual – he is out of the government and retired from active military command.  The real danger is his effort to arouse the active military officers with command of troops, to answer his call to action or as he cleverly puts it ‘for the military to reflect on the context of the constitutional reforms.’  Baduel’s analysis and action program places the military as the centerpiece of politics, supreme over the 16 million voters.

His vehement defense of ‘private property’ in line with his call for military action is a clever tactic to unite the Generals, Bankers and the middle class in the infamous footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, the bloody Chilean tyrant.

The class polarization in the run-up to the referendum has reached its most acute expression: the remains of the multi-class coalition embracing a minority of the middle class and the great majority of the working power is disintegrating.  Millions of previously apathetic or apolitical young workers, unemployed poor and low-income women (domestic workers, laundresses, single parents) are joining the huge popular demonstrations overflowing the main avenues and plazas in favor of the constitutional amendments.  At the same time political defections have increased among the centrist-liberal minority in the Chavez coalition.  Fourteen deputies in the National Assembly, less than 10%, mostly from PODEMOS, have joined the opposition.  Reliable sources in Venezuela (Axis of Logic/Les Blough Nov. 11, 2007) report that Attorney General Beneral Isaias Rodriguez, a particularly incompetent crime fighter, and the Comptroller General Cloudosbaldo Russian are purportedly resigning and joining the opposition.  More seriously, these same reports claim that the 4th Armed Division in Marcay is loyal to ‘Golpista’ Raul Baduel.  Some suspect Baduel is using his long-term personal ties with the current Minister of Defense, Gustavo Briceno Rangel to convince him to defect and join in the pre-coup preparations.  Large sums of US funding is flowing in to pay off state and local officials in cash and in promises to share in the oil booty if Chavez is ousted.  The latest US political buy-out includes Governor Luis Felipe Acosta Carliz from the state of Carabobo.  The mass media have repeatedly featured these new defectors to the right in their hourly ‘news reports’ highlighting their break with Chavez ‘coup d’etat’.

The referendum is turning into an unusually virulent case of a ‘class against class’ war, in which the entire future of the Latin American left is at stake as well as Washington’s hold on its biggest oil supplier.

Conclusion

Venezuelan democracy, the Presidency of Hugo Chavez and the great majority of the popular classes face a mortal threat.  The US is facing repeated electoral defeats and is incapable of large-scale external intervention because of over-extension of its military forces in the Middle East; it is committed once more to a violent overthrow of Chavez.  Venezuela, through the constitutional reforms, will broaden and deepen popular democratic control over socio-economic policy.  New economic sectors will be nationalized. Greater public investments and social programs will take off.  Venezuela is moving inexorably toward diversifying its petrol markets, currency reserves and its political alliances.  Time is running out for the White House:  Washington’s political levers of influence are weakening.  Baduel is seen as the one best hope of igniting a military seizure, restoring the oligarchs to power and decimating the mass popular movements.
President Chavez is correctly ‘evaluating the high command’ and states that he ‘has full confidence in the national armed forces and their components.’  Yet the best guarantee is to strike hard and fast, precisely against Baduel’s followers and cohorts.  Rounding up a few dozen or hundred military plotters is a cheap price to pay for saving the lives of thousands of workers and activists who would be massacred in any bloody seizure of power.

History has repeatedly taught that when you put social democracy, egalitarianism and popular power at the top of the political agenda, as Chavez has done, and as the vast majority of the populace enthusiastically responds, the Right, the reactionary military, the ‘Centrist’ political defectors and ideologues, the White House, the hysterical middle classes and the Church cardinals will sacrifice any and all democratic freedoms to defend their property, privileges and power by whatever means and at whatever cost necessary.  In the current all-pervasive confrontation between the popular classes of Venezuela and their oligarchic and military enemies, only by morally, politically and organizationally arming the people can the continuity of the democratic process of social transformation be guaranteed.

Change will come, the question is whether it will be through the ballot or the bullet.

Filed Under: COMMENTARIES

PSUV: “The Struggle to Defend the Revolution and take it Forward”

November 2, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Interview with Francisco Rivero, Spokesperson for the ‘Armando Reveron’ Battalion of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)

By El Militante – venezuela.elmilitante.org Wednesday, 31 October 2007 and Marxist.com

El Militante: How is the process of creating the structures of the PSUV and the election of spokespeople, committee members and delegates developing in the run-up to the founding congress?

Francisco Rivero: In my area, Carabelleda, in Vargas, as in the rest of the country, the structures of the Battalions began to take shape on Saturday 28th July. We held an all-day meeting. Although in the initial sessions there was a degree of disorganisation, and failure in certain aspects of preparation and orientation, from the third session onwards the Battalions began functioning efficiently. In my district, the average attendance at meetings has swung a little towards the middle class. Battalions in the poor areas have an average attendance of some 80 comrades; in the middle class areas the average is 25 to 30 comrades.

A noticeable thing is the composition of the Battalions. It is striking that the vast majority of the men, women and youth who are active had no previous membership of other parties. The majority were not even members of Venezuelan Revolutionary Movement (RMV – the previous Bolivarian party). These are people who had despaired of politics during this revolutionary process, who support President Chavez and call themselves revolutionaries, Bolivarians, anti-imperialists and socialists. The only ideological education the majority have received is their own experiences during these ten years of revolution, and from the President’s speeches. Among these sections of the population there is vision, a motivation to participate in politics, huge enthusiasm and revolutionary will.

Over August and September, various issues relating to the agenda proposed by the National Policy Office which is presided over by Comrade Jorge Rodriguez, Vice-President of the Government, began to be discussed. In each Battalion, various commissions were organised:

Politics and ideology
Organisation
Propaganda and mobilisation
Social issues
Civil defence

Due to the fact the political situation become more acute as a result of the hysterical reaction of the right-wing to the proposed changes to the Constitution, which aim to move the revolution forward and promote popular power, President Chavez proposed speeding up the timetable for the party’s Founding Congress. The date for elections of spokespeople and committee members was brought forward, and these took place on October 8th. Over the past few weeks the political debate has centred around discussion of the proposed constitutional reforms.

EM: How were the elections conducted?

FR: During weekly meetings of the Battalions throughout August and September, the members of each battalion had the opportunity to get to know each other, debate politically, listen to every comrade’s views, hear what their proposals for political action were, and judge their capability, the steadfastness of their ideology and their revolutionary conviction. In my Battalion I put forward, from the start, a Marxist method and programme.
I think that the clarity of Marxist methods allowed me to gain the respect of the group, which elected me its spokesman in bringing about the socialist federation of the different constituencies.

The procedure for electing spokespeople, committee members and delegates was as follows: each Battalion elected one spokesperson and five committee members – one for each committee. The committee members were not elected by the committees themselves but the by Battalion as a whole. All elections were by secret ballot. The spokespeople and committee members of 10 Battalions in a given district come together to form a socialist federation. Weekly meetings take place in which they debate their positions and get to know each other, and one delegate from each federation is then elected to the Founding Congress, which is on 2nd November.

EM: What have been the main issues and concerns during the debates in the Battalions and socialist federations?

FR: The discussion over constitutional reform, which has raised very interesting views and proposals that reflect the aspirations of the revolutionary rank and file, and also concerns about particular mistakes and failures. There were also very strong criticisms over certain local and regional authorities (governors, mayors, councils). There were many speeches against the bureaucracy and concerns over ethical and ideological deviance – corruption and so on – that we are seeing among some public officials.

There was huge concern about the need for local councils to conform to revolutionary policies. We discussed how the PSUV and, specifically our Battalion, would run the local councils and develop popular power in our region.

EM: Some ultra-left sects who call themselves revolutionary, and even Marxist, say the the PSUV is not a revolutionary party, that it is ‘bourgeois’, ‘multi-class’. They offer as proof the fact that bureaucrats and even entrepreneurs have joined the party. As a PSUV activist, what is your reply to them?

FR: The wide popular participation in the formation of the PSUV, with more than 5 million waiting to join in support of the President’s proposals and a current membership of 1,500,000 activists, has been a blow against the bureaucratic elements. These controlled the MRV (Venezuelan Revolutionary Movement) and other parliamentary parties through the methods of cunning and cliqueism, using manoeuvres on quotas and eligibility in elections.

Now these bureaucratic and reformist elements, the counter-revolutionaries who infest the revolutionary movement disguised in red clothing, have reacted virulently to the clear evidence that they have lost control over the revolutionary organisation. These elements are doing, and will continue to do, all they can to try to prevent the participation of the rank and file, and try to control the Battalions and federations. But the results remain to be seen and will depend on the development of the class struggle and the revolutionary process. The important thing is that revolutionaries should work shoulder-to-shoulder with the masses in this struggle, and to win it. For now the bureaucratic elements are facing many problems, and their manoeuvres are being repudiated by large sections of the rank and file.

EM: How is the struggle between the reformist, the bureaucratic and the revolutionary factions within the revolutionary movement developing within the PSUV?

FR: One example of the fear of democratic debate and the participation of the rank and file, following the President’s proposal to create the PSUV from below, can be seen in the declarations of member of parliament Francisco Ameliach. Ameliach is a leading national protagonist of these reformist and bureaucratic factions. He went so far as to declare publicly that it was not timely to continue developing the PSUV and even gathered signatures from MPs calling for a return to the old structures of the MRV, at least until after the reform referendum. These proposals met with general rejection and were strongly criticised by President Chavez himself.

