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Archive for July, 2007
Posted by Dipankar Basu July 7, 2007 at 1:49 pm in Labour, Economy, India
In an article in the Business Standard a couple of months ago, economic commentator T N Ninan pointed to some of the important emerging trends in the Indian economy, what he called the “mega trends”. In his words, these trends deserve to be called “mega trends” because they “cannot easily be reversed, have large ripple effects, and … therefore will define the future”. While these “mega trends” are important for throwing up interesting empirical regularities, these can be equally well, if not better, understood within a Marxist paradigm, a paradigm built on looking at reality from the perspective of labour. Adopting the perspective of labour is important for another reason: it allows us to see the incompleteness, the one-sidedness of bourgeois economic analysis. It is only by complementing Ninan’s “mega trends” with some important but neglected trends that are often invisible to bourgeois economists (which I merely point to at the end) that we can get a better understanding of the evolution of Indian economy and society.
The first trend - “acquiring of scale” in Ninan’s words - refers to the growing “concentration and centralization” of Indian capital, a process that inevitably accompanies the development of capitalism. The growth of concentration and centralization is leading to the much talked about growth of “self-confidence” of Indian capital, buttressed no doubt with incursions into foreign territories. As Ninan points out, Indian capital was acquiring “three overseas companies a week, through 2006.”
The second trend - “spread of connectivity and awareness” according to Ninan - refers to the technological development accompanying the growth of capitalism; Ninan limits himself to the technological developments in the communications sector but it can easily be extended to other sectors of the economy too. But there are several important reasons to focus on the transportations and communications sector. First, an increasing efficiency of communications and transportations is essential for a smooth and efficient completion of the numerous “circuits of capital”; the increasing volume of surplus value being generated in the economy needs well functioning circuits of capital to be realized into profit. Second, technological development of the communications technology, especially information technology, is important for the establishment of the networks through which finance capital exerts its influence over the economy. Third, and related to the earlier, is the necessity of swift and reliable communications to support all the processes that facilitates the “concentration and centralization of capital”.
The third trend - “the growth of the middle class” in Ninan’s analysis - if put into proper perspective, refers to two things: (1) the increasing inequality that inevitably comes along with the growth of capitalism, and (2) the changing nature of the Indian working class. What Ninan refers to as the “middle class” is really the fraction of the Indian working class (though it does not want to see itself as part of the working class) that acquires high wage employment in the “leading” sectors of the economy by acquiring skills useful for capital.
The fourth trend - what Ninan calls the “growing problems of growth” - refers to the serious environmental problems created by a regime dominated by the logic of capital accumulation. As the problem of global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere has come into focus, it has become clear that cosmetic changes and technological solutions will not be enough to deal with the whole range of environmental problems under capitalism. What will be required is a wholesale, radical socio-economic transformation, in other words, a transition to socialism. It will become increasingly important for radical political forces representing the interests of capital to come to grips with this issue in India and other underdeveloped economies undergoing rapid (dependent) capitalist development.
The fifth trend - “India’s growing openness to the world” according to Ninan - refers to the growing penetration of the Indian economy by imperialist capital; being supplemented by the growing “export of capital” from India to foreign economies, the two together points to the growing “interpenetration” of imperialist and Indian capital and the incorporation of the Indian capitalist class into the global ruling bloc. The penetration of imperialist capital underlies the oft-forgotten “dependent” nature of the capitalist development in India, a capitalism which cannot, almost axiomatically, benefit the majority of the population.
The sixth trend - what Ninan sees as “the continuing dominance of youth” - refers to the demographic backdrop of capital accumulation in India. The fact that a large proportion of the population will be part of the workforce (if they manage to get employed at all!) will mean that huge reserves of labour will be readily available for capital to exploit and extract surplus value. It will be a long time before these reserves dry up and increasing wages start eating into the profit rates, a process that seems to have already started in China.
It is not, as Ninan asserts, that these “mega trends” will “define” the future in a mechanical sense; it is rather the case that these trends will define the framework within which the class struggle will unfold. For it is the class struggle which will ultimately “define” the future of India. But even in the sense of defining the framework of class struggle, Ninan’s characterization is inadequate because it leaves out labour from the picture, other than in a marginal sense. How will India’s working class evolve over the next few years or decades? What are the trends, working silently but decisively, that can be observed in the evolution of the Indian working class? To even attempt to pose this question adequately, one will have to look at the agricultural sector of the Indian economy and all the forms of labour associated (directly or indirectly) with it. Ninan, quite remarkably, has nothing to say about the sector of the economy which continues to employ (directly or indirectly) the majority of the working people in India!
