In this interview Leo Panitch deals with the problems of working class politics and organisation – of trade unions, parties, bureaucratisation and social democracy. There is a very interesting discussion of the Soviet experience and on the international left’s attitude towards various transformatory praxes and experiments throughout the world, including the Latin American.
Courtesy: Socialist Project
Shri B S Yeddyurappa,
Chief Minister,
Karnataka
Sir,
We the undersigned are writing to you in the backdrop of the fact that Dr E Rati Rao, a senior scientist, long-standing activist of the women’s rights movement, Vice-President of PUCL-Karnataka and Vice President of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) has recently been charged with sedition by the police of the state that you govern – Karnataka.
Dr. Rati Rao was Editor of an in-house PUCL-Karnataka Kannada language bulletin (called PUCL Varthapatra) for private circulation among PUCL members – and it is this bulletin (last published in 2007) that is the supposed basis for the charges of ‘sedition’.
The FIR against Dr. Rati Rao accuses her of publishing the PUCL bulletin that is “favoring naxals and Muslims and is propagating that the police are killing innocent people in the name of encounter”; that “calls upon dalits, women, minorities, farmers and adivasis to build organizations in order to fight for their rights”; that “accuses the Sangh Parivar in Karavali (coastal Karnataka) of indulging in false propaganda and fueling communal disharmony” and “calls upon the secular forces to raise their voice against such spread of communal hate”; and “by raising such issues incite and spread intolerance, disbelief, discontent amongst the public”; that “in the name of doing good to the dalits, women, minorities, & adivasis the said bulletin is spreading false information against the casteist & communal Government…It is propagating intolerance, disbelief, and discontent amongst the Government officials.”
The sections under which Dr. Rati Rao has been booked are Section 124 A (Sedition), Section 505 (False statement, rumour, etc., circulated with intent to cause mutiny or cause communal discord) and sections of the Press Act that relate to knowingly spreading false information. The PUCL Bulletin in question had discussed the attacks on the Christian community in Karnataka and had indicted the Government for failing to do enough to protect the minority community from attack.
Going by the FIR against Dr. Rati Rao, are we, the citizens of India, to believe that in the eyes of the BJP-ruled Karnataka today, it is ‘sedition’ to avail the basic democratic right (and duty) of resisting communal hate campaigns and extra-judicial killings by the police; of asserting secularism; of encouraging dalits, women, minorities, farmers and adivasis to organize for their rights; and of asking why the Government is failing to prevent attacks on minorities and dalits?! Is it because the Karnataka Government itself is colluding in the attacks on women, dalits, minorities and human rights that it feels so threatened by democratic activists who take up such issues? Is the Government of Karnataka out to muzzle every voice of democracy and dissent?
We find it ironic that while the Karnataka police does not book the Sangh outfits for spreading rumours galore of ‘love jehad’ and ‘forced conversion’ etc to target Muslims and Christians, nor for violating the Constitution by indulging in communal violence – people like Dr. Rati Rao who have devoted their lives to defending constitutional liberties are accused of sedition and activists seeking to bring facts to light are booked for ‘spreading rumour’!
Dr Rati Rao is a scientist and researcher specializing in food microbiology, and retired as the Deputy Director of the CFTRI (Central Food Technological Research Institute). She has a history of several decades of democratic activism – first in the student movement, then in the women’s movement with the Samata Progressive Women’s Forum, Mysore since 1978 and as a prominent figure in the autonomous women’s movement right since the 1980s; and long associated with the Left and progressive movement and the human rights movement, especially the PUCL.
Why was a bulletin last published in 2007 dug out now, three years later, for punitive action by the Karnataka Government? We believe it is merely a pretext to intimidate Dr. Rati Rao, who has in recent times, as National Vice President of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) been visiting Karnataka villages to organize rural poor women to fight for their rights, who was recently part of a fact-finding to expose the atrocities against Dalits in Chitradurga district of Karnataka, and who recently participated in a National Convention against Sexual violence and State Repression in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
To us it is clear that the charge against Dr. Rati Rao is part of a calculated campaign of harassment of civil liberties and democratic activists and crackdown on dissent that has marked the BJP regime in Karnataka and the ‘Operation Greenhunt’ of the central government.
We the undersigned condemn the trumped up charges against a respected member of the democratic rights and women’s movement and demand your immediate intervention to ensure that the charges be immediately withdrawn.
Kumar Sanjay Singh
Every conscious citizen is aware that the proposed operation Green Hunt, ostensibly to deal with the Maoist armed struggle, is an event with ominous portents. It can be argued that the events that are unfolding have consequences that go much beyond the attempted military solution to problems that are essentially political and economic in nature.
That the intended target of the government is much larger than the stated target is becoming obvious in the statements and actions of the state. Witness how in the aftermath of the Silda action the Home Minister Mr. P C Chidambaram tried to steam roll all the critiques of the government into Maoist sympathisers, completely ignoring the fact that criticising the human rights violation of the government is not tantamount to a support of the Maoists. More recently, the charge sheet on Mr. Kobad Ghandy, filed by the Delhi Police, mentioned some prominent democratic and civil liberties organisations and activists as fronts of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Obviously, the intended targets of the state are not simply the Maoist party but all such organisations and individual that have been critical of the state’s developmental policy and track record on human rights. A fact testified by the assault of rights activists and Gandhian organisations in Chhattisgarh.
The manner in which the central government wants to deploy paramilitary forces in the so-called sensitive states betrays the state’s unstated agenda in three respects. First, the attempt to cajole and pressurise the reluctant chief ministers of Bihar and Jharkhand through media propaganda and other kinds of pressure and persuasion is a testimony of the attempt to redefine centre-state relationship in the favour of the centre; even on the issue of law and order which is a state subject.
Second, deployment of armed paramilitary forces through a central fiat amounts to imposition of armed paramilitary forces over civilian administration. This is permissible only under emergency. Yet the government is not declaring emergency since such a declaration obliges the government for a mandatory review of the declaration every six months. The government has therefore imposed a de facto emergency without actually declaring it. Thus it has claimed unfettered power without any legal or time bound restraint, in other words it has claimed impunity in the area of operation Green Hunt. Experience of use of armed and paramilitary forces provided with impunity, for instance in the north eastern states and J& K has been that the number of civilian casualty and the erosion of human rights is unacceptably high. In other words the casualty, repression and oppression of the civilian population living in the areas of operation green hunt will be dramatically higher than the stated targets of operation green hunt. In fact, the plight of the civilian population is further compounded since they have been also targeted in some instance by the guerrilla forces.
Third, the initiation of the inter-state counter naxal operation is actually a part of the oft stated plan of the centre to restructure and centralise internal security apparatus. Thus, this is a decisive shift of law and order and policing from the state subject. Over the period of last more than two decades several issues of state subject have been taken over by the centre, for instance forest, roads, port management and now policing. These are portents of a shift towards a more unitary form of governments. Could this also be seen as imposition of a Presidential form of government by stealth? It ought to be pointed out here that this idea had been mooted by Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee during their respective tenures as Prime Minister.
