Industrial McCarthyism in India?

July 4, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Auto component manufacturer Pricol Ltd claims that its OE customers have warned it that “if the company ‘engages with a Communist union, we won’t have confidence that your labour relationship would be good in the long term’”. The management is “ready for talks with workers” but not with their communist union in Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu). Don’t think this can happen only in the McCarthyist US. The union continues to resist the use of non-permanent workers in works meant for permanent ones without giving them equal benefits.

Now after the Indian State’s banning of the CPI(Maoist), the management has found a new justfication. In one of its official press releases it unabashedly boasts:

“The management has adopted a stand in principle not to recognise the Maoist – Leninist outfit. The recent ban by the Centre on Maoist outfits justifies our stand as our own actions were based on upholding the peace and harmony of the society as a whole.”

Interestingly, the union is affiliated to the country’s one of the few official recognised national trade union centres, All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), which is linked with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation, not the Maoists. The CPI(ML)-Liberation is one of the prominent groups that claim the legacy of Naxalism, but has long been engaged in parliamentary politics and is duly recognised by the Election Commission of India.

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Crisis and Class Struggle: The American Way

June 17, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Pratyush Chandra

If we have to name a single industry prototypical of post-second world war capitalism, which to a large extent defined the nature and range of economic activities in this period, the choice would undoubtedly be the automobile industry. With the financial crisis finally taking its toll over this industry (especially the Detroit Three – GM, Chrysler and Ford), the crisis has almost acquired a general character. The most interesting aspect of this long impending collapse in the automobile industry is its bearing for the industrial regime that will evolve out of the present crisis – this will largely depend on the balance between the forces (classes and their agencies) which will see through this process of restructuring. The bailout package has already been declared and it aims to completely disarm the workers, that too with the assent of their own unions.

A foremost business magazine, The Economist (‘A Giant Falls’, June 4 2009) while assessing “where did it all go wrong”, found the “insupportable burden” of its commitments to workers (that they wrested through decades of their struggle) as the single most important factor that led to the bankruptcy of General Motors, the collapse of the American pride. So obviously the general consensus is being created that these commitments were not justified. It was a case of “mismanagement and decline”. Thus, “the auto unions, themselves once emblematic of what workers could achieve within capitalism, have been reduced to lobbying to save “their” companies, and a decades-long trend in private-sector labor negotiations has now confirmed collective bargaining as having shifted from demands by workers to demands on workers.” (Herman Rosenfeld, ‘The North American Auto Industry in Crisis’, Monthly Review, June 2009)

General Motors (GM), that shaped the American way of life and economy for so many decades, is bankrupt, now, and Obama has alighted to save it. The bankrupt capitalists hid themselves behind the State which is determined to save the “American way of life”. Such determination can be fruitful only under the condition of some sort of social corporatism – through the state-sponsored or negotiated peace among capitalists, and between workers and capitalists. The first reproduces a capitalist-class-for-itself, while the second submits the workers to the logic of capital accumulation and the competitive needs of “their” employers. Didn’t Gramsci teach us that corporatism (or consensus) is the only alternative, besides coercion, for dealing with the crisis of legitimation and accumulation in capitalism?

Around 90 years back, in October 1920, a crisis had struck another giant automobile company, Fiat, in Turin (Italy). To counter the militancy of Italian workers, evident in the tremendous Workers’ Councils and factory occupation movements, the Fiat management had offered a scheme of co-operation, which the workers summarily rejected. Gramsci and his comrades understood the designs of the State and Fiat behind their ideology of co-operation – to get the workers at their mercy. The Turin Communists understood that within this scheme, “[t]he workforce will necessarily have to bind itself to the State … through the activity of working class deputies…. The Turin proletariat will no longer exist as an independent class, but simply as an appendage of the bourgeois State. Class corporatism will have triumphed, but the proletariat will have lost its position and role as leader and guide.” (Quoted in Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, Pre-Prison Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 325-326)

Where Italian premier Giolitti could not succeed, Obama has succeeded. The “working class deputies” in the US have ultimately bound the workforce to the State and the bourgeoisie, right at the time of a crisis, a moment that Marx and Engels acknowledged as “one of the most powerful levers in political upheavals”. Crisis indeed is a moment for heightening class struggle. Why not? If capitalism itself is shaped through open and hidden struggle between capital and labour, then should the moment of crisis be left out from this fight? At least capitalists are not going to do that; they know the meaning of the crisis – now or never! And in the absence of any strong labour movement, they know it is an opportunity not to be lost.

There are diagnoses and recipes going around to save the ‘economy’ from the deepening crisis, as if the economy in itself is something neutral, and we can struggle over its colour once it is saved. Even when capitalism is blamed (taking into consideration the growing interest in Marx throughout the First World) for its own ailments, the revival is recommended through various interventionist measures. There are many Keynesian quacks nowadays roaming and gossiping around irritating the capitalists – “we told you so”. But the capitalist knows what to do. Yes, intervention, if it’s must, but on whose cost – capital’s or labour’s? The capitalist must be bailed out, and the labourer must be reined in. Social corporatism is not at all bad, if it subjugates labour to the ‘general interests’ of the economy.

Capital doesn’t want to mess up with labour. It has tried to evade the very circuit in which labour-power has to be bought in, but every time it does that destiny reminds it of its painful bond with labour. This time capital had almost created a world of its own without the nuisance of labour. But these consumers and debtors, on whom it relied so much, betrayed it – it suddenly realised that these were in fact the same little urchins – those children of labour, whose devilish smell and smile it wanted to forget.