Posted by Pratyush Chandra July 6, 2007 at 10:22 am in Marxism, Politics
A few months back, a comrade associated with a communist organisation in India circulated a question - “Are there no possibilities of outside-party movements now?” This question is already internationally debated, prominently within a large section of radicals, who have either been part of the party based movements or have struggled fervently against what could be called the party’s tendency to “substitute” the spirit of self-emancipatory struggles through its organisational conservatism and control. However, this question has been reframed in various ways, especially as, “Is there any possibility of party movements now?” The issue has become all the more relevant in the context of recent revolutionary upsurges in Latin America, given the rising scepticism among the traditional left and jubilation among the non-party/post-party left.
Recent arguments and endeavours for building a unified revolutionary party in Venezuela to spearhead the Bolivarian transformation beyond the present stage have once again brought to focus the issues of party, party structure and its relationship to movements. In India, where the ‘communist movement’ despite its splintering has been a decisive force both within state politics and radical politics, the question has become significant with mushrooming of diverse varieties of movements independent of party influences. Also, I believe, this question of party and beyond party has always been a central concern in socialist and working class movements the world over (many times as discussions over the dialectic of spontaneity and organisation).
I
Any “yes-no” answer to the above-mentioned question is bound to be refuted by counter-examples. In fact, a crucial part of the answer to that question lies in understanding movement, party and party building as processes, in their fluidity, not as fixtures imposing themselves on the spontaneity of the masses. If a party is organically linked to a movement, then it perpetually recreates itself in the moments of that movement. A revolutionary party is nothing more than an organisation of the militants of a revolutionary movement. You can have a group-structure (well-organised or loose) prior to any movement, but until and unless it refounds itself within the movement, it generally polices the popular energy.
There are innumerable examples of movements throughout the world that can claim to be partyless or above/beyond parties - prominent among them are the Venezuelan, Argentine and Zapatistas in Mexico, anti-globalisation movements etc. However, there are numerous groups, even traditional party structures operating within most of these movements - but none of them individually can claim these movements to be ‘theirs’. What is a movement which is not more than a party? But in the very “organisation” of all these movements, we find a continuous party building process or rather processes going on in the attempts to give definite expressions to the goals and visions of the movements.
So, in my opinion, to put it rather schematically, what we witness in the formative processes of a movement is that groups or group-structures (it is immaterial whether they call themselves parties or not), with their own prior movemental experiences come into contact with mass spontaneity - where they are either reborn as groups of “militants” trying to give expression to the movemental needs and goals or they come as predefined structures shaping the movement according to their own fixed needs and goals (for example, to win elections etc).
When I say they “come”, it does not mean that these groups are not there. But their there-ness is defined by the consolidation and institutionalisation of their prior experiences, gains and failures. During these latter processes, these groups either congeal as having interests which are now accommodated within the system or they are ready to unlearn and relearn during the course of new struggles of the oppressed and the exploited. In the first case, they are there as part of the hegemony or as its agencies (conscious or subconscious), and in the second case, they are “reborn” as groups or parties of militants, of organic intellectuals - intellectuals organically linked to the working class, as Gramsci would put.
On this perpetual making and remaking of the organisation and party within and with relation to movements, Marx made a very interesting observation in his letter to Friedrich Bolte (November 23, 1871), where he recapitulates the role and problems of the First International:
“The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point… [O]ut of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.”
It is important to remember and grasp the dialectics of Marx’s dual assertion about the need of a communist party, on the one hand, and what, as Engels asserted in his 1888 preface of the English edition of the Communist Manifesto, “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”. The latter was already there in the General Rules of the First International (”That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”). In his Critique of Gotha Programme too, while criticising the Lasalleans, Marx says, “The international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men’s Association.” Marx clearly rejects here any substitutionist tendency, which has been rampant within the workers and peasants’ movements in India and elsewhere, as the ‘vanguard’ organisations attempt to “possess” movements. A striking example is the following quote from the party programme of the largest constituent of the parliamentary left in India:
“The people’s democratic front cannot successfully be built and the revolution cannot attain victory except under the leadership of the working class and its political party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist).”