These elements, and their attempts to prevent debate and the participation of the rank and file in decision-making, have made their appearance in my Battalion. To cite one example, on the day of the election of spokespeople and committee members, various Vargas local government officials, who had scarcely attended a single meeting of the Battalion in the previous months, turned up to vote. This caused huge indignation among the other comrades in the Battalion, who reacted strongly, accusing them of political immorality and lack of revolutionary ethics. This, such as it is, is the situation in other Battalions.

Unfortunately, a last-minute manoeuvre succeeded in the National Policy Office changing its original position, which was that only those who had attended at least 50% of all meeting could vote or stand as candidates, to one which allowed those who had attended two meetings, including that on the day of the election, to vote.

In addition, and this is a sad observation, these bureaucratic and pro-capitalist elements are using their positions of power in relation to election of delegates to the Founding Congress in the federations to try to prevent the true reflection of the will of the rank and file. Spokespeople and committee members in some Battalions have been subjected to pressure. Some who work in public administration have even been threatened with the sack by some bureaucrats.

There have been campaigns to discredit some individuals and others have been offered bribes in the form of cushy jobs. In some Battalions where spokespeople who are not under the influence of the bureaucracy have been elected, the bureaucrats have challenged the results and in some cases have organised violent provocations. For instance, in another Battalion in my own district, Comrade Oduber (known as ‘Professor Oduber’), a well-known local social activist and fighter, who was elected spokesman for his Battalion, was even arbitrarily detained by the Chief of Police for denouncing these bureaucratic activities.

However, the most significant factor is the widespread and apposite response to the bureaucracy’s desperate actions in the overwhelming majority of Battalions. An example: in my federation during a political debate among the spokespeople and committee members elected by the different Battalions, a known representative of the regional bureaucracy – who demonstrated during his intervention a complete lack of understanding of revolutionary politics – in desperation at seeing he was in a minority, recommended that there be no election of delegates (‘because it would be divisive’) but rather an ‘entente cordiale’ between those in the federation with the most ‘political experience’. The spokespeople and committee members insisted that we were not interested in agreements between groups and cliques, but wanted democratic discussion, accountability and right of recall of delegates.

EM: What ideas, methods and programme do you, a Marxist elected as spokesman and candidate, and delegate for your Battalion to the Founding Congress, think the PSUV should defend?

FR: There is a strong yearning among the rank and file for the political programme of the PSUV to serve the interests of the people, that the PSUV become a genuine socialist, revolutionary party and that it not be under the control of hierarchies and cliques. As Marxists we have a responsibility to defend these wishes. We must participate in the process and through our ideas and methods strive to ensure the political programme of the PSUV is infused with the ideas of scientific socialism, the permanent revolution, and the central role of the working class in the revolutionary process; that we help bring about the expropriation of the oligarchs and replace the exploitation and barbarism of capitalism with a democratic, planned, socialist economy under workers’ control.

Equally, Marxists must openly support President Chavez’s proposal to press forward with the workers’, community and youth councils. At the same time, we call for the unification of these councils, that they be accountable and subject to recall at any time, at local, regional and national level, in order that they form the basis of a genuine revolutionary state to replace the capitalist state apparatus that remains in existence.

EM: What is your general overview to date on the establishment of the PSUV, and how do you think the party can develop in the future?

FR: If we draw a balance sheet, we can say with all certainly that the establishment of 15,000 Socialist Battalions throughout the country, that are discussing socialism, the constitutional reform and how to use it to overthrow capitalism, and so on, represents a revolution in the history of political parties in Venezuela. It is a crushing blow against the traditional way of doing politics in Venezuela, where previously everything was decided bureaucratically from above.

There is complete freedom of discussion and analysis within the debates we are conducting in the PSUV Battalions. There are no demarcation lines, there is complete freedom to implement changes, and everyone has equal right to participate. It remains for the Founding Congress, and thereafter, to fight to ensure it continues this way, and to enable the millions of Venezuelans involved in the PSUV to fight for socialism and a genuine revolutionary, Marxist, socialist programme – a democratic organisation with a leadership under right of recall that expresses the will of the rank and file, responds to it and is under its control.

The most significant element in all this is that for the first time a political organisation is being created from below, with the participation of workers, housewives, youth, peasants, professionals, etc., united in their neighbourhoods and districts or, in many cases (also very important) in their workplaces.

In this sense, I think it’s particularly important and significant that the workers in the abandoned factories taken over by the workers are running them under workers’ control. Inveval has formed its own Battalion and the vast majority of the workers in the factory are members of it. This is the way forward. The revolutionary union leaders must build PSUV Battalions in every factory so that the working class can play its appropriate role in the revolution.

Regardless of the balance of forces between the reformist and revolutionary factions, which will be reflected in the elections of delegates to the Founding Congress, we must be clear that the process towards the establishment of a mass revolutionary party in Venezuela has only just begun. It is a dialectical process that will be subjected to changes produced by the different junctures that will occur during the class struggle. The most important thing, over and above the concrete results the workers achieve in the election of spokespeople, committee members and delegates to the Founding Congress, is the existence of the 15,000 Battalions where there will be continued debate and revolutionary watchfulness, and where the struggle to defend the revolution and take it forward to its final victory will deepen in the coming period.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: ,

An Appeal on Bhutan

October 31, 2007 by 1 Comment

An appeal to the poets, writers, theatre artists and other intellectuals

Anand Swaroop Verma

It is matter of shame for all of us that while the neighboring country Bhutan is continuing with the autocratic monarchy and its repressive activities with the help of world’s largest democracy India, the intelligentsia in our country has maintained silence over the issue whereas the Indian media, time and again, keeps on praising the monarchy in Bhutan. We are repeatedly told by the media that the tiny populace in Bhutan is prospering, the country is unaffected by the environmental degradation and cultural pollution and so on. During the last couple of years, Indian media is full of news praising the King for his liberal attitude by arguing that he himself wants to end the monarchy to usher in the democratic system of governance. The media keeps on telling us that the King of Bhutan wants to join the modern world because he feels that continuing with monarchy in the present scenario is suggestive of a regressive thought.

The same media never told us sternly that this ‘peaceful and environment friendly’ King, in 1990 with the help of his army, had expelled 1.5 lakh citizens of his country, run bulldozer over their hamlets, destroyed their orange and cardamom plantations and unleashed a reign of terror and oppression on elders, women and children just because they were asking for the establishment of minimum democracy and respect for their human rights. Media never bothered to tell us that in the drama that is being enacted in the name of the countrywide elections scheduled for February 2008, neither political parties banned for last 20 years and termed illegal (Bhutan People’s Party, Bhutan National Democratic Party, Druk National Congress) nor the people living in seven refugee camps run by UNHCR inside Nepal’s border for last 17 years have been permitted to participate. The total population of Bhutan is around seven lakhs and expelling 1.5 lakh people out of this tiny population has been an incident never witnessed in the history of any country. The most surprising thing is that India is the only country in the subcontinent extending support to the King of Bhutan. He was even invited by the Indian government as chief guest in Republic Day parade two years back.

India has contributed significantly towards the plight of Bhutanese refugees. These refugees had brought out some pamphlets and organized peaceful demonstration demanding a minimum democracy in 1990. The centre of this movement was southern part of Bhutan which is close to the Indian border, particularly the West Bengal border. Although the King of Bhutan had imposed ban on the entry of television in his country, but how could this neighboring region of West Bengal could remain uninfluenced by the movement related activities which are the very soul of life in West Bengal. People from South Bhutan came to India for educational purposes and they had to pass through West Bengal. Apart from that, due to lack of connecting roads in mountainous Bhutan, people had to take the road which passes through West Bengal in order to reach the other parts of Bhutan. Since southern part of Bhutan was primarily inhabited by Lhotsompas, a Nepali speaking Bhutanese community which constituted 90 percent of the Southern Bhutanese population, the King charged them with creating disturbance. When the people of Sarchop community from east and north Bhutan were also expelled, it became clear in the long run that this movement was not confined to the Nepali speaking community alone.

Teknath Rizal, advisor to the Royal Council set up by the King wrote a letter to the King requesting that he must humbly pay heed to the people’s complaints. But instead, the King put Teknath Rizal behind the bars. He was forced to suffer unbearable pains for 10 long years. He was released in 1999 when the King’s officials realized that he could die in prison due to illness. He is now living an exiled life in Nepal and leading the anti-monarchy struggle. Rizal hails from Lhotsompa community.

On the same lines, the popular leader of Sarchop community Rongthong Kunley Dorji was arrested by the monarchy and charged with supporting the demand of minimum democracy. The King seized his property, put him in the jail where he was subjected to severe atrocities and was finally kicked out of the country along with his family. He was arrested by the Indian police on his arrival to India in 1996 and was put in Tihar prison for two years. He is currently on bail and the Indian government has imposed various restrictions on him. He is also leading the anti-monarchy struggles. He is the president of Druk National Congress. India has always given refuge to the pro-democracy activists of various countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, Tibet and Nepal. Keeping this in mind, India’s discriminatory attitude towards pro-democracy forces in Bhutan is surprising.