Time and again, the capitalist class is reminded of the basic lesson in political economy that ultimately profit generates in the productive sector, through engagement with labour. But this class which is composed of competing entities – individuals or groups – relapses into amnesia once prosperity steps in, as they compete to “accumulate, accumulate…”. Ultimately, they all find it ideal to directly jump from M(oney) to M'(oney) without going through the strenuous process of production where they must deal with labour, which simply cannot behave like another dumb ‘factor of production’.

Once capital comes to its senses, and realises its inevitable bond with labour, it tries very hard (and every means) to sterilize labour – alienating it from its creativity (hence, its destructivity) and thus, its humanity. Whoever – capital or labour – mobilises its class and community first during the crisis commands the post-crisis phase. Here labour is always at a disadvantage, it has to make an enormous extra effort and prior preparation to come to command. If it arrives late, it gives enough time for capital and its agents to put themselves in their headquarters. They don’t meet in the streets (only leaving their dogs and watchdogs for the street-fights) but in lavish boardrooms and in the offices of national and international agencies. The labouring multitude is reduced to its representatives, who are b(r)ought in these offices to negotiate a deal. Thus, the social compact is attained.

This is what has happened in the auto industry and will probably happen in many other cases until and unless the working class too realises that crisis is a moment of class struggle, not of negotiation and compromise. In fact, what is a compromise, but an institutionalisation of class struggle under the conditions of capital, in which the defeat of labour is immanent!

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Petition: Stop Crackdown on Dalit Workers’ Struggle for Housing in Punjab

June 7, 2009 by 2 Comments

Please sign the following petition

To
Shri Manmohan Singh,
Hon’ble Prime Minister,

Sub: Intervention sought in the mass arrest of rural poor and dalit workers in Punjab

Dear Sir,

We are writing to seek your urgent intervention in the mass arrests of dalit agricultural labourers in Mansa, Sangrur and Bathinda districts of Punjab. Since 21 May, over 1300 agricultural labourers and labour leaders, including 511 women and 42 children, have been locked up in different jails of Punjab. Almost all the activists and leaders of the Mazdoor Muktio Morcha and the CPI(ML) (Liberation) in Punjab have been jailed, and even the most peaceful protests and ordinary political activities by these groups is facing a crackdown. Some of the senior activists have been isolated from the others and confined along with hardened criminals and are being harassed within the jail. This includes Jasbir Kaur Nat, a National Council Member of the AIPWA, who is held in Naba jail , in violation of her rights as a political prisoner.

The arrests have happened in the course of a struggle for NREGA job cards and homestead plots promised by the SAD-BJP State Government. The SAD-BJP Government launched this offensive immediately following the Lok Sabha elections, where the results reflected the disenchantment of the rural poor with the government.

In Punjab, where agriculture is highly mechanised, rural poor often get very few days of employment a month – whereby the rural poor had pinned their hopes for survival on the extension of NREGA to all rural districts in the country. Consequently, the failure of the administration to provide NREGA job cards, and the fact that the Punjab Govt. returned 350 crores of NREGA funds unused to the Centre, became a major issue.

The Akali-BJP Government had moreover reneged on its promise to provide homestead plots (5 marla plots for every rural poor family). It was in protest against this denial of basic rights of livelihood and housing, that agricultural labourers of Mansa district, led by the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha and CPI(ML), occupied a portion of panchayat/commons land allotted to be leased to workers. Under the Land Consolidation Act 1961, one-third of panchayat land is meant for agricultural workers on lease for cultivation – and it was this land that the agricultural workers used to build their hutments, until such a time that the Government would keep its promise to allot house plots.

Naturally, for women from dalit labouring background, the issue of both NREGA job cards and land is a very important one, and so they participated in very large numbers in the agitation.

This movement for land and work began prior to the elections and continued even during the elections. The Akali-BJP Government, it seems, has waited till the elections were over, to begin an all-out crackdown. The agricultural workers had begun a peaceful dharna on 17 May and held a massive Rally on 19 May, which put enough pressure on local officials to effect an agreement to ensure job cards within one month and house plots to all within three months. The very next day, local upper caste land owners began a road-roko protest demanding eviction of the poor from the panchayat land, and, one cue, on 21 May, labour leaders, including even the General Secretary of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions (AICCTU), Comrade Swapan Mukherjee, were arrested. On 22 May, over 1000 workers including a very large number of women and children were arrested and jailed – from the dharna site, from their homes, and from the office of the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha and CPI(ML). Young children have been separated from their jailed mothers and sent to junvenile and delinquent homes without informing the parents on where their children have been confined.

The ostensible excuse for the arrests was the need to vacate the so-called “illegal occupation” of the panchayat land – but the arrests have continued even after the forcible eviction of the poor from that land, and the demolition of their makeshift homes.

In Punjab, when rich farmers habitually occupy common land, land allotted for waste disposal, etc. the government never lifts a finger against them. It is a shame that the same government, having blatantly broken its promises of housing and livelihood, has unleashed severe repression when poor rural workers are demanding fulfilment of the government’s own promise.

Even today, activists of the AIPWA, Mazdoor Mukti Morcha and CPI(ML) outside jails are being threatened with arrest at the slightest sign of any peaceful protest or ordinary political activity like party meetings. Activists who have not been jailed are being held under virtual house arrest, without any warrant and in complete violation of their fundamental rights, as the offices and homes are being encircled by the police and ordinary movement hampered. This unspoken emergency has a dimension of class and caste bias – since it is the organisations of the rural workers and dalits which are being targeted and prevented from functioning.

We demand your Government’s urgent intervention to ensure an end to the repression, harassment and witch-hunt being unleashed on the rural poor by the Punjab Government, immediate and unconditional release of all arrested activists and leaders of the AIPWA, Mazdoor Mukti Morcha and CPI(ML), and fulfilment of the basic and inalienable demands of agricultural labourers for land, housing and jobs.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign the Petition

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Revolutionary May Day Greetings!