In the above-quoted letter to Bolte, Marx made a very illuminating remark on the function of sectism within the working class movement, which can be a lesson for all of us today:
“The International was founded in order to replace the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organisation of the working class for struggle. …The Internationalists could not have maintained themselves if the course of history had not already smashed up the sectarian system. The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. Nevertheless what history has shown everywhere was repeated within the International. The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form.”
As the most recent and clear example of “the antiquated” making an “attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form” are, what Michael Lebowitz calls, the “glum faces” in reaction to Chavez’s call for a unified party in Venezuela. To resist the replacement of “the Socialist or semi-Socialist sects by a real organisation of the working class for struggle” at the time when the working class has attained maturity is “essentially reactionary”.
In India, too, at the grassroots level the labouring classes have time and again come together and demonstrated their will and energy to move beyond the systemic logic, but the presence of the “antiquated” becomes a hurdle in transforming this solidarity into a decisive challenge to the system. This hurdle is perpetuated by schematically subordinating the working class consciousness (dubbed “economistic”) to the “politics” of parties. The party becomes an organisation above class rather than “the organisation of what already exists within the class” (Mario Tronti), in other words, as the organisation of class capacity. Hence the issue of class seizure and control of production apparatuses and means of production as a challenge to capitalist hegemony transforming the social relations is relegated to a secondary level, while the issue of ensuring formal political consolidation and stability in a competitive setup becomes the end of party politics. The issue of posing class alternatives to capitalist regime of accumulation is sidelined in the process of the “accumulation of power”.
However, this “antiquated” cannot be fought by wishing away the notion of “party”, it can only be done by viewing party building as a process with all its contradictions and as a continuous class struggle, including against internalised hegemonies - against labour aristocrats and party bureaucrats.
II
In West Bengal (in fact, everywhere in India) the working class and the poor peasantry have outgrown the traditional left. This is not something new and to be lamented upon. It always happens that organisations develop according to the contemporary needs of the class struggle, and are bound to be institutionalised, and even coopted, becoming hurdles for further battles, not able to channel their forces for new exigencies of class dynamics and struggle. This happens so because in the process of a struggle, a major segment devoted to the needs of this struggle is caught-up in the networks it has established for their fulfillment. It is unable to detach itself from the fruits of the struggle, therefore losing its vitality and is overwhelmed by the existential needs.
In the name of consolidation of movemental gains, what is developed is a kind of ideologisation, a fetish - organisation for organisation’s sake. This leads to the organisation’s and its leadership’s cooption in the hegemonic setup (obviously not just in the formal apparatuses) which in turn due to struggles has to concede some space to new needs and aspirations. In fact, this is how capitalism reproduces itself politically. And this is how societal hegemonies gain agencies within radical organisations, and are organisationally internalised - developing aristocracies and bureaucracies.
Two important points regarding the recent agitations in West Bengal can be fruitful for us in understanding the above-mentioned dynamics:
1) As prominent Marxist-Feminist historian Tanika Sarkar says, “an amazing measure of peasant self-confidence and self-esteem that we saw at Singur and at Nandigram” is a result of whatever limited land reforms the Left Front (LF) initiated and is in the “very long and rich tradition of the Left politics and culture”.
2) The price of state power that helped sustain this was the cooption of the LF in the hegemonic policy regime, which is neoliberal for now. So the vested interests that developed during these struggles and cooption led to a situation where “[b]eyond registration of sharecroppers and some land redistribution, no other forms of agrarian restructuring were imagined.” Also, “industries were allowed to die away, leaving about 50,000 dead factories and the virtual collapse of the jute industry”, as competition and the flight of capital were not challenged (which probably in the federal setup of India could not be challenged) by questioning the nature of production relations.
However, there is no fatalism in the above view - the radical vitality of an organisation/party is contingent upon the sharpening of struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies within an organisation, which in turn is embedded within the overall class struggle, i.e., it all depends on class balance and struggle within an organisation.