India’s role in this regard is both shameful and significant because when the helpless Bhutanese citizens arrived inside the Indian border after being expelled from their own country, Indian security forces forcefully loaded them in trucks as if they were livestocks and dumped inside Nepal border. Those who resisted were beaten up severely. With no choice left they stayed in Nepal. Later on India laid its hands off from the issue. Whenever Government of India was requested to hold talks over the Bhutanese refugees issue, it raised its hands by saying that this was a bilateral issue between Nepal and Bhutan. Bhutan shares border with India, not Nepal. Any one who leaves Bhutan will obviously enter India first. It is a known fact that India has itself created this problem for Nepal. Nepal being a small and weaker state cannot force India, which has repeatedly ignored its request to resolve the refugee crisis.

In the last 17 years, whenever the Bhutanese refugees tried to return home risking their lives, they were stopped at Indo-Nepal border at Mechi bridge by the Indian security forces. When they tried to proceed further, they were beaten up. The most recent incident in this series is that of May 28, 2007 when one refugee was killed in police firing and hundreds of them were injured.

I had organized a conference on the Bhutanese refugee issue in 1991 along with friends from Nepal and India. At that time, a booklet entitled ‘Human Rights in Bhutan’ was also published. Many distinguished people including Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, Justice Ajit Singh Bains and Swami Agnivesh participated. In order to create a mass consensus on the issue, an organization named ‘Bhutan Solidarity’ was formed towards the end of the conference and Justice Krishna Iyer was made its patron. I was asked to take the responsibility of convener. A study team from this organization in 1995 prepared a detailed report after a tour to the refugee camps. I tried my level best to contribute in resolving the issue till May 2006 in this capacity. From June 2006 onwards, MLA from MP and young farmer leader Dr. Sunilam is holding the position of convener.

As per UNHCR, the total number of refugees in the camps of Nepal is One lakh six thousand. The survey carried out by Bhutan Solidarity in 1996 revealed that more than 40,000 refugees are living in India (West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh) and they have not been given the status of refugee by UNHCR. As per 1950 Friendship Treaty between India and Bhutan, government of India refused to give these people refugee status. They too are living in worst conditions.

A team from ‘Bhutan Solidarity’ visited the refugee camps again in August 2006 and found that 40 percent of the refugees were in the age group of 17-40. They are losing patience after the failure of many peaceful attempts to go back home and feeling that this problem can not be resolved through peaceful means. They have also been inspired by the Maoist people’s war in Nepal and this thought is getting concretized in their minds that justice will only prevail through the barrel of the gun. In spite of being aware of everything, Bhutan government and government of India have maintained an indifferent attitude. It seems as if both the governments are waiting for the refugees to take the violent path which will give them an excuse to unleash repression.

I feel that the Bhutanese refugee crisis can be resolved in a peaceful way provided the intellectuals of India raise their voice and stand behind them in solidarity with their struggle. The area which relates with these refugees is politically very sensitive. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Jhapa, close to West Bengal, have been experiencing violent movements since long but the arms here are not in the hands of revolutionary forces, but in the hands of separatists, anarchists and state sponsored armed groups. In this scenario, if the Bhutanese refugees take to armed struggle, their voice will be lost and it will pave the way for their repression. In nutshell armed struggle waged by the Bhutanese refugees to solve their problem will prove to be suicidal at this stage.

Monarchy in Bhutan is at the weakest stage. As I said earlier, it is supported only by India. It has somehow sustained itself by giving offerings to the high officials of Ministry of External Affairs and a crop of selected journalists. This is the reason why every Foreign Minister- be it I.K. Gujral, Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh or Pranab Mukherjee- has ‘off the record’ given same argument that the Indian support to Bhutan is only due to India’s ‘geo-political compulsions’.

In the last couple of years, US policy has been a fiasco in Nepal. Despite US disliking, the political parties of Nepal and Maoists reached a 12 point understanding in Nov 2005, signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Maoists entered the parliament and they even joined the interim government. Inspite of all this, Maoists are still listed as ‘terrorist’ in the US records. Having seen utter failure of its policy in Nepal, US has now shifted its focus on Bhutan since it wants to consolidate its position in South Asia by hook or crook. US had announced last year that it will undertake to settle 60,000 Bhutanese refugees on its own and assist to settle 10,000 each in Australia and Canada. This announcement revealed many things. Firstly, it tried to create a divide among the refugees. Secondly, it tried to prevent the ideology of violence taking an organized form among them and lastly, assured the King of Bhutan that it will help him get rid of the mounting problem of refugees. This is what US aims at. While this proposal seems to be providing some relief to the King at the same time the debate on this proposal has for the first time in 17 years generated violent conflicts among the refugees. It is interesting to know that hardly 10 percent refugees are in favor of US proposal. One more incident is noteworthy. King of Bhutan Jigme Singhe Wangchuk had announced to abdicate the throne voluntarily in 2008 in favor of his son Prince Khesar Singhe Wangchuk. But suddenly US came in picture and through its efforts got the process completed much earlier, that is in May 2007 itself. Prince Khesar is now the King of Bhutan and US has full faith in him.

The objective of writing this letter is to inform you about the plight of Bhutanese refugees and government of India’s position in this regard as well as to appeal you to give a serious thought on the possible ways to resolve the problem. This problem can surely be resolved peacefully and a terrible bloodshed can be avoided in this region if the intellectuals, human rights activists and active pro-democracy people of Indian political parties think seriously over this issue. If our endeavour fails to bring change the government of India’s attitude of indifference, then the movement of Bhutanese refugees taking a violent turn can not be termed as illegitimate. But I have strong feeling that even a small effort on our part can bring a peaceful solution to the problem.

Your suggestions on this issue are invited so that we can sit together in the near future and find out a way in the coming days.

Email: vermada@hotmail.com

Date : September 14, 2007

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With:

Without Workers Management There Can Be No Socialism

October 31, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Kiraz Janicke
Venezuelanalysis.com

Over the weekend of October 26 to 27, several hundred people attended a two day conference on Worker’s Management: Theory and Practice, as part of a program, “Human Development and Transformative Praxis,” run by Canadian Marxist academic Michael Lebowitz at the International Miranda Center in Caracas. The first day addressed the theory and historical experience of worker’s control and attempts to build socialism, with presentations by Pablo Levin, the Director of the Center for Planning and Development at the University of Buenos Aires, British Marxist economist Patrick Devine (the author of Democracy and Economic Planning), Michael Lebowitz, and sociologist Carlos Lanz Rodriguez, a former guerrilla and now president of CVG-ALCASA the state owned co-managed aluminum factory. The second day of the conference focused on the various practical experiences of worker occupied factories in Latin America. Speakers included, Carlos Quininir (Zanon) and Jose Abelli (FACTA), from the recovered factory movement in Argentina, Serge Goulart from the Occupied Factory Movement in Brazil, as well as spokespeople from various examples of state owned companies under workers control or workers co-management and worker run cooperatives in Venezuela, including the Tachira Textile Cooperative, Inveval – an expropriated valve manufacturing company under workers control, ALCASA, and Cemento Andino in Trujillo, one of the most recent examples of workers control in Venezuela.

During his opening presentation Lebowitz said, “On May Day 2005 I marched with workers in Caracas and the slogan workers were chanting at the time was, ‘Without co-management there is no revolution!'”

“Indeed, the main slogan of that march organized by the UNT [National Union of Workers] was “Co-management is revolution and Venezuelan workers are building Bolivarian socialism.”

From its beginning, the UNT, which came together in December 2002 when the old corrupt Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) supported the bosses lockout and sabotage of the oil industry and has functioned essentially as an alliance of trade unions and union leaders and is characterized by internal divisions.

Despite the million strong May Day march in 2005, the UNT was unable to organize a united May Day demonstration in 2006 and at its second congress shortly thereafter, in the context of simmering factional divisions, fractured over the question of whether to hold elections or wait until after the presidential elections in 2006 in order to focus on supporting Hugo Chavez’s campaign for presidency.

Since then the UNT has remained divided and although union leaders Orlando Chirino from the Current for Revolutionary Class Unity and Autonomy (C-CURA), and Marcela Maspero, of the Collective of Workers in Revolution (CRT), the two principal currents involved in the split, agreed in July to organize elections within the UNT before the end of this year, this has still not occurred. Although the UNT continues to organize on a regional level, it does not function as a united union federation and at the national level, it could be argued, its existence is nominal only.

Problems of Worker Management

As Lebowitz pointed out, we don’t hear much talk of co-management or workers control coming from the UNT anymore. “We don’t have masses of workers saying, ‘without worker management there is no socialism’ or ‘that you cannot build socialism without worker management.'” Nevertheless, Lebowitz argued, “I think we have to recognize the essential truth of this proposition”

Framing the discussion, Lebowitz said it is useful to look at the different dimensions of what President Chavez has called “the elementary triangle of socialism,” – units of social property, social production organized by workers, and production for the needs of communities. “You can’t separate these in socialism” he argued. Capitalism is based on a different triangle he said; private property, exploitation of labor, and production for profit.

