Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital

Posted by Radical Notes February 28, 2010 at 1:33 pm in Labour, Marxism, Working Class

Silvia Federici & Mario Montano

A text from the first wave of Italian ‘autonomist Marxist’ theory, first published under the name Guido Baldi in Radical America (Vol. 6, No. 3, May-June 1972).

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The years from the beginning of the century up to the English general strike of 1926 witness this crucial new feature in class struggle: Whereas deep contradictions between developed and backward areas characterize capitalism at this stage and confine it to national levels of organization, the political autonomy and independence of the working class reach an international level: For the first time, capital is bypassed by the workers at an international level. The first international cycle, roughly 1904 to 1906, is a cycle of mass strikes which at times develops into violent actions and insurrections. In Russia, it starts with the Putilov strike and develops into the 1905 revolution. 1904 is the date of the first Italian general strike. In Germany, the spontaneous Ruhr miners’ strike of 1905 on the eight-hour issue and the Amburg general strike of 1906 lead a class wave that overflows into a large network of middle-sized firms. In the US, the miners’ strikes of 1901 and 1904 and the foundation of the 1WW in 1905 seem to be a premonition of the struggles to come.

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The second cycle starts with 1911. We see the same class vanguards initiate the struggle: In the US the vanguards are the coal miners of West Virginia, the Harriman railroad workers, and the Lawrence textile workers; in Russia they are the Lena gold miners of 1912; in Germany they are the workers of the 1912 mass strike of the Ruhr. World War I represents the occasion for the widest development of class struggle in the US (1,204 strikes in 1914; 1,593 in 1915; 3,789 in 1916; and 4,450 in 1917 – and the National labour Board sanctions a number of victories: collective bargaining, equal pay for women, guaranteed minimum wage) while laying the groundwork for a third international cycle.

Since the War has produced a boom in precision manufacturing, electrical machinery, optics, and other fields, the class weight of the superskilled workers of these sectors is enormously increased in Germany and elsewhere. They are the workers who form the backbone of the councils in the German revolution, the Soviet Republic in Bavaria, and the Italian factory occupation of 1919. By 1919, the year of the Seattle General Strike, 4,160,000 workers in the US (20.2% of the entire labour force) are mobilized by the struggle. In the international circulation of struggles, Russia, the “weakest link”, breaks. The capitalist nightmare comes true : The initiative of the working class establishes a “workers’ state”. The class that first made its appearance in the political arena in 1848 and that learned the need for political organization from its defeat in the Paris Commune is now moving in an international way. The peculiar commodity, labour power, the passive, fragmented receptacle of factory exploitation, is now behaving as an international political actor, the political working class.

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The specific political features of these three cycles of struggle lie in the dynamics of their circulation. The struggle starts with class vanguards, and only later does it circulate throughout the class and develop into mass actions. That is, the circulation of struggles follows the structure of the class composition that predominates in these years. That composition consists of a large network of sectors with diverse degrees of development, varying weight in the economy, and different levels of skill and experience. The large cleavages that characterize such a class composition (the dichotomy between a skilled “labour aristocracy” and the mass of the unskilled is one prominent example) necessitates the role of class vanguards as political and organizational pivots. It is through an alliance between the vanguards and the proletarian masses that class cleavages are progressively overcome and mass levels of struggles are reached. That is, the “political re-composition of the working class” is based on its industrial structure, the “material articulation of the labour force (labour power)”.

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The organizational experiments of the working class in these years are by necessity geared to this specific class composition. Such is the case with the Bolshevik model, the Vanguard Party. Its politics of class consciousness “from the outside” must re-compose the entire working class around the demands of its advanced sectors; its “politics of alliances” must bridge the gap between advanced workers and the masses. But such is also the case with the Councils model, whose thrust toward the self-management of production is materially bound to the figure of the skilled worker (that is, the worker with a unique, fixed, subjective relationship to tools and machinery, and with a consequent self identification as “producer”). In Germany in particular, where the machine-tool industry developed exclusively on the basis of the exceptional skill of workers, the Councils express their “managerial” ideology most clearly. It is at such a relatively-high level of professionalization – with a worker/tools relationship characterized by precise skills, control over production techniques, direct involvement with the work plan, and co-operation between execution and planning functions – that workers can identify with their “useful labour” in a program for self-management of the factory. In the heat of the struggle, this program gains the support of productive engineers.

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With the Councils, “class consciousness” is expressed most clearly as the consciousness of “producers”. The Councils do not organize the working class on the basis of a political program of struggles. The Council structure reproduces – by team, shop, and plant – the capitalist organization of labour, and “organizes” workers along their productive role, as labour power, producers. Since the Councils assume the existing organization for the production of capital (a given combination of variable and constant capital, of workers and machines) as the basis for their socialist project, their hypothesis of a workers’ democratic-self-management can only pre-figure the workers’ management of the production of capital, that is, the workers’ management of their very exploitation.

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Yet, the revolutionary character of all workers’ struggles must always be measured in terms of their relationship to the capitalists’ project. From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that the organization of the Councils, by reproducing the material articulation of the labour force as it is. Also freezes development at a certain level of the organic composition of capital (the level of fixed, subjective relationship between workers and machines). Therefore, it challenges capital’s power to bring about whatever technological leap and re-organization of the labour force it may need. In this sense the Councils remain a revolutionary experience. As for the ideological aspect of the self-management project, the hypothesis of a workers’ management of the production of capital, it also becomes clear that “the pre-figuration of a more advanced level of capitalist development was the specific way in which workers refused to yield to the capitalist needs of the time, by trying to provoke the failure of capital’s plan and expressing the autonomous working-class need for conquering power”. (De Caro) It is in the workers’ refusal to be pushed back into a malleable labour force under capitalist rule, and in their demand for power over the productive process (whether in the form of the Councils’ “self-management” and freeze over development, or in the Bolsheviks’ plan for development under “workers’ control”) that the fundamental political novelty of these cycles of struggle lies: on an international level, the workers’ attempt to divert the direction of economic development, express autonomous goals, and assume political responsibility for managing the entire productive machine.

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When the capitalists move to counter-attack, they are not prepared to grasp the two main givens of the cycles of struggle : the international dimension of class struggle, and the emergence of labour power as the political working class. Thus while the international unification of the working-class struggle raises the need for an international unification of capital’s response, the system of reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty merely seals the inter-capitalist split. While confronted by the international working class, the capitalists can only perceive their national labour powers. The outcome is a strategic separation between their international and domestic responses. Internationally, world revolution appears to the capitalists as coming “from the outside”, from the exemplary leadership of the USSR: hence the politics of military isolation of the Revolution in Russia. Domestically, all the capitalists know is the traditional tools of their rule: (1) the violent annihilation of workers’ political organizations (the Palmer raids and the destruction of the IWW; Fascism in Italy; bloody suppression of the “Red Army” in the Ruhr, and so forth), which breaks the ground for (2) technological manipulation of the labour force (Taylorism, the “scientific organization of labour”) as a means of politically controlling class composition.

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Taylorism, the “scientific organization of labour”, the technological leap of the Twenties serves but one purpose: to destroy the specific articulation of the labour force which was the basis for the political re-composition of the working class during the first two decades of the century (Thesis 3). The introduction of the assembly line cuts through traditional cleavages in the labour force, thus producing a veritable revolution in the composition of the entire working class. The emergence of the mass worker, the human appendage to the assembly line, is the overcoming of the vanguard/mass dichotomy upon which the Bolshevik Party is modeled. The very “aristocracy of labour” that capital created after 1870 in its attempt to control the international circulation of the Paris Commune (the very workers supposedly “bribed” by the eight-hour work day, Saturdays off, and a high level of wages) became one of the pivots of the circulation of struggles in the Teens. Through the assembly line capital launches a direct political attack, in the form of technology, on the skills and the factory model of the Councils’ professional workers. This attack brings about the material destruction of that level of organic composition which served as the basis of the self-management project. (The political unity between engineers and workers is also under attack. From Taylorism on, engineers will appear to the workers not as direct producers, but as mere functionaries of the scientific organization of exploitation; and the self-management project, devoid of its original class impact, will reappear as a caricature, the “managerial revolution” to come.)

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Thus, capital’s response to the struggles follows the Nineteenth Century’s “technological path to repression”: It entails breaking whatever political unification the working class has achieved during a given cycle of struggles, by means of a technological revolution in class composition. Constant manipulation of class composition through continual technological innovations provides a tool for controlling the class “from within” through its existence as mere “labour power”. The re-organization of labour is a means to the end of the “political decomposition” of the working class. Since the working class has demanded leadership over the entire society, to push it back into the factory appears as an appropriate political move. Within this strategy, factory and society are to remain divided. The specific form of the labour process in the capitalist factory (that is, the plan) has yet to be imposed on the entire society. Social anarchy is counterposed to the factory plan. The social peace and the growing mass production of the Twenties seem to prove that traditional weapons have been successful again. It will take the Depression to dissipate this belief.

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With 1929, all the tools of the technological attack on the working class turn against capital. The economic and technological measures for containing the working class in the Twenties (re-conversion of the war economy, continuous technological change, and high productivity of labour) have pushed supply tremendously upward, while demand lags hopelessly behind. Investments decline in a spiral toward the great crash. In a very real sense, 1929 is the workers’ revenge. Mass production and the assembly line, far from securing stability, have raised the old contradictions to a higher level. Capital is now paying a price for its faith in Say’s law (“supply creates its own demand”), with its separation of output and market, producers and consumers, factory and society, labour power and political class. As such it remains caught in a tragic impasse, between the inadequacy of the economic and technological tools of the past and the lack of new, political ones. It will take Roosevelt-Keynes to produce them.