Posted by Dipankar Basu July 5, 2007 at 6:21 pm in Finance, USA, Economy
A view that is very popular among the votaries of capitalism rests on the alleged efficiency of the financial markets of a “well functioning” capitalist economy. Financial markets, it is claimed, provide the prime mechanisms for channeling funds from savers to the most efficient investment projects, thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the economy. Lack of well-developed financial markets are often interpreted as markers of underdevelopment and economic stagnation. That this is not always the case, that financial markets are unusually prone to “irrational exuberance”, that financial booms and busts are part of the regular functioning of financial markets if often forgotten by this fundamentalist viewpoint.
A more nuanced version of this view is marked by a more measured view towards financial markets. Proponents of this view start by asserting that the financial system is composed of two parts: financial markets and the web of interdependent financial institutions. They recognize the fact that financial markets, by themselves, are often unable or unwilling to perform several important functions (like collecting, processing and disseminating reliable information about borrowers; providing liquidity services; offering deposit and check-writing facilities) required for the smooth functioning of an advanced capitalist economy. Hence, they recognize the important role of institutions, especially financial institutions (like commercial banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, etc.), within the architecture of advanced capitalism. But very often they also go on to assert that the financial system works best if left to itself; that government intervention in the financial system creates unnecessary inefficiencies. When confronted with the evidence of endemic instability of the financial system, they argue that crises and problems have led, over the years, to the development of a host of institutions that are capable of dealing with such episodes; it is both unnecessary and undesirable for the State to regulate the financial system, they claim.
A closer look at the history of the financial system in the US - the leading capitalist nation today - will demonstrate that such a view is seriously misleading; the government has always had to intervene to put the financial house in order. In fact one can go further and assert that the financial system cannot properly function without supervision at crucial moments by the State, if not constant supervision. Let me illustrate this with three well-known historical instances when the State had to step in to deal with the endemic instability of the financial system in the US. These historical instances are important, apart from illustrative purposes of this article, for at least two more reasons. One, they are the defining interventions in the financial system of the US; the financial system as we know it today has been largely shaped by these interventions and the institutions created at those moments. Two, they destroy the facile opposition that is often constructed, both by the Right and even some on the Left, between private capital and the State; the State is an institution created to protect the interests of capital as a whole even though, on occasion, it has to act against some capitals (some firms or industries or even some sectors of the economy). These instance demonstrate clearly that even when the State acted against some financial firms or sectors it was doing so to save and strengthen the capitalist system.
The first major instance of government intervention stands at the very foundational moment of the modern financial system in the US. The unregulated banking industry in the US led to massive bank failures in the late 19th century: waves after waves of bank failures where savers lost their deposits and lenders could not borrow to meet their needs; this led the Congress to create the Federal Reserve System (the Central Bank of the US) in 1913.
Within less than two decades we come to the second major intervention: creation of the FDIC. In the late 1920’s, the US economy was into the biggest downturn it had ever faced: the Great Depression. During this traumatic period, there were thousands of bank failures again (along with a huge stock market crash) and confidence in the whole financial system was greatly eroded. The Congress again stepped in to create the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) which was meant to deal with the problems that the unregulated banking industry could not handle: bank runs.
The third major intervention (also made around the time of the Great Depression) had been to restrict competition in the banking industry (i.e., to force some form of branching restrictions across geographical regions) and also to restrict the areas into which a commercial bank could enter (basically to separate commercial and investment banking to prevent conflict of interest).
The last instance of government intervention is important because over the last few decades, these laws and the supporting institutions have been generally nibbled away at. For instance, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 had created a “wall” separating commercial and investment banking; from the 1970s onwards the growing power of finance has been continuously trying to attack and change this very important law. Finally in 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act repealed the Glass-Steagall Act!
The effects are already coming to the fore in the form of major banks’ (like J P Morgan Chase’s) involvement in financial frauds and other irregularities (see the Spring 2007 issue of Dollars & Sense). For instance, Chase was one of the banks which had systematically assisted Enron in its accounting frauds. It had also, in its role as an underwriting agent - one of the main functions of an investment bank - sold Enron stocks to the public knowing full well that Enron was in bad shape. This is precisely the kind of “conflict of interest” that the Glass-Steagall Act was meant to take care of. Now that it has been thrown out, we can expect many more instances of such irregularities.
