In his notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, Lenin came to an essential conclusion that I embrace and which is reflected in the essays in this book:
Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!! [1]
Lenin’s comment did not drop from the sky. Rather, its germination can be traced in his Philosophical Notebooks; it can be seen in his growing appreciation of Hegel’s conception of the interconnection of all elements (‘the necessary connection of the whole world’, ‘the mutually determinant connection of the whole’) and of Hegel’s dialectical process of reasoning (‘the immanent emergence of distinctions’).[2] ‘The basic idea,’ Lenin observed, ‘is one of genius: that of the universal, all-sided, vital connection of everything with everything and the reflection of this connection — Hegel materialistically turned upside-down — in human concepts, which likewise must be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world.’[3]
But it was not only Hegel’s understanding of the inner connection that Lenin embraced. It was also the recognition of the problems inherent in appearances and therefore the necessity to go beyond appearance. ‘Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract,’ he indicated, ‘does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it.’ This process of abstraction is essential: ‘From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice — such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.’[4] In short, as Hegel stressed, we must go beyond even the regularities in appearances if we are to understand what underlies those regularities. Developing ‘laws’ and theories simply on the basis of empiricism, Lenin learned here, is inherently ‘narrow, incomplete, approximate’.[5]
Reading Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, I was guided through Hegel’s Logic and from there to an understanding of the Grundrisse and Capital. In these collected essays on method, appearance and essence, crisis theory and one-sidedness — as well as in my Beyond Capital and The Socialist Alternative (Lebowitz 2003, 2010), I try to pass on what I have learned. It is my hope that Indian scholars and activists can follow the same path — the one that Lenin pointed to:
Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique…. And purely logical elaboration? It coincides. It must coincide, as induction and deduction in Capita1.[6]
For, if there is one thing clear to me, it is that what Lenin called ‘the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object’ has not come to an end, and it has been a great error to believe that we have inherited ‘truth in the form of a dead repose’.[7]
References
Lebowitz, Michael A. 2003. Beyond CAPITAL: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lebowitz, Michael A. 2010. The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, New York: Monthly Review Press.
The second meeting of DARTS was held on 30-12-2011 from 5:00p.m to 7:00p.m. at XIMB, Bhubaneswar. Prof. Raju Das of York University began his talk with a Power Point Presentation on Marx’s theory of ‘fetishism of commodities.’ Fetishism of the commodity, according to Marx, means that ‘the relationships between producers, within which the social characteristics of their labourers are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of [their] labour’. In his talk he explained this idea with a simple example using export-oriented shrimp production in Orissa. The conditions of the shrimp producers, as that of numerous other workers, in Orissa (as elsewhere), are simply bad. The work they perform in producing the shrimp as a global commodity not only fails to fetch them enough money for their daily maintenance. The production process oriented towards producing the maximum amount of exchange value (profit) for the shrimp producers/traders is inscribed on their labouring bodies: chemicals used in the process affect the (women) workers’ fingers so badly that they cannot even eat with their hands. When the shrimps are in the market, every buyer, including the buyer in advanced countries, wants to get the maximum counts of shrimps for every rupee/dollar she has in her pocket. Doing this is in her own material interest. The buyer (who is also a producer of other commodities, be it a service or a physical commodity) does not care about the conditions under which shrimp workers work. And the buyer does not care because her own conditions of work and wage-level, like those of the shrimp-worker, are beyond her own control. So, it is as if shrimps and other commodities start talking in the market. The actual people who produce those commodities are not directly and socially interacting. It is immaterial whether or not people know the conditions of shrimp producers because given their own position they have to command a maximum amount of the commodity (e.g. shrimp) they want for every unit of the commodity they own (or its money form). There exists, in the words of Marx, ‘the social relation between commodities’ and ‘material relation between men.’ In Prof. Das’s words: “commodities rule over us instead of ourselves ruling over articles of use to us.” Relations between commodities replace – or at least, become much more important than – relations between people, i.e. people-as-producers of things-for-use.