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While Hoover resumes the old search for external “international causes”, Roosevelt’s approach is entirely domestic: a re-distribution of income to sustain the internal demand. Keynesian strategy is already emerging – keeping up demand by allowing wages to rise and by reducing unemployment through public expenditure. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) of 1933 raises wage rates, encourages unionization, and so forth at the same time that it authorizes both massive investment in public works through the PWA and large relief funds. The political break with the past is enormous. In the classical view, the flexibility of wages is the main assumption. Workers’ struggles are seen as an outside interference with a self-regulating economy: labour organizations belong with other “institutional factors” that maintain wages “artificially”, while it is the State’s role to preserve the economy against such artificial interference. In the Keynesian model, the downward rigidity of wages is the main assumption; wages are taken as independent variables. The State becomes the economic subject in charge of planning appropriate redistributions of income to support the “effective demand”.

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Keynes’ assumption of the downward rigidity of wages is “the most important discovery of Western Marxism” (Tronti). As wages become an independent variable, the traditional law of the “value of labour” collapses. No “law” but only labour through its own struggles can determine the value of labour. Class antagonism is brought into the heart of production and is taken as the material given on which capital must rebuild its strategy. The NRA is precisely a political maneuver to transform class antagonism from an unpredictable element of risk and instability into a dynamic factor of development. Through its emphasis on the income effect of wages, as opposed to the mere cost effect, the New Deal chooses wages as the mainspring of growth, but within precise limits: Wages must rise harmoniously with profits. The necessary control over wage dynamics requires the institutionalization of class struggle. For workers’ struggles inside capital’s plan means working class inside capilal’s State. Hence the need for the emergence of two new political figures in the Thirties: capital as the new “State-as-Planner” and the working class as organized “labour”.

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The turn toward State-as-Planner is a radical break with all previous policies of State intervention. The NRA regulates the whole of industrial production. The certainty of a capitalist future has been shaken to its roots by the crisis: The NRA “codes”, involving the totality of the capitalist class (95% of all industrial employers), guarantee that a future exists. As the depth of the crisis makes the State’s function of “correcting mistakes” obsolete, the State must assume the responsibility of direct investment, “net contribution” to purchasing power. The State must expose the myth of “sound finance” and impose budget deficits. It is no longer a juridical figure (the bourgeois government of law); it is an economic agent (the capitalist plan). (All this represents a historical watershed, the beginning of a long political process that will culminate in the “incomes policy”, the wage-price guideposts of the New Frontier.) Most important, as the representative of the collective capitalist, the State’s main function is the planning of the class struggle itself. Capital’s plan for development must establish an institutional hold on the working class.

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Hence, the need for labour as the political representative of the working class in the capitalist State. But the technological leap of the Twenties has entirely undermined the trade unions, by making their professional structure obsolete: By 1929. the AFL controls only 7% of the industrial labour force. By cutting through the old class composition and producing a massification of the class, Taylorism has only provided the material basis for a political re-composition at a higher level. As long as the mass worker remains unorganized he/she is entirely unpredictable. Thus with “Section 7a” of the NRA and later with the Wagner Act the collective capitalist begins to accept the workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively. It will be no smooth process, for while capitalists as a class support the NRA, the individual capitalist will resist its consequences at the level of his own factory. The birth of the CIO will make the victory of a thirty-year-long struggle for mass-production unionism. Capital and the mass worker will now face each other as the State-as-Planner and organized labour.

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Class struggle, once the mortal enemy of capitalism to be dealt with through bloodshed, now becomes the main-spring of planned economic development. The historical development of labour power as the political working class is acknowledged by capital’s plan in this major theoretical breakthrough. What was conceived of as a passive, fragmented object of exploitation and technological manipulation is now accepted as an active, unified political subject. Its needs can no longer be violently repressed; they must be satisfied, to ensure continued economic development. Previously, the working class was perceived as capitals immediate negation and the only way to extract profits was to decrease wages and increase exploitation. Now, the closed interdependence of working class and capital is made clear by the strategy of increasing wages to turn out a profit. Whereas the reduction of the working class to mere labour power was reflected in a strategic split between factory (exploitation) and society (repression) (Thesis 9), capital’s political acknowledgment of the working class requires the unifying of society and factory. Capital’s plan is outgrowing the factory to include society through a centralized State.

This involves the development of the historical processes leading to the stage of social capital: the subordination of the individual capitalist to the collective capitalist, the subordination of all social relations to production relations, and the reduction of all forms of work to wage labour.

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The signing of the NRA by the President (June 1933) marks the beginning of a new cycle of struggle. The second half of 1933 witnesses as many strikes as the whole of 1932 with three and a half times as many workers. By June 1934, with sharply reduced unemployment and a 38% growth of the total industrial payroll, the strike wave gathers momentum: 7.2% of the entire labour force (a peak not to be matched until 1937) is mobilized by the struggle. The crucial sectors are being affected – among them steel and auto workers, the West Coast longshoremen, and almost all textile workers, united behind wage, hours, and union recognition demands. 1935 is the year of both the CIO and the Wagner Act. Between the summer of 1935 and the spring of 1937, employment surpasses the 1929 level, from an index of 89.2 to 112.3. In a context of relative price stability, industrial production moves from an index of 85 to 118, and wages move from 69.1 to 110.1. The massification of the working-class struggle and the economic development of capitalist recovery are two sides of the same process: The struggle circulates to small factories and marginal industries while the sit-downs begin at Fire stone, Goodyear. and Goodrich. 1937 is the year of 4,740 strikes, the peak year in the generalization of the mass worker’s struggle. In February GM capitulates; in March US Steel recognizes the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and accepts its basic demands: 10% wage increase for a 40-hour week.

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The crucial aspect of the struggles throughout the New Deal is the general emergence of wages (wages, hours, unionization), the workers’ share of the value produced mutually acknowledged by both capitalists and workers as the battlefield for the new stage of class struggle. For capital, wages are a means of sustaining development, while for the workers they represent the weapon that re-launches class offensive. It is precisely this contradictory political nature of wages (the means of workers’ “integration” on one hand, and the basis for the class’s political re-composition and attack on profit on the other) that causes Roosevelt’s failure to ensure steady growth while at the same time maintaining control of the working class. To the threatening massification of struggles, big business responds with an economic recession, a refusal to invest, a “political strike of capital”. (B.Rauch: The History of the New Deal)

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The economic recession of 1937-38 is the first example of capital’s use of the crisis as a means of regaining initiative in the class struggle. Inflation, unemployment, and wage cuts are weapons that break the workers’ offensive and are means for a new political de-composition of the working class. The political necessity of the economic crisis shows dramatically that the Keynesian model is not sufficient to guarantee stability; only through an act of open violence can capital re-establish its domination over workers. Yet, it is only with the introduction of crises as a means of controlling the class that the Keynesian model can show its true value. While in 1933 the use of class struggle as the propelling element of capitalist development was the only alternative to economic recession, five years later, with the “Roosevelt recession”, “crisis” is revealed as the alternative face of “development”. Development and crisis become the two poles of one cycle. The “State-as-Crisis” is thus simply a moment of the “State-as-Planner” – planner of crisis as a pre-condition for a new development. From now on, capital’s crises will no longer be “natural”, uncontrollable events, but the result of a political decision, essential moments of actual “political business cycles”. (Kalecki)

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The political figure which dominates class struggle from the 1930s on is the mass worker. The technological leap of the Twenties has produced both the economic recession of 1929 and the political subject of class struggle in the Thirties (Thesis 8). The “scientific organization” of mass production necessitates a malleable, highly interchangeable labour force, easily movable from one productive sector to another and easily adjustable to each new level of capital’s organic composition. By 1926, 43% of the workers at Ford require only one day for their training, while 36% require less than a week. The fragmentation and simplification of the work process undermine the static relationship between worker and job, disconnecting wage labour from “useful labour” entirely. With the mass worker, “abstract labour” reaches its fullest historical development: The intellectual abstraction of Capital is revealed as worker’s sensuous activity.

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From the plant to the university, society, becomes an immense assembly line, where the seeming variety of jobs disguises the actual generalization of the same abstract labour. This is neither the emergence of a “new working class” nor the massification of a classless “middle class”, but a new widening of the material articulation of the working class proper. (In this process, however, lies the basis for much ideology. Since all forms of work are subsumed under capital’s production, industrial production seems to play less and less of a role, and the factory seems to disappear. Thus, what is in fact an increasing process of proletarianization – the main accumulation of capital being the accumulation of labour power itself – is misrepresented as a process of tertiarization, in which the class dissolves into the abstract “people”. Hence the peculiar inversion whereby the notions of “class” and “proletariat” appear as “abstractions”, while “the people” becomes concrete.)

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From the worker’s viewpoint, interchangeability, mobility, and massification turn into positive factors. They undermine all divisions by productive role and sector. They provide the material basis for the political re-composition of the entire working class. By destroying the individual worker’s pride in his or her skills, they liberate workers as a class from an identification with their role as producers. With the political demand of “more money and less work”, the increasing alienation of labour becomes a progressive disengagement of the political struggles of the working class from its economic existence as mere labour power. From the workers’ viewpoint, wages cannot be a reward for productivity and work, but are instead the fruits of their struggles. They cannot be a function of capital’s need for development, they must be an expression of the autonomous needs of the class. In the heat of the struggle, the true separation between labour power and working class reaches its most threatening revolutionary peak. “It is quite precisely the separation of the working class from itself, from itself as wage labour, and hence from capital. It is the separation of its political strength from its existence as an economic category.” (Tronti)

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Dial M For Maoists

Posted by Radical Notes February 28, 2010 at 7:54 am in India, State Repression

Saroj Giri

With Maoist leader Kishenji’s rather bold offer for ceasefire to the Union government, a new situation seems to be unfolding in the red corridor of heartland India. Seeking to place the ball in the Centre’s court, the 72-day offer clearly seems to trump Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s 72-hour offer. Moreover, it’s the nature of the offer — unconditional, as opposed to earlier Maoist proposals stipulating the release of their key leaders, restoration of land and forests to the tribals, scrapping of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with big investors etc, all major irritants for the government — which begs a serious consideration. Practically the only condition set by the Maoists this time is that the State should reciprocate. This is at a time when reports of the CRPF in Lalgarh killing Lalmohan Tudu of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) in front of his family members on February 22 are filtering in, over and above the initial propaganda about him being killed during an attack on a CRPF camp.