Lebowitz then drew on the lessons of the experience of worker self-management in the former Yugoslavia. He pointed out that although the enterprises were state owned and were viewed as social property, they functioned in the market and were driven by one thing, self interest of the workers in an individual enterprise; there was no concept of solidarity, that is, production for the needs of communities.

In order to maximize the income of workers in each individual enterprise, they invested in automation to increase production, rather than take on new workers. By 1971 there was 7% unemployment in Yugoslavia, plus 20% of the workforce worked outside the country as guest workers in Western Europe.

“Legally these enterprises were social property, but social property means that everyone in society has equal access to the means of production and benefits from it, the unemployed though, had no access to the means of production.”

“In fact, what happened in the context of the market,” Lebowitz said, was “a new productive relation had emerged in these enterprises, group ownership, group property.”

“Of course” Lebowitz continued, “all members weren’t really equal – it was the managers and technical experts that had the knowledge about marketing products investments, banking, and establishing links with other enterprises, creating mergers.”

There was no sustained effort in the workplace to truly educate workers on how to run the enterprises, he added, “the result was that the distinction between thinking and doing remained.”

Workers became dependent on the managers and technical experts “and in the end it was the managers who emerged as the capitalists, leaving the workers as wage laborers.”

According to Lebowitz, the Yugoslav case “demonstrates that the existence of workers councils, even with the legal power to make decisions, is not the same as worker management.”

Additionally, “It demonstrates that the focus upon the self-interest of the workers in an individual enterprise is not the same as focusing on the interest of the working class as a whole.”

Lebowitz then came back to the elementary triangle of socialism; “Of course it can’t all be put into place once there is a long process of struggle to develop each side of that triangle, but if we are not actively building each side we inevitably infect the whole process. How can you build socialism without real workers management? How can you create real developed human beings, without protagonistic democracy in the workplace and the community?”

In his introductory presentation Devine said that the question of how to organize production had been the subject of fierce debate since the time of Marx and the two principal ways of achieving this had been either through the market or the system of central planning adopted in the Soviet Union, where there was no democracy and workers had no power to make decisions.

Devine agreed with Lebowitz that worker managed enterprises, which are truly autonomous, function as a form of “group private property” and he said by seeking to maximize income, “they set up pressures against the participation of workers”

In order to develop socially oriented production he argued that production decisions cannot be made solely by workers in an individual enterprise, but must be made with the participation of all the social owners of an enterprise, that is all the social groups affected by the activities of an enterprise, including suppliers, consumers, and environmental groups and so on, to determine what counts as social production.

In small-scale enterprises, Devine contended, it is fairly easy to determine what counts as social production. However, in much more complex and large-scale industries that involve production and distribution on a national or even international level and do not correspond to a single community, it is therefore more difficult to ascertain what can be determined as production in the social interest.

Therefore Devine suggested, “A model of bottom-up planning involving part of the social owners at each level through a process of coordinated negotiation, applied up to the national level and at an international level a coordinated set of activities that meet social needs at that level.”

“This is neither the anarchy of market forces, or top down planning, but participatory democratic planning from below, initially directly, then indirectly through elected and recallable representatives”

In this context, key debates in the discussion of how to build workers democracy and socialism, throughout the conference, included; not only the question of state owned enterprises under workers control vs. worker owned cooperatives and how to overcome the social division between intellectual and manual labor, but also how to build links with communities and the role of the trade unions in relation to the different experiences of workers’ participation. Different perspectives on these issues were reflected through the various examples from Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.

Experiences of Worker Management in Latin America

Jose Abelli from FACTA, a network of independent workers cooperatives, explained that the recovered factory movement in Argentina, which is composed primarily of independent worker cooperatives with few ties to the traditional trade unions, developed as a defensive mechanism, “as a form of resistance to harsh neoliberalism” and was born directly out of the need to defend employment in the context of the economic crisis of 2000.

Abelli said that the 220 recovered and self managed factories in Argentina have generated 300 million dollars in the Argentine economy this year and generated 2,000 jobs since the economic crisis.

What the recovered factory movement in Argentina shows, Abelli argued, is that not only can workers manage factories, but also the economy and that, “we can administrate society in a manner more just than private capital.” “We have demonstrated that economy is not the property of a few powerful, important men,” he added.

However, for Abelli, it is important that the worker cooperatives in Argentina “are independent of political parties and the state.” This reflects a different political context. “We obviously don’t have a government like here in Venezuela,” he said.

Abelli also pointed out that the Venezuelan government was supporting the worker’s cooperatives in Argentina and had recently signed an agreement with FACTA for the purchase of 2,000 tractors.

Serge Goulart, a spokesperson for the Occupied Factories Movement in Brazil, which works closely with the unions and is part of the CUT (Central Union of Workers) said the Bolivarian revolution, is the “oxygen” of the workers movement in Brazil. He explained to the conference how the Venezuelan government is helping out the Flasko plastics factory in Sao Paulo, closed in 2003 and subsequently occupied by workers, by supplying raw materials in exchange for technology to produce plastic housing in Venezuela.

For Goulart, in contrast to Abelli, it is important for workers to demand 100% state ownership under workers control, because, “We don’t want to become small capitalists.”

However, Goulart explained that unlike many cooperatives in Argentina or the example of Inveval in Venezuela, where all workers are paid exactly the same, the occupied factories in Brazil had a policy of paying workers on the basis of award rates for different types of work, this is because, he explained, if skilled workers are not paid a higher rate they would look for work elsewhere and not stay with the occupied factories.

Goulart also warned of threats to workers management, not only by the governments and capitalists in Argentina and Brazil, but also from the state bureaucracy in Venezuela. He referred to the example of Sanatarios Maracay, where although the Venezuelan National Assembly has approved its expropriation, sections of the state bureaucracy have sided with a parallel union supported by the boss to remove occupying workers from the main installations of the factory.

A spokesperson from Inveval, Nelson Rodriguez, explained to the conference how the workers council functioned there. He said the highest decision making body is the general assembly of workers in the factory but also there are a number of elected permanent commissions, including finances, social and political formation, a technical commission, administration, discipline, security and control and services. However, to ensure democratic accountability within the factory, Rodriguez said any person elected to a commission could be recalled at any time through a general assembly of the workers council.

In order to overcome the division between intellectual or administrative labor and manual labor, they also rotate different types of work within the factory, combined with political discussion within the workers council, education for collective development, and technical training.

On the question of cooperatives vs. state ownership with workers’ control, Rodriguez told Venezuelanalysis.com that factories should be 100% state owned under worker control, because, “Cooperatives have a capitalist structure in reality.”

Also key to the experience at Inveval are the links between the workers council and the local community. Not only does the factory provide a space for health and education missions, but the workers council also participates in the local communal council.

Rodriguez presented to the conference an explanation of a delegate system developed by workers at Inveval based on their own experience, where workers councils send delegates to communal councils and vice versa, but which could be applied on a much broader scale to federations of workers councils and communal councils in order to construct structures of popular power.

A battalion of the new United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) also functions out of Inveval. Rodriguez told Venezuelanalysis.com, “The PSUV is a huge political school, to drive forward the revolution, and together with the construction of popular power proposed in the constitutional reform – through workers, students, campesino and communal councils, the aim is to create a socialist state, because the state is not socialist.”

“We participate in the battalion as workers, not as citizens, but from the point of view of workers.”

Significantly, Rodriguez explained that the workers council at Inveval developed largely outside the framework of the organized trade union movement in Venezuela. And in February 2006, the workers in Inveval initiated the Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed Factories (FRETECO), because, “We saw that here in Venezuela the unions were not supporting the struggle for occupying and taking over factories through the UNT.”

According to Rodriguez, the leaders of the UNT were more interested in factional struggles and winning elections, rather than putting forward a strategy that corresponded to the political reality of Venezuela.

“Therefore we saw the necessity to organize a way that we could support workers in taking over factories and support factories in the same situation,” he said

FRETECO held its first congress in October 2006 with workers from 15 occupied factories participating. However, it is open to all groups of workers involved in conflicts over occupied factories and is now comprised of approximately 20 factories, with workers from newly occupied factories regularly coming to them for advice and support.

The conference also heard from Alcides Rivero a spokesperson from ALCASA, arguably the most important experiment of workers co-management in Venezuela. In 2005, at the behest of President Chavez, a process of worker’s co-management was initiated in ALCASA, a company that had been owned by the state for 38 years, but had been run down by previous governments in order to prepare it for privatization.

Rivero outlined the first stage of co-management in ALCASA, “the construction of the political viability of co-management,” which was characterized by the initiation of open workers assemblies and discussion of an 18-point plan to re-launch the company and a process of electing a new management through secret ballot. Of the 2700 workers in ALCASA 95% participated in these elections. The workers also elected 36 spokespeople to work together with the management in making decisions.

“This revolutionary proposal of Chavez,” Rivero pointed out, “was an extraordinary experience, never before had workers been able to participate in making decisions.”

However, Rivero contended, there are obstacles. One of the obstacles is the culture within ALCASA, and “Every workplace has its own culture. In ALCASA there was a culture where workers only worked to get money, and didn’t have a vision of creating a new society.”

Related to this question of culture was the sharp polarization between different unions within ALCASA, principally the conflict between union leaders Trino Silva and Jose Gil. “The confrontation within the Chavista political movement within ALCASA is amazing,” Rivero said. According to Rivero, the unions in ALCASA, “have a monetarist view,” and “are concerned with power. They view the elected spokespeople as a threat.”