Then Prof. Das explained the aspects of Ideology using I.I.Rubin (author of Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value), Terry Eagleton (author of Ideology) and Slavoj Zizek (author of Sublime Object of Ideology). Marx’s ideas of fetishism are connected not only to his ideas about alienation (partly in the sense that fetishism – the rule of commodities over us — happens because of the absence of democratic social regulation over production) but also ideology: the objective reality is such that we think that things for use necessarily have a money-tag and have to be bought and sold (for a profit) and we behave accordingly. The reality – and not (just) our discursive inability to comprehend it – is such that it makes us think that our needs can only be satisfied through commodity exchanges. Commodity fetishism is not our failure of intelligence. It is an intelligent failure. The commodity form hides the real social relations from us. It acts as a veil. And, in the words of Marx: ‘The veil is not removed …. until [the production process] becomes production by associated [producers], and stands under their conscious and planned control’ (Marx). The question is what is to be done to make this happen. Marx, of course, ends Capital Vol 1 with his most definitive answer to the question. Marx’s discussion of the commodity (dealt with in the inaugural meeting of DARTS) and of fetishism clearly shows that if we want to understand the capital and the society it dominates we must understand Marx (and his Capital).
There was an audience from several disciplines – students and teachers of Technology, Literature, Economics, Business Studies, etc. A number of political and civil rights’ activists were also present. Interesting questions were raised and discussed in the meeting. The questions included: ‘What is the distinction between objective and intrinsic in the context of value?’; ‘In a particular village, where people know each other and produce agricultural products and consume them, how is the theory of ‘fetishism of commodities’ relevant?’. What is the distinction between concrete labour and abstract labour, and why is such a distinction important? One perceptive member of the audience and a senior scholar explicitly linked the idea of fetishism to alienation, building on early Marx’s writings.’
There was an active participation as each participant found Marx relevant in her/his field of work and/or area of interest. All the questions posed could not be addressed properly due to the lack of time, which meant that there was a great need for several rounds of discussion on such concepts as the commodity and fetishism.The discussion had to be limited to commodity fetishism; there was no time for a discussion of the other form of fetishism in Marx’s work: capital fetishism.
The DARTS provisional organizing committee has decided to meet on the 29-01-12. The topic to be discussed was proposed to be ‘Labour-power as commodity.’ The time and venue will be conveyed by e-mail.
We collectively hope that we will continue to discuss important ideas of Marx both from the standpoint of their theoretical value and from the standpoint of their ability to shed light on contemporary issues facing the humanity. We also hope that there will be reading teams such as ours in many other cities and towns of Orissa and India.
The second meet of ‘Discussion And Reading Team of Socialists’(DARTS) is to be held on the 30-12-2011 at Xavier Institute of Management (XIMB), Bhubaneswar Room No. 229 from 5p.m to 7p.m. In the first meet Prof. Raju Das from York University, Toronto delivered a short talk on the relevance of Marx’s Capital and on Marx’s Labour Theory of Value followed by discussion among the participants. Marx’s Capital is an essential read for activists and intellectuals alike. The analysis of the commodity in the first chapter ‘Commodities’ is, as Marx claims, the point from where he begins his analysis/critique of capitalism (see Marx’s Introduction to first edition of Capital). It requires more effort understanding this chapter than the rest of Capital. Prof. Das, in the second meet of DARTS will deliver a small talk on the last section of this chapter ‘the fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’ after revisiting the initial section of the chapter. We request you to be present for discussion.
P.S: In the third meet the discussion team is supposed to meet after reading Chapter I (or a part of it — this shall be decided in the second meet). The date, time and venue will be let known via e-mail.
Please send your suggestions to darts.bhubaneswar@gmail.com
The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been analysed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but this is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official US data, that Marx’s crisis theory can explain these events.
Marx believed that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, leading to economic crises and recessions. Many economists, Marxists among them, have dismissed this theory out of hand, but Andrew Kliman’s careful data analysis shows that the rate of profit did indeed decline after the post-World War II boom and that free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt – and ultimately to the Great Recession.