Chidambaram, instead of welcoming the offer to start a process of negotiation and addressing the substantive issues at hand, responded with a presumptuous and hypocritical statement calling upon the Maoists to abjure violence first. The Planning Commission’s Expert Group on Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas has argued that the government is engaging in peace talks with other rebel groups like the Nagas even though they have not abjured violence and in fact ‘taken advantage of the peaceful conditions to consolidate their parallel government’. So, they ask, ‘why a different approach for the Maoists?’

Chidambaram is clearly trying to make violence the key issue — that the real problem facing the country is violence by illegitimate actors like the Maoists and not the inequalities and injustices that are spiralling in the country. On the other hand, basking in the cover of being constitutional and democratically elected, even as it spearheads a system of a million injustices and the repressive Operation Green Hunt, the charge of being ‘violent’ somehow does not stick against the government. Instead, with terror attacks in Mumbai and Pune, the non-State violence as the main problem gets reinforced by the discourse of the ‘war on terror’ — that our country is under attack and hence no dissensions. NATO troops at Marjah, Afghanistan, are currently supposed to be flushing out the Taliban and then installing a civilian government — not too different from Chidambaram’s policy of flushing out Maoists to make way for a civilian administration.

This approach frames the Maoists in terms of a conflict model — that this is primarily a problem of violence, of illegitimate actors challenging the State and rule of law, and indeed the understanding that the Maoists are ‘the biggest internal security threat’. There is an underside to this seemingly straightforward picture. By simply raking up the violent nature of the Maoists again and again, the substantive issues at hand — corporate plunder, land grab, vigilante groups like Salwa Judum — are easily set aside or regarded as secondary.

Hence Kishenji’s dropping of the other conditions for ceasefire might add to this perception that violence is the real issue. In fact, several civil society groups and independent intellectuals who have always insisted on addressing the core problems facing tribals might even feel that this is a new situation where only violence and hostilities become the real problem. However, through this offer, the Maoists may actually be trying to reach out to civil society. They are probably appealing to the wider civil society — maybe to gain some credibility as a political force; or be recognised as not only interested in violence and a military solution. This must be seen as a positive development. The ‘abjure violence first’ line, however, is bent upon undoing this.

So what about the ‘skeptics’ who argue that the Maoists have come with this offer only because they are feeling the heat of Operation Green Hunt, or they are being strategic and trying to regroup — biding time, trying to trap the government? What is significant is that even though they may be feeling the heat, given the repression unleashed by the State, the Maoists are seeking a political process, involving sections of civil society, unlike the belligerent attitude of the State.

Indeed the government has made it impossible for anyone from outside to visit these ‘affected areas’ — human rights activists and independent observers have been harassed and chased away repeatedly. A cessation of hostilities is therefore what the State fears the most — for that will mean the possibility of a free exchange between the Maoists in the hinterland and urban civil society. The State clearly does not want that to happen — for that will turn the heat on it. This is the real trap it fears — getting politically cornered for its misdeeds. Hence, the need for this hysteria surrounding Maoist violence and human rights activists of supporting it.

There is nothing retrograde for the Maoists in seeking a political way out when cornered militarily — if this is what the ceasefire means. But the ‘abjure violence’ approach of the government seems to be aimed at precluding precisely such a possibility. Even the language used in the media — regroup, bidding for time, walking into a trap — all assume a situation of continuing war. In a way, the demand to ‘abjure violence’ is nothing less than the guilt of the State slipping out. Foregrounding violence in the context of a ceasefire allows the State to skirt the key issues and keep portraying the Maoists as liable to be physically eliminated, catching them off-guard.

This is the experience of the talks between the State and the Peoples War Group in Andhra Pradesh, where the ceasefire was used by the State to finish off the Maoists. Making the ‘violent’ tag stick on the Maoists meant that they could be delegitimised and made easy targets even after formal talks had started in October 2004 between the Maoists and the government, while the undercover attacks and elimination of Maoist leaders and sympathisers continued unabated. Leading civil liberties activist KG Kannabiran, who was one of the eight mediators then, told BBC that, “It was agreed that the police would not undertake combing operations against the Maoists. Why was there a need for the police to become so active, launching combing operations and killing the extremists in encounters?”

PERHAPS THIS is where return to a focus on the core issue of tribal displacement and habitat, cannot in the circumstances, be delinked from the fate of the Maoist movement. After all the Maoist movement is not only a current problem or a temporary happenstance specific to the present conjuncture. Since 1967, the Naxal movement and its present avatar, the Maoists, have stared in the face of the ruling order of the country. Indeed the Naxal slogan — Yeh azaadi jhooti hai (this independence is false) is a comment on the state of our nation. To relegate the Maoist issue to only one of violence, or for that matter that of Adivasis or land reforms or livelihood — is to deny and suppress its wider political provenance — something which might have implications on the very ‘idea of India’. This is perhaps why the government is more comfortable engaging with the Naga or Kashmiri militants in talks, than with the Maoists.

Those on the left and progressive liberals, ruing the erosion of ‘the idea of India’ and the decline of our political ideals, are so status-quoist in their upholding of the constitutional values of democracy, that they have conceded any possibility of rewriting history, or revising the basic structure of the Constitution, to the Hindu right. This seems true of the post-ideological, neoliberal age where the right-wing free marketeers are the radicals, calling for change, whereas the left are the conservatives, holding on to the myth of the founding moment and a dream of the long-dead founding fathers of the republic. The Naxal who refuses to ‘abjure violence’, in precisely being unconstitutional and undemocratic, in moving out of the shadow of our founding fathers, has come to stand for a left-wing agenda of change, taking the wind out of the Hindu right’s sails and realigning the terrain of thinking for the left as a whole. Whether the Maoists are adequate to this fertile moment is however not a settled question yet.

Saroj Giri is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Delhi University

COURTESY: Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 09, Dated March 06, 2010

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A Picture of Finance Capital, Or the Income Pyramid under Capitalism

Posted by Deepankar Basu February 28, 2010 at 7:45 am in Economic Notes, Economy, Finance

Deepankar Basu, Sanhati

The ideology of neoliberalism: trickle down theory of growth and distribution. The reality a tad different: the gushing up of income and wealth. But, in a manner of speaking, we always knew that this is what neoliberalism was all about; we knew, in other words, that the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s was meant to facilitate the flow of income, wealth and power up the societal pyramid, that it was meant to restore the economic and political clout that “finance capital” had lost during the post World War II period. We knew that it was meant to efficiently pump the economic surplus out of the working people and channel it up the income ladder to the top fraction of the capitalist class. That neoliberalism performed this role even more effectively than expected by its hardest-core champions emerges clearly from recent studies of income and wealth trends of the past few decades.

TOP US INCOMES OVER THE CENTURY

Noted Marxist economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy have studied the changing patterns of income and wealth under neoliberalism in great detail . [1] Drawing on the extensive research on income and wealth inequality around the world by Emmanuel Saez [2] and Thomas Piketty [3], Dumenil and Levy clearly show: (a) that the neoliberal regime was preceded by falling income shares of the top income groups in the US for an extended period of time, (b) that the so-called neoliberal turn has clearly reversed the trend towards progressive redistribution of income of the post-War years, (c) that the income shares of the top income groups have climbed back up to pre-War levels, and even surpassed them, and (d) that ownership of the productive resources of society remains as skewed as before making claims of the development of middle-class capitalism in the U.S. totally baseless.

Below, we reproduce some of the striking trends that Dumenil and Levy’s presented in their article in the New Left Review (Volume 30, November-December, 2004) and also extend the analysis to the year 2007 (by using an extended data set that Saez and Piketty has made publicly available). [4] The picture that emerges from such an analysis clearly show that the trends identified by Dumenil and Levy (2004) have continued operating unhindered right until the end of 2007, i.e., right till the onset of the Great Contraction of 2008. Did the current crisis have anything to do with this worsening distribution of income in society? Will the Great Contraction turn into the Great Depression of the 21st century? Will the current crisis unleash progressive social forces that will reverse the horrific neoliberal income trends? Will the working class regain its social and political strength? These are important and interesting questions, but I do not wish to address them in this article.

Let us instead study the evolution of income distribution in some detail. Chart 1 presents data relating to the shares of total income going to various “top” income earning groups in the U.S. for the period 1917-2007. Even a cursory glance reveals the most striking feature shared by all the graphs, their U-like shapes. The U-shape implies the following: the share of total income garnered by the “top” group was historically high in the 1930s (the pinnacle of the original liberal era of capitalism); the share steadily declined after the second World War, through the “Golden Age of Capitalism” (because of the struggle of the working class); the trend reversed course around the late 1970s (with the onset of the neoliberal counter-revolution), and steadily gained lost ground in the next three decades. This general feature is true of all the graphs and is the remarkable feature about income distribution that emerges from all serious studies.

The first graph on the left-top of Chart 1 displays the share of income going to the top 10 per cent of income earners in the U.S. Towards the end of the 1920s, the share of the top 10 percent had nudged 50 per cent (from below); it recovered that level by 2006. The top 10 per cent of the population takes half of all the income created during any year; isn’t that remarkable? Well, that is (neo) liberal capitalism.

The second graph of Chart 1, the one on the right-top, displays the share of income going to the group of income earners running from the top 5 to the top 1 per cent of the population. Much like the top 10 percent, their income fell through the Golden Age and then started the ascent in the neoliberal era, without as yet reaching the historically high levels in the late 1920s.

CHART 1

The third graph at the bottom-left of Chart 1 displays the share of income going to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population. Quite astonishingly, they get more than a fifth of all the income generated in society now: just a nice throwback to the glorious late-1920s, they would point out. Thus, in 1928, the top 1 per cent of the income earners in the U.S. got about 24 per cent of the total income; in 2006, the top 1 per cent of the population was once again receiving about the same share: 24 per cent of the total income generated in the economy.