May 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Saswat Pattanayak

Relevance of this day never was greater than it is today – as a celebration of collective human progress, as a reminder of historic labour struggles, as an occasion to reaffirm class allegiance with the working poor, and the majority strugglers.

Not an allegiance to exploitative ruling class demarcations of geographical boundaries drawn and redrawn through manipulative gestures of status-quo diplomacy. Not an allegiance to standards of academic, material, knowledge society thus distinguished and rewarded by the handful corporate czars to effectively facilitate their spheres of influence. Not an allegiance to normative philosophies of spiritual and religious practices aimed at bringing calm and internal peace through aggrandizing state of ignorance, indifference and ineptitude.

An allegiance to organized human labour necessarily requires obliterations of several convenient divisions mapped thus by the ruling class combines, while recreating new necessary ones.

Class allegiance in action must uproot the notions of purity attached with the cultural high-handedness in the form of canonic texts, classical arts and holy scriptures. Owing to lack of time from life’s labour, indulging in critical reflections on societal upbringings often becomes impossible or inadequate. As a result, the majority’s thought processes of any time are mostly conditioned by the simplistically offered explanations of recognized experts, not reshaped through rigorous testing by the self of acquired knowledge and incidental experiences. Such a propensity towards contentment by not subjecting oneself to question the foundations of belief systems helps maintain the glorification of cultural produces that puts the peoples in their oppressed places: that is, at the level of passive observers.

Authoritative texts irrespective of how patriarchal, discriminative and violent they are – all religious scriptures fall into this category – are passively consumed as holy and irrefutable. Ongoing texts of necessary collective resistance do not find a publishing house or a review on the mainstream liberal media. Classical as well as postmodern arts depicting both the royal past and confused future are heralded as containing “high” artistic value, while realist arts depicting peoples revolutions in the past or existing organized working class movements are discarded as socialist propaganda. Labour union songs, films portraying human labour as protagonist, and books about organized revolutionary history are forced out of circulation. If elite culture is limited to incomprehensible museums, popular culture is defined in terms of vulgar exhibits of indiscriminate media consumption. After dumbing down people through trivia overloads, they are praised for being free to choose what works best for their lives. After conditioning popular thoughts through uncritical materials, subjects are offered options to choose – between Coke and Pepsi, Disney and James Bond, McCain and Obama, Drama and Romance, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres, Rock and Pop. Choices vary only by degrees, because they simply cannot vary by kind. Such wide array of similar choices offered by corporate greed must necessarily be a substitute for the limited options necessary for establishment of a classless society. They cannot be supplements.

Classical/postmodern and socialist/realist choices cannot co-exist harmoniously. In their realized state, the monumental and fundamental conflicts must surface. Just as haves and the have-nots cannot co-exist peacefully. In their emancipated states, revolutionary struggles must take over. Political systems that claim otherwise and preach possibility of peaceful coexistence between economically disparate classes merely work overtime to deceive their subjects through propagandist media which conveniently redefine economic classes (hence, a creation of “Middle Class”) and reposition boundaries of dissent by forming among themselves mutually respecting groups of liberals and conservatives – as a result, annihilating the possibility of communistic discourse around property relations.

Political systems such as these – the wide array of “Democracies” rule over a comfortably numb, blissfully ignorant, uncritically religious, and eternally grateful mass of people who are preached the merits of self-centric career growth, domestic peace and personal saving accounts over the high costs they cause – endless cycles of poverty, unemployment, lack of healthcare, absence of socially relevant education, continuation of escalated wars, and unquestioned acceptance of accumulation of private wealth as a necessary virtue. This hegemonist worldview not only widens its own sphere but in the process closes the alternatives. As a result, individual comforts take precedence over collective good and external aggression is justified in the name of internal peace. The wealthy section is heralded as deserving, the poor as resulting high-crime neighborhoods. The rich are rewarded with tax-breaks and bank loans while the poor are condemned to be credit-unworthy and liabilities. The true majority comprising the working class is treated as a minority when it comes to effecting administrative changes, policies governing education, house ownerships, business labour practices and environmental concerns. The true minority consisting of the historically privileged and their recent elite cronies express and install the legislations that suit their interest while masquerading them as national interests. Hence the president of a given country declares wars in these times under the advice of the friendly military-industrial lobby without taking into account the interest of majority of people in the world. What is worse, the majority of people are in fact attributed as the ones who wanted to go to war in the first place. After all, in the democracies – the system where the leaders are elected by virtue of how much money they have gathered – people deserve the kind of government they elect. Since people have exercised their voting options – no matter how uninformed they were kept in their choices not just to vote one leader or the other but about their stance on the process of farcical elections themselves – the leaders carry out most heinous of acts relegating the consequences of responsibilities to the masses.

Under the conditioned pretense of being active deciders of their destinies, people support their elected heads in all unfortunate decisions – just as inside houses the children do not question their reactionary parents, students do not confront their ignorant teachers, followers do not challenge their religious preachers. In effect, narratives of socioeconomic history are authoritative when they speak through the ruling class lenses. Students grow curiosity about the hairstyles and handbags of the First Ladies of White House, than pose critical questions concerning the reason why their own working mothers toil so hard and yet feel they do not deserve the similar treatments as the rich presidential wives or their corporate guests at grand banquets. A “free” society based on rhetoric of individual liberty suffers from being inherently an unfree, ignorant, selfishly passive one. Women are defined by gender roles prescribed to them by men. Their loyalty is defined in terms of how much of the body they cover, and their freedom is defined in terms of how much of the body they expose. From their menstrual cycles to pregnancy months, their status as workers is defined as a liability by norm and disability by law. When the entire workforce strives to accentuate the greedy private capitalist bank accounts, the sense of contribution to societal developments is felt through the merciful charities – disguised as tax evasions – of rich individuals, and through painfully slow legislations of judicial systems that offer drops of justice from time to time. Legal amendments to grant freedoms to minorities – that conveniently divided group of oppressed world majority – offer quotas in lowly paid jobs in form of so-called affirmative actions and reservations. Not as reparations to the historic damages.