Kliman’s conclusion is simple but shocking: short of socialist transformation, the only way to escape the ‘new normal’ of a stagnant, crisis-prone economy is to restore profitability through full-scale destruction of existing wealth, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.
About The Author
Andrew Kliman is Professor of Economics at Pace University, New York. He is the author of Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency and many writings on crisis theory, value theory and other topics.
Capitalism creates poverty. It indeed requires poverty and thrives on it. It causes and requires massive social and geographical inequality. And capitalism is inherently crisis-prone. We have just witnessed a major global economic crisis. In part because of its crisis-proneness, modern world capitalism is necessarily imperialist: advanced capitalist countries try to shift the effects of the crises they experience to politically and economically weaker countries (often with the connivance of the state in these countries). Normal mechanisms of capitalism and the combination of economic crisis and imperialism have major adverse impacts on the living conditions of the working masses in general and workers and poor peasants in the less developed countries such as India in particular.
No system of injustice goes unchallenged, however. Away from the pre-occupations of the corporate-controlled mainstream media, people’s movements against the profit-driven system have been taking place. Consider, for example, the Arab Spring, various social justice movements in India and elsewhere, as well as the ‘occupy movements’ in the US and Europe, which are bound to leave an impression on the radical imagination of the masses, even if they are being repressed. Humans have an irrepressible quest for justice and have a desire for a humane world. These various movements have emerged in response to the heightened levels of exploitation of workers, massive amount of dispossession of peasants from their property, undemocratic control over socio-economic activity and the government by large companies, and the irreparable ecological devastation and cultural impoverishment.
Many activists and movements have been inspired in their thinking by the critique by Marx and other progressive scholars of capitalist commodification and development. Ideologically, these protests and the recent economic crises call into question the legitimacy not only of capitalism, including its neoliberal form, but also of capitalist nation-states and global ‘state’ apparatuses (e.g. World Bank; IMF). This happens in richer countries and in poorer countries such as India as well.
There has indeed been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in a Marxist worldview recently, which as Terry Eagleton put it, is the ‘most theoretically rich, politically uncompromising critique of [the capitalist] system’ (Why Marx was right?). The process of resurgence of this intellectually insurgent worldview (Marxism) has been helped by the fact that the social relations of authoritarian ‘communism’, and other related views, which had acted as a fetter on the development of productive powers of Marxist research, have been burst asunder. In this context, question of alternatives to capitalism (beyond Keynesianism, state-bureaucratism, and neo-populism) – and the role of (Marxist) intellectuals whether in academy, in the media or ‘civil society’ in radical social change – are being actively discussed the world over. This has led to a series of important interventions rethinking political parties, democracy and visions of viable socialisms. More and more people are reading Marx and Marxists, and reading them critically, for Marxism is a science which must be updated where necessary. There is an outpouring of Marxist discussions including in journals such as New York-based Science and Society, world’s longest continuously published Marxist journal, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in October 2011, Review of Radical Political Economics (from Cornell University), Historical Materialism (from SOAS, London), Capital and Class, and so on. Much of this resurgence is exhibited on- online, Radical Notes itself being a testimony to this as is, for example, Sanhati.
The remaking of socialist visions – which emphasize socialism as the flourishing of optimal level of democracy in all spheres of human life – has also meant extensive considerations of race, caste, tribality, gender, sexuality and disability. These issues of social oppression/discrimination are important in their own right. But they are important dominantly because of the ways in which capitalism subordinates them to its own logic. Capitalism furthers its accumulation projects by using these sources of oppression to define certain working subjects as less than average workers who can be paid lower compensations. Capital also politically dominates the suffering subjects (workers and peasants) by dividing them on the basis of these non-class identities. An aspect of the resurgence of Marxist research is the immense popularity of Marxist dialectics as a holistic way of looking at the capitalist world, in terms of its unity as well as difference, from the standpoint of radically changing it. Such a dialectical method allows us to reflect on various methods of exploitation and social oppression as interconnected and as forming a concrete whole.