To cut a long story short the current operation while stated to be against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has a much larger unstated target. It threatens to trespass the safety and security of the indigenous and tribal people in the operation area, it seeks to trespass on the fundamental rights of the citizens of the country and finally, it seeks to redefine the structure of governance of the country. It is evident, therefore, the current offensive is quite comprehensive and seeks to impact upon a cross section of political process and the life and rights of common citizens. It stands to reason that such a challenge requires a resistance that is imaginative and flexible enough to include the opinions of all the stake holders that are to be impacted.
On 20th February, the Hindustan Times, reporting on the chargesheet produced by the Delhi Police against Kobad Ghandy, stated that Ghandy was alleged to have been in direct contact with GN Sai Baba, a professor in Delhi University, and who is alleged to be in control of the CPI (Maoist)’s tactical counter offensive against Operation Greenhunt. Reporting on the same chargesheet, on the same date, the Times of India reported the investigators’ claim that civil rights groups like the PUDR and PUCL were actively helping the Maoists to spread their base; while Mail Today stated that there was an active Maoist operation amongst Delhi University students, specifically identifying the Democratic Students Union (DSU). Elaborating on this same chargesheet report the next day, the HT adds that a prominent research scholar and a human rights activist have been specifically identified by Ghandy as Maoist leaders in the capital, although they are not named by the newspaper. Interestingly, each of these details appears only in the particular newspaper mentioned, and not in any of the other papers: like the blind men and the elephant, it is as if each has ‘found’ something unique in the chargesheet, that characterises the contents of that document – but unlike the blind men in the story, who after all are each seeking to describe the same beast but end up describing only the part that they sense, these newspapers presumably all have access to the same ‘beast’ in its entirety (i.e., the chargesheet), but have chosen to report only on specific – but different – aspects of the extensive Maoist network that it alleges exists in Delhi. What, we may ask, is going on?
Very simply, if each newspaper reports on any one branch of this alleged Maoist network, each will have apparently reported something unique; further, each newspaper’s readership will have been made aware of one crucial way in which the Maoist ‘menace’ is apparently already in their neighbourhood, and spreading like a virus. But the total effect of all the reports is the imaging of a hydra, a Ravana, a many-headed monster conceived in the savage and distant tribal terrains of Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh and Orissa, and that is now slouching towards the safe cosmopolitan world of the NCR to be born. What is most disturbing in this picture – which would be fantastically ridiculous if it were not so dangerous – is that the heads of this monster that have been identified in the newspapers are intellectuals, civil rights bodies and university student organisations: the classic sites of dissent in any free society. In other words, Operation Green Hunt (or OGH) is no longer just ‘out there’, but is now itself slouching around in the NCR: dissent towards OGH is gradually itself being targeted under OGH.
Troublingly, sections of the press appear to be participating – wittingly or unwittingly – in this urbanisation of OGH. The fact is that if each of these papers had presented all that the others had also reported, the larger picture would have been self-evident, the elephant would have stood revealed as the state preparing to trample on intellectual dissent. One does not need to be particularly gifted visually or intellectually to see the connection between intellectuals, university students and civil rights activists. Every modern state has sought to control these sections of its society – and usually the press too – precisely because they have always been sources of political discomfort. When the press decides to go along with the state, or confines itself to being the voice of the state, it must ring a bell for us – in this case a very loud alarm bell, that tolls the names of Joseph Goebbels, over and over again. The question before us is, did the newspapers noted above choose to remain blind men? Or were their reporters deliberately fed partial information by the police, to ensure that the fear of the Maoist virus spreading would be treated as a ‘real’ threat, and not be perceived for what it patently is: a strategy for clamping down on any questioning of the government’s armed offensive against large populations of its own citizenry, in the name of cleansing the Maoist ‘infection’? Even if it was the latter, it was and is incumbent on any press worth its name – as another important site of dissent in any free society – to have sought out the information in its entirety, before rushing to press. Otherwise, in true Goebbelsian fashion, it will simply be blindly repeating the lies, over and over again, till the lies become the truth.
That this did not happen, for whatever reason, is closely related to another issue, which is the absence in the mainstream press and media in general, of any real understanding of or interest in the anxieties and apprehensions that OGH has given rise to, and of the consequent concern over it. This anxiety and concern has been emanating from several very diverse quarters, and essentially pertains to whether it is appropriate for the state to take arms against its own citizenry. Very few of these voices may be considered even remotely sympathetic to the Maoist cause; several of them have explicitly, repeatedly and sometimes even vehemently spoken against it. Irrespective of their take on Maoism, however, these voices have focused on the fact that OGH is an operation that is unconstitutional, violative of fundamental human rights and pretty evidently underway in order to further the interests of big corporate investments in the ‘infested’ areas. They have repeatedly sought to point out that the perceived ‘infestation’ actually constitutes the local tribal populations living there. If large sections of the tribal populations in these areas – threatened with displacement, destitution and/or violent death at the hands of big-money private armies and/or the state’s own military and paramilitary apparatus – should choose to resist this apparently inexorable process of internal colonisation, sometimes violently, then should we in Delhi be surprised? Delhi’s denizens are now world-famous for resorting to fists, lathis and the odd baseball bat on what might be considered the slightest provocation: it might be a neighbour parking his car in my space, or another’s washing hanging over my balcony – our sense of our space as sacred is powerful. Then, when the tribal – for whom it is not parking space but her very livelihood, history and future that are being stolen with her land – decides to protest, should we not be stirred by sympathy? If we are not, we need to wonder why we are not. And at least part of the reason for that is because we have been buying into the Goebbelsian lies of the state: that these tribal movements are all controlled and managed by Naxals/Maoists; or that the tribals are actually being coerced by Maoists; or that there are no tribals, only Maoists. That these are people fighting for rights sanctioned to them under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, is a fact that gets drowned in all the noise.
The Indian state – which is thus explicitly enjoined by the Constitution (among other documents) to protect the social and economical interests of tribals in these scheduled areas – is financially and politically too deeply invested in the project of clearing these areas and making them accessible to corporate exploitation, to acknowledge this. It would lose legitimacy and become a global scandal. Or it would simply reveal what most states under this stage of capitalism are doing. Hence the extended exercise of labelling all tribals protesting its actions ‘Maoist’; all intellectual and civil rights attempts to dissuade it, ‘Maoist sympathisers’; and all dissent in general is increasingly being viewed as ‘terrorist’. This, as will be easily recognised, has long been the hallmark of McCarthyism. And as with that form of political repression, no doubt a chain of arrests will be initiated based on ostensible ‘confessions’, beginning with Kobad Ghandy’s, and spreading out in a network that will be produced as Maoist, with no way of knowing if it actually is.
It is particularly instructive that Joseph McCarthy’s strategy of labelling all dissent ‘communist’ arose at a time when the capitalist economy of the United States was, post-Depression, impatiently seeking to lose the shackles of Franklin Roosevelt’s socially oriented New Deal policies. Thus, any policy that carried even a whiff of being social-welfarist was immediately branded communist and dumped, and its proponents attacked socially, politically and legally.
