The Sarkari Doublespeak?
The Union Minister Nitin Gadkari while talking to the journalists of The Indian Express (January 4, 2021) said:
“….after the Green Revolution, we now have surplus rice. Prior to 2020’s production, we had about 280 lakh tonnes of rice in our godowns. We can give rice to the entire world. In case of corn, the MSP is Rs 1,700, when the market price is about Rs 1,100. Last year, we exported 60 lakh tonnes of sugar, providing a subsidy of Rs 600 crore. Why is it that the cost of sugar in the international market is Rs 22 per kg but we are paying Rs 34 per kg for sugarcane? Our MSP is more than the international and market prices, and that is the problem.
I have been talking about ethanol for the last 12 years. But the permission to convert foodgrains (to fuel) was not granted. We import fuel worth Rs 8 lakh crore. We can make 480 litres of ethanol from 1 tonne of rice. From 1 tonne of corn, we can make 380 litres of ethanol. The economy of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh will be transformed.”
Ironically, Gadkari is openly considering the MSP as a problem, when his government is trying hard to convince the farmers that it does not intend to remove the MSP. At the borders of Delhi, farmers are protesting against the farm reform acts and one of their main demands is to keep the institution of MSP intact!
Surplus Foodgrains and the Hungry Poor – A Paradox?
The minister while mentioning about overflowing stocks in godowns probably forgot that this overflow is not due to surplus production, but the godowns are full because a large section of the Indian population is stricken by hunger. They lack the purchasing power to buy food items and hence the stockpile; which for the government is an achievement as well as a cause of worry.
The minister and the current government may take pride like their predecessor on the overflowing food stock, but reality is far from being rosy, or rather it is bleak.
Almost 20 crore Indians go to bed hungry, and about one third of the world’s hungry lives in India. In the Global Hunger Index 2020, India ranked 94 among 107 countries and has been categorised as ‘serious’. The report further mentioned that 14 per cent of India’s population is undernourished. It also says that the country recorded a child stunting rate of 37.4 per cent. Stunted children are those who have a “low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition”. (The Indian Express, October 19, 2020)
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2020 report by the FAO further reveals the state of abject poverty faced by the large population of the country. It reported, 189.2 million people are undernourished in India. By this measure 14% of the population is undernourished in India. Also, 51.4% of women in reproductive age between 15 to 49 years are anaemic. Further, according to the report, 34.7% of the children aged under five in India are stunted (too short for their age), while 20% suffer from wasting, meaning their weight is too low for their height. Malnourished children have a higher risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria.
A country with such a high level of hunger and malnutrition cannot be then termed as food sufficient and the logic of moving away from what is termed as ‘cereal trap’ by the official economists, does not hold ground. In fact it is the other way round. The country has enough grain because the vast majority have been denied access to it.
The surplused population of India has been driven out of the food market by making it economically inaccessible. They over years have become the proverbial ‘lost tribe’ whose life and well being does not bother the government, either at the centre or the states. They no longer hog the headline hence political outfits be it of any orientation also do not care about them.
Finance Capital, Agriculture & Surplus Population – The Logic of Capital vs the Logic of Life
To the mingled cries of the impoverished and the dying masses, the government has formulated acts that would intensify capitalist accumulation in the agrarian sector. The rate of capital accumulation and reproduction in agriculture cannot increase until it is vertically integrated with commercial and industrial capitals organised in agribusinesses and otherwise.
Furthermore, today capitalist accumulation is dominated by the finance capital, which is not simply the institutionalised merger of banking and industrial capital. In the current phase of neoliberalism, the circulation of money is increasingly making itself independent of commodity production and circulation, i.e., the real economy. Through various mechanisms, instruments and institutions of finance, capital is able to attract and accumulate surplus value anticipated and actualised in the production process without really engaging with it. The recent farm acts restructure the relationship of agriculture with commercial, and industrial interests in such a manner that the whole sector can be open for financial predation.
Hence, instead of food crops the government wants the farmers to grow cash crops to be utilised by the industries, be it in the form of ethanol or other industrial products. The profit maximisation is the key. People’s survival becomes secondary.
The myth of food self sufficiency being dished out by the government and its experts would dispel in thin air, as soon as the purchasing power increased of the dispossessed. The hungry poor and producers of the country in fact if they decide to feed themselves would be found wanting to raise the production as well they might even have to increase the area of current cereal cultivation. The entire gullible story of cereal trap and move to cash crop, has been built on the edifice of hunger, malnutrition and poverty.