What about the scenario at the very top, the top of the top so to say? The fourth graph in Chart 1, the one at the bottom-right, provides some clues. As can be seen, the share of income garnered by the top 0.01 per cent of the income earners was about 5 per cent of the total income during the 1920s; that figure had already been reached by the end of the 1990s. The dip in the share at the end of the 2000 is a reflection of the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the ensuing short recession in the early parts of 2001. They got their act together pretty quickly, and the share of total income going to this group rapidly climbed up in the “boom” of the 2000s, surpassing the figure for the heyday of liberal capitalism. In 1928, the top 0.01 per cent of the income earners in the U.S. garnered about 5 per cent of the total income; by 2006 their share of total income was back at that level: 6.04 per cent. Neoliberalism triumphs liberalism!

What do we take away from these striking graphs? I would suggest the following three. First, we can safely make the claim that income and wealth are awfully concentrated in capitalism; a capitalism that caters to the middle class is a myth. To understand the import of this simple proposition recall that the mainstream media never tires of portraying the U.S. economy as a haven for the middle class, where anyone, even Joe the Plumber, can easily climb up the economic ladder with grit, determination and hard work; or, so the story goes. Aggregate trends in the distribution of income over the last three decades that have been presented in Chart 1 clearly makes nonsense of this oft-repeated fairy tale.

Second, the concentration of wealth and income under capitalism is nothing new; it is rather the normal state of affairs in capitalism, as the data for the last 90 years show. When one takes a long and historical view, the so-called Golden Age of capitalism, based on the compromise between capital and labour, and buttressed by re-distributive policies of a welfare state, seems to be the exception rather than the rule. The workings of welfare state capitalism quickly led to the creation of a situation, endogenous it must be remembered, that militated against the core principles and institutional features of welfare state capitalism.

And third, that the concentration of income, wealth and power keeps increasing as we move up the income pyramid, so that the buck really stops at the top. What about the very top of the top of the top? Well, let us see.

TOP OF THE TOP

Tucked away in an obscure corner of the business section of the New York Times on February 18, 2010 is a small article with some very striking facts relating to the important issues of income, class and power in the U.S. that we have been discussing. [5] The article discusses interesting facts relating to income and taxation of the top 400 income earning families in the U.S., the families sitting on the very top of the income and wealth pyramid in the U.S. Data about the earnings of the top 400 families, based on tax return information, was first made public by the Clinton Administration. Much along expected lines, the Bush Administration cut off access to this report, the so-called “top 400 report”; the Obama Administration has again made it public. [6]

Writing on Tax.com, a Web site run by Tax Analysts, David Cay Johnston provides a wealth of information about the top 400 families that might be worth looking at carefully; the NY Times report drew on Johnston’s article, and we will also use data that he has made available on-line along with his article. [7]

Here are some facts to get started with. Average annual income of the top 400 income-earning families was $131.1 million in 2001; it had more than doubled within the next 6 years, reaching $345 million in 2007. That was a whopping 17.5 per cent annual compound rate of growth over that 6 year period. In 2007, the total income of the top 400 families was $138 billion, rising from $105.3 billion a year ago. Adjusted for inflation, the top 400 families witnessed a 27 per cent increase in their income between 2006 and 2007; the bottom 90 per cent of U.S. families saw their income rise by a mere 3 per cent during the same period. If we go back a little further we see the divergence taking shape more clearly. Between 1992 and 2007, the real income of the bottom 90 per cent of the U.S. families increased by 13 per cent; during the same period, the real incomes of the top 400 increased by 399 per cent.

To put these numbers into some perspective, let us compare the incomes of the top 400 U.S. families with some figures for the whole U.S. economy. Median real income, i.e., income adjusted for inflation, for U.S. families in 2007 was $52,163. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 37.3 million persons were below the poverty line in 2007 (i.e., about 12.7 per cent of the population was deemed “poor”), where the poverty line was defined (in 2008) as follows: it was $22,025 for a family of four; for a family of three, it was $17,163; for a family of two, $14,051; and for unrelated individuals, $10,991. While the incomes of the top 400 families increased to astronomical amounts, there were 45.7 million people without health insurance coverage in the U.S. in 2007. [8]

To make the comparison a little more systematic and to get an idea of the true nature of the income generation process under neoliberalism, we have summarized some data in Chart 2. [9] The graph on the top-left in Chart 2 plots the inflation adjusted average income of the top 400 U.S. income-earning families from 1992 to 2007. Average real income increased from $71.6 million in 1992 to $356.7 million in 2007, a 399 per cent increase over the 15 year period, which translates into a real income increase of $285.2 million.

The graph on the top-right of Chart 2 plots the ratio of the average income of the top 400 families and the average income of the bottom 90 percent of U.S. families (arranged in terms of household income). In 1992, the ratio was 2419; in 2007, it had become 10634. Think about these numbers again. In 1992, the average income of the top 400 U.S. families was 2419 times the average income of the bottom 90 per cent; in the next 15 years, that ratio had seen a more than 4 fold increase. That is neoliberalism in a nutshell.

The next graph, the one on the bottom-left of Chart 2 plots the share of total income (what the IRS calls the adjusted gross income) that went to the top 400 families. In 1992, the figure was 0.52 per cent; by 2007, it had increased to 1.59 per cent. Now think about that again. During the period under consideration, the U.S. economy had about 105 million households; thus in 2007, the top 400 out of these 105 million households were getting 1.59 dollars for every 100 dollars generated in the economy. (If you divide 400 by 105 million, you get a 0.0000038!)

The last graph, the one on the bottom-right of Chart 2, shows the policy response of the U.S. governments to this rising inequality. What should the state do when faced with this enormous concentration of wealth at the very top of the income pyramid? Why, aid that process. Effective tax rates for the top 400 families saw a remarkable secular decline over this 15 year period, starting at 26 per cent in 1992 and falling to about 17 per cent by 2007. So, as the incomes started flowing up, tax rates started going down. Result: disposable real income, i.e., after-tax real income, of the top 400 U.S. families shot through the roof.

CHART 2

EVOLUTION OF WAGE INCOME

How did this huge income inequality get built up? The simple answer: neoliberal counter-revolution. The whole institutional set-up and policy framework that characterized the so-called Golden Age of capitalism was the result of the class struggle of labour against capital; the power of the working class had managed to institute policies that resulted in the re-distribution of income away from capital and towards labour. The neoliberal counter-revolution reversed this historical trend and got the re-distribution to start working the other way round: move income away from labour and towards property owners and the top wage-earners (managers, technocrats, CEOs, etc.). Probably nothing demonstrates this better than the evolution of wage income, i.e., the income of the working people in the U.S. over the last few decades. Let us take a look.

Chart 3 presents some relevant data on wage income. The first graph in Chart 3, the top-left graph, plots the time series of the average annual real wage in the US economy for the period 1970 to 2005. Average annual real wage is computed from the National Income and Product Account data as the ratio of total wages and salaries and the number of full-time employees; to take account of inflation over the years, the wage has been expressed in 2006 prices. [12] The average annual wage, as shown in the graph, increased from about $38,000 (2006 $) to $47,670 (2006 $). So, did workers really increase their average incomes during the last three decades? The answer is no.

The picture presented in the graph is misleading. The average annual wage in the graph has been computed by including the wages and salaries not only of production workers but also of supervisory workers and managers and CEOs. The “wages and salaries” that accrue to the latter category of “workers” cannot be considered wages in the strict sense of the word; this income comes out of the economic surplus created by production workers. Thus, from a societal viewpoint, income of managers, bureaucrats, CEOs and other such employees are a deduction out of the the total social surplus. Hence, to get a better and more accurate picture of the evolution of what would normally be called wage income, we need to look at the wages of production workers. [13]

The second graph in Chart 3, the top-right graph, plots the time series of weekly real wages of production and non-supervisory workers in the nonfarm business sector of the US economy for the period 1964 to 2009. This data – relating to the production workers in mining, logging and manufacturing, construction workers in construction and non-supervisory workers in the service sector – is taken from the website of the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics and is expressed in 1982 prices to remove the effect of price increases (i.e., has been deflated by the consumer price index for all urban consumers with a base year of 1982). Here, we see a remarkable trend, a trend that really explains the secret of neoliberalism: real weekly wages of production and non-supervisory workers fell between 1964 and 2009. True, there was a slight recovery starting from the mid-1990s, but that has not managed to take the real wage back to the level of 1964, let alone the higher level of the early 1970s. Real weekly wages in 1964 was about $314 (1982 $); in 2009, it was about $287 (1982 $). Moreover it is clear that the recovery that had started in the mid-1990s will be pretty difficult to sustain in the midst of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

Thus, the upward movement of average annual real wages that is depicted in the first graph of Chart 3 is really driven by increases of the “wages and salaries” of non-production and supervisory “workers”, the fraction of the working or middle class that derives its income as a deduction from the surplus value generated by production workers. This would imply a growing inequality even among the ranks of the wage earners.

And that is precisely what is depicted in the third and fourth graph in Chart 3, the bottom-left and bottom-right graphs. Let us look at them one at a time. The bottom-left graph plots the ratio of two quantities: (a) the average annual real pay of the top 100 CEOs in the Forbes survey of the top 800 CEOs (in terms of pay), and (b) the average annual real wage in the U.S. economy (the data that has been plotted in the top-left graph in Chart 3). [14] In 1970, the ratio was about 39; in 2005, it was about 768, coming by way of 1043 in 1999. Thus, in 1970, the average income of the top 100 CEOs was only about 39 times the average annual wage in the economy; in 1999, the average annual income of the top 100 CEOs had become 1043 times the average annual wage in the economy!

The bottom-right graph plots the average real pay of the rank 10 CEO (in 2006$), i.e., the pay of the 10th CEO from the top when all CEOs are ranked according to their incomes. The real pay of the rank 10 CEO in 1970 was about $1.87 million (2006$); in 2005, the corresponding figure was $73.24 million (2006$), having climbed down from an astronomical $109 million (2006$) in 1999. That is more than a 50 fold increase in 19 years!