The parallels are clear with our own context: we live, as the old Chinese curse goes, in interesting times – when our own capitalism is kicking with impatience at obstacles to (irony of ironies!) ‘economic reforms’; when its increasing population of dollar billionaires are panting to go forth and multiply their billions by raping the hinterlands of the country; when the state is itself eager to role back measures like the PDS and to massively fudge figures on poverty, even as prices of especially essential commodities continue to escalate and farmers continue to commit suicide; when ‘Islamic terror’ – that bogeyman that allowed the BJP to simultaneously terrorise the Muslim community as well as steamroll its own version of economic reforms through – has given way to the ‘red terror’ of ‘Maoism’ (after all, the Congress can’t be seen as anti-Islamic), but to the exact same end. While there may appear to be a kind of poetic irony in our own Chinese curse seeming to be Maoism, the not so poetic fact is that it is not the spectre of Maoism that haunts the land today but the multiple spectres of unbridled corporate capitalism, state collusion with and participation in this capitalist expansionism, the consequent and unprecedented assault on the lives and livelihoods of millions of tribals in the ‘infected’ areas. And the ideological cover for all this in our own brand of McCarthyism: OGH or ‘anti-Maoism’ (which is less of a mouthful than Chidambaramism, although that would probably be a more accurate term). (We shall for now not even touch upon the absurdity, in an ostensible democracy, of banning an ideology, as has happened with Maoism; who or what, we might well ask, even if we do not subscribe to this ideology, is being sought to be protected by this ban?) The Indian state is, it seems, learning well from Joseph Goebbels and Joseph McCarthy; perhaps it will very soon look to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge too. And it seems, the first to be purged from the metropolises will be the nuisances identified above: inconvenient intellectuals, university students and civil rights activists who will all be identified as ‘Maoists’ (never mind that they may actually be socialists, Gandhians, environmentalists or other such ‘beasts’) and removed from ‘shining India’. And once the intellectuals and activists and students are disposed of, Mr. P (Joseph?) Chidambaram will no doubt find an able ally in Mr. Kapil Sibal, to ensure that they do not surface again – for the latter as we know, is already working hard to dismantle the higher education system and sack it off to private and foreign institutional interests – but that is another tale. Suffice it for now to reiterate that, thanks to Mr. Chidambaram and his ilk, we do indeed live in interesting times, and all the interest is accumulating in the pockets of our dollar billionaires.
P K Vijayan is Asst. Prof., Dept. of English, Hindu College, Delhi University
Courtesy: Tehelka
Mezhdunarodnyi den’ rabotnitz, Moscow 1920 — Women’s Day or Working Women’s Day is a day of international solidarity, and a day for reviewing the strength and organisation of proletarian women.
But this is not a special day for women alone. The 8th of March is a historic and memorable day for the workers and peasants, for all the Russian workers and for the workers of the whole world. In 1917, on this day, the great February revolution broke out.[2] It was the working women of Petersburg who began this revolution; it was they who first decided to raise the banner of opposition to the tsar and his associates. And so, working women’s day is a double celebration for us.
But if this is a general holiday for all the proletariat, why do we call it “Women’s Day”? Why then do we hold special celebrations and meetings aimed above all at the women workers and the peasant women? Doesn’t this jeopardise the unity and solidarity of the working class? To answer these questions, we have to look back and see how Women’s Day came about and for what purpose it was organised.
How and why was Women’s Day organised?
Not very long ago, in fact about ten years ago, the question of women’s equality, and the question of whether women could take part in government alongside men was being hotly debated. The working class in all capitalist countries struggled for the rights of working women: the bourgeoisie did not want to accept these rights. It was not in the interest of the bourgeoisie to strengthen the vote of the working class in parliament; and in every country they hindered the passing of laws that gave the right to working women.
Socialists in North America insisted upon their demands for the vote with particular persistence. On the 28th of February, 1909, the women socialists of the USA organised huge demonstrations and meetings all over the country demanding political rights for working women. This was the first “Woman’s Day”. The initiative on organising a woman’s day thus belongs to the working women of America.
In 1910, at the Second International Conference of Working Women, Clara Zetkin [3] brought forward the question of organising an International Working Women’s Day. The conference decided that every year, in every country, they should celebrate on the same day a “Women’s Day” under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”.
During these years, the question of making parliament more democratic, i.e., of widening the franchise and extending the vote to women, was a vital issue. Even before the first world war, the workers had the right to vote in all bourgeois countries except Russia. [4] Only women, along with the insane, remained without these rights. Yet, at the same time, the harsh reality of capitalism demanded the participation of women in the country’s economy. Every year there was an increase in the number of women who had to work in the factories and workshops, or as servants and charwomen. Women worked alongside men and the wealth of the country was created by their hands. But women remained without the vote.
But in the last years before the war the rise in prices forced even the most peaceful housewife to take an interest in questions of politics and to protest loudly against the bourgeoisie’s economy of plunder. “Housewives uprisings” became increasingly frequent, flaring up at different times in Austria, England, France and Germany.
The working women understood that it wasn’t enough to break up the stalls at the market or threaten the odd merchant: they understood that such action doesn’t bring down the cost of living. You have to change the politics of the government. And to achieve this, the working class has to see that the franchise is widened.
It was decided to have a Woman’s Day in every country as a form of struggle in getting working women to vote. This day was to be a day of international solidarity in the fight for common objectives and a day for reviewing the organised strength of working women under the banner of socialism.
The first International Women’s Day
The decision taken at the Second International Congress of Socialist Women was not left on paper. It was decided to hold the first International Women’s Day on the 19th of March, 1911.
This date was not chosen at random. Our German comrades picked the day because of its historic importance for the German proletariat. On the 19th of March in the year of 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognised for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promises he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.
After January 11, efforts were made in Germany and Austria to prepare for Women’s Day. They made known the plans for a demonstration both by word of mouth and in the press. During the week before Women’s Day two journals appeared: The Vote for Women in Germany and Women’s Day in Austria. The various articles devoted to Women’s Day – “Women and Parliament”, “The Working Women and Municipal Affairs”, “What Has the Housewife got to do with Politics?”, etc. – analysed thoroughly the question of the equality of women in the government and in society. All the articles emphasised the same point: that it was absolutely necessary to make parliament more democratic by extending the franchise to women.
The first International Women’s Day took place in 1911. Its success exceeded all expectations. Germany and Austria on Working Women’s Day was one seething, trembling sea of women. Meetings were organised everywhere – in the small towns and even in the villages halls were packed so full that they had to ask male workers to give up their places for the women.
This was certainly the first show of militancy by the working woman. Men stayed at home with their children for a change, and their wives, the captive housewives, went to meetings. During the largest street demonstrations, in which 30,000 were taking part, the police decided to remove the demonstrators’ banners: the women workers made a stand. In the scuffle that followed, bloodshed was averted only with the help of the socialist deputies in parliament.