The financialised logic of capital in which the Indian state has long been caught up has led to a progressive surplusing of population in India which could sustain themselves in various levels of informal economies of agriculture and industry. It is now through various legal, structural and digital mechanisms these economies are being further opened up for their direct integration in the logic of finance.
The move towards cash crop as well as diverting the agrarian land to other commercial use, ranging from industrial use to even golf course would simply mean pushing a vast segment of the population currently reproducing themselves through agricultural work towards further surplusing. Pulling people from the agricultural to industrial sector proved progressive during the initial phase of capitalist development, where the industries were able to absorb the latent force into industrial wage work. But, in the era of neoliberalism where we have been witnessing jobless development and the rate of new job creation is diminishing, the working masses of the country are at the verge of total destitution. The provisions of these three acts points to the same direction. Marx once said:
“in a declining state of society — increasing misery of the worker, in an advancing state — misery with complication, and in a fully developed state of society — static misery.”
Having a large unemployed force, is what even the capitalists want. A country having massive unemployment is also a place for maximum exploitation. The surplus labour acts to keep the wages down as well as it keeps the labour ‘disciplined’. For fear of being replaced they would not unionise nor would demand for any wage hike. Such a scenario becomes ideal for the more brutal and primitive system of absolute surplus value extraction (by extending the working day etc., complementing the more advanced relative surplus value extraction through intensified mechanisation and automation) in which the majority of the working class would suffer. What else is the meaning of the labour law changes in India today?
The Latin phrase cui prodest? meaning “who stands to gain?” needs to be applied more than ever under the present noble system of capitalism, where national interest is the veil of class interest. As capitalist brutality increases the precarities would increase, which could be managed only by violence and war (internal and external). We are standing at a juncture where the question of roti (bread), land and peace is once again at stake. Of all the political questions the struggle for bread, land and peace is the one that would take precedence and this is the struggle of the surplused and disposed, which today means the whole of the labouring masses.
Mazdoor Samanvay Kendra
Shramik Samvad (Nagpur)
Historical Materialism, Delhi: Legal Marxism Redux
The HM conference in New Delhi, India, is the arch-example of sanitising Marxism and academicising it. The purported promotion of the “new cultures of the left” is nothing but an attempt to sanitise Marxism of its dirty old history in India and elsewhere, and present it to the liberal conscience of western academic tourists in Marxism in the manner that suits their taste. Initially, it proposed to base itself on a virulently anti-communist group of postmodern journo-academics in India. The danger of de-legitimation (of course, who would like to lose their brand name and business) and to provide space to radical international tourists and NRIMs (Non-resident Indian Marxists) forced it to tone down such alignment. As a result, we have an eclectic assortment of non-serious social democrats, NGO-secular-civil liberty activists, poor academics and perpetually passive learners ready to line up to welcome international Historical Materialists.
The recent vocalisation of an open dissociation with the Socialist Workers Party of Britain by the organisers of HM, Delhi, further reveals their desperation to satisfy and bridge liberal consensuses of the West and India. And the last straw in this regard was the withdrawal of their invitation to Alex Callinicos, perhaps the only Trotskyist in whom genuine Marxist activists in India find some ‘cultural’ affinity. This was obviously done to appease the disgruntled pocos, who were lately alienated from the organising committee. As they are on the lookout to find opportunity to vent their frustration of not having been included in this gala event, this was done to preclude any disturbance from their side.
If Marxism or historical materialism is able today to find an important place in academia, it means two things – one, that the capitalist apparatuses have conceded to the pressures from below, and two, in this concession they have been able to sanitise it of its anti-systemic roots and have found tools that would help them in reproducing capitalist ideologies and social relations. The ideological Marxism that academia produces is a form of Marxism that is entrenched within the disciplinary divides that help capitalism to control and regulate knowledge production.
The endeavour the HM conference in Delhi signifies has nothing to do with revolutionary politics insofar as theory in revolutionary politics is about being implicated in thinking the strategic orientation of movements in their socio-historical concreteness. This is precisely the modality of operation of theory in revolutionary working-class politics. Even theory in its bare philosophical abstraction, when its practice is internal to such politics, is meant to be in a dialectical articulation with the concrete political methods (tactics if you will) of socio-historically determinate movements, and are thus meant to clarify the strategy of praxis in seeking to be reconstituted with programmatic accuracy in the concrete tactical specificities of those movements. All this, in order to actualise the generality of the principle of revolutionary-proletarian politics.