CHART 3

Thus, neoliberalism not only increased the share of property income (in aggregate national income) but also increased the share of income that accrues to the hangers-on of capitalism, the managers, the supervisors, the technocrats, the bureaucrats, in short the class of people who oversee and facilitate the extraction of surplus value from the working class, and contribute to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

How did this impact on the working class and the macro economy? Since real wages were stagnant or even falling, the working class that had become used to increasing consumption levels over previous decades had to be fed with an ever exploding mountain of debt. First the dot-com bubble and then the housing bubble partly facilitated this process. The growing debt kept consumption levels of the working class growing even, but only at the cost of increasing the financial fragility of the macro economy. When the housing bubble burst towards the end of 2006, that started off the financial crisis.

(I would like to thank Debarshi Das, Panayiotis T. Manolakos and Sirisha Naidu for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article. The usual disclaimers apply.)

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.jourdan.ens.fr/levy/dle2004t.pdf

[2] http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

[3] http://jourdan.ens.fr/piketty/indexeng.php

[4] The data is available on the website of Emmanuel Saez: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/business/economy/18irs.html?ref=business

[6] http://tax.com/taxcom/features.nsf/Articles/0DEC0EAA7E4D7A2B852576CD00714692?OpenDocument

[7] http://tax.com/taxcom/features.nsf/Articles/0DEC0EAA7E4D7A2B852576CD00714692?OpenDocument

[8] http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/014227.html

[9] Data used to construct the graphs in Chart 2 comes from David Cay Johnston’s summary of IRS Statistics of Income data and is available on-line at: http://tax.com/taxcom/features.nsf/Articles/0DEC0EAA7E4D7A2B852576CD00714692?OpenDocument

[10] http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0509keeler.html

[11] Dumenil, G. and D. Levy. 2004. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Harvard University Press.

[12] This data is from Saez and Piketty.

[13] Production workers, as we have used the term here, is related to though not strictly equivalent to what is referred to as “productive workers” in Marxian political economy

[14] Average annual wages are in 2006$ and average CEO pay is in 2006$; hence, the exact ratios might a little off the mark though the trend will certainly be fairly accurate.

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Statement: Against the Indian Version of McCarthyism

Posted by Campaign against War on People February 27, 2010 at 1:05 am in India, Press Release, State Repression

The Delhi Police produced its chargesheet against Mr Kobad Ghandy in the Tees Hazari Courts New Delhi on 18.02.2010. This document has baselessly alleged unlawful activities against a number of individuals and legitimate democratic organisations working in the public domain. These include Dr. Darshan Pal of the People’s Democratic Front of India (PDFI), Mr. GN Saibaba, a professor with Delhi University, Mr. Rona Wilson, Secretary of the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, Mr. Gautam Navlakha of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), PUDR itself, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), the Democratic Students’ Union (DSU), Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), the PDFI, the Indian Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL), Anti-displacement Front (ADF) and the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR; wrongly named in the chargesheet as the Association of Peoples For Democratic Rights). APDR, PUDR and PUCL in particular have been solely concerned with safeguarding democratic and civil rights in India for over 30 years, and are internationally reputed for their rigorous and scrupulous approach to these issues. Among the charges against these established and respected organisations, is the completely unfounded one that they are playing “a very important role to broaden the base of the [CPI (Maoist)] outfit”. The chargesheet has provided no evidence whatsoever to substantiate its allegations.

These individuals and organisations have been actively and openly working for democratic and civil rights and liberties across the length and breadth of country, on issues ranging from displacement, people’s movements and rural destitution to issues of ethnic conflict and custodial deaths. Today, however, they are being targeted in the chargesheet because, along with hundreds of others, they have actively and openly protested ‘Operation Green Hunt’ (OGH). They have been consistently engaging with violations of civil and democratic rights arising out of the conflict between the Indian state and the tribal communities that have been resisting it. The Indian state over the last few months has targeted the people protesting against OGH, as well as those who have taken up their cause. The chargesheet is yet another instance of the state’s attempt to criminalise any resistance or protests against its actions in the areas covered by OGH. The allegations in it only suggest the state’s intention to clamp down on legitimate protest against its undemocratic practices, and especially against its own attacks on its citizens – in fact, these allegations themselves constitute an unprovoked and unwarranted attack on these democratic and civil liberties organisations and individuals. It aims to further cramp already restricted democratic spaces: as the Supreme Court recently observed (with reference to charges against Mr. Himanshu Kumar of being a Maoist sympathiser) in the name of ‘sympathizers’ and ‘sympathizers of sympathizers’ and so on, all criticism and opposition is being stifled. It seems the intent of the chargesheet is also to intimidate and silence all those who are engaged in protesting OGH.

Evident in this is a 21st century, Indian version of McCarthyism: an attempt to silence independent voices that was evident in the trumped-up case against Mr. Binayak Sen, in the brutal illegality of the demolition of Vanvasi Chetna Ashram and the eviction of Mr. Himanshu Kumar – all in the name of the fear of ‘Maoists’. The fear psychosis is being sought to be generated so openly now, that the union government even tried to allege that Maoists were infiltrating the Telengana movement in Osmania University – which it had to recant in the Supreme Court recently. We collectively and unitedly condemn the state’s attempt to intimidate and silence legitimate protests and affirm the democratic rights of all people. In the light of the above we also reiterate our demand that the state engage in genuine dialogue with the CPI (Maoist) instead of prosecuting war against its own people.

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Seminar: “Dismantling Democracy in the University”

Posted by Correspondence February 26, 2010 at 9:32 pm in Delhi, Events, India, Press Release, Students

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PUDR condemns the murder of Lalmohan Tudu

Posted by Radical Notes February 26, 2010 at 9:15 pm in India, Press Release, State Repression, West Bengal

Moshumi Basu and Asish Gupta,
Secretaries, People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)

People’s Union for Democratic Rights strongly condemns the cold blooded murder of Lalmohan Tudu, leader of People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities by the Central Reserve Paramilitary Forces on February 23, 2010 at Kantapahari near Lalgarh. It has been reported that Lalmohan Tudu was killed in an ‘encounter’ along with his relatives Yuvraj and Suchitra. The IG CRPF, Nageshwar Rao condoned the killing claiming that they were Maoists killed in exchange of fire. But other accounts claim that as he was at his house to meet his younger daughter, CRPF personnel called him out along with his relatives and shot them dead in front of his wife, daughter and mother. His body was then dragged to the nearby fields.

It has been extensively reported that Lalmohan Tudu was amongst top leaders of PCAPA and at the forefront of the adivasi movement in Lalgarh. Killing of Tudu reflects a desperate attempt by the government to ‘sanitise’, suppress and eliminate all the dissenting voices. A patterned and esoteric account of ‘encounter’ narrated by the police and the security forces hardly gives any credence to such stories. We believe that killing of Tudu and his two relative are part of the policy to annihilate leading members of the PCPA as well as CPI (Maoists) and instantiates blatant violation of fundamental rights as enshrined in the Indian Constitution as well as the procedures established by law. PUDR unequivocally condemns such cowardly acts and demands that a case under section 307 of the IPC be registered against the erring officers pending an independent inquiry to ascertain the facts and circumstances leading to death of Lalmohan Tudu and his relatives. PUDR has repeatedly pointed to Government of India’s propensity to conduct wars against its own people. Therefore, PUDR wishes to point out that if the Government is unwilling to engage in civilized forms of engagement, namely dialogue, then at least it should abide by civilized norms of warfare as enshrined in Geneva Convention and Protocol.

pudrdelhi@yahoo.com

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Press Conference: Against a profiling of activists and organisations (Feb 27 2010)

Posted by Radical Notes February 25, 2010 at 8:31 pm in Delhi, Events, India, Press Release, State Repression

Rona Wilson, Secretary,Public Relations,
Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners

Ever since the filing of the charge sheet of Mr. Kobad Ghandy on 19.02.10 before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police a deliberate profiling of the civil rights organisations and other people’s organisations as espousing the cause of the CPI (Maoist) is being planted in a section of the media by the investigating agencies. This is ostensibly on the basis of the specific mention of these organisations in the charge sheet.

The manner in which the profiling is intended to vitiate the public space as inimical to any democratic protest/dissent against the policies of the government raises ominous portends towards a fascist polity as desired by the powers that be for the future.

To protest against all such vilification campaigns, such attempts to strangulate any voice of sanity PUCL, PUDR, CRPP, Jan Hasthakshep, CPDM, NPMHR, Saheli, Kashipur Solidarity Group, RDF, DSU and other organisations have decided to convene a PRESS CONFERENCE ON 27.02.10 (SATURDAY) 12 NOON AT THE PRESS CLUB. Justice Rajinder Sachar, Arundhati Roy will address the Press Meet along with others.

Please send your reporter/camera person to cover the event.

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Lalgarh – Lalmohan Tudu and two others murdered by CRPF

Posted by Radical Notes February 25, 2010 at 7:34 am in India, Press Release, State Repression, West Bengal

Sanhati Statement, February 24, 2010

We express our profound shock, grief and feeling of outrage at the cold-blooded murder by the CRPF of Lalmohan Tudu, the president of the Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee (Peoples’ Committee against Police Atrocities), at Narcha village near Kantapahari in Lalgarh, during the night of 22nd February. There is no language that can suitably condemn this heinous crime of the murder of a leader of a mass movement. Lalmohan Tudu’s murder is just the latest in the series of murders, rapes and arrests of adivasi activists and supporters of the PCPA by the state and central police forces that has been going on in the Lalgarh area for the past six months.

Lalmohan Tudu was staying away from his home ever since the combined state and central paramilitary forces invaded Lalgarh, just as most males in the villages throughout Lalgarh are, as he ran the risk of arrest by the combined forces. On 22nd February he had returned home to meet his younger daughter who was going to appear in the state boards examination scheduled to start on 23rd February. At around 11 pm, he and another couple, Yubaraj Murmu and Suchitra Murmu, who were staying with his family, were called out by the CRPF and shot dead in cold blood. His body was found a little distance behind his house. The bodies of the others have not been found yet.