In 1913 International Women’s Day was transferred to the 8th of March. This day has remained the working women’s day of militancy.
Is Women’s Day necessary?
Women’s Day in [North] America and Europe had amazing results. It’s true that not a single bourgeois parliament thought of making concessions to the workers or of responding to the women’s demands. For at that time, the bourgeoisie was not threatened by a socialist revolution.
But Women’s Day did achieve something. It turned out above all to be an excellent method of agitation among the less political of our proletarian sisters. They could not help but turn their attention to the meetings, demonstrations, posters, pamphlets and newspapers that were devoted to Women’s Day. Even the politically backward working woman thought to herself: “This is our day, the festival for working women”, and she hurried to the meetings and demonstrations. After each Working Women’s Day, more women joined the socialist parties and the trade unions grew. Organisations improved and political consciousness developed.
Women’s Day served yet another function; it strengthened the international solidarity of the workers. The parties in different countries usually exchange speakers for this occasion: German comrades go to England, English comrades go to Holland, etc. The international cohesion of the working class has become strong and firm and this means that the fighting strength of the proletariat as a whole has grown.
These are the results of working women’s day of militancy. The day of working women’s militancy helps increase the consciousness and organisation of proletarian women. And this means that its contribution is essential to the success of those fighting for a better future for the working class.
Working Women’s Day in Russia
The Russian working woman first took part in “Working Women’s Day” in 1913. This was a time of reaction when tsarism held the workers and peasants in its vice-like a grip. There could be no thought of celebrating “Working Women’s Day” by open demonstrations. But the organised working women were able to mark their international day. Both the legal newspapers of the working class – the Bolshevik Pravda and the Menshevik Looch – carried articles about the International Women’s Day: [5] they carried special articles, portraits of some of those taking part in the working women’s movement and greetings from comrades such as August Bebel and Clara Zetkin.[6]
In those bleak years meetings were forbidden. But in Petrograd, at the Kalashaikovsky Exchange, those women workers who belonged to the [Bolshevik] Party organised a public forum on “The Woman Question”. Entrance was five kopecks. This was an illegal meeting but the hall was absolutely packed. Members of the party spoke. But this animated “closed” meeting had hardly finished when the police, alarmed at such proceedings, intervened and arrested many of the speakers.
It was of great significance for the workers of the world that the women of Russia, who lived under tsarist repression, should join in and somehow manage to acknowledge with actions International Women’s Day. This was a welcome sign that Russia was waking up and the tsarist prisons and gallows were powerless to kill the workers’ spirit of struggle and protest.
In 1914, Working Women’s Day in Russia was better organised. Both the workers’ newspapers concerned themselves with the celebration. Our comrades put a lot of effort into the preparation of Working Women’s Day. Because of police intervention, they didn’t manage to organise a demonstration. Those involved in the planning found themselves in the tsarist prisons, and many were later sent to the cold north. For the slogan “for the working women’s vote” had naturally become in Russia an open call for the overthrow of tsarist autocracy.
Working Women’s Day during the imperialist war
The first world war broke out. The working class in every country was covered with the blood of war. [7] In 1915 and 1916 Working Women’s Day abroad was a feeble affair – left-wing socialist women who shared the views of the Russian Bolshevik Party tried to turn March 8th into a demonstration of working women against the war. But those socialist party traitors in Germany and other countries would not allow the socialist women to organise gatherings; and the socialist women were refused passports to go to neutral countries where the working women wanted to hold international meetings and show that in spite of the desire of the bourgeoisie, the spirit of international solidarity lived on.
In 1915, it was only in Norway that they managed to organise an international demonstration on Women’s Day; representatives from Russia and neutral countries attended. There could be no thought of organising a Women’s Day in Russia, for here the power of tsarism and the military machine was unbridled.
Then came the great, great year of 1917. Hunger, cold and trials of war broke the patience of the women workers and the peasant women of Russia. In 1917, on the 8th of March (23rd of February), on Working Women’s Day, they came out boldly in the streets of Petrograd. The women – some were workers, some were wives of soldiers – demanded “Bread for our children” and “The return of our husbands from the trenches”. At this decisive time the protests of the working women posed such a threat that even the tsarist security forces did not dare take the usual measures against the rebels but looked on in confusion at the stormy sea of the people’s anger.
The 1917 Working Women’s Day has become memorable in history. On this day the Russian women raised the torch of proletarian revolution and set the world on fire. The February Revolution marks its beginning from this day.
Our call to battle
“Working Women’s Day” was first organised ten years ago in the campaign for the political equality of women and the struggle for socialism. This aim has been achieved by the working-class women in Russia. In the soviet republic the working women and peasants don’t need to fight for the franchise and for civil rights. They have already won these rights. The Russian workers and the peasant women are equal citizens – in their hands is a powerful weapon to make the struggle for a better life easier – the right to vote, to take part in the soviets and in all collective organisations. [8]
But rights alone are not enough. We have to learn to make use of them. The right to vote is a weapon which we have to learn to master for our own benefit, and for the good of the workers’ republic. In the two years of soviet power, life itself has not been absolutely changed. We are only in the process of struggling for communism and we are surrounded by the world we have inherited from the dark and repressive past. The shackles of the family, of housework, of prostitution still weigh heavily on the working woman. Working women and peasant women can only rid themselves of this situation and achieve equality in life itself, and not just in law, if they put all their energies into making Russia a truly communist society.
And to quicken this coming, we have first to put right Russia’s shattered economy. We must consider the solving of our two most immediate tasks – the creation of a well organised and politically conscious labour force and the re-establishment of transport. If our army of labour works well we shall soon have steam engines once more; the railways will begin to function. This means that the working men and women will get the bread and firewood they desperately need.
Getting transport back to normal will speed up the victory of communism. And with the victory of communism will come the complete and fundamental equality of women. This is why the message of “Working Women’s Day” must this year be: “Working women, peasant women, mothers, wives and sisters, all efforts to helping the workers and comrades in overcoming the chaos of the railways and re-establishing transport. Everyone in the struggle for bread and firewood and raw materials.”
Last year the slogan of the Working Women’s Day was: “All to the victory of the Red Front”. [9] Now we call on working women to rally their strength on a new bloodless front – the labour front! The Red Army defeated the external enemy because it was organised, disciplined and ready for self sacrifice. With organisation, hard work, self-discipline and self-sacrifice, the workers’ republic will overcome the internal foe – the dislocation (of) transport and the economy, hunger, cold and disease. “Everyone to the victory on the bloodless labour front! Everyone to this victory!”
The new tasks of Working Women’s Day
The October Revolution gave women equality with men as far as civil rights are concerned. The women of the Russian proletariat, who were not so long ago the most unfortunate and oppressed, are now in the Soviet Republic able to show with pride to comrades in other countries the path to political equality through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and soviet power.
The situation is very different in the capitalist countries where women are still overworked and underprivileged. In these countries the voice of the working woman is weak and lifeless. It is true that in various countries – in Norway, Australia, Finland and in some of the states of North America – women had won civil rights even before the war. [10]
In Germany, after the kaiser had been thrown out and a bourgeois republic established, headed by the “compromisers”, [11] thirty-six women entered parliament – but not a single communist!