Reading Marx and those who engage in what the American Marxist, Hal Draper called ‘Marx’s Marxism’ would be more than apt at a political moment when neoliberalism, in theory and practice, is in crisis, when the turbulence of capitalist economies is part of daily life. As David Harvey and others have argued, Marx is more relevant now than he was during his own time.
The problems caused by capitalism are everywhere. These problems are, however, particularly acute in less developed countries and in the most under-developed parts of these poor countries. In many under-developed regions of India (e.g. Odisha), capitalist market relations in land and labour coexist with remnants of coercive production relations in some localities and with highly undemocratic relations of casteism, patriarchy and tribalism more generally. The institutions of the state are more or less ‘instruments’ of property-owners, including those whose main object is to subject natural resources and working people to cruel forms of commodification and ruthless forms of exploitation, all in the name of development and dollars (export earnings). There is an inverse relation between democratic rhetoric and its actual content. There is an absence of democratic values both in the economy or polity: ordinary people have little real democratic control over the way our resources and abilities to work are used. The cult of violence is everywhere. There is systemic violence as that caused when people’s livelihood is snatched away from them or when people do not have the money to buy basic necessities because of which they starve to death or suffer from poverty-caused diseases. Related to this violence is ‘agentic violence’: in some places ordinary people, often out of sheer desperation, tend to resort to violence (which is unproductive in the long run), in response to which and often to preempt which the state resorts to massive and disproportionate violence.
The situation in more under-developed regions of India and in similar other countries raises several questions. Why are these regions so poor when they are so rich in terms of natural resources and labouring quality of their workers and peasants? How does capitalism make use of undemocratic social and economic relations? What explains the inability of the political and intellectual elite to help the suffering masses in any significant way? Just why it is that the majority of our people have no access to nutritious food, decent housing and clothing, quality education and health-care as well as other amenities including safe drinking water and electricity? These and many other questions can be fruitfully explored only if we have an adequate understanding of capitalism as such and the ways in which it works in concrete circumstances. Understanding Marx is essential therefore. A proper understanding of Marx and his legacy would also make clear to people that the Marxist vision is a vision of a society which is authentically democratic and that Marxism has little to do with any political activity which is aimed at hurting individuals. Individuals are bearers of social relations. What needs to be changed is the system of social relations, not occupiers of positions in the system.
To understand the world, it is not enough to have sense-data. We need theory, this is because important aspects of the world are not immediately accessible to mere empirical observation. To understand the world from the standpoint of the majority, the working masses, we need a theory from their standpoint. Radical transformation in the direction of social, economic and ecological democracy and justice is not possible without a radical theory. Marx and his legacy provide such a theory. It would be useful to set up Radical/progressive reading groups in different places to promote a counter-hegemonic culture, a tradition of radical imagination in theory. Consisting of interested academics, activists, workers-peasants, and indeed anyone who is interested in critically understanding the current situation with a view to radically transcend it and deepen the democratic content/spirit of our society to the highest extent possible, this group could meet regularly to read the Marxist and progressive literature on topics of classical and contemporary significance and discuss it in a comradely and non-sectarian manner. It will also connect the readings and the discussions to the world around us and draw theoretical implications for political practice. There are thousands of progressive people engaged in theoretical-political struggle for justice. Often in terms of theory, politics and method of struggles, there are ‘deep’ divisions among them (including, and interestingly, over the fact of whether poor countries such as India are dominantly capitalist or not). Perhaps an understanding of Marx and his legacy would show that the divisions are not as real as they appear to be, and that there is cause more for unity and less for division: at least the divisions should be discussed in the light of theoretical discussions the foundation for which was laid by Marx. These reading groups cannot only read radical academic literature but also encourage performance of radical art in its various forms and reflect on these theoretically.
A culture that accurately reflects the interest and ideas of the majority of the people is a most democratic process to promote. Setting up Marxist Readings Groups is an important need of the hour therefore.