Demands for reparations lead to revolutions. Revolutions are prevented by means of granting of charities. Status quo of the privileged is maintained through shedding of material grants, and guilt, from their surplus. World Bank loans and grants to the landless in the world is an act of charity on behalf of the greedy bankers, financiers who put their poster-boys at the helm of political power just to prevent any step toward reparations. In these days as always in the past, private bankers help their political weapons to rule over the people. They do so by granting credits and loans to people for essential needs that otherwise should be taken care of by the governments. Instead, availing of housing, healthcare and education facilities are privatized in order to keep people debt-ridden throughout their lives. Debts and interests accrued on them create a majority population that is unable to conceptualize the demands of reparations. On a May Day today it is only important to note that Bank of America which has received billions of taxpayers money not only spends them for its own profit motives by pursuing a credit war on the hapless consumers; it also lets the CEO Ken Lewis receive $35 million salary in the past two years; and what is worse, it fires thousands of employees who cannot avail of the so-called Employees Free Choice Act – yet another false promise from the American President Obama, known better as the lasting friend of the corrupt banks.

It is not enough to say the economic class war on majority of world’s peoples is an indictment for the freedom and equality envisaged for our world. Indeed, it is only natural that in order to keep the world unfree and unequal, it is important that the economic class war waged by the rich upon the poor continues in this manner. For the ruling class of individualistic corporate, political, judicial, academic, religious profiteers who assume the world does not need revolutionary replacements whereby they must be prepared to give up their private houses, businesses and mansions, it is necessary for them to continue exploiting people – directly and indirectly- by preaching peace while waging war, teaching lies while educating the youths, celebrating private properties while pretending to be moral and religious.

Those of us who must realign or strengthen our class allegiances with the oppressed and the exploited, must sympathetically understand why the ruling class does what it is doing. Only then can we unite together to transcend barriers and divisions instilled among us by the exploiters and empathetically revolt for the classless society that we strive for. May Day is an occasion to stop wondering in surprise. Only yet another day we need to rise above and beyond the divisions. And working class must still continue to unite even more and reach out to those workers who have doubts choosing which side they must be on.

Laal Salaam!

Filed Under: EDITORIALS Tagged With: , , , ,

SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-STUDENTS-WORKERS UNION

April 5, 2009 by 2 Comments

A Leaflet

Today is the time of economic crisis. All national and multinational companies are feeling the effect, especially, the workers in them. Millions of workers have lost their jobs throughout the globe. This is not the first time that the workers are facing such problems. Several times in the last century similar problems have been created for workers. In the beginning of this century, after the 9/11 attacks, there was a similar period. Production of workers, i.e., students coming out of universities have outnumbered, by more than a hundred times, the intake capacities of companies. The only solution that has been offered is competition. Study hard… compete and get better appropriated than your fellow mates. There can be just one solution – the “better” students/workers, i.e., those who are compliant to the bosses’ interests and demands, will get or sustain their jobs; and, in that case there will be a growing brigade of unemployed and underemployed (underpaid, casual and temporary) workers, still expecting and competing to get accommodated. All this is because something needs to be sustained in the companies, namely, high profits. That can’t be compromised or shared with workers!!!

Some of us are over-optimistic about getting out with an MBA degree and joining some company in a highly paid managerial post. This section needs to realise that the intake capacity with regard to these posts in companies is much more restricted than that of workers proper. They share the same fate in a much larger magnitude. When there is a reduction in the number of workers, managers who “manage” them will be more and more redundant.

In this process of profit realisation, the sufferer is the student and/or the worker community. They compete and struggle amongst and against each other, weakening themselves ‘as a whole’.

It is high time for this community to get organized and cooperate in their struggle for liberation, rather than compete against each other. It is high time for them to ask themselves what they have lost in the process of competition and assess the magnitude of what they are going to lose if they continue competing blindly. It is high time they get organized and ask the big bosses of companies and the governments as to why ‘we’ have to lead a life of subjugation so that the profit is maintained. It is high time for them to choose between this alternative path of questioning the present state of affairs and the path of blind competition.

Science-Technology-Students’-Workers’ Union (STSWU) is an organization that provides this alternative platform to students and workers to meet the challenges of their class – locally, nationally and internationally.

To join, contact Satyabrata.
Email: satyabrata@radicalnotes.com
Mob. No. 09238535626

Workers of all countries, unite!

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In Defence of Hamas – Response/Counter-response

January 27, 2009 by 1 Comment

The Original Article by Pothik Ghosh

Is there really a Palestinian bourgeois class, which shares socio-political interests with its Israeli counterpart? For the very same reason that explains the absence of a working class movement in Palestine, there is no capitalist solidarity in that region as well. There have been working class leaders who have failed their class without being bourgeois themselves.

There is greater out-migration from Israel than there is immigration into the country. There is no material pressure to expand territory. After all, Israel did vacate Gaza. You are willing to compromise with Hamas’s Islamicism. Why can’t the Hamas accept Israel in the same spirit? – TK Arun

Dear TK,

I will attempt to address only the fundamental theoretical questions you have raised in your response to my piece on Palestine here. I’ll leave out some of the more empirical details that you have brought up.