In 1919, in England, a woman was for the first time elected a member of parliament. But who was she? A “lady”. That means a landowner, an aristocrat. [12]
In France, too, the question has been coming up lately of extending the franchise to women.
But what use are these rights to working women in the framework of bourgeois parliaments? While the power is in the hands of the capitalists and property owners, no political rights will save the working woman from the traditional position of slavery in the home and society. The French bourgeoisie are ready to throw another sop to the working class, in the face of growing Bolshevik ideas amongst the proletariat: they are prepared to give women the vote.[13]
Mr Bourgeois sir – it is too late!
After the experience of the Russian October Revolution, it is clear to every working woman in France, in England and in other countries that only the dictatorship of the working class, only the power of the soviets can guarantee complete and absolute equality, the ultimate victory of communism will tear down the century-old chains of repression and lack of rights. If the task of “International Working Women’s Day” was earlier in the face of the supremacy of the bourgeois parliaments to fight for the right of women to vote, the working class now has a new task: to organise working women around the fighting slogans of the Third International. Instead of taking part in the working of the bourgeois parliament, listen to the call from Russia – “Working women of all countries! Organise a united proletarian front in the struggle against those who are plundering the world! Down with the parliamentarism of the bourgeoisie! We welcome soviet power! Away with inequalities suffer by the working men and women! We will fight with the workers for the triumph of world communism!”
This call was first heard amidst the trials of a new order, in the battles of civil war it will be heard by and it will strike a chord in the hearts of working women of other countries. The working woman will listen and believe this call to be right. Until recently they thought that if they managed to send a few representatives to parliament their lives would be easier and the oppression of capitalism more bearable. Now they know otherwise.
Only the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of soviet power will save them from the world of suffering, humiliations and inequality that makes the life of the working woman in the capitalist countries so hard. The “Working Woman’s Day” turns from a day of struggle for the franchise into an international day of struggle for the full and absolute liberation of women, which means a struggle for the victory of the soviets and for communism!
DOWN WITH THE WORLD OF PROPERTY AND THE POWER OF CAPITAL!
AWAY WITH INEQUALITY, LACK OF RIGHTS AND THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN – THE LEGACY OF THE BOURGEOIS WORLD!
FORWARD TO THE INTERNATIONAL UNITY OF WORKING WOMEN AND MALE WORKERS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT – THE PROLETARIAT OF BOTH SEXES!
Notes
2. Tsarist Russia still used the old “Julian” calendar of the Middle Ages, which was 13 days behind the “Gregorian” calendar used in most of the rest of the world. Thus March 8 was “February 23″ in the old calendar. This is why the revolution of March 1917 is called “the February Revolution” and that of November 1917 “the October Revolution.”
3. Clara Zetkin was a leader of the German socialist movement and the main leader of the international working women’s movement. Kollontai was a delegate to the international conference representing the St. Petersburg textile workers.
4. This is not accurate. The vast majority of unskilled workers in England, France and Germany could not vote. A smaller percentage of working-class men in the United States could not vote – in particular immigrant men. In the south of the US black men were often prevented from voting. The middle class suffrage movements in all the European countries did not fight to give votes to either working-class women or men.
5. At its 1903 Congress, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party divided into two wings, the Bolsheviks (which means “majority” in Russian) and the Mensheviks (which means “minority”). In the period between 1903 and 1912 (when the division became permanent) the two wings worked together, unified for a while, split again. Many socialists, including entire local organisations, worked with both wings or tried to stay neutral in the disputes. Kollontai, an active socialist and fighter for women’s rights since 1899, was at first independent of the factions, then became a Menshevik for several years. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and became the only woman member of their central committee. She also served as commissar of welfare of the Soviet Republic and head of the women’s section of the Bolshevik Party.
6. August Bebel (1840-1913) was a leader of the German Social-Democratic Party. He was a well-known supporter of the women’s movement and author of a classic book on Marxism and women Die Frauenfrage, translated into English as Woman Under Socialism, which has been translated into many languages.
7. When war broke out in 1914, there was a massive split in the international socialist movement. The majority of the social democrats in Germany, Austria, France and England supported the war. Other socialists, such Kollontai, Lenin, the Bolshevik Party and Leon Trotsky in Russia, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, and Eugene Debs in the United States, to name some of the leaders, denounced the pro-war socialists for being traitors to the working class and to the fight for a workers’ revolution.
8. The word “soviet” means “council”. Soviets, or workers’ councils, are democratic bodies in which delegates are elected in factory and neighbourhood meetings and are controlled by their sister and brother workers. The representatives of the soviets must report back to their constituency and are subject to immediate recall.
9. After the working-class seizure of power in October/November 1917, the Russian workers’ state was faced with two major problems. One was an invasion, including the United States; the second was resistance by the pro-monarchist and pro-capitalist elements in Russia. Primarily under the direction of Leon Trotsky, the soviets created a workers’ and peasants’ army, the Red Army, which defeated the forces of counterrevolution.
10. Women had won the right to vote in several of the states of the United States prior to World War I. A federal amendment guaranteeing all women over 21 the right to vote was passed on August 26, 1920. It was not until the 1960s that the last legal barriers to working-class people voting in the United States were abolished.
11. The “compromisers” Kollontai is referring to are the Social Democratic Party leaders who formed a new capitalist government in Germany after the fall of the kaiser in 1918. They actively supported counterrevolution after coming to office.
12. While the aristocratic Lady Astor was indeed the first woman to serve in the British parliament, the first woman elected to parliament was the Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz. Together with other members of the Sinn Fein party, she refused to take her seat in the imperial parliament.
13. French women did not finally get the vote until after World War II.
A Document Drafted by the International Relations Study Group of the New Democratic Party (Sri Lanka)
Prelude
The manner in which debates are conducted among some Marxist Leninist organisations and individuals with Marxist Leninist views on issues of varying importance, makes one wonder whether they as Marxist Leninists have learnt much from Mao Zedong on the question of handling contradictions, especially those not concerning the enemy.
Disagreement and dissent are not new or unusual to communists. Yet, seemingly deep divisions of opinion have, more often than not, been healed inside communist parties by thorough discussion and debate, to lead ultimately to greater unity. Splits occur more for lack of dialogue than for sharp ideological differences. Individuals seeking to prevail over others through suppression of discussion and debate have done much harm. Nevertheless, the predominant desire has, as a rule, been to resolve internal contradictions through dialogue or debate as necessary. Criticism and self-criticism constitute an important part of the process.
The method of democratically resolving contradictions within an organisation has also been successful inside broad front organisations as well as short-term alliances led by good communists, because communists do not lose sight of the common cause and persevere to ensure that the common interest prevails over differences, except when the differences stand in the way of attaining the agreed goals or in the face of duplicity.