“This is a culture from the fourth republic,” Rivero argued. In order to overcome these cultural problems, Rivero said that political formation is essential; for this reason the Negro Primero Centre for Political and Social Formation was set up in ALCASA in 2005. However, not only is political formation necessary he said, but also technical training and education. “Together with workers from PDVSA we have created the Bolivarian University of Workers. I study there.”

Rivero also spoke of the challenges posed by the technocracy of the CVG industrial complex for co-management, “because the CVG is a monster.” “ALCASA is the only section of the CVG industrial complex that has co-management, there is also Venalum, Carbonorte Feromineria, but there is no line to push forward with co-management in these other sections,” he said.

Despite these challenges the process of workers co-management in ALCASA has resulted in significant achievements, including increased production, improved working conditions, and, according to a report on May 8 2007, “Balance and Perspectives on Co-management in CVG ALCASA” by Carlos Lanz Rodriguez, is now entering the “third stage of co-management” (the second stage being a focus on developing co-management and a new strategy for the company), which involves a debate and discussion on the humanization of labor, including the reduction of the working day, the democratization of knowledge to reduce the social division of labor within the factory and the decentralization of decision making through the construction of workers councils.

Another question for the development of workers democracy and socialism in Venezuela is the issue of worker’s management in strategic industries. During a report back session from a series of workshops on how to move forward with the struggle for workers management and socialism, workers asked, “Why can’t we have workers management in PDVSA?”

They pointed to the example of the guide committees, organic workers organizations that sprang up within PDVSA during the bosses lockout and sabotage of the oil industry in December 2002 to January 2003, saying these showed that workers could run strategic industries.

Not only is it necessary for the means of production to be socially owned, but that it is necessary for workers to be able to participate and make decisions in strategic industries, not just small factories, “if we are truly to advance to socialism” they asserted. In addition to making decisions in the factories, they argued, workers also need to make decisions within the institutions of the state, which are also very vertical.

The key task, they determined, is to build on and strengthen the existing examples of workers control, workers cooperatives, and workers organizations, and in particular to strengthen political consciousness of workers to deepen the struggle for socialism.

“The political formation of the workers is essential, but not only political formation, also ideological and technical formation and training are necessary for workers to run factories and society,” one woman said.

In his closing presentation Lebowitz questioned the lack of confidence in workers to manage strategic industries such as PDVSA, saying “the same logic that say’s there’s no place for co-management in strategic industries would also extend to the position that there’s no place for workers’ strikes in those sectors.”

Lebowitz also pointed out that while cooperatives don’t fundamentally break with private property, they could act as an “important school for socialism” showing that workers do not need bosses. “This is obvious when we hear the workers here and see the sense of pride and dignity that they have.”

Similarly, he said that the example of Yugoslavia showed that state owned enterprises under workers control in and of themselves were insufficient to create socialism, but could be viewed as Lenin described them as a “threshold” on the path to socialism.

What is necessary, Lebowitz argued, is to shift the focus from the self-interest of workers in an individual state enterprise or workers cooperative to the general interest of society as a whole. “This cannot be achieved by a distant state telling the workers ‘you must serve society'” he continued, but conversely, what is needed is a strong community voice. Lebowitz then pointed to the example of the communal councils in Venezuela as an essential tool, together with the workers cooperatives and state enterprises under workers control or co-management, to push forward the struggle for socialism.

A key weakness in the struggle for workers management and socialism in Venezuela, Lebowitz pointed out, is the lack of a political strategy and the economism of the trade unions. “Their whole orientation towards higher wages and their tendency to act like a labor aristocracy in a society where so many people are poor.” This is not just a case of bad policy Lebowitz argued, “There are in fact structural reasons for the way they behave.”

What is happening to the UNT he said “is the reproduction of the privileges of the trade unions in the Fourth Republic.” Therefore, Lebowitz concluded, “Not only do you need a revolutionary state, you also need new revolutionary trade unions.”

Summing up, Devine argued that the logic for state owned enterprises under workers control as opposed to worker owned cooperatives is compelling because it, “at least formally, represents the society as a whole” where as cooperatives represent a form of “group private property.”

But, he said, that depends on two things; firstly, “the nature of the state, the extent to which it remains a capitalist state, the extent to which it is a socialist state, the extent to which it is a state in transition.” In Venezuela, Devine contended, there is “a state in transition.” “If it is the case that Venezuela is in a transitional phase, then of course you either go forward or you go back.”

Devine suggested, that “One way of thinking about the way forward in Venezuela is to think of transforming state property into social property, to create a structured system of democratic participatory planning, which is built up from below, but results in an integrated plan that has been created by the localities and the enterprises themselves.”

“The immediate task facing revolution,” he added, “is the development of participatory worker councils and communal councils. Without these, together with education programs and the human transformation they enable, nothing else is possible, this is an immense task and will take place over a long period.”

“One thing that is clear from historical experience is that, without active participation of workers, the community and other groups in civil society there can be no socialism.” However, Devine concluded, “I am inspired by the enthusiasm, the knowledge, the commitment of the people here, and I have great confidence that you will succeed in moving things forward, but it will obviously not be easy.”

Source URL: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2784

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: ,

A Review of “Labour Bondage in West India”

October 24, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Pratyush Chandra  

Jan Breman, Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present , Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007, ISBN:9-780195-685213, pp. xii+216, Price (HB) Rs. 525.

The combined socio-economic development in India has been an enigma for the political economists. It defies any strict characterization in terms of a single mode of production. Any alternative analysis needs to provide a coherent semantics of the capitalist adoption and oft-times perpetuation of the ‘outmoded’ modes of exploitation. Jan Breman’s contribution in unfolding the political economy behind the dynamic persistence of labour bondage and other ‘non-capitalist’ forms of subordination of rural labour has been widely recognized. His conceptualization of ‘footloose labour’ substantiated by his empirical studies of the phenomenon of rural-to-rural migration and non-agricultural occupations in rural Gujarat provides a formidable picture of how (post)modernity perpetuates informal sector and “neo-bondage” in the age of neoliberalism.

The present book complements Breman’s other works by focusing “on the historical antecedents of the ongoing subordination of rural labour in what has come to be hailed as a booming economy”.(x) It provides a historical survey of the changing nature of land rights, rural bondage and conflicts, embedded within the wider political economic transformation since pre-colonial times. The book also contains a couple of very interesting chapters giving a class analysis of the agrarian unrest and anti-colonial struggle in South Gujarat, while exposing the cyclic subaltern and open assertion of rural labour within these movements.

The book begins with an analysis of the structure of the traditional rural economy, how the domestication of indigenous population and their allocation within the Hindu social hierarchy took place, how all these socio-cultural changes had a direct link with “the advent of sedentary agriculture”. Breman succeeds in demonstrating a continuous dynamic reshuffling within this supposedly rigid structuring, at least among the landed castes. Political changes, changes in tax regime, and the changing linkages of the rural economy with the wider economy all affected the local socio-economic relations and even caste-class nexus. In fact, “[t]he peasantry continued to be highly mobile until deep into the second half of the nineteenth century, and the situation stabilized only when, with the twentieth century in sight, all land fit for agriculture had been taken up for cultivation and the colonial administration had restricted the power of landlords”.(12) Also, Breman “contradicts the assumption that the village economy was a closed circuit that functioned solely to meet the needs of the inhabitants”.(28) He recognizes the limited, yet definite role of monetization in connecting the local economy with the outside world. The most important role of the British colonization was that it completed the process of land and labour enclosures, putting an end to the frontier nature of the agricultural economy in the region, sedentarizing every nomadic community and its activity, thus permanently allocating the local communities in the dominant economic structure.

The second chapter deals with the standpoints of various relevant social and class forces on halipratha or the system of bonded labour – masters, servants, the colonial and legal views, etc. The chapter begins with providing a glimpse of the basic hegemonic ideological make-up that justified the system of bondage and patronage – how masters and servants both had their own logic to exist in these relations. The colonial administrators and reporters, well-versed in western capitalist liberalism, saw this system essentially as transitory labour arrangement, which would eventually give way to free labour. Breman discusses a prominent historian Gyan Prakash’s critique of the colonial view. According to Prakash, the colonial view reduced the system of bondage – a “manifestation of social hierarchy” – to an economic transaction, classifying it as a form of debt bondage. Prakash concludes that this bondage “was constructed by the colonial discourse of freedom”, thus disconnecting it from its “pre-modern” roots. Breman though sympathetic to the idea of halipratha as a patron-client relationship, strongly departs from the postmodern tendency, evident in Prakash, of reducing various levels of determinations of this relationship into a single horizontal level, of discourse. Breman stresses that there was an “awareness on the part of both landowners and landless that the unequal relationship between them was clearly given an extra dimension by the subjugation that secured a far-reaching and permanent claim on the labour power of the hali”.(46-47) Also, Breman, as noted above, does not take the pre-colonial local economy as a closed one. Thus he finds debt-bondage in the time of the British as a continuity – a means of permanent claiming of labour power. However, there was definitely a radical intensification in this relationship during the colonial period, a decisive factor being “the gradual increase in production for the market, and the monetization of economic exchange that inevitably accompanied it”.(59)

The third chapter deals with the Bardoli movement (1922-28), which has been posed as the success story of peasant mobilization and struggle under the Gandhian nationalist leadership of the Indian National Congress. It shows how this leadership remained loyal to the ruling classes, becoming an agency to vocalize the landed class interests, while policing and crushing the assertion of the landless and halis. Even at the level of discourse, leaders like Sardar Patel used outrageous casteist rhetoric to encourage the unity and assertion of the landed gentry, while alienating and silencing the subaltern, in the name of homogeneous nationalism. The issues of land reforms and bondage were effectively sidelined.