To begin at the beginning, capitalist solidarity does not necessarily preclude struggle within capitalism among various sections of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the hegemonic social logic of capital, which would be constitutive of such solidarity, is of competitive socialisation. Capitalist solidarity is, therefore, not without stratification, and domination of one or more sections of the bourgeoisie by others. Capitalist solidarity can never, precisely because of this constitutive logic, be truly envisaged as absolutely horizontal. To that extent, there is no equality, even within the bourgeoisie, in capitalism. And to my mind solidarity among various sections of capitalists cannot, unlike socialist solidarity, be conceptualised (repeat conceptualised) as an absolute state. It exists, provisionally if you like, only in relation to their domination of the working class. I have, if you go back to my piece, said that the PLO-PA – and the Palestinian social groups embodied by them – also pose a Palestinian identity of struggle against Israel. But the decline in the radical tenor of resistance as posited through this ‘secular’ identity, seen in conjunction with its rejection by the Gazan underclass and the ascendancy of Hamas and its Islamism as the principal idiom of Palestinian resistance, indicates that there is a Palestinian bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie, even as it poses a struggle (competitive) against the Israeli state, and the Jewish bourgeoisie it embodies, for a better position within the larger regional capitalist hegemony, also seeks to protect and preserve its own interests against the assault of the Palestinian underclass. The PLO-PA’s collaboration, ever since Oslo, with the Israeli state to marginalise and even crush Hamas on one hand, and continuing to pose a Palestinian identity of struggle against Israel, on the other, is symptomatic of this strange capitalist paradox called competitive solidarity of the bourgeoisie. You will surely agree, and I have adduced examples to that effect in my article, that the Palestinian question posed by PLO-PA, post Oslo, is an apology of resistance in that it has been perfectly amenable to and even a participant in Israel’s insidious undermining of the Oslo Accords. Or, how else does one explain the failure of the Mahmoud Abbas-led group’s failure to forge a solid solidarity between West Bank and Gaza and conduct resistance against Israel with the same doggedness that Al Fatah, the Yasser Arafat-led main faction of the PLO, did in its heyday. That is something that Hamas has been doing. If anything, Abbas has used the PA security forces, and wonder of wonders Fatah fighters, to quell anti-Israeli dissent within Palestinian society not only in Gaza but also sometimes in West Bank.

If you argue that Hamas too is posing the question of self-determination in the idiom of competition I would certainly not disagree. Given that it’s not a self-conscious proletarian subjectivity, it sure is not self-reflexively aware that the question of political autonomy it’s raising cannot really be resolved unless it’s informed by a politics that shifts the horizon of socialisation from competition (capitalist) to non-alienated association and dialogue (trans- or counter-capitalist). Yet, at this moment this competitive posing of the ‘Islamised’ national Palestinian identity of Hamas – given that it is located in that section of Palestinian society (underclass) that is disenfranchised, dispossessed and dominated by a constellation of various institutionalized and alienated configurations of socio-political power formed by the PLO-PA and the Zionist state together as also separately – objectively poses the decimation of the competitive social logic of capitalism and its hegemony in the region. A hegemony that is, at this moment, precisely, the root cause of this dispossession and domination of a section of Palestinians. By the same token, the PLO-PA’s competitive ‘struggle’ against Israel, considering that it simultaneously seeks to collaborate with it, is an attempt to keep certain sections of Palestinian society at bay and, therefore, seeks to preserves and perpetuate the hegemony of capitalism and its competitive social logic and ideology.

I would, of course, join you in ruing the fact that working class forces have grasped this objective conjunctural situation neither in their theoretical analyses nor political practice. For, only that would break and displace the conjuncture towards a more ideologically proletarianised situation. And yet, that will not be any reason for me to simply reject a political subjectivity, which foregrounds this objective autonomy-association question sharply, merely because it’s not self-conscious of what its subjectivity actually amounts to in the objective realm. Of course, Hamas, or any such agency, will have to be critiqued for its deficit on those terms of self-consciousness. But that to my mind is not accomplished by painting it with the same moral-secular brush of Islamism that is used to taint forces like Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Coming back to a problem that has often cropped up in most of our discussions and debates, class for me is, in its essence, not a social identity or group. Though it can appear in that form sometimes. (Hegel’s “the essence must appear” or Marx’s “Class qua class”.) Class, for me, is a logic of relation. When competition happens, as is capitalism’s wont, in its moments of circulation (social) and distribution/regulation (political), we have to see in totality, by retroactive location in the moment of production (economic), what is the point from which absolute extraction of value occurs. The social group or identity that occupies that point at that moment is the form that the working class takes at that moment. In other words, politico-cultural identities have to be located within this matrix of social relations to figure out which class position they hold in themselves. And that would be irrespective of whether or not they display a subjective consciousness of their objective class location (or position) in positing their respective identities.

Your analysis seems to be informed by an economistic view of Marxism and class politics, which conflates the working class with workers and the bourgeoisie with a specific section among them: the industrial capitalists. But in my analysis West Asia, particularly Israel-Palestine, does not need to have heavy-duty industrialisation and thus industrial capitalists and industrial workers, for us to find either the working class or the bourgeoisie in that region. Capital, if I may repeat myself, is a certain configuration of social power.