A reason why splits in left parties take long to come into the open is the practice of democratic centralism. Effort is always made to resolve contradictions through discussion and debate. Not only the great debates within the Soviet and the Chinese Communist Parties but also the debates between them on the questions of Stalin, People’s Communes, and the ‘peaceful path to socialism’ took place in a disciplined manner over a long time. It was after Khrushchev launched a vicious public attack on Comrade Stalin as a pretext for replacing Marxism with revisionism that the existence of serious differences became public knowledge. Even then, efforts continued to resolve the contradictions through discussion based on democratic principles; and it was Khrushchev’s hostile and provocative attitude towards fraternal parties and socialist countries opposed to revisionism which led to acrimony. What is important to note here is that, despite deep divisions and the prospect of reconciliation getting bleaker by the day, Marxist Leninists persevered in internal debate and refused to be provoked until the revisionist camp went on the offensive.
The tendency to split has been strong when the general political climate was not favourable to the left. Ironically so, since that is exactly the kind of situation demanding greater unity and serious effort to resolve the differences, and rebuild the proletarian revolutionary party and the left movement. Marxist Leninists cannot compromise with opportunism or adventurism, and need to be firm against such tendencies. But the way to correct erroneous tendencies is patient discussion and debate rather than hasty confrontation. There is a need for a culture of respect for opposing views—not one of accommodating wrong tendencies and views—in dealing with contradictions so that those who hold the wrong views are corrected while incorrect views are eliminated in a friendly and democratic way.
Intra-Party and Inter-Party Contradictions
Marxist Leninist parties have generally been good at handling internal contradictions. The Marxist Leninist movement in India was splintered in the wake of state repression in the 1970s and in Sri Lanka following the political chaos caused by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection. Similar problems have been faced by Marxist Leninists elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. But, as a whole, the Marxist Leninist movement has demonstrated remarkable resilience to survive the crises and re-establish itself, and in some cases launch successful revolutionary mass struggles.
Marxist Leninist organisations in India are showing a steady growth but have difficulty in uniting as a powerful revolutionary force. In Sri Lanka, active Marxist Leninists among the Tamils and Hill Country Tamils are, in effect, represented by a single organisation, while growth of narrow nationalist politics during the past three decades has not helped the growth of the left—not just the genuine—among the Muslims and Sinhalese. Emergent narrow nationalism has been a major factor among Muslims in the wake of hostility from Sinhala chauvinism and Tamil narrow nationalism. The strong Trotskyite tradition among the Sinhalese continues to be a divisive force even after the left lost ground to the populist pseudo-left JVP which assimilated the Sinhalese youth to its chauvinist agenda. There are, however, Marxist Leninist groups and individuals who are unable to organise themselves as a political party. Thus Marxist Leninists need to think in terms of a broad front to the exclusion of opportunist politics and opportunist alliances.
Attempts to develop international alliances of Marxist Leninist parties and organisations has had limited success. While the need for developing fraternal relationship between Marxist Leninist parties is urgent, its fulfilment is hampered by difficulties in resolving what would, if handled correctly, be only friendly contradictions.
Stable and healthy relationship needs to be built between fraternal parties, including Marxist Leninist parties with seemingly strong ideological differences, at a party-to-party level. While the relationship between Marxist Leninist parties within a country is mainly about unity and struggle in carrying forward the revolutionary mass movement, that between parties in different countries or even regions of a country, where geography and ethno-linguistic differences stand in the way of close interaction and collaboration, is mostly about mutual support and exchange of thought and experience. Based on past experience, both positive and negative, in the international communist movement, it is important that interaction between parties is fraternal and on an equal footing.
Given the absence of a broad umbrella organisation or a network, fraternal ties between organisations demand mutual understanding and support and the will to treat differences as friendly contradictions. This demands the recognition that conditions differ from country to country and from region to region, and that revolutionary strategy will invariably be unique to each situation, be it a country, a region or different communities within a region – in short the specific context.
One cannot deny a fraternal party the right to comment on the political situation in the country or region of another party; or make general or universal observations; or draw attention to potential dangers and errors. Fraternal relationship is meaningless without such right. But the way in which views are exchanged is important. A Marxist Leninist party, however strong or successful, should show humility and avoid dictating to a fraternal party on matters of policy, tactics and strategy. Equally, a Marxist Leninist party should be receptive to views expressed by a fraternal party as well as other friendly forces, and all parties should be willing to learn from each other.
Insisting on universal solutions to seemingly similar but fundamentally different situations leads to harmful misunderstandings. It will be dogmatic to refuse to recognise differences in approach in their context and to reject the need for different strategies in different situations. Marxist Leninist parties need to be cautious about utterances with unfavourable implications for fraternal parties. Equally, in the event of error, the response, while being uncompromising on principles, should not be hostile. Public debate is best avoided until every possibility of rectifying errors and resolving differences through fraternal dialogue has been exhausted.
Recent International Experience
One unfortunate recent instance concerns the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – now the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – which had carried out a successful 10-year long armed struggle. The UCPN(M), besides declaring that they will pursue their goal of establishing a People’s Republic of Nepal peacefully, prescribed it as the way forward for socialism in the 21st Century. The views expressed had adverse implications for the Communist Party of India (Maoist) which has been persevering in armed struggle in several parts of India. Not surprisingly, the revisionist Communist Party of India (Marxist) mischievously demanded that the Indian Maoists should take the cue from their Nepali counterparts. The strong public response of the Indian Maoists to the Nepali Maoists only helped to strain the relationship between the two parties than to rectify mistakes.
It has already been seen through the recent experience of the UCPN(M) that any decision on a peaceful path for the Nepali revolution is not in its hands but in the hands of the Nepali reactionaries, Indian expansionists and US imperialists who are keen to restore the old order. Thus the declared position of the UCPN(M) has to be understood in the context of India and the US branding it as terrorist and using it as pretext to militarily intervene to restore the old order. Yet there was neither need nor adequate basis to generalise that experience or prescribe it to other countries. That error could have been rectified through dialogue which did not spill over into the media, at least until after its resolution, and allowing the UCPN(M) time to review their new found position.
Nevertheless, there are things for left parties across the world to learn from the Maoists of Nepal. Their ability to resolve internal contradictions through patient and thorough discussion is one of them. While the enemies of the Nepali revolution gleefully speculated that differences on the line of the struggle would lead to a split in the party, the Maoists surprised them by not only resolving their differences but also consolidating party unity. The Maoists achieved it through a long and thorough process of uninhibited discussion, debate, criticism and self criticism.
Thus there is no reason why Marxist Leninist parties within a country cannot find common ground and make it the basis for cooperation in mass struggles against the state. Such cooperation will inspire Marxist Leninist parties in other countries to cooperate with each other nationally and internationally.
There is also the question of how to deal with anti-imperialist and left movements whose political line disagrees with the Marxist Leninist position on the road to socialism. Venezuela is perhaps the most important case today, as it is also used by several reformists as well as frustrated Trotskyites to reject Marxism Leninism. Marxist Leninists know what is keeping the populist left government of Chavez in Venezuela in power amid sustained efforts by the US and the forces of Venezuelan reaction to topple it. Flatterers are seeking to lull the Latin American left into a state of complaisance, and Marxist Leninists have warned against it, especially since the enemies within and without are strong. Marxist Leninists call for the politicisation of the Latin American masses on the basis of class and class struggle and have reservations about the way in which the left is being organised in Venezuela.