The bottom line is that I do not share in the optimism about the US financial system (which many people seem to harbour), nor do I think that there is any evidence for such optimism. To suggest that the US financial system has managed to take care of the problems of instability is to willfully ignore well-known empirical evidence. Here are a few: the Savings and Loan (S&L) crises through the 1980’s, the wave of bank failures in the late 1980’s, the stock market crash of 1987, the LTCM scandal in 1998 (when the Fed had to step in to bail out a major financial firm), the dotcom bubble and bust, the imminent meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market …one could go on and on; but let us look a bit more closely at only two of these well-known episodes of financial trouble: the LTCM fiasco and the sub-prime mortgage meltdown currently underway in the US.
LTCM (Long Term Capital Management), a very famous financial firm of the late 1990s in the US had been feted by Wall Street as one of most technologically sophisticated financial firms in existence; after all it had offered close to 40% annual returns for two years in a row and had towering figures from theoretical finance among its founding members. It was a “hedge fund” formed in 1994 and had, among its founder member two Nobel laureates in Economics: Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. Within four years LTCM was on the verge of collapse! More details about the the rise and fall of LTCM can be found here (there are lots of useful references at the end of this article; among others, there is a very nice PBS documentary on the whole episode which is worth watching.)
A little note about “hedge funds” might not be inappropriate at this point. A “hedge fund” is, to be brief and simple, a financial institution which pools the money of a few very rich individuals and then invests it around the world to make huge profits. Membership to hedge funds is not open; it’s stocks don’t trade in the financial markets; it is always very secretive about how it invests and also about who its investors are. Usually the smallest amount of money that is required by an individual to become part of a hedge fund (i.e., an investor who is one of the many whose money has been pooled into the hedge fund) is $1 million. In most cases, it is much higher. If we look at hedge funds from the point of view of ordinary citizens, we cannot escape the well-known (and increasingly well-recognized) fact that they are notorious for creating instability in financial markets, especially in the low and middle income economies. Their huge size and ability to move funds very rapidly gives them undue power and influence over small and medium economies (now even large economies are facing the music of hedge funds), whose macroeconomic stability is severely jeopardized by their investment strategies.
Coming back to the stunning LTCM collapse, it is important to remember that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had to step in to arrange credit for its bailout. If the Fed had not intervened to bail out the tottering giant, it might have led to a asset price deflationary spiral leading to a string of failing firms and lost jobs and lost output and macroeconomic instability. For the purposes of this essay, it is merely necessary to note that the financial system could not deal with this problem on its own!
Let us now move on to the second story, a story that is still unfolding: the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis in the US. Referring to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that is currently underway in the US, a recent report by the Centre for Responsible Lending has estimated that more than 1 million low-income families have lost their homes on net (i.e., after accounting for those who have gained home ownership) over the past nine years. Have the banks and financial firms that created this crisis lost much? It is doubtful whether the banks originating the mortgages, the focus of all the attention in the mainstream press, have really lost anything.
Let me remind readers that the “sub-prime” mortgage meltdown refers to the market for mortgage loans (i.e., loans for buying real estate) supposedly for low-income households without good credit histories. The rule of the game, as it evolved over the last decade, was that the house that is bought with the mortgage loan is used as collateral for the loan so that whenever a family fails to make a single monthly payment (there might be a little variation on this), it leads to “foreclosure” and the bank that had made the loan takes possession of the house to recoup its losses.
But why the term “sub-prime”? The attribute of “sub-prime” comes from the fact that most of these loans made on this market are at above-average (much above the market interest rate for mortgages) interest rates and at very onerous terms; the term contrasts this market with the “prime” mortgage market where loans are available at much lower interest rates. In most cases, these “sub-prime” loans are made in bad faith because the concerned families are “convinced” of the suitability of high-interest rate and “coaxed” into the loans at unreasonable terms. More often than not big banks use various kinds of methods to consciously keep out low-income families from the “prime” mortgage market (where they might have got loans at reasonable rates and terms); most of these families, needless to say, are either African-American or Latinos. Once, in this way, these families have been pushed out of the “prime” mortgage market and into the “sub-prime” market, the same banks turn into loan sharks and strip the low-income families to their bones. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that many families are unable to meet the monthly payments of the mortgage and lose their house and most of their life’s savings. That is what has been documented by the Centre for Responsible Lending and that is what is creating havoc in the lives of many working-class Americans.