Therefore, your assertion that there is no working class movement in the region is right. But not for the reasons you seem to imply. This absence is because, as I state above, the left forces in the region, which had some significant presence there once, have not been able to grasp, either in theory or in political practice, the conjuncture of Hamas’s emergence and critically engage with that conjuncture and thereby the Palestinian movement that has engendered a force like Hamas. If that sounds a tad voluntaristic and utopian, let me complete the dialectic, which will dissolve this subjective voluntarism into its objectivity, by saying the same thing from a different angle: only if Hamas succeeds in enabling a truly nationally (repeat nationally) self-determined Palestinian state would the Palestinian society have taken yet another step towards founding such a working class movement. The institutionalisation of Hamas, which the founding of such a nation-state would entail, would lead to the emergence of a new elite and bureaucracy from the currently struggling sections of Palestinian society, its concomitant alienation from the masses and the complete instrumentalisation of its Islamism, something that is at times visible now as fascism at the Palestinian community level.

All that would further deepen the objective conditions for the emergence of a significant working class politics in Palestine. Of course, subjective intervention to seize this objective moment would still be required. And we, who do politics in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the elimination of the Tudeh Party by Khomeini’s band of Islamists, know all too well the heavy price to be paid for not seizing the objective moment through subjective ideological intervention. After all, only that can rupture the conjuncture. Similarly in Palestine. Hamas’s success and institutionalisation, going by the current configuration of political forces, could well lead to the emergence of more radical outfits such as the Islamic Jihad as the principal agency of Palestinian resistance. But Hamas’s marginalisation through military force, precisely what Israel has been trying to accomplish, would surely compel large sections of the beleaguered Palestinian underclass to vest their despair in the pernicious chimera of a hope that the pan-Islamism of Al Qaeda offers. Such perils in political struggles cannot, clearly, be pre-empted. They have to be faced even at the risk of making grave mistakes. For, if people eschew struggles for fear of the perils such struggles are likely to produce there would be no hope of them emancipating themselves. We would do well to recall Mao, who in his peculiarly Chinese Jacobin style used to say, “A revolution is not a dinner party.”

By the way, an aside: revolutionary forces in Palestine might be down but they are not out. Fighters of George Habbash’s Popular Front have reportedly been fighting the Israeli incursion shoulder to shoulder with the guerrillas of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The opportunity for a socialist revolutionary subjective intervention has not exactly been lost in Palestine.

Pothik Ghosh

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Workers Occupy Chicago Factory: Echoes of Argentina’s 2001 Worker Uprising

December 9, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Benjamin Dangl

When the 250 workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago were told that the plant was shutting down, they decided to take matters into their own hands.  On Friday, December 5, the workers occupied their factory in an act that echoes the sit-down strikes of the 1930s in the US and the occupation of factories during the 2001 crisis in Argentina.

"They want the poor person to stay down.  We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere until we get what’s fair and what’s ours," Silvia Mazon, 47, a formerly apolitical mother and worker at the factory for 13 years told the New York Times.  "They thought they would get rid of us easily, but if we have to be here for Christmas, it doesn’t matter."

The workers are demanding that they be paid their vacation and severance pay, or that the factory continue its operations.  They were given only three days’ notice of the shut down, not the 60 days’ notice which is required under federal and state law.

On Friday, fifty of the workers at the plant — taking shifts in the occupation — sat on chairs and pallets inside the factory and were supplied with blankets, sleeping bags, and food from supporters.  Throughout the takeover, workers have been cleaning the building and shoveling snow while protesters gathered in solidarity outside waving signs and chanting.

The occupation of the factory — which produces heating efficient vinyl windows and sliding doors — is taking place in the midst of a massive recession, with the rate of unemployment in the US at a 15 year high, and with 600,000 manufacturing jobs lost in this year alone.  As another indicator of the economic crisis, 1 in 10 Americans — a record of 31.6 million — are now using food stamps.

The factory workers are protesting the fact that the Bank of America received $25 billion in the recent $700 billion government bailout, and then went ahead and cut off credit to Republic Windows and Doors, resulting in the subsequent closing of the factory.

"The bank has the money in this situation," said Mark Meinster, a representative of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the union to which the factory workers belong.  "And we are demanding that Bank of America release the money owed to workers who have earned it and are entitled to it."  On Monday Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich announced that, in support of the workers, the state will temporarily stop doing business with Bank of America.

President-elect Barack Obama also announced his support: "When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right . . . what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy."

Rev. Jesse Jackson delivered turkey and groceries to the workers, saying, "These workers are to this struggle perhaps what Rosa Parks was to social justice 50 years ago. . . .  This, in many ways, is the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence."

Occupy, Resist, Produce: Argentina’s 2001 Crisis

Argentina’s crisis was similar to the current recession in the US in the sense that in December of 2001, almost overnight, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to the one of the weakest.  As the occupation of the factory in Chicago indicates, there are some tactics and approaches used in Argentina to combat economic crises that could be applicable in the United States.

During Argentina’s economic crash, when politicians and banks failed, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old.  Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems, alternative currency, and neighborhood assemblies which provided solidarity, food, and support in communities across the country.

Perhaps the most well known of these initiatives were the occupation of factories and businesses which were later run collectively by workers.  There are roughly two hundred worker-run factories and businesses in Argentina, most of which started in the midst of the 2001 crisis.  15,000 people work in these cooperatives and the businesses range from car part producers to rubber balloon factories.  Though the worker occupation of Republic Windows and Doors is different in many respects to examples of worker occupations in Argentina, it is worth reflecting on the strikingly similar situations in which workers in both countries found themselves, and how they are fighting back.

The Chilavert book publisher in Buenos Aires offers one example of workers taking back a bankrupt factory to operate it as a worker cooperative.  "Occupy, resist, and produce.  This is the synthesis of what we are doing," Candido Gonzalez, a long time Chilavert worker explained to me during a visit to his bustling publishing house, with printing presses clamoring away in the background.  "And it is the community as a whole that makes this possible.  When we were defending this place there were eight assault vehicles and thirty policemen that came here to kick us out.  But we, along with other members of the community, stayed here and defended the factory."