The next chapter completes the canvas of class struggle that marked rural Gujarat, correcting the hegemonic perceptions within the nationalist movement. The landless, Dublas, halis were not “as passive and docile as these perceptions seem to suggest”. In fact, they have long practiced passive resistance by indulging in so-called ‘indiscipline’ and insubordination. Even in the Bardoli campaign of 1928, the vertical solidarity was not so much prominent as professed by the campaigners and chroniclers. There were voices even among Gandhians who were aware of the upper caste-class orientation of the movement and tried to resist it.

The nationalist voices concerned with tenancy rights and anti-landlordism united to form the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) at the country level in 1936. Despite a stress over an all-peasant unity evident in the name of the organization, it was a tremendous leap towards uniting the forces conscious of the need for a radical reconstruction of the rural society. At least in the ryotwari areas like Gujarat, where the AIKS was formed under the leadership of Indulal Yagnik and Dinkar Mehta, its programmes were directly translated into the mobilization and agitation of the poor peasantry and the landless including the bonded labour, the halis. Breman notes the clarity of the AIKS leadership in its understanding of the hali system especially for its conception of the halis’ masters as capitalist farmers! Despite a tremendous resistance on the part of the capitalist farmers and their nationalist leadership, the AIKS in Gujarat succeeded in posing the halipratha, landlessness and poverty as material issues rather than issues for “self-improvement” and spiritual development of the rural poor as Gandhians and upper caste-class biased leadership posed. Even the Congress leadership had to address the issue, even though reluctantly. On January 26, 1939 Sardar Patel announced the formal end of the halipratha system on the terms agreed upon by the landowners, which tilted very much on their side, especially with regard to wages etc. But the subsequent events showed the intensification of conflicts on the issue of implementation. Remarkably, despite the fact that the Congress was running the government in Bombay Province since 1937, the leadership did not insist on a government order or legislation banning bonded labour, thus allowing the landowners freedom to sabotage the agreement.

The final chapter deals with whatever happened to the various legislative measures taken for land redistribution and the continued presence of landlessness and unfree labour after independence. Ultimately, “[t]he halpatis benefited in no way at all from the land reforms. The few tenant farmers among them generally lost the land that they had sharecropped on an informal basis”. In fact, even with regard to the uncultivated land not under private ownership to which everyone had free access, “this access would be increasingly restricted as a result of the widespread trend to privatize the land”.(166) Breman thus concludes his review of land reforms in post-colonial India: “they were designed and implemented in such a way that social classes like the Halpatis were denied access to agrarian landownership…. Increasing the share of land owned by landpoor farmers was given priority above allocating plots of land to the landless masses”.(167-68) The mechanical notion widespread among the leadership with regard to the transition from agriculture to industrial development – that the rural poor has to be shifted ultimately to the urban centres – also weakened the voice for formulating and implementing any radical measure for land reform.

With regard to unfree labour too, the tremendous resistance to any abolition of the hali system at the ground level on the part of the landowners, along with the impotent nationalist leadership which was more subservient to the landed interests, broke every resolution to gain freedom for and by the landless. With the repression and disappearance of the AIKS activists from the scene, the Gandhian reformers were the only ones left to ‘represent’ the interests of the halpatis, and they had no concrete strategy for serving them except to act as middlemen using the tactics of persuasion. “The halis had no other choice than to go back to work under the old regime”.(169) Despite the announcements to the effect, even after Independence, “getting rid of unfree labour was not seen as a government responsibility but, as in 1938, was once again left to the free play of social forces. These forces were represented, on the one hand, by a class of farmers who had not only consolidated their power base at the local level during the process of independence but had further reinforced it, and on the other hand by a large mass of landless labourers whose labour power was only required in full strength for certain parts of the year.” (175) Ultimately the effect for the landless was either more indebtedness, or they had to seek employment outside agriculture. The hegemonic social forces including their political representatives were free from any responsibility in this “free play of social forces”. Breman discusses how the one-sided class struggle over the legislative measures like the fixing of minimum wages too were effectively emasculated, leaving the rural poor unrepresented.

The book goes on to discuss how the tools of repression were utilized to deradicalize the rural poor. In fact, “[t]he Congress party, which had come to power after Independence both at the central level and in the separate states, put an end to the pressure that had been placed on the leaders of the nationalist movement for decades to pursue a rural policy in the interests of the landless and landpoor peasants.”(180) Breman narrates how the halis and tribals fared when they were “henceforth [placed] under the protection of the Gandhian reformers”. Even the moderate and conciliatory measures of these reformers were resisted by the landed classes.

In the end, the book elaborates on the reasons behind the gradual disappearance of bondage, discussing the seminal contributions of Daniel Thorner, “who portrayed the development of the underclass in the agricultural economy of South Asia in the 1950s and 1960s”.(188) With the gradual capitalist development in the region and the intensification of local class struggle, the bondage as practiced till then became both economically and politically untenable. “Bonded labour came to an end not because of government intervention but because employers and employees, for different reasons, wanted it that way…The disintegration of the halipratha system was an expression of the resistance of the landless underclass to the ideology and practice of inequality”.(193)

In my view, the most important contribution of the present book has been to trace the trajectory of class struggle over the issue of bondage. In this process, Breman is able to deconstruct the anti-colonial politics, legal, legislative and social reforms before and after independence as expressions of multi-level struggles between various classes. Nothing is conceded by anyone without resistance from others. Even the chronicling of these struggles has been sharply influenced by the conflicts of interests, and this book succeeds in presenting a holistic picture of these discursive conflicts from the standpoint of the exploited and downtrodden.

(A slightly modified version of the article was published in the Indian Journal of Labour Economics 50(1), 2007)

Filed Under: COMMENTARIES, REVIEWS

Can Partition be Undone? – An Interview with Lal Khan

October 24, 2007 by Leave a Comment

 Paramita Ghosh

Lal Khan’s Crisis in the Indian Subcontinent – Partition… Can it be undone? is provocative not only because it questions the official narrations of the modern history of the Indian subcontinent by analyzing new facts with theoretical tools embedded in Marxism, but mainly because of its activistic programmatic sharpness that backs the revolutionary transformatory politics in the region. It asserts that only a voluntary socialist federation of the subcontinental societies can guarantee peace and prosperity in the region. The following interview with Lal Khan (LK) by Paramita Ghosh (PG) brings out some of the important issues dealt in the book, along with Khan’s perspective on the political situation and transformation in the subcontinent . It was originally published in an abridged form in The Hindustan Times on October 21, 2007.

PG: You have taken on the holy cows, the big boys of the Indian subcontinent – Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Sheikh Abdullah… Who according to you, did his people most harm to the people’s movements? Which, or whose actions, most influenced the way the class picture of the subcontinent looks today?

LK: I don’t think that all these leaders can be evaluated on equal terms and their roles be subjected to same degree of critical analysis. But the role played by the political representatives of the local elite was clear enough in the freedom struggle. Even the serious mouthpieces of British Imperialism conceded the clear class divide and conflicting interests in the movement of National Liberation in India. I quote from the editorial of the London Times of January 29, 1928. It said, “There is no real connection between those two unrests, labour and congress opposition, but their very existence and co-existence, explains and fully justifies the attention, which Lord Irwin gave to labour problems”. I also want to assert that these politicians could only play this role because the leadership of the CPI in reality abdicated the struggle of independence by collaborating with the British under the instructions from Stalin’s Moscow where the bureaucracy was carrying out its foreign policy for the national interests of “Russia” rather than following the Marxist-Leninist path of proletarian internationalism.

I think all of these ‘leaders’ influenced the post-colonial politics in different ways and to different degrees. Again the reason has been the lack of a clear alternative for irreconcilable class struggle.

PG: Your attitude to Gandhi is really interesting and it of course overturns the popular perception about him. On the one hand, there is of course his formidable reputation as the saviour of minorities, as he did at Noakhali 1947. On the other hand, as your book shows, in 1922 when Hindu soldiers from the Garhwal rifles refused to fire on an anti-imperialist demo by Muslims, Gandhi opposed this act of violence. Is there a contradiction between the two?

LK: The ideological foundations of Gandhi’s policies were confined within the parameters of semi-feudal, semi-capitalist social economic relations. Hence all his political actions flowed from this thought. All the confusion and divinity aside, the reality is that India won Independence through a compromise and 2.7 million innocent souls were lost in this bloodshed. Sixty years later, India and Pakistan are the bastions of most disgusting destitution and poverty in the world.

PG: You seem to suggest that Gandhiji’s protection of Muslims was actually an extension of a kind of state support to one’s subjects.