These are but two small instances of the operation of financial system under advanced capitalism; one can very easily multiply them ad nauseum. The evidence, if one cares to look, strongly suggests that the US (or any other capitalist economy for that matter) will have to learn to live with inescapable instability; these episodes are as much part of life under capitalism as are economy-wide business cycles. Of course, under capitalism, the overwhelming cost of these episodes of financial and other forms of instability will be always borne by the working people. Hence, all political formations claiming to represent the interests of the working people must vociferously argue for the regulation of the financial system without taking recourse to the false opposition between the State and capital.
Posted by Radical Notes July 3, 2007 at 9:37 pm in West Bengal, Agrarian Question, India
Ish Mishra
Machiavelli’s living role model for his Prince, Cardinal Caesar Borgias who subsequently manipulated his ascendance to the papacy of the Roman Church as Alexander VI, “did nothing but deceive the people and found enough opportunities to do so and did it magnificently”. If Machiavelli had to choose a model for his Prince in the contemporary Indian politics, where conquests are not decided by the war of sword but of numbers, he would face a great difficulty, due to abundance of modern Indian Borgias, nevertheless Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee would be a serious contender. The West Bengal Government declared that in the process of “developing the state, the interest of agriculture shall not be compromised and that no land acquisition shall be implemented without the consent of the peasants and the local communities” and next day the chief minister, Mr. Bhattacharjee unleashes the rein of terror on the peasants by ordering Police firing in collusion with the CPI(M) patronized goons, as has been purported by the preliminary CBI inquiry. The philosopher of the European Renaissance had advised the successful Prince to kill quickly and reward gradually. If the political economy of Left Front Government, particularly after the take over by the “Marxist” Nadir - Budhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indicator, the CPI(M) seems to have heeded Machiavellian advices more earnestly than the Renaissance absolutist monarchies did.
The heinous act of killing, wounding and maiming innocent farmers, artisans and agricultural laborers - a crime against humanity - reminds the stories of the gory acts of medieval sadist despots. The Nandigram, that has become a common noun from proper noun due to the brutal repression of the heroic resistance by the farmers of the area against the expropriation of their agricultural land for creating “foreign territories” - the SEZs. It once again witnessed death of 14, protesters and injury to hundreds in police firing aided and abetted by CPI(M)’s lumpen brigade on the14th March 2007 on the orders of the Marxist Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, committed to the “development of West Bengal at any cost”. However, the peasants’ resolve not to be displaced at any cost forced the postmodern Nadirs to step back from their declaration of creating the SEZ for Salim group at any cost. The CPI (M) supremo Prakash Karat has gone all the way out to defend Singur “take over” for the Tata’s “pro-people” car factory and Nandigram atrocities and killings in the name of establishing governance as they don’t want to allow West Bengal into becoming a “Chhattisgarh”! A party refusing to part away with the prefix-Communist from their name despite acting as agents of corporate houses is using the “law-and-order” argument more dubiously than any social democratic party. This is being met by pervasive protest and condemnation, even by its allies and sympathetic intellectuals including the veteran Economist Ashok Mitra. Now Prakash Karat had declared that there would be no land acquisition for SEZ in Nandigram area. This wisdom needed so much of bloodshed and terror. Apart from the loss of lives and causing irreversible harm to the interest of the working people politically and economically, its ideological bankruptcy has made the other imperialist parties and rightwing lumpen elements into heroes. Prakash Karat to counter Advani, reminded of the state engineered Gujarat pogrom by Narendra Modi government in order to defend the repression at Singur and Nandigram. Well Modi and Bhattacharjee, despite opposite ideological declarations and pretensions bear many similarities. Prakash Karat defends the West Bengal Chief Minister as “elected by the people” in the same language as the Hindutva lumpen brigade defends Modi. Both of them take pride in “developing” their respective states with the same formulae as the Corporate led imperialist globalizations seeks to develop the “under-developed” and “developing” countries of the world.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced that there would be no forced acquisition in Nandigram and sent the police to kill the people resisting the land grab. One stark similarity between Kalinganagar and Nandigram is that at both the places people are firmly refusing to be displaced and the agitators were shot dead in a targeted manner. The one difference, which has gone unnoticed, is that Naveen Patnaik shed crocodile tears by announcing a judicial enquiry where as the West Bengal’s self claimed leftist chief minister and the CPI(M)’s leaders went out of way to defend the Police action in the name of law and order. The CPI(M) led left front government, despite opposition by some of the constituent parties of the front, had expressed its determination to go ahead with the plan of creating the SEZs at any cost, and has been forced to make a hasty retreat.