More serious concerns exist about the extrapolation of the Venezuelan experience to the whole of Latin America, let alone the world, by some who project it as Socialism for the 21st Century. Yet it is essential to recognise the need for unconditional support for the left and anti-imperialist governments in Latin America in defending themselves against US-led conspiracies. It is equally important for Marxist Leninists and the broad left to be aware of the risks faced by the Latin American left governments and to warn against the risks, especially the dangers of over enthusiasm. But it will be a grave error to denounce the governments in ways that will weaken internal and international anti-imperialist solidarity.
Lessons in Handling Contradictions
Thus the central issue boils down to the correct handling of debates and discussion among fraternal parties and friendly forces. Many of the rules that apply to the correct handling of contradictions within a party apply to the handling of contradictions between fraternal parties. The Communist Party of China, at least until China took the capitalist road, was exemplary in its dealings with fraternal parties. It treated all parties as equal and with respect. The CPC did not dictate to fraternal parties, nor did it seek to advice fraternal parties how they should conduct their affairs. The most one could expect from the CPC was a statement of its experience and general comments indicative of its assessment of a situation, but never prescriptions.
The New-Democratic Party has learnt from friendly Marxist Leninist parties and through its own experience, including serious mistakes. Thus it has been able to avoid friendly contradictions from developing into hostile contradictions. For example, differences have existed between the NDP and most of the Indian Marxist Leninist parties in India on the Sri Lankan national question. The position of the NDP was that the national question should be resolved without recourse to secession, by establishing autonomies for the various nationalities based on the principle of self determination. While denouncing Sinhala chauvinism, it criticised Tamil narrow nationalism, the anti-democratic ways of the Liberation Tigers (LTTE), and LTTE’s excessive reliance on arms at the expense of mass politics. This approach was at variance with the views held by several Indian Marxist Leninist parties, which were conditioned by the general impression created by the Indian media and other biased sources of information.
The NDP did not fault the Indian Marxist Leninists for what it saw as erroneous positions. Instead it patiently explained its position to each party with which it was in touch. Some took the trouble to understand the position of the NDP by accessing its publications, while there are others who still differ. The NDP, despite its position that the national question is still the main contradiction in Sri Lanka, seeks to prevent differences over that matter from developing into a major contradiction.
Likewise, the NDP has its assessment of conditions in India. It supports all mass struggles against the repressive state and seeks friendly relations with all Marxist Leninist parties and groups in India. It has its overall assessment of the political situation in India, and the political lines and methods of struggle of fraternal parties. It shares its views with the party or group concerned wherever opportunity arises; and it makes its understanding clearer and corrects wrong impressions through exchange of views. It has, on principle, refused to take a public stand on disputes among Marxist Leninist parties and groups. At the same time, when its views are sought, it has expressed them frankly and in a friendly manner.
It is unfortunate that when an NDP delegate attends a function organised by one Marxist Leninist organisation, some other organisations frown upon it, as if it is an unfriendly act. The truth is that the NDP places its relationship with all fraternal parties, nationally and internationally, on an equal footing so that cooperation and support are on a mutual basis and without discrimination between friendly parties, and not siding with one against another. Here, again, the approach is like that of Marxist Leninist parties in the 1960s and 70s towards rival Marxist Leninist organisations from another country, namely one of encouraging the rival parties to resolve their differences amicably and forging closer ties without taking sides.
The Need for a Sound Marxist Leninist Approach
In the final analysis, all Marxist Leninists have to get close to each other, nationally and internationally. One has to be conscious of the fact that the Marxist Leninist line of struggle is based on mass struggle and broad front organisations. That means achieving the broadest possible unity based on a common programme without compromising on basic principles. It is important to strike the correct balance between broad-based unity and being firm on principles. Firmness in principles can go hand in hand with cooperation with others holding different views, provided that the aims are clearly defined and there is no hidden agenda. That was how Marxist Leninists across the world successfully led struggles against colonial rule, fascism, imperialist aggression and various forms of internal oppression.
It merely requires an extension of the above approach to the relationship between fraternal parties to enhance mutual support and cooperation with a view to build strong Marxist Leninist revolutionary movements nationally and internationally.
Contradictions are bound to arise between fraternal parties when policies and practices of one appear to be in conflict with those of the other. Such differences are not difficult, certainly not impossible, to resolve. It is important to study the conditions under which the seemingly unacceptable decisions are taken and appreciate the reasons for differences in approach. To understand a decision is not to endorse it but to recognise the conditions that lead to that decision. This step should be thoroughly implemented before making critical comments or suggesting more appropriate options.
It is important to remember that contexts differ and that the revolution needs to address specific situations and issues which vary not only from country to country but also from region to region and community to community within a country. That is not to deny universal principles and the primacy of class and class struggle. It is only a call to apply the scientific method of Marxism Leninism to solve a problem rather than redefine the problem to fit a model solution.
What Marxist Leninists should always remember is that all fraternal parties are equal and that party to party relations should emphasise matters that unite fraternal parties and not what seem to divide them. There is a need for unanimity on a wide range of issues concerning mass liberation struggles against imperialism and its lackeys. Such unanimity demands a flexible rather than a rigid approach, comprising firmness in principles and flexibility in handling differences.
Modern communication technology has certainly helped revolutionary struggles in many ways, including exchange of information with speed and establishment of contact with relative ease. But it has also encouraged hasty and ill-considered exchanges of views between individuals and organisations as well as to the spilling over of debates into the public domain before the issues concerned are even understood. The so-called “blogsites” and other such websites of Marxist Leninist organisations and individuals associated with them need to exercise caution and discipline in the handling of political information in the public domain.
We now witness the liberal use of the term ‘self criticism’ by parties to polemical debates demanding that the opponent should self-criticise before he/she or the organisation could comment on a subject. Such conduct is childish and violates the spirit of self-criticism as understood by Marxist Leninists. Indulgence in personal or personalised debates in the public domain can lead to childish petit bourgeois conduct which is certainly not characteristic of a good Marxist Leninist. It is well to remember that it is the enemy and mischief makers who gain when Marxist Leninists indulge in bitter personal attacks in the public domain.
The Marxist Leninist method of rectifying errors has criticism and self-criticism as a central feature by which the organisation seeks to correct erroneous views and actions and not humiliate the holder of a wrong view or doer of a wrong deed. What is needed is support and solidarity among individuals as well as organisations.
Marxist Leninists in Sri Lanka like those in other small South Asian countries look up to mass revolutionary struggles in India as an inspiration. A revolution in India will make the revolutionary task all the more easier for the smaller neighbours; and, in the event of an advancing revolution as in the case of Nepal, Indian revolutionary forces can effectively stop Indian meddling aimed at undermining the revolution and destabilising the country. It is our appeal to Indian Marxist Leninists that they should, irrespective of differences, seek to build and to strengthen ties with Marxist Leninist and anti-imperialist liberation movements in the region and encourage mutual support on matters relating to the common cause of anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonic mass struggles.