The police and the CRPF have presented constantly changing versions of the event, attempting to prove that Lalmohan Tudu was a dreaded Maoist leader killed while he was perpetrating some crime! While they initially claimed that he was killed in an exchange of fire while trying to attack the fortress-like Kantapahari CRPF camp together with a group of Maoist cadres, they later changed the version and have said that he was killed when a Maoist squad, to which he belonged, was apprehended by a CRPF raiding party. These versions are downright lies. All evidence at the site where his dead body was found (shown on local television channels) and eye witness accounts tell that he was killed near his house and his body was dragged into the paddy fields nearby. This incident clearly shows that the government has taken up the policy of individually annihilating the leaders of a mass movement of adivasis.

Lalmohan Tudu was no military strategist or ideologue of the Maoists, nor did he have connections with any political party. He was a very popular and highly regarded person, who had been elected as the president of the PCPA in a mass meeting at Dalilpur Chowk when the Lalgarh movement against state atrocities started. Many people who have visited Lalgarh in the course of the last one year remember him as a quiet elderly person, with great organizational abilities and an eye for the care and comfort of the various people visiting Lalgarh to express solidarity with the adivasis.

With his murder, the government has clearly sent out a signal that it will crush all forms of dissent by annihilating mass leaders. On one hand, the home minister is offering to talk to the Maoists, on the other his paramilitary forces are liquidating leaders of mass resistance movements. This cynical, two-faced policy is sure to drown the entire country into a vicious cycle of violence.

We vehemently condemn the murder of Sri Lalmohan Tudu as a blatant act of state terror and appeal to all democratic-minded people to join us in condemning this heinous act and demanding the immediate withdrawal of the paramilitary forces from Lalgarh.

We also demand that the government should constitute a judicial probe into this killing and those who are found guilty of planning and executing the heinous act should be adequately punished. Moreover, we demand that the state law enforcement agencies should strictly adhere to legal methods of countering any transgressions of law and any official/unofficial counter-insurgency policy of “shoot to kill” should be immediately stopped.

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Kobad Ghandy on “Sugar’s Bitter Policies”

Posted by Radical Notes February 25, 2010 at 12:23 am in Economic Notes, Economy, India

MAINSTREAM, VOL XLVIII, NO 8, FEBRUARY 13, 2010

The following article on the present rise in prices of sugar has been written by Kobad Ghandy, the CPI (Maoist) leader now lodged in Ward No. 8 of Tihar Jail No. 3. Though suffering from prostrate cancer and incarcerated in prison he retains an alert mind as is reflected in the following article sent specially for publication in this journal (Mainstream).

At Rs 50 per kg sugar prices have never been so high. With sugar prices soaring, prices of all sugar linked products—sweets, mithais, tea etc.—have also sky-rocketed. Not only will festivals for most become a drab affair, children’s wailing for the little sweet or toffee will get louder. At the rate at which sugar prices have been rising it will be out of reach of many a poor and middle-class life.

One would have thought, given the free-market mantra of the rulers, that high sugar prices would at least convert into higher prices for the producers—the fifty million sugarcane farmers. But that was not to be; the so-called free market functions only to benefit big business, traders and politicians. In this case both the producers and consumers are being crushed by the cane and sugar pricing policies of the government dictated by the millers and international sugar cartels.

It is indeed a policy that has resulted in windfall profits for a few at the cost of millions of farmers and crores of consumers. And the solution being suggested—huge duty free imports—will help no one except the importers, the foreign traders and the bureaucrats/politicians who will get their commissions on each order. The entire people of our country are made to suffer so that a few may make fortunes. This is indeed tragic.

And while the entire people suffer the politics of sugar is diverting the entire issue with the Central and UP governments throwing the blame on each other.

Farmers being Crushed

In October last year the Ministry of Consumer Affairs (Food and Public Distribution) changed the pricing regime for sugarcane and introduced a Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) mechanism, replacing the Statutory Minimum Price (SMP) system that was prevailing till then. Soon after passing the ordinance the Central Government declared an FRP to the millers to purchase sugarcane at Rs 130 per quintal, when, according to the NAFA (National Alliance of Farmers’ Association), the input cost of one quintal of sugarcane is roughly Rs 233.5 per quintal. This FRP therefore amounts to a massive loss to the farmer.

Immediately after the announcement, farmers (from UP) took to the streets stopping rail and road traffic. They marched to Parliament. They seized trains that sought to bring imported raw sugar and prevented them from reaching the mills. Some took the extreme step of self-immolation. Others burnt their crop. With the rabi season approaching many resorted to distress sales, selling their crop to local gur manufacturers at Rs 155 per quintal. Under pressure from the farmers the UP Government banned the import of raw sugar.

According to the new order, the FRP shall be fixed by the Central Government from time to time. It also specified that any other authority fixing a price for the crop above the FRP would have to bear the difference. (The latter point was retracted after the farmers’ march to Parliament.) The practice so far was for States such as UP, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana to declare the State Advised Price (SAP) that mills are required to pay farmers. This was usually higher than the SMP which was announced by the Central Government on the basis of the cost of cultivation estimated by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP).

As it is, for a number of years, sugarcane growers have been squeezed by the low prices paid by the millers and the spiralling input costs. This has led even to many suicides of sugarcane farmers who had at one time earned a good amount for the crop. In fact in the four years from 2004-05 to 2008-09 the SMP for sugarcane barely rose from Rs 79 per quintal to Rs 81 per quintal while input costs increased phenomenally. In addition, the millers cheat the farmers in varied ways—weighing, recovery rate etc. So it is not surprising that sugar production dropped drastically from 27.8 million tonnes in 2007-08 to 16 million tonnes last year. In the coming year production is not likely to be more than 15 million tonnes.

The government did not create a buffer stock in 2006-07 and 2007-08 when production was at its peak. In 2006 when international prices were high (Rs 20,680 per tonne) and local prices were low (Rs 13,000 per tonne) the government banned exports. At that time due to large stocks and ban of exports the millers harassed the farmers paying them late. In 2007-08 when international prices crashed to Rs 13,000 per tonne the government exported 68 lakh tonnes of sugar even though sugar production was dropping. Later when there was shortage the government imported sugar at Rs 10-35 per kg.

It is these shortsighted policies of the government which have played havoc with the lives of the sugarcane farmers. In its report for 2008-09 the CACP warned the government that unless it raised the SMP for sugarcane the net area under the crop would continue to fall. But the government could not be bothered. They expect the millers will import raw sugar and continue to make money. The area under sugarcane cultivation dropped from 4.38 million hectares last year to 4.21 million hectares—that is, a drop of about 1.5 lakh hectares in just one year. Farmers are shifting away from sugarcane cultivation.

Consumers Robbed

Sugar prices have tripled in the last one year from Rs 17 per kg a year back to Rs 50 today. In just the last four months it has risen by over 40 per cent from Rs 32 per kg. Notwithstanding the claims of the Agriculture Minister, sugar prices are unlikely to drop. When production is estimated at a mere 15 million tonnes and consumption at 23 million tonnes without a single kg of buffer stock (compared to 10 MT at the beginning of last year), the price will be determined by the cost of imports. Given the shortfall, a minimum of eight million tonnes will have to be imported.

The raw sugar import cost to the miller will not be less than Rs 38 per kg. With such high costs, what the consumer has to pay is not likely to be below Rs 50 per kg. And with India entering the international market with huge purchases, the international prices are only likely to go up—expected to be up to Rs 70 per kg.

The question that arises is that when the millers are paying Rs 13 per kg to the farmer (FRP rate with recovery at 10 per cent) why should sugar be so expensive? Even if we calculate that for every kg of sugar produced the transportation and processing charges come to Rs 5, the cost of production would be a maximum of Rs 18 per kg. If we add another one-third as profit the selling price comes to Rs 24. Then if we count the wholesaler’s/ retailer’s profit sugar should not cross a maximum figure of Rs 30 per kg. Then why Rs 50? Even if they give the sugarcane grower the rate that is remunerative—say, Rs 23 per kg or Rs 230 per quintal for sugarcane—the maximum price to the consumer will come to Rs 40 per kg. This would be still less than the cost of imported sugar or raw sugar.

So there is no reason for sugar prices to sky-rocket as millers continue to pay a price lower than the remunerative price. Though this may vary from State to State the plight of the farmer in the two main sugarcane growing States—UP and Maharashtra—is pathetic. In Maharashtra, sugar mills are cooperatives dominated and controlled by powerful politicians like Sharad Pawar. In Maharashtra, every farmer is tied to a particular cooperative mill and is not free to sell it to any other. So they are at the mercy of the cooperative bosses who keep the prices of sugarcane low. In UP many mills are owned by big business houses like Birla, Bajaj etc.

Depending on imports is no solution to the sugar problem—whether shortage or high prices. The only solution must be to promote sugarcane production by investing in agriculture and subsidising the farmer. In this way not only would the farmer and rural economy flourish, the consumer too would get sugar at a reliable price.

Need for a Pro-active Agrarian Policy

With nine lakh tonnes of imported sugar stuck at the ports since the last month due to the UP Government’s ban on processing it, the Centre has been blaming the Mayawati Government for the high sugar prices. The Mayawati Government, on the other hand, instead of announcing a high SAP, has clamped cases on the millers under the Essential Commodities Act in order to share the booty made by them. The plight of the millions of sugarcane farmers and crores of consumers is not on the mind either of the Congress or the BSP. They are interested in only extracting their share of the windfall profits being made by the millers, cooperatives, big traders and hoarders.

The only policy that would benefit both the producer and consumer is for the government to invest heavily in agriculture and subsidise sugarcane production. Sugarcane production requires large quantities of water, so irrigation projects should be its first focus. Unfortunately the government has systematically been cutting investment in agriculture. Rural development expenditure of the government averaged 14.5 per cent of the GDP in the 1985-90 period. This dropped to eight per cent in the early 1990s and since 1998 it has dropped even further to a mere 5.6 per cent of the GDP. In real terms, there has been a reduction of about Rs 30,000 crores annually in development expenditures on average in the first five years of this century compared to the pre-reform period.