LK: The liberation movement would not have stopped at the ‘stage’ of national liberation and could have moved on to social and economic emancipation through a socialist revolution. It was cut across by the religious frenzy to restrain it within the clutches of capitalism and the system of continual imperialist exploitation. Gandhi wanted a peaceful derailment of the class struggle, which is a utopia. He might have had an honest sentiment to protect the Muslims but once the forces of reaction and communal hatred were unleashed even Gandhi failed to restrain them.

PG: Leon Trotsky believed that the Indian bourgeois could never lead a revolutionary struggle and went on to call Gandhi an artificial leader and false prophet. Would you say the same of Jinnah? You mention an oyster dinner at the Waldorf hotel in 1933 when he laughed at the idea of Pakistan calling it impractical.

LK: All leaders were subjected to change through the dynamics of the movement and dictates of the vested interests of the class they represented. Jinnah was vulnerable to that too. This shows the evolution of Jinnah from Woldorf hotel in 1933 to Karachi assembly in 1947. There were innumerable zigzags in that journey. Although Trotsky didn’t analyze him individually but from the point of view of his theory of permanent revolution, Trotsky’s analysis of Jinnah would not have been any different from his analysis of Gandhi.

PG: Would you attribute the shaky structure of democracy in Pakistan to the class biases of its founding father?

LK: The shaky structure of democracy in Pakistan is mainly due to the belated and corrupt character of its nascent bourgeoisie. In sixty years the Pakistani ruling classes could not accomplish a single task of the democraticbourgeois revolution and cannot do that in a thousand years. Parliamentary or bourgeois democracy was one of those fundamental tasks. I may add that even the Indian ruling class has not been able to complete any of these tasks.

PG: Bhagat Singh was of course one of the most progressive and thinking radicals of the liberation movement. But what is it about him that the Left, the Right and the Centre rush to adopt him as their own?

LK: Bhagat Singh was no doubt an icon of the struggle against British imperialism. He developed his political policies and ideology when he had a chance to read works of Lenin and Marxism while in prison. He was still forging his political position when he was hanged. Hence when his position of “inqilaab’ is put, its ideological and theoretical foundations are relatively shallow and not entrenched in scientific Marxism. Hence it is easier for the left, the right and the centre to rush to adopt him as their own. Thus it is vital that unless the youth who are inspired by Bhagat Singh are developed into Marxist cadres, mere slogan mongering of ‘Revolution’ could lead them in any direction. They can even blunder into certain reactionary movements displaying a revolutionary rhetoric. It is the tragedy of cultural primitiveness that the role of the individual in political movements is exaggerated. Icons are mystified and even worshipped. This devastates the role of a collective leadership in a revolutionary struggle and undermines the importance of scientific theory and practice.

PG: Pakistan has mostly been under military rule. It has had democratically elected governments only thrice in 60 years. What is the reason that Marxism has never been an option, not even as an experiment?

LK: In 1968-69 there was a revolution in Pakistan. From Chittagong to Peshawar, there was only one slogan in the air – Revolution! Revolution! Socialist Revolution! Workers occupied factories, the peasants besieged the landed estates and the youth were on the streets, refused to pay fairs in trains and buses. The prevalent property relations were being challenged by the revolution. From November 6, 1968 to March 29, 1969 there were at least 7 occasions when the capitalist system and state could have been overthrown through a revolutionary insurrection. Unfortunately due to the lack of a Bolshevik party this historical opportunity was missed. The Pakistan Peoples Party was a product of this revolution, as its founding documents clearly stated:

“The ultimate objective of the party’s policy is the attainment of a classless society which is only possible through Socialist Revolution in our times.”

Z. A. Bhutto recognized that the character of the (1968-69) movement was socialist and not national democratic. That is why he became a legend of the masses for three generations. But he had no organised Bolshevik party or a strategy to carry this revolution through to its victorious end.

The so-called democratic regimes in Pakistan were only inducted by the ruling state either to diffuse a rising revolutionary upsurge or as a preemptive measure to deviate and confine the raging movements against military dictatorships within capitalist structures. In any case the basic fault lines in Pakistan are not between democracy and military or extremism and moderation. The fundamental contradiction is of class interests and no stability can come without the resolution of this contradiction.

PG: Please tell us about your introduction to the Left ideology. Who were your mentors, your peers?  You were born ten years after Independence. In the 1970s you were a student leader resisting the despotic Zia regime. Was Marxism a natural progression of a politics of student activism?

LK: The first time I got to study Marxism was in 1976 when I was incarcerated in Multan Central Jail after a clash with Islamic fundamentalists; we were tortured by the state. In the prison library there were some works of Marx and Lenin lying in a corner. They were left there by some communist prisoners during the 1940s. After I was ordered to be shot at sight by the Zia dictatorship on June 10 1980, I had to flee to exile in Amsterdam. In Europe I had the opportunity to meet and discuss with comrade Ted Grant, who was my friend mentor and teacher. I think that after Trotsky’s assassination, Ted single-handedly held high the red flag of revolutionary Marxism. His contribution in Marxist theory is enormous. For more than sixty years he resolutely worked to deepen and enhance perspectives and strategy to lay the foundations of a new and genuine Marxist international.

PG: When did you become Lal Khan?  Why did you choose this name?

LK: Lal Khan was the name of a sergeant in the British Indian army. He was my uncle and had been a prisoner of the Bolsheviks in 1919 when 21 imperialist armies attacked the nascent Soviet state. As a child I used to listen his stories of how the Bolsheviks had treated the Indian military prisoners. Sometimes in dearth of food supplies the Bolshevik captors used to remain hungry themselves but fed their Indian prisoners. I was so amused and impressed that when in 1981 I had to choose a pen name under the vicious Zia dictatorship I opted for that name. It also means Red. As I have been writing under this name for more than 26 years it would have been useless to change the name which was recognized by workers and youth and linked with an ideological tendency.

PG: Under whose regime was/is it most difficult to conduct Left politics? How irresponsive were Zulfiqar Bhutto, Zia, Sharif, Benazir to people’s movements?

LK: There is no situation in a capitalist milieu that is easy and viable to build the forces of revolutionary Marxism. Similarly there can be no objective conditions so bad in which Bolshevik party cadres can’t develop the art of expanding the organization and building the revolutionary forces.

However the wrath and indignation of the masses against the brutalities of the Zia dictatorship was helpful in gaining recruits. But when Benazir Bhutto came to power, the way she disillusioned the movement and dashed the hopes of the masses, the political apathy and a certain demoralization that had set in made our work somewhat more difficult.

PG: What will happen to Kashmir?

LK: The ruling classes of India and Pakistan have used and abused the Kashmir issue for sixty years. Now they can’t go to all-out war nor can they sustain peace. Their systems don’t allow them much room. The masses of Kashmir have been brutalised and subjected to misery by these subcontinental elites. The Americans want a continual sale of their weapons of mass destruction at the expense of the sweat, tears and blood of the subcontinental masses. Without the overthrow of these capitalist regimes, Kashmir issue cannot be solved. Unless the subcontinent gets independence from imperialist slavery, how can Kashmir gain freedom?

Nationalism and fundamentalism are on decline in Kashmir, the youth and workers are moving more on to the lines of class struggle. This has to be linked to the class movements in India and Pakistan. A voluntary socialist federation of the Indian subcontinent would be the only guarantee for a genuine freedom and emancipation of the Kashmiri oppressed.

PG: In Pakistan, on the one hand, there is the military which somehow has, in a way, been an upholder of liberal will and democratic parties like the PPP are corrupt and thoroughly discredited. On the other hand, there are the religious rightist forces. What will Pakistan choose now?

LK: The liberals and fundamentalists are both entrenched in this decaying capitalist economy. Imperialism and religious obscurantism are two sides of the same coin. As soon as a revolutionary movement of the toiling masses emerges, the so-called liberaldemocratic and religious rightist forces have always and again will join hands to crush any challenge to this exploitive system. The perspective of a mass movement is rejected by mainstream intellectuals in Pakistan. There is always a doom and gloom scenario preached by these apologists of Capital in the media. But a social revolution is the only way-out for the salvation of the people. I am convinced that working masses shall tread upon this path sooner rather than later. The events of 1968-69 are too glaring a tradition to ignore.

PG: How supportive are the Indian left of leftist struggles in its neighbourhood in Pakistan? What do you think of its position on the nuclear deal, which many feel, is just an anti-American statement?

LK: There cannot be two separate revolutions in India and Pakistan. Five thousand years of common history, culture and society is too strong to be cleavaged by this partition. However the left forces can learn from experiences of each other. Especially the ideological mistakes made have to be rectified and lessons learnt from. Obviously the opposition to the nuclear deal is positive. But from a Marxist point of view it is not the most important of issue in the present situation. The way market economy is ravaging India and throwing the vast majority of population into the abyss of misery, poverty, disease and deprivation is horrendous. I think that after sixty years of the traumatic experiences the left should at least try to understand that the basic character of the Indian revolution is not national democratic but socialist. Unless they change course the Indian proletariat will force them onto a revolutionary path. The vote of the masses to left parties in the 2004 elections was for a revolutionary change rather than to maintain the existing order. Next time they will vote with their feet. If these leaders still cling on to the redundant theory of two stages they shall perish in the rising tide of a workers upsurge. A fresh revolutionary Marxist leadership shall emerge to make socialist victory a reality in the impending class war-about to explode.