Practitioners of radical, actually revolutionary, theory should always remember that their kind of theory cannot be a discursive articulation of tactics or the epistemology that frames the programmatic articulation of such tactics. And yet, revolutionary theory is not outside methods whose open constellation is the enactment and expression of that theory. Clearly, only when theory grasps itself as being internal to its constitutive methods does it become revolutionary. Methods that actualise theory while simultaneously interrupting this actualisation, thereby clearing the way for its refoundation. And this exercise in its continuously unfolding entirety is praxis.
This dialectical continuity between theory and practice – or philosophy and epistemology, or strategy and tactics, or concept and subject – if and when it becomes uninterrupted (by sublating its various inevitable punctuations) in practical materiality amounts to the actuality of praxis or actuality of revolution/communism. “Communism as the real movement” (Marx and Engels in The German Ideology) or “revolution in permanence” (Marx in The Class Struggles in France). In Marxism, theory is not – like Kant’s “categorical imperative”– a norm for the governing of practice. Rather, it is, or should be at any rate, the herald of practice to come. One which will abolish theory by realising it and thereby become praxis, which is a higher and radically different ontological level of actuality, positivity and the concrete than the finite empiricism (and positivism) of mere practice. This is what is often referred to as the “future-anteriority” of Marx’s historical-materialist approach to praxis.
That is, however, not to contend academically-turned Marxism has no analytical connect whatsoever with really-existing movements in their historical concreteness, and is consumed solely by the ethics of theory or, which is pretty much the same thing, conceptual abstractions pertaining only to the internal architecture of discursive formations. Of course, that has, more or less, been the orientation, if not the methodological protocol, of Critical Theory founded almost as a disciplinary paradigm. Nevertheless, there is a sizeable and ever-growing section of critical theorists who are equally exercised by the question of historically concrete movements. But even for them such historically concrete social and political movements as objects of analysis are meant, at best, to be occasions of inquiring into and demonstrating how those movements constitute the determinate actualisation and thus the limit of proletarian revolutionary praxis. The next step of how that praxis, as an excess of such historical limits, can be reconstituted as a constellation of specific socio-historical subjects — which can be posed only in the shape and register of a concrete programme of action and guidelines for the enforcement of that programme – is clearly beyond the remit of their theoretical practice. And it’s precisely this academicised Marxist modality of reflection and analysis of movements that would arguably be on display at the various panels meant to discuss Kashmir, Nepal, the Maoist-led tribal movements in central and eastern India, the recent workers’ upsurge in the industrial belt of National Capital Region and the like at the Historical Materialism conference here. For, even the best and the most well-intentioned among the panelists — their numbers are few and far between — engage with their objects of analysis as no more than sympathetic ethnographers. Their outside support for such movements eventually shirks the ultimate responsibility of plunging into the practical materiality of movements. A move, which if made through the immersion of their analytical engagement with those movements into the practicality of the latter, would render their analyses and the approach that underpins them to become the sublated constitutivity of programmes of those movements in question. That would not only rid their theory of its academicism but also simultaneously enrich the movements in question with the spirit of revolutionary generalisation, thereby enabling the revolutionary praxis constitutive of those movements to tend towards overcoming the historical limits imposed on them. Limits that inevitably tend to hypostatise the movemental materiality of revolutionary praxis into overgeneralising sectarianism at the level of practice and pragmatic epistemological fetishism at the level of theory.
The remit of critical theory that prevents it from straying beyond its own prettified gardens into the dank and malodorous world of really-existing politics that lie beyond them is, needless to say, imposed on practitioners of such theory by the position that is constitutive of the way they envisage their theoretical practice as an untainted and untaintable outside to the historically concrete social and political movements. Such a conception of theoretical practice and its actual operation – which is constitutive of the academicisation of radical theory in general and Marxism in particular – stems from the purist and puritanical yearning of its practitioners to evade in advance the vagaries, exigencies, impurities, ugliness and errors, which engaging with such really existing movements by being integral to their respective agencies of practice inevitably brings. Clearly, they know, or care to know, nothing about the revolutionary virtue of risking all that taint by going through those vagaries, exigencies, impurities, ugliness and errors of practicality in order to extenuate them in practice. Nor do they remember, drunk as they are on their ephemeral status of being philosopher-kings, that the foundational logic of their academicised theoretical practice is precisely a restoration of the effete Young Hegelian legacy of “critical criticism” or “critical philosophy” that Marx systematically demolished to establish the rigorous scientificity of critique of political economy as practical critique.