CPI(M) ideologues aided and abetted by its propaganda brigade are justifying the governmental decision in the name of the law and order, using Marxist and Leninist jargons, creating the confusion of the contexts by juxtaposing of 19th century England and early 20th century Russia over 21st century India. Probably for such Marxists of his time Marx had pejoratively said that “thank God! I am not a Marxist”. History never repeats itself. As a philosopher of the Greek antiquity had rightly said that every thing in the world is in continuous state of change and flux and that the only constant is the change itself. History does not repeat itself, it only echoes. The creation of “foreign territories” within the country under the SEZ Act 2005 echoes the creation of fortified enclaves in the costal regions by various - French, Dutch and English East India Companies - in the costal regions of the country. It appears that history has taken a full circle. But much water has flown down the Bay of Bengal. Capitalism and innately linked imperialism has made multiple advances since then. Imperialism in its latest avatar of globalization has become so ubiquitous that now there is no need of any Lord Clive, all the Sujauddaulas have turned into Mir Zafars.
European Renaissance was not the “rebirth” of classical antiquity. “Rebirth” is a myth. It was not the rebirth but the reconstruction of the society with the nostalgic memory of the classical antiquity, according to the needs of the new social forces that had matured in the womb of decaying feudalism. It announced the emergence of a new era which witnessed the emergence of a new species of hero - the hero of finance struggling to get money making included in the circle of virtues, even if on the periphery. This new hero proved to be very smart. In less than 150 years time it became the hero and moved from periphery to centre. The17th century ideologue of this new hero, John Locke declared in unambiguous and categorical terms, “governance is a serious matter; it can be entrusted with only those who have already proved their worth by amassing sufficient wealth.” Their demand for freedom and equality was interpreted as universal equality and liberty and which eventually led to universal franchise and territorial-national universal citizenship and establishment of representative democracies, dictatorship of proletariat and their reversal into capitalism. There have been many insightful presentations and discussions and shall be more on the changing nature of citizenship and its theorization based on the changing nature of the economic base structure and its political superstructure. SEZ is the cheapest and sure-shot technique of the latest stage of the imperialist capitalism leading to the erosions of citizenship rights of people working in and outside these “foreign territories”, which in essence are “Special Exploitation Zone” and its long term possible implications. Also the details of fiscal and revenue implications are beyond the scope of this presentation and constitute the subject matter of separate discussions. The country-wide intensification and radicalization of the resistance against the land grab campaign by the state and corporate nexus for industrialization/SEZ/real estate provides a ray of hope for the anti-imperialist struggles all over the world over and Nandigram has created a precedent by forcing the government to rollback.
Indian parliamentary parties have gone many steps ahead of their colonial predecessors in using the draconian colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894, in the sense that even they did not acquire the agricultural land for private capitalists in the name of “public utility”. But preceded by Kamalnath and Chidambaram, Man Mohan Singh also reiterated his government’s firm determination to go ahead with the SEZ plans at any cost. Seeing his sense of history with gratitude to colonialism for “civilizing” India into a “nation” as revealed by him while being awarded with an honorary doctorate at Oxford University’s University and his World Bank affinity, it is not unexpected. This has provided an opportunity to CPI (M) leaders to shift the blames and devise new methods of the expropriation of agricultural land for national/transnational corporate houses. The Nandigram has taken an initiative and shown the way. There have been reports of peasants’ resistance against SEZ from all the corners. Only future will tell how long and to what extent the peasants struggling for the right to land and livelihood can hold against the formidable nexus of Indian state and the imperialist capital.
Heroic struggle of the peasants of Nandigram and Kalinganagar have challenged and foiled the neo-imperialist strategies of land expropriation by the state-corporate-judiciary nexus and forced a debate upon non-devastating models of development by laying their lives. “Their martyrdom shall not go in vain and let us salute the martyrs of Nandigram and Kalinganagar and resolve to condemn the brutalities of Budhadeb Bhattacharjee and Navin Patnaik governments in no uncertain terms”, said an activist of the Kalinganagar movement. “These local battles would strengthen the international forces seeking human emancipation and an end to exploitation of human by man”.
(A modified version of the article was published in Red Star April 2007)