Lal Khan is a prominent Marxist activist from Pakistan. He is the editor of the Asian Marxist Review.

Filed Under: COMMENTARIES, INTERVIEWS Tagged With:

Fidel Reflects on the Elections

October 22, 2007 by 3 Comments

Our elections are the antithesis of those held in the United States, not on Sundays but on the first Tuesday of November. Being very rich or having the support of lot of money is what matters the most there. Huge amounts are later on invested in publicity, specialized in brain washing and the creation of conditioned reflexes.

With honorable exceptions, no one can hope to be appointed to an important post without being backed by millions of dollars.

Being elected President in the US requires hundreds of millions, which come from the coffers of big monopolies. Elections can be won by a candidate earning a minority of votes.

Less and less citizens are going to the ballots; there are many who would rather go to work or spend their time doing anything else. There is fraud, tricks, discrimination against ethnic minorities and even violence.

Having more than 90 per cent of all citizens voting in the elections and school children guarding the ballots is an unheard of experience; it’s hard to believe that this occurs in one of the “dark corners of this world”, a harassed and blockaded country named Cuba. That is how we exercise the vigorous muscles of our political awareness.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 19, 2007
6:12 p.m.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With:

Environmental Clearance, a farce played by MoEF-The Vedanta Case

September 24, 2007 by 3 Comments

Rahul Choudhary

Whether it is the Samata ((1997)8SCC19) case, Kudramukh case or more recently the Vedanta Mining case in Orissa, mining is always in disputes and creates a tremendous conflict of interest. For government and the mining company it is always a lucrative enterprise, but for environmentalist, tribal and other affected by mining, it is a disaster. While the mining company flaunts the benefits, concealing the real impact of its project in order to get the environmental clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), the Ministry itself never seeks to assess the real impact through its so-called expert committees. There are numerous examples where a mining company has tried (rather successfully) to evict members of some indigenous community, projecting the dense forest as rocky and barren land. Even when there are hundreds of indigenous people affected, they are projected as few, and most of them are not even included in the list of Project Affected Persons (PAP).

Vedanta Alumina Limited, a subsidiary of M/s Strerlite Industries (India) Ltd proposed a one million tonne per annum capacity alumina refinery project together with a 75 MW coal based captive power plant. The bauxite for the refinery was to be sourced from the Niyamgiri Hills. Interestingly, the Alumina refinery was granted environmental clearance without linking the project with the Mining.

M/s Sterlite (the parent company of M/s Vedanta) applied for environmental clearance on 19.03. 2003 to the MoEF. In the application, Vedanta stated that no forestland is involved and that within the radius of 10 kms there is no reserve forest. M/s Vedanta thereafter on 16.08.2004 applied for use of 58.943 ha forestland consisting of 28.943 ha village forest and 30 ha reserve forest. However, the application for environmental clearance was not modified and the same was processed on the premise that no forestland is involved.

Further, though Mining at Lanjigarh was integral part of the Alumina refinery project, Vedanta could not have started the work on the Alumina refinery without getting the clearance for mining also. As per the guidelines of the MoEF – “for projects requiring clearance from forest as well as environment angles, separate communications of sanction will be issued, and the project would be deemed to be cleared only after clearance from both angles…”

M/s Vedanta requested the MoEF to grant environmental clearance for the Alumina Refinery Plant stating that it would take three years to construct the refinery plant whereas mines can be opened up in one year. In its application for seeking environmental clearance for the project dated 19.3.2003 it is stated that “nil” forestland is required for the alumina refinery and that within a radius of 10 km of the project site there is no reserve forest, which is contrary to the facts on record. Subsequently, on 16.8.2004 a proposal for allowing the use of 58.943 ha forestland, consisting of 28.943 acre of “Gramya Jungle Jogya” land and 30 ha of reserve forest, was moved under the FC Act through the State Government to the MoEF. Out of the above, 26.123 ha forestland was required for the refinery, 25.82 ha for the mine access road and the balance 7.0 ha was required for the construction of the conveyor belt for the transportation of the mineral from the mine site to the plant.
The MoEF gives environmental clearance for Alumina Refinery Project by delinking it with mining project. In the environmental clearance it is stated that no forestland is involved, even though the application under the Forest Conservation Act was still pending.

As per para 4.4 of the guidelines laid down by the MoEF “Some projects involve use of forest land as well as non-forest land. State Governments / Project Authorities some times start work on non-forest lands in anticipation of the approval of the Central Government for release of the forest lands required for the projects. Though the provisions of the Act may not have technically been violated by starting of work on non-forest lands, expenditure incurred on works on non-forest lands may prove to be infructuous if diversion of forest land involved is not approved. It has, therefore, been decided that if a project involves forest as well as non-forest land, work should not be started on non-forest land till approval of the Central Government for release of forest land under the Act has been given”

But Vedanta started the work on Alumina Refinery in blatant violation of this provision.

Three applications were filed before the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), constituted by the Supreme Court of India against establishment of project and the environmental clearance granted by the MoEF without considering the forest area on 22 Sept 2004 to M/S Vedanta Alumina Ltd. The CEC heard the matter and also conducted a site visit of the proposed refinery plant and mining area. The CEC filed their report on 21 Sept 2005 before the Supreme Court with the recommendation that the apex court may consider revoking the environment clearance dated 22/09/2004 granted by the MoEF for setting up of an Alumina refinery plant by M/S Vedanta and directing them to stop all further work on the project.

The Supreme Court in its order dated 03/02/2006 in I.A.NO 1474 with I.A.No.1324 in writ petition (civil) No.202 of 1995 directed the MoEF, GOI, New Delhi that various studies to assess the impact of the project may be carried out within three months. Accordingly the MoEF placed the application for forest diversion of Lanjigarh Bauxite Mine before the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC), constituted under section 3 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980. The FAC after examining the proposal also suggested for carrying out in depth studies to assess the impact of the project. The MoEF, GOI, New Delhi directed the Central Planning and Designing Institute (CMPDI), Ranchi to carry out the above-mentioned studies.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) submitted their report dated 14 June 2006 to Forest Advisory Committee and it was examined by them in its meeting held on 30 Aug 2006.The WII was asked to reexamine the report in the light of facts and figures put forward by the State of Orissa. The WII prepared a supplementary report dated 25th Oct 2006. In this report WII put their point of view on wild life, likely adverse impact of mining and identification of alternate source of bauxite among others. The studies related to soil erosion, impact on ground vibration and the studies related to soil erosion, impact on ground vibration on hydrological characteristics, flow of natural water resources/ streams etc were carried out by the Central Planning and Designing Institute (CMPDI), Ranchi as per the request made by the Orissa Mining Corporation (OMC) and after their proposal was accepted by the OMC.

The approach of the Supreme Court is perplexing, as the Central Empowered Committee clearly pointed out the illegality in the clearance granted and once the clearance is granted then post facto impact study is not provided in law.

The Niyamgiri hill is spread over in 250sq.km. of area. This hill is also known as Dongaria Kondha country. Dongaria Kondh is one of the primitive and schedule tribes of the state and fully dependent on the Niyamgiri Hill. If one claims to be Dongaria Kondh then he must reside in the Niyam Giri Hill. Niyamgiri Hill is also a source for Vamsadhra River, along with for various other perennial streams. Mining in the Niyamgiri Hill involves a blatant violation of various laws which are there for the protection of Scheduled tribes, like the Orissa Schedule Areas Transfer of Immovable Property (Regulation) 1956, the Scheduled Caste and Schedule Tribes (prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. .

The mining company put up the point that by mining there will be a development of the area, the villagers will get employment etc. But the reality is the villagers who are self-dependent, having land of their own will become marginalized workers in the mines. As most of the villagers are unskilled for industrial or mining work, they will only get job of informal and unskilled labourers dependent on the whims of the company and the contractor. They lose everything to pass over to the next generation except the misery of working in the mine. We all know also who benefited from the mining at Dhanbad and various parts of Rajasthan for several decades.

The Supreme Court is hearing the matter in detail but has not stayed the work on this 4000-Crore-Rupees-project on the ground of large investment involved. Tendentially, the company’s argument before the Court is that, as they have spent a large amount of money, so the project should not be scrapped.

While at the same time, the Courts are quick in granting the removal of jhuggi jhopris (urban poor settlements) in Delhi and other metro cities in the country on the ground of  being unauthorised. However, if the investment of the jhuggi jhopris is considered, then that is in fact an absolute investment by the poor people living there. Moreover, the same courts have allowed construction of big shopping malls and even 5-star religious temples like the Akshardham Temple in East Delhi on the same land from where the authorities removed the Jhuggi jhopries.

With all regards to Indian judiciary, we must admit that in recent years, unlike in the 1960s-70s, it is unwilling to check the reckless pace of corporate industrialisation, which is taking its toll on the environment, tribals and people in the pursuit of profit. On the other hand, the downtrodden majority has no recourse left within the coordinates of the status quo (as fixed in the constitution, interpreted by the judiciary and amended by the legislature), except queuing up for electoral rituals now and then.

Filed Under: DIARIES Tagged With: , ,
«Previous Page
Next Page»