When investment in agriculture should be increasing as it is there that the bulk of our population live, the above figures indicate a massive reduction with disastrous consequences. Rather than become dependent on imports and thereby compromise the food security of the country, the government needs to invest heavily in agriculture (with focus on irrigation) to boost the production of sugarcane and other crops.

To solve the sugar/sugarcane problem the government needs to increase investment in irrigation, subsidise input cost (fertiliser, pesticide, electricity) and ensure a remunerative price is paid to the farmer. To maintain consumer prices it should put a halt on the profiteering, hoarding and illegal methods of the millers and subsidise sugar particularly for the poor. If the government can announce a massive bail-out to the three-to-four oil companies and Air India, why does it shy away from bailing-out 50 million farmers and a few crore masses? The amounts being suggested to the three-to-four oil companies and Air India run up to Rs 20,000 crores, a lesser amount would be needed for the millions of sugarcane farmers.

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On Howard Zinn

Posted by Radical Notes February 25, 2010 at 12:01 am in Obituary

Cyrus Bina, Distinguished Research Professor
University of Minnesota

We have lost a towering figure of remarkable quality during the age of intellectual decline and moral timidity in Americana. This is the time of destructive creation in (and by) Wall Street, which has now been piggybacked on Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” an apt description of bread-and-butter and winner-take-all modus operandi of business throughout America and elsewhere. This is an era that our government has invaded the two major Muslim countries based upon a little more than out-of thin-air reasoning, and decidedly created a two-front war that has not only dilapidated us to the core morally but, if history is of any consolation, will haunt us not unlike the ghost of Hamlet’s father all the way to the end of the twenty-first century. We have entered into the era of transnationalization of capital and capitalism, which is synonymous with the end of the Pax Americana and American hegemony and which had sunk us since the 1980s in the ocean of hegemony-smashing globalization; yet our sanguine government acts like a newly minted hegemon of the yesteryears, and then when hardly any nation (particularly those which were the subject of past US coups) does give a hoot, it mindlessly plan to dominate, even invade, it by extra-judicial and colonial means. The excruciating lessons of Vietnam War, civil rights, Watergate, labor strife, rampant racism and racial segregation, immigration and immigrant bashing, racial and political profiling, blanket surveillance of citizenry, government secrecy, not to mention, tempering with tenure and academic rights appear to have lost on those who sit at positions of power in this country. It is in midst of these unlearned lessons and unheeded mistakes that Howard Zinn’s loss is felt so glaringly today. Howard Zinn wore a couple of dozen hats in dealing with all these crucial matters in his long life and colorful career, which placed him among a handful of most daring and effective public intellectuals in the twentieth century. He was a renaissance man, in his thought and in his deeds. He will be remembered as an illuminating towering candle in the altar of humanity that burnt fully to the very last droplet, before it faded away. The world is dimmer now and I miss him already.

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‘The Four Rs’ of global capitalism

Posted by Radical Notes February 23, 2010 at 12:24 pm in Economic Notes, Economy, Venezuela

Michael A. Lebowitz, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal

February 19, 2010 — Correo del Orinoco — In Venezuela, people know what the 3Rs stand for: revise, rectify and re-impulse. Like Karl Marx, who stressed that the revolution advances by criticising itself, President Hugo Chavez has argued that it is necessary to recognise errors and to go beyond them in order to advance.

But who knows what the four Rs of global capitalism are? At the recent meeting in Davos, Switzerland, of the wheelers and dealers of global capitalism, the conference theme was “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild — Improve the State of the World”. But what did they do? Although we don’t know what happened in their dinner meetings (which, as Adam Smith wisely observed, inevitably end up in a conspiracy against the public), there doesn’t appear to be much sign that they improved the state of the world. Of course, there was never a question that these corporate giants and their faithful servants would rethink the logic of capital — a logic of exploitation, expansion of capital, unending generation of needs and consumerism, and the destruction of what Marx called the original sources of wealth, human beings and nature. How could they? But did they redesign and rebuild in order to improve the state of the world for capital?

Not noticeably. However, that doesn’t mean they have not already been advancing on their real 3Rs. To improve the state of world capitalism, Reverse has become a major theme — especially in the western hemisphere. Given the growing rejection of neoliberalism and global capitalism that has been occurring in Latin America, given the inroads that have been made by a new conception of national sovereignty, international solidarity and socialism for the 21st century, capital sees the need to reverse those advances. Honduras, the Colombian military bases, subversion in Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela — all this is capital’s effort to improve the state of its world.

Of course, as we know, global capitalism has had its problems lately — the economic crisis, which is the result of a long process of overaccumulation. And so, it is indeed engaged in a process of redesigning or, rather, Restructuring. It is important to recognise that a crisis in capitalism is not the same as a crisis of capitalism. For a crisis in capitalism to become a crisis of capitalism, you need actors who are prepared to put an end to capitalism. There is, though, no sign of that in the immediate future. And so, like before, capital will proceed to restructure itself. After the depression of the 1930s, capital restructured itself internationally through the Bretton Woods agreements that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We can already see a similar attempt underway with the shift from the G7 to the G20 — in other words, the incorporation of new emerging capitalist powers such as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). And, international capital clearly hopes that through this process of restructuring in which it brings the new important capitalist actors to the head table for international discussions, it will be able to resume its process of growth in accordance with the logic of capital. Reverse, Restructure and Resume — these are the 3Rs that global capitalism wants.

However, there is a fourth R of global capitalism. The very solution to the crisis that capital introduces — that restructuring which brings the emerging capitalist countries to the central committee — implies the right of the latter to be full members, i.e., to achieve levels of consumption and economic development equal to the present levels of the North. Yet we know that the world’s resources and the Earth itself cannot possibly sustain this. And in this situation of true scarcity, how can capitalism solve this?

Capitalism, after all, is a system in which all capitals are trying to expand as much as possible. However, it is not a system in which all its members march in unison; and, as Lenin explained in relationship to World War I, the combination of uneven rates of development and scarcity is a major source of conflict among capitalist countries. In this situation, the new emerging powers want the fourth R– Redivision. Redivision of resources, redivision of industrialisation, redivision of the right to emit carbon — the struggle is on. It is a struggle over access by capital to scarce resources, energy, water and food.

Clearly, in this world of immense inequality, exclusion and starvation, redivision is necessary if we are ever to realise the ideal embodied in the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela of the importance of ensuring the overall human development of all people. We want a world, a socialist world, in which (as Marx and Engels stressed) “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. But, capitalist redivision is a process of struggle over the right to exploit. It is a struggle not only among capitals but also against the exploited and excluded of the world.

Who would doubt that this struggle will become more intense as the logic of unremitting capitalist expansion comes up against the reality of natural limits? The slogan writers for Davos were right. We do need to “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild — Improve the State of the World”. And, we need to redivide, too — to create a world without capitalism. As Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez continue to remind us, humanity is faced with a critical choice — socialism or barbarism?

[This article first appeared in the February 19, 2010, issue of Correo del Orinoco, the new weekly English-language newspaper published in Venezuela.]

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On People’s Movements and State Repression in Orissa: Lenin Kumar

Posted by Correspondence February 18, 2010 at 1:02 pm in India, Orissa, Self-Determination, State Repression, Video

An interview with Lenin Kumar, an artist, editor of Nishan and political activist based in Bhubaneswar.

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On State Repression in Orissa: Biswapriya Kanungo

Posted by Correspondence February 18, 2010 at 1:01 pm in India, Orissa, State Repression, Video

In Dec 2009-Jan 2010, a Radical Notes-Correspondence team toured Orissa and interviewed many activists and intellectuals in the state. The following interview with Orissa based lawyer and human rights activist, Biswapriya Kanungo is first in the series.

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People’s Struggles in Orissa: Bhalachandra Sarangi

Posted by Correspondence February 18, 2010 at 11:42 am in India, Orissa, State Repression, Video

CPI(ML) New Democracy’s leader from Orissa, Bhalachandra Sarangi talks about the various movements in Orissa, including Narayanpatna. Presented at a Seminar organised by Campaign Against War on People, Delhi University. (14th December, 2009)

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“Jhuggi dwellers are not to be treated as secondary citizens”: Delhi High Court

Posted by Radical Notes February 12, 2010 at 1:27 pm in Delhi, India, Labour, Law, Poverty, Working Class

Delhi Shramik Sangathan

After several years, a land mark judgment has come in favor of slum dwellers. We can say that a pro poor judgment has been delivered by the judiciary on the basis of existing legislation & policies, which were denied to them earlier in several cases.

A division bench of Delhi High court comprising justice A P Shah & justice S Murlidhar has delivered the order yesterday. The case was filed by members of Delhi Shramik Sangathan of New Sanjay camp, Okhla Industrial area, New Delhi. The part of Sanjay camp was demolished on 5th Feb’09 by PWD in the name of Right of Way and the evictees were not resettled under the relocation policy. The part of Nehru camp of Patparganj was also demolished in 2007 in the name of Right of way by PWD and the evictees were not resettled.

The case was represented in the court by eminent Supreme Court lawyer Sh Prashant Bhushan & his committed team. The DSS members of New Sanjay camp put a lot of effort in collecting information & evidences in support of the case. The central team of DSS provided all secondary information & other inputs. The DSS local team worked with assistance of lawyer Mr. Somesh & Mr. Rohit of Mr. Prashant Bhushan team.

Below is the report on the judgement from a mainstream newspaper, The Hindu:

NEW DELHI: Observing that “jhuggi dwellers are not to be treated as secondary citizens and are entitled to no less an access to basic survival needs as any other citizen”, the Delhi High Court on Thursday ruled that every eligible slum dweller has to be relocated to a place with proper civic amenities before being evicted from a piece of public land.

A Division Bench of the Court comprising Justice A. P. Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar delivered the judgment on a bunch of petitions seeking proper relocation of jhuggi dwellers whose slums set up at various places across the Capital were demolished without relocating them at alternative sites.