Raju J Das is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto, Canada. Email: rajudas@yorku.ca
Published as afterword in Ron Ridenour’s book “Sounds of Venezuela”, New Century Book House, Chennai, 2011
The narrative Ron Ridenour has woven here in these pages provides a glimpse of the Venezuelan reality, which exposes not only the significance of the Bolivarian revolutionary processes, but also their contradictions. Obviously, these contradictions are the source of much anxiety among the friends of the Bolivarian revolution throughout the globe. But is it not true that a revolution is as much about hope as it is about apprehensions and dangers? A revolution is always unsettling. You cannot ever pronounce the final judgement about the event called revolution. That is why what famous Marxist historian George Rudé said about the French Revolution is true for all revolutions—”the Revolution remains an ever-open field of enquiry.”(1)
I
Nothing remains settled in the revolutionary process—otherwise how can it be called a revolution? We need to understand that this process is constituted by conflicts among various ever-new possibilities that emerge at every moment therein. Ideological struggles are nothing but representations of these conflicts; expressed in political programmatic language, these possibilities constitute the various lines within the revolutionary movement. These conflicts are what determine the course of the revolution.
To be more specific, there is always an impulse internal to the revolutionary process that seeks to control or limit the pace and extent of the revolution—to make things settled. It can have a positive implication to the extent that it compels the revolutionaries to be conscious of the course of the revolution and to be vigilant enough to differentiate between the forces of reaction and revolution that are internally germinating. The ‘faces’ of these forces do not remain the same—what seems revolutionary at one moment might dawn as reactionary at another. The conservative impulse we are talking about lies somewhere in the interstices of the moments of movement and consolidation, trying to break the simultaneity of these moments. When it is able to break this simultaneity, it morphs into a Thermidorian form with the apparent task of consolidating the revolutionary achievements and protecting them from the enemies. This Thermidorian power externalises all problems of revolution—it tries to cleanse the revolution of these problems so thoroughly that what emerges out of this deadly bath is a revolution sans revolution—sanitised of all contradictions.
The formalisation or institutionalisation of the achievements cannot be avoided. However, this is what gives birth to a new status quo, which tries to guard itself against revolutionary impermanence. It is a conflict like this that could be understood as a two-line struggle—between the emerging headquarters and the forces of continuous revolution. This struggle is in fact the revolutionary truth which cannot be avoided. No moment in the revolutionary movement is devoid of the forces of conservation, which have the potentiality of turning into a full-scale centrism or even reaction depending on the balance of class forces.
With regard to the revolutionary processes in Venezuela, it has been regularly emphasized that “the ultimate contradiction of the (Bolivarian) revolution” is the struggle internal to Chavism—”between the ‘endogenous right’ and the masses who have been mobilised.” Chávez himself frequently describes the Venezuelan reality in Gramscian terms—”The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” However, as Gramsci said, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear—which appear in Venezuela (alongside the continued existence of the old oligarchy, latifundistas, monopoly capitalists and US imperialism) in the form of the new ‘boli-bourgeoisie,’ the military-civil bureaucracy, and ‘the party functionaries and nomenklatura’ who seek to thwart the class and mass initiatives from below.(2) These are the material forces, which with their dispassionate mannerisms try to conserve a pragmatic and ‘realistic’ Bolivarian future against the erratic spontaneism of grass roots initiatives. These are the Bolivarian headquarters.