However, to explain away academicisation of Marxist theory merely in terms of such motivations of a group or section of intellectuals would be sheer psychologism unbecoming of a complete and rigorous Marxist analysis of the same. We need to understand the structural condition of possibility – structural causality if you will – of such psychological motivations to turn Marxism from a revolutionary theory for revolutionary practice into an accommodated, and impotent ideology. To effectively combat such academicisation, of which HM, Delhi, not unlike Legal Marxism in late 19th century Russia, is a typical exemplar, we must recognise it for what it really is: a symptom of the conjunctural crisis of both Marxist theory and revolutionary working-class movements. This crisis, which is currently manifest as movements without theory and theory without movements, has arisen from the shifting of the conjunctural regime from that of embedded liberalism to that of neoliberalism. Due to this shift, the theoretical recognition of the revolutionary subject lags behind its recomposition, which has devastated the forms of organisation – both political and conceptual. In such circumstances, we are confronted with, to paraphrase Gramsci, a monstrosity: a conceptually elevated theory that has emerged, in lieu of the yet-to-be-born revolutionary subject, by making the cognitive abstraction of negativity and critique into an autonomous ground from where it preaches to the impotent revolutionary subject of the earlier conjuncture and berates it for its expected lapses as if that ground were a transhistorical tribune of revolutionary reason.
So, what we have today by way of Marxism as revolutionary praxis is not a dialectical unity but a duality of two mutually competing ideologies – pragmatism (of movements under the leadership of various shades and sects of the party-left) and subjective-idealism (that goes under the name of critical theory). In such a situation, we have the party-left tendencies rejecting the academicised style of theoretical practice of academic Marxists as a psychological impulse of some individual intellectuals and the groups they comprise while engaging with the theoretical products of those academic Marxists by seeking to instrumentalise them. The party-leftists believe this to be their critical stance vis-à-vis academicised radical theory. But this attitude, in reality, amounts to no more than the playing out of the objective logic of competition and split between the theoretical subjectivity of analysis and the practical objectivity of movement, one in which the domination of the latter by the former is implicitly an established fact. Something that has reinforced and reproduced the capitalist logic of social relations within the twinned-domain of Marxist theory and working-class movements, thereby significantly undermining the radical tenor and orientation of revolutionary proletarian praxis. This hierarchical split between theory and movements has also meant that such academicised Marxism is no longer a constitutive theoretical moment of revolutionary praxis but is a reified analytic that, therefore, is destined to do no more than engage in a competitive war of one-upmanship with other non-Marxist and even anti-Marxist radical-theoretical analytics. That is clearly revealed by the liberal eclecticism that has gone as much into the making of the organisational core of the Delhi edition of the Historical Materialism conference as the conference itself. And the unsavoury controversy that has dogged the organising of the conference, what with a few pocos and semi-pocos, who had initially been part of that eclectically composed core of conference organisers, reportedly walking out of it in a huff, and threatening to boycott and even disrupt the proceedings further substantiates our charge on that score. That a good number of such pocos, semi-pocos, and non- and anti-Marxists are still very much part of both the conference and its organisational core, even as some of their friends who have abandoned it are now attacking the conference from the outside, reveals that the logic of competitive one-upmanship constitutes a marketplace of ideas which commodified academic trends share with each other in order to be part of the process of outcompeting one another. In that sense, the eclectically organised core of the conference, the conference itself and its so-called detractors on the outside are one extended continuum of academic capitalism. So much so that it would not be inaccurate to title this soap opera of a conference the ‘Extended Family of Histo-Mat and its Inner Feuds’.
This competitive co-habitation of academicised Marxism with other non- and anti-Marxist academic trends under the aegis of Historical Materialism, Delhi, is a travesty of critical dialogue the former claims to be engaged in with the latter. The only stake such Marxism has in its engagement with those other theoretical tendencies (read analytics/ideologies) is accommodation in the marketplace of ideas in competitive co-existence with all other kinds of discursive commodities. Need we tell these Marxist industrialists and their non-Marxist academic compatriots that their unctuous and self-important claims of a holding ‘critical dialogue’ among themselves can delude none for long save such sell-outs and hustlers as themselves? Critical dialogue, they ought to be reminded, is polemical communication, not competition. One that constitutes radical antagonism between the horizons of commodification and the politics of decommodification, effecting radical separation between them.