Courtesy: New Democracy 36
Dr. Manmohan Singh
The Prime Minister of India
New Delhi 110 001
Dear Dr. Singh,
We, the undersigned, hereby express our grave concern over the recent press reports that ‘The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill 2009’ is planned to be tabled in the ongoing Budget Session of Parliament and the UPA government is apparently bent upon rushing it through without holding fair and transparent public consultations, regardless of its profound consequences.
A quantum leap in installed capacity for nuclear power generation, from the current level of 4,120 MW to 63,000 MW by 2032, which you have committed yourself to, is but an invitation to disaster given the intrinsically hazardous and potentially catastrophic nature of the industry. It is necessary to further bear in mind that the health burden, clean-up and recovery costs for damages arising out of any nuclear accident are irreversible in consequence and generational in effect, poisoning not just human beings in the vicinity of a nuclear plant but the web of life itself through air, water and soil contamination.
Yet, pretty much shockingly, the nuclear liability bill, approved by the Union Cabinet in last November, understandably overriding strong objections even from two nodal ministries, viz. Finance and Environment, appears to pave the path for the entry of private enterprises, known to cut corners to maximize profits, not just as equipment suppliers but also as operators of nuclear power plants.
The nuclear liability bill, as per the reports leaked in the media, proposes to cap the total liability amount to 3 hundred million Special Drawing Rights. This works out to just about a paltry US$ 450 million or Rs 2100 crore per accident. We find it inconceivable and outrageous that any cap, let alone such a meagre one, be placed on the total liability, regardless of the scale of disaster.
Ironically, the total liability cap amount now being proposed, $450 million, is marginally less than the amount awarded in the Bhopal Gas case way back in 1989, which was a gross under-assessment of liability even at that time. Today, more than two decades since, and given that a major nuclear disaster could very much dwarf the Bhopal disaster, the proposed nuclear liability cap appears to be truly a slap in the face of the people of this country. Further, while the supplier of nuclear equipment would enjoy standard indemnity, the maximum liability of the operator reportedly would not exceed the ridiculously low amount of Rs 300 crore or thereabout. In fact, it may even be as low as Rs 100 crore. This cannot but be considered as a brazen move towards helping profiteering corporations while penalizing the unsuspecting Indian people, who have elected you to the office you hold.
We further draw your attention to the public statement of former Attorney General of India, Soli Sorabjee, that putting a cap on nuclear liability violates the very Right to Life as enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution.
It is shocking that a bill that compromises the Right to Life is being pushed through without soliciting the opinion of the people of the country, whose health and well-being, safety and human rights, and life, are being put directly in danger.
This is just unacceptable. We strongly condemn any attempt to introduce any caps whatsoever on nuclear liability and that too without widespread public debate on the issues involved.
Hence we demand that the contents of the proposed nuclear liability cap bill be disclosed forthwith to the public.
We further demand that widespread public consultations be held before any attempt is made to introduce such profound changes in the nuclear liability regime.
Sincerely,
Arnab Goswami with his loudmouth style of idiot-box journalism talking to Saroj Giri and Saibaba…
Part 2
Part 3
Courtesy: Times Now
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).
1
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.
2
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.
3
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)”.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.)
9
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.
10
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.
11
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”.
12
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”.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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.
17
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)
18
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)
19
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.
20
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.)
21
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
Condemn State Repression on Democratic Mass Movements Against Injustice
The leaders of mass movements and democratic political organizations condemned today the shocking incident of undemocratic arrest and possible torture of veteran Marxist leader Com Gananath Patra by the State police in Bhubaneswar on 27 January 2010. Com Gananath Patra has been in the forefront of the anti-displacement struggles throughout the state. He is one person who was able to articulate the issues related to rapid industrialization quite well and could share this with masses in a convincing manner. Be it Baliapal or Kalinganagar or Narayanpatna he supported the struggles without any hesitation and as a true revolutionary always wanted to be with the victims of injustice. He supported Nachika Linga and the Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangh when he realized that these liberated bonded laborers were fighting against the liquor Mafia, land grabbers and tried to get justice for the victimized tribals.
Since, Com Gananath Patra stood firmly behind the victims of industrialization and forcible land grabbing the State wanted to silence his voice. Several false cases have been filed against him including that of murder and attempt to murder at time when he was nowhere close to any area where such “ crimes” have taken place. It has been impossible for the state to deal with Maoists but the state is targeting peaceful and democratic mass movements who have been raising issues of genuine concerns to tribals and the oppressed communities throughout the state. The media need to be cautious about the motives of the state who is promoting the interests of the capital only at the cost of its own people. Certain discredited police officers of the past are unnecessarily getting media space to spread confusion about the protest movements and their sympathizers. The state, instead of the listening to the voice of the oppressed millions is now trying to finish the democratic struggles for justice everywhere as it anticipates these movements to be a threat to the mindless mining and industrialization agenda the political leadership is pursuing today with the support of the opposition for their own self interests. Be it Laxman Chaudhury or Gananath Patra if any one speaks out truth and fights for justice he/she will be silenced.
The police have arrested Com Patra just to warn the people who are trying to be with the oppressed common men to defend their rights when the government of the day is trying to finish them off and hand over their rich resources to profit making corporations who in turn will help build the fortune of future generations of the ruling politicians and the ruling elites of the state.
We express deep concern for Com Patra’s health which is in a bad condition. We are afraid the insane police force will not take his helth condition seriusly and sympatheticlly.
All the mass movements will meet at Bhubaneswar in a convention to expose the state’s corporate friendly and anti-people agenda on 10th February 2010. They have appealed the people of the state to understand the grim future they are being forced to face and to react before it becomes too late.
Prafulla Samantara, Lok Shakti Abhiyan, Radhakant Sethy, CPI ML Liberation, Bhala Chandra, CPI ML New Democracy, Sivaram, CPI ML, Prashant Paikray, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti
Yesterday Com Gananath Patra was arrested in Bhubaneswar. Following is a news report:
Bhubaneswar: Prominent Left leader and adviser of Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangha (CMAS), Narayanpatna, Gananath Patra was today arrested here on the charge of instigating violence in tribal-dominated Koraput district.
Patra, was arrested from city’s Vivekananda Marg, the police said adding that CMAS was engaged in several violent activities in Koraput district.
“He has been accused of murder, attempt to murder and rioting. Several cases were registered against him in Bandhugaon police station,” Superintendent of Police Koraput Anup Sahu said.
While CMAS president Nachika Linga had gone into hiding after the police crackdown on his house at Narayanpatna, Patra was found here.
Linga was suspected to be taking shelter in jungle with Maoists, the police said.
Earlier, Patra had led a agitation of CMAS here in the state capital during the assembly session.
Radical Notes