Candido didn’t attribute Chilavert’s success to any politician.  "We didn’t put a political party banner in the factory because we are the ones that took the factory.  All kinds of politicians have come here asking for our support.  Yet when the unions failed, when the state failed, the workers began a different kind of fight. . . .  If you want to take power and you can’t take over the state, you have to at least take over the means of production."

NO PASAR
Una mirada desde el trabajo autogestionado

Back in Chicago, at a time when politicians have failed to respond appropriately to one of the worst US economic crises in history, the occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory is a reminder that desperate times call for fresh approaches to social change.

"We aren’t animals," Republic Windows and Doors employee Apolinar Cabrera, 43, told reporters.  Cabrera is a father of two, with another child on the way, and has been an employee at the factory for 17 years.  "We’re human beings and we deserve to be treated like human beings."

***

Click here to take action to support the workers at Republic Windows and Doors and to hold Bank of America accountable.

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press).  The book includes many stories of workers, families, and activists throughout Latin America working together to build a new world in the face of economic crises.

Courtesy: MRZINE

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Workers occupy Chicago factory – “Doing something we haven’t done since the 1930s”

December 7, 2008 by Leave a Comment

United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (regularly updated)

Chicago, IL – Saturday Evening, December 6

National news networks CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, as well as Chicago news media, are reporting on the following dramatic developments involving UE members in Chicago.

Members of UE Local 1110 who work at Republic Windows and Doors are occupying the plant around the clock this weekend, in an effort to force the company and its main creditor to meet their obligations to the workers. Their goal is to at least get the compensation that workers are owed; they also seek the resumption of operations at the plant. All 260 members of the local were laid off Friday in a sudden plant closing, brought on by Bank of America cutting off operating credit to the company. The bank even instructed managers at Republic to refuse to pay workers their earned vacation pay and the severance pay they are owed under the federal WARN Act, since they were not given the legally-required notice that the plant was about to close.

Below are some links to ongoing news coverage of this story:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28084616/

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/republic.windows.sitin.2.880850.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,463030,00.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-workersoccupyfact,0,1928458.story

http://www.france24.com/en/20081206-laid-off-workers-furious-bank-pulls-chicago-plants-credit

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/republic-windows-doors-120508.html

Bank of America, the country’s second largest bank, has received $25 billion in taxpayer money as part of the $700 billion government bailout of the financial industry. The public was told that this bailout was necessary in order to keep credit flowing and prevent the loss of jobs. Yet the very-well-paid executives at Bank of America have actually cut off credit and forced the closing of Republic where workers were, at least up until Friday, producing energy-efficient doors and windows.

Jobs with Justice, the national worker rights coalition, is asking people to sign an online letter to Bank of America, demanding that they provide the needed credit to keep Republic Windows and Doors open – or at a minimum, that they pay workers the money they are owed. Please go to this link to support this important struggle.

UE Local 1110 members, along with community supporters, picketed and rallied in front of Bank of America’s main Chicago branch on Wednesday, December 3. They chanted, “You got bailed out, we got sold out!” Local 1110 President Armando Robles told the news media, “Just weeks before Christmas we are told our factory will close in three days. Taxpayers gave Bank of America billions, and they turn around and close our company. We will fight for a bailout for workers.”

To support the members of Local 1110 in their courageous fight, send checks payable to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, to: UE, 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Messages of support can be sent to leahfried@gmail.com. For more information, call the UE Chicago office at 312-829-8300.

UE has already contacted Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and will soon be in touch with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), chair of the Senate Banking Committee, regarding Bank of America’s apparent abuse of its public obligations under the federal banking bailout.

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A New Cultural Revolution?

November 27, 2008 by Leave a Comment

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” -Eduardo Galeano. … Photographs of workers’ protest in a Chinese toy factory.

Courtesy: China Daily

Courtesy: Telegraph

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Crisis, the Bankers’ Bailout, and Socialist Analysis/Strategy

November 24, 2008 by 3 Comments

Dave Hill

The current crisis of Capital and the current response

In the current juncture, the crisis of capitalism, as in the repeated crises of capital and overproduction and speculation predicted by Marx, capitalists have a big problem. Their profits, the value of the shares and part control of companies by Chief Executive Officers and other capitalist executives (late twentieth century capitalists), are plummeting. The rate of profit is falling, has fallen.

The political response by parties funded by Capital, such as the Democrats and Republicans in the USA, and Labour, Liberal and Conservative in the UK is not to blame the capitalist system, not even to blame the neoliberal form of capitalism (new brutalist public managerialism/ management methods, privatisation, businessification of education, for example, increasing gaps between rich and poor, between schools in well-off areas and schools in poor areas). They have criticised only two aspects of neoliberalism: what they now (and only now!) see as the over-extent of deregulation, and the (obscene) levels of pay and reward taken by ‘the big bankers’, by a few Chief Executive Officers (CEOs).

Not an end to Capitalism or even to Neoliberal Capitalism

Talk of an end to neoliberalism is premature, so is talk of an end to capitalism. Criticism in the mainstream capitalist media and mainstream capitalist political parties is only of the excesses of Capitalism, indeed, only the excesses of that form of capitalism- neoliberal capitalism- that has been dominant since the 1970s, the Thatcher-Reagan years- dominant in countries across the globe, and within the international capitalist organisations such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the World Trade Organisation.

Premature, too, is talk of a return to a new Keynesianism, a new era of public sector public works, together with (in revulsion at neoliberalism’s- in fact- capitalism’s- excesses) a new Puritanism in private affairs/ private industry.