Dismissing the argument of the Delhi Government and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi that these jhuggi dwellers did not deserve to be relocated as they had set up their jhuggis on public roads and thus violated the “right of way”, the Bench said: “This Court would like to emphasise that in the context of the Master Plan for Delhi-2021, jhuggi dwellers are not to be treated as secondary citizens. They are entitled to no less an access to basic survival needs as any other citizen”.

“It must be remembered that the Master Plan for Delhi-2021 clearly identifies the relocation of slum dwellers as one of the priorities for the government.

Spaces have been earmarked for housing of the economically weaker sections. The government will be failing in its statutory and Constitutional obligation if it fails to identify spaces equipped infra-structurally with civic amenities that can ensure a decent living to those being relocated prior to initiating the moves for eviction,” the Bench ruled.

“The decision of the respondents holding that the petitioners are on the ‘right of way’ and are, therefore, not entitled to relocation is hereby declared illegal and unconstitutional. In terms of the extant policy for relocation of jhuggi dwellers, which is operational in view of the orders of the Supreme Court, the cases of the petitioners will be considered for relocation,” the Bench said.

The Bench said that within four months from today each of those eligible among the petitioners in terms of the relocation policy be granted an alternative site as per the Master Plan subject to proof of residence prior to the cut-off date.

This will happen in consultation with each of them in a meaningful manner as indicated in this judgment.

The State agencies will ensure that basic civic amenities consistent with the right to life and dignity of each of the citizens in the jhuggis are available at the site of relocation.

The Bench ordered that a copy of this order be sent to the Member-Secretary, Delhi Legal Services Authority, with the request that wide publicity be given to the operative portion and directions of this judgment in the local language among the residents of jhuggi clusters in the city as well as in the relocated sites.

It said the Legal Services Authority would also hold periodic camps in jhuggi clusters and in relocated sites to make the residents aware of their rights. “A copy of this order be also sent to the Delhi Chief Secretary for compliance,” the Bench added.

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“People’s Movements” vis-a-vis the Maoist Rebellion in India: The Case of Himanshu Kumar

Posted by Radical Notes February 9, 2010 at 2:44 pm in India, State Repression

Nisha Mehta

Amidst the current gruesome war of the state power in India against a section of its own poorest people rebelling under the leadership of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist), the recent episodes of persecution of Himanshu Kumar (HK hereafter), the avowedly Gandhian activist running Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA), by the Governments of Chhattisgarh and India are poignant as well as curious. The incidents of persecution are too well-known: how his ashram was shut down and bulldozed, how one of his main co-worker, Kopa Kunjam has been arrested, and finally how his attempts at a padayatra and jan-sunwai (people’s hearing) were blocked. (A summary of these can be found in the collection at Sanhati; there are videos too where we find HK himself summarizing these episodes (Video 1, Video 2).

One of the salutary features of these episodes is that HK himself seems to have been changing his political views gradually. So, below we summarize some lessons that appear to stand out from these episodes: especially regarding the understandings of revolutionary Marxism in India on the correct path of emancipating the poor in the country vis-a-vis the understandings of the specific issue-based “people’s movements”. This seems quite important as one perennial complaint against the CPI (Maoist), from Nandigram to Lalgarh, is that they have been regularly `hijacking’ spontaneous people’s movements geared toward some immediate goals to convert these into components of the broader struggle for seizure of political power by the working class and the poor. Below we try to understand whether these incidents with HK provide some justification for the perception and the corresponding revolutionary strategies of CPI (Maoist).

To put succinctly, these episodes seem to raise the questions whether any serious attempt to emancipate the deprived people in India has to, perforce, develop into an explicit class-war against the state and whether sufficient democratic space is currently present in our country for sustaining a serious movement in this regard while remaining within the existing structure of legal polity.

A. What is the nature of the state:

One of the very first lessons of Marxist understanding is that “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes” (Lenin: The State and Revolution). The further elaboration by Lenin is very well-known but still worth-remembering:

“In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors. … the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”.”

Obviously, CPI (Maoist), following this understanding, specified the class character of the Indian state (rightly or wrongly) and the battle led by them in Chhattisgarh is directed against what they perceive to be the constituents of this state power.

HK avowedly perceived state in a different way. He seems to have understood the Indian government and its constitution to be quite sacrosanct. He repeatedly claimed that his aim was to assist government’s own work in perfectly legal ways (he has elaborated on this in his speech available as a four-part video in as well as in his interview). But it seems that when his apparently tame efforts at some seemingly harmless issue-based movements (like rehabilitating the villagers driven away by Salwa Judum) came into conflict with the class interests of what CPI (Maoist) would call the monopolistic capital and their ally of comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the Indian state did not hesitate to brush aside HK, his reconciliatory moralistic rhetorics notwithstanding. This raises the question once again: whether it is possible to continue a serious ‘people’s movement’ on any issue of fundamental importance without making it culminate into a war against the existing state.

B. To mobilize on the basis of what identities:

A person can, and often does, have several identities: nation, colour, class, religion, gender etc. From a Marxist standpoint, class is the most important identity among these. This perception is rooted in the Marxist conception of materialistic foundation of historical development. Thus, from Marxist point of view, one basic political task of the revolutionary left is to organize the oppressed people mainly along class lines.

Again, as a classic and unequivocal illustration of this point, Lenin’s writing in the context of Jewish workers in Russia can be put forward:

“The great slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!”, which was proclaimed for the first time more than half a century ago, has now become more than the slogan of just the Social-Democratic parties of the different countries. This slogan is being increasingly embodied both in the unification of the tactics of international Social-Democracy and in the building of organisational unity among the proletarians of the various nationalities…

The Bund’s mistake is a result of its basically untenable nationalist views; the result of its groundless claim to be the sole, monopolistic representative of the Jewish proletariat, from which the federalist principle of organisation necessarily derives; the result of its Long-standing policy of keeping aloof and separate from the Party. We are convinced that this mistake must be rectified and that it will be rectified as the movement continues togrow. We consider ourselves ideologically at one with the Jewish Social-Democratic proletariat. After the Second Congress our Central Committee pursued a non-nationalist policy; it took pains that such committees should be set up (Polesye, North-Western) as would unite all the local workers, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, into a single whole”. (To the Jewish Workers)

HK seems initially to have perceived the adivasis of Chhattisgarh having a pristine identity of their own. He still invokes this idea:

“There are three types of poor – (i) those who survive on your riches – the balloonseller, the domestic servant, construction workers; (ii) those who feel they are unworthy of being rich; they feel they are low caste, uneducated; they can never be rich; and (iii) those like the adivasis who were living happily in the forests till you invaded their land to make yourself richer.” (Economic and Political Weekly, Nov 21, 2009, p.12)

However, the CPI (Maoist) would characterize current phase of the struggle in backward Chhattisgarh in class terms. International monopolistic capital and their ally of comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie are grabbing the means of production and this specific method of accumulating capital is determined by the pre-capitalist production relations existing in Chhattisgarh: non-anonymous hegemony of a dominant class that imposes unfreedom on productive activities (including surplus appropriation) of the broad masses of people (see also, Tugge: “Two Paths of Development”, People’s March, December 2007).

The curious thing is that HK himself is coming round to a similar perception! (see his speech). He is explicitly going beyond any tribal identity: he is now talking about the 20% of people in India expropriating the remaining 80% and using the coercive state apparatus to hold the expropriated in check. So, from this, the question again arises whether any serious `people’s movement’ in India can do without a conscious scaffolding of class-based mobilization.

C. How meaningful are the existing Indian democratic institutions:

It is quite well-known that CPI (Maoist) considers the existing structure of democratic institutions in India as a sham which is quite in conformity with their goal of bringing about the New Democratic Revolution, ostensibly to usher in true `people’s democracy’. From such an understanding emerges their strategy of boycotting parliamentary elections, one component of the democratic institutions. This strategy has been disputed a lot and earned them a good deal of criticisms.

In contrast, HK tried to use these existing democratic institutions, MPs, ministers, judiciary… so far as possible for his efforts. His mode of movement was also entirely what is understood to be democratic mass movement. But he attained almost no palpable success. Finally he has had to leave Chhattisgarh convinced that the existing democratic institutions there are merely a sham.

Again, this makes us remember that Lenin is quoted famously by all the parliamentary left parties in India in justifying their primary attachment to electioneering:

“it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before – the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism “politically obsolete”.” (Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder).

Perhaps the unsuccessful but sincere efforts of HK serve the same purpose–participating in these institutions to the fullest possible extent to expose their limitations. These experiences of HK, curiously, seem to prove the point claimed by CPI (Maoist)! I hope I am wrong. This should also make the `people’s movements’ in India trying to work within the present set-up to improve this set up from within think more about the fruitfulness of their efforts.

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Seminar on operation Green Hunt: Displacement and Genocide of Tribals

Posted by Campaign against War on People February 9, 2010 at 9:09 am in Events, India, State Repression

Date: 11 th February

Venue: Room No. 56, Arts faculty, DU

Time: 11a.m.-3p.m.

Speakers

Amit Bhaduri (JNU), Sudha Bharadwaj (Chhattisgarh Mukti
Morcha) , Venuh (NPMHR), Tridib Ghosh (PUCL, Jharkhand), Kumar Hassan
(writer, Orissa)

A Note

• More than 100,00 paramilitary troops in addition to police forces are carrying out military operation backed by air force
• According to official government estimate 107 ‘naxalites’ have been killed during the joint operation
• Tens of thousands of villagers displaced; villages burnt down; villagers tortured; children mutilated
• The entire area cordoned off, fact finding teams being harassed, illegally detained and driven out

LET US DEMAND AND END TO THIS GREEN HUNT

• Stop war on tribals; people’s movements and nationality movements
• Withdraw all armed forces
• Stop ‘biggest land grab since Columbus’
• Cancel all MOU; stop plunder of land and resources by multinational corporations

Organised by Campaign Against War on People

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