The current intervention by governments across the globe to ‘save banks’ can be seen as ‘socialism for the rich’, a spreading of the pain and costs amongst all citizens/ taxpayers to bail out the banks and bankers. Side by side with this bailing out of the banks (while retaining them as private- not nationalised institutions!) is the privatisation, and individualisation of pain- the pain that will be felt in wallets and homes and workplaces throughout the capitalist countries, both rich and poor. Already (November 2008) we see in Britain the Conservative Party changing its previous policy of matching Labour’s spending plans for 2010 onwards into a rightward slide- saying that public services will have to suffer, to pay for the cost of the crisis. Capitalist governments throughout the world will, unless successfully contested by class war and action from below, make the workers and their/ our public services, pay for the crisis. So that, once again, the bankers can make their billions, extracted from the surplus value of the labour power of workers.

It is true that finance institutions need government intervention, in order to keep funding loans and mortgages, to prevent banks and finance capital repossessing people’s homes. But under what conditions?

Marxists and left socialists need to lead and support calls and mobilisations for the nationalisation of the banks. In Britain, for example, people such as John McDonnell, the leader of the ‘left’ Labour MPs in Britain, and the LRC (Labour Representation Committee) and Marxist groups such as the Socialist Party and the International Socialist Group and the Socialist Workers Party call for banks to be taken into public ownership (with the SP calling for ‘compensation only on the basis of proven need’), in other words for the nationalisation of finance to be complete and long-term.

But Capital and the parties it funds will, seek to ensure that Capital is resurgent, and that after what they see as this temporary ‘blip’ in capitalist profitability, it will once again confidently bestride the world, though with less of an obvious smirk on its face, and with less obvious flashing of riches. At least for the time being.

In times such as these, of economic crisis and of the inevitable retrenchment, it will be the poor that pays for the crisis, in fact, not just the poor, but the middle and lower strata of the working class.

Controlling the Workers

And who better to ‘control’ the workers, the workforce, to sell a deal – cuts in the actual wage (relative to inflation) and the social wage (cuts in the real value of benefits and of public welfare and social services)- but the former workers’ parties such as the Labour Party, or, in the USA, the party with (as with labour in Britain) links to the trade union movement- the Democrats. So US Capital swung massively behind Obama in the US Presidential election, and it is likely that increasing sections of British Capital will swing behind Gordon Brown and what is still regarded by many as a workers’ party, or at least, the more social democratic of the major parties on offer. Better to control the workers when the cuts do come. And to return to a slightly less flashy form of capitalism- more regulated, but still the privatising neoliberal managerialising, commodifying, neo-colonial and imperialistic capitalism.

Resistance

This is, as ever, subject to resistance and the balance of class forces (itself related to developing levels of class consciousness, political consciousness and political organisation and leadership). Resistance is possible, and will, inevitably grow. Demonstrations, strikes, anger, outrage at cuts, will increase, perhaps dramatically, in the coming period. To repeat, to be successful instead of inchoate, such anger and political activism needs to be focussed, and organised. In such circumstances, the forces of the Marxist Left in countries across the globe, need to put aside decades old enmities, doctrinal, organisation and strategic disputes. In Britain, for example, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers party, Respect, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the Communist Party of Britain, other groups on the Marxist Left, together with socialists within the Labour Party, need to rapidly form a coherent organisation/ alliance and expose the current crisis as a crisis not just of neoliberalism, but of Capitalism itself. And to pose Socialist alternatives. Here, the new anti-capitalist party in France (under the leadership of Olivier Besancenot), coalescing formerly rival groups and individuals, is an outstanding example of a successful regrouping/ regroupement of the Marxist Left. And in Britain, the Convention of the Left could play a coalescing role?

Of course, regroupment by itself just organises current activists and supporters. Regroupment needs to be followed by, accompanied now! by recruitment. At this particular moment in the crisis of capital accumulation and the actual and potential for loosening the chains of ideology/ false consciousness promulgated by knowledge workers in the (witting or unwitting) service of Capital.

Implications for Education Policy of the Current Crisis

Within England there may well be some minor changes following from disenchantment with neoliberalism. Such changes, the changes in recent years promoting more creativity in the curriculum, reducing the burden of tests, have been argued for by unions and by the Socialist Teachers Association (STA) for years.

But changes to restore and go beyond a more democratically accountable, less brutalist, less divisive, less test-driven, less punitive education system, are not yet on the cards. With campaigns and mass pressures they could become so.

But there is nothing inevitable about neoliberal education transmogrifying any time soon into liberal child friendly and/ or socialist education for equality. These need to be fought for, and will need to be part of a wider transformation of social and economic relations in society.

Which is why we can foresee an intensification of right-wing attacks on radical and socialist educators, on critical pedagogues, throughout the capitalist world.

The culture wars, between the ideologies/ belief systems of Marxism and Socialism on the one hand, and the various forms of pro-capitalist ideology: social democratic, liberal –progressive, neoconservative, neoliberal and racist/ Fascist ideologies on the other, will intensify.

Interest in Marxism is growing. More are seeing through the Emperors’ clothes of pro-capitalist politicians, sand their sleight of hand support for Finance Capitalism and Capitalist exploitation of the labour power of workers.

Hence, in these current times, Marxist and radical educators are dangerous. Intimidation, dismissals, public denunciations (there are many cases globally, most recently in Australia and the USA) will increase.

It is a time for civic courage, for hope, for Marxist analysis, for solidarity, for organisation. A united Left could and should display all five.

Dave Hill is Professor of education policy, University of Northampton, United Kingdom.

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