II
As is well-known, historically there has been a systematic erosion of productive sectors in Venezuela which are not allied to operations of the oil industry. Since 1998, there has been a consistent endeavour to rebuild these other sectors of production and infrastructure around them. In order to achieve this, many steps both backwards and forward have been taken. Many bureaucratic, intermediary and petty bourgeois interests have not just been tolerated but even encouraged and promoted to compete with old oligarchies and corporate interests. Incentives to ‘native bourgeoisie’ and petty bourgeoisie have been an interim strategy of the Bolivarian regime to fragment the corporate unity of capital, while helping in diversifying the Venezuelan economy. In fact, the imperative to create an ‘alternative social bloc’ against corporate hegemony has forced a vision under which “capitalist sectors whose business activity entered into an objective contradiction with transnational capital” are not considered unapproachable.(3)
However, the radical supporters of the Venezuelan transformation have cautioned that the pragmatic need to neutralise private capitalist interests in order to develop a broader bloc against immediate enemies, like transnational capital and imperialist interests, must not scuttle the anti-capitalist nature of the transformation. It has been shown how “‘incentives’ to private capitalists in order to increase productivity” fail generally because they tend to strengthen the historically nurtured rentierist character of Venezuela’s native bourgeoisie. For example, incentives in agriculture without having a fundamental structural transformation have cost the Chávez government heavily, both politically and economically, as “the big landowner (latifundist) recipients of the Government’s generous agricultural credits and grants are not investing in agricultural production, in raising cattle, purchasing new seeds, new machinery, and new dairy animals. They are transferring Government funding into real estate, Government bonds, banking and speculative investment funds or overseas.”(4) These latifundistas have successfully used to their own advantage the Bolivarian government’s urgency to ensure domestic food security and agricultural productivity amidst volatile international relations by bargaining protection from the upsurge of peasants and landless organisations demanding radical land reforms. However, there has been an increasing realisation within the Bolivarian circles about the futility of such compromises with the rentierist forces.
The emergence of the Bolivarians at the helm of the existing political economic institutions has, of course, intensified the internal class struggle leading to a tremendous crisis for the status quo. But there still exists a considerable space for the consolidation of powerful economic interests because these institutions were essentially built for this purpose. The most recent case of their successful manoeuvrings has been exposed by WikiLeaks, which narrates how a radical Chavista, “Eduardo Saman was replaced as commerce minister following pharmaceutical companies’ efforts to protect old patent legislation and their profits.”(5)
There is a massive danger of the containment of the revolutionary pace and agenda, if the revolutionary forces are not vigilant enough with regard to the activities of those social classes that are crowding the institutions of revolution for incentives and patronage. The new intermediate interests that have emerged close to the state structure, along with the old ones, have resisted every popular attack on private capital. They have attempted to thwart endeavours to institute workers’ control over economic activities. Even within the oil and other ‘monopolistic’ industries, these interests have not conceded any substantial move beyond nationalisation, as state monopoly allows them to use their own proximity to the state machinery for intermediary profiteering. There has been a consistent resistance to the attempts to institute co-management,(6) not just from the side of corporate interests, but also from economistic trade unionism (especially in the state-owned petroleum company, PDVSA), which cannot envisage a system of workers’ control that questions the institutional hierarchy and labour aristocracy.
As long as there is a popular movement which questions and subverts the norms and everydayness of the bourgeois state in Venezuela, with the resoluteness to build ‘a new state from below’ with the novel institutions of protagonistic democracy and communal councils, there is a hope for the Bolivarian Revolution. Or else, “it will lapse into a new variety of capitalism with populist characteristics.”(7) That is why there has been a growing need to envisage the alternative bloc and class alliances which are subservient to the exigencies of “an overall system of socialized production.”(8) The accommodation of capitalist interests in any form (state or private), even when they are in consonance with the immediate interests of the revolutionary transformation at a particular juncture, is fraught with risks of the reassertion of ‘the logic of capital,’ and “there will be a constant struggle to see who will defeat whom.”(9) It is this logic and its constitutive representatives, who try to consolidate their position through the so-called ‘endogenous right’ of the revolution.
III
The emergence of headquarters in a revolution is linked with the question of state, state power and hegemony. During a revolutionary period the state returns to its elements—it emerges as a naked instrument of suppression—of holding down adversaries. The proletarian dictatorship too will not allow its enemies to have a free play. Revolution is a period when class struggles begin to explode the barriers of the existing state order and point beyond them. On the one hand, there are “struggles for state power; on the other, the state itself is simultaneously forced to participate openly in them. There is not only a struggle against the state; the state itself is exposed as a weapon of class struggle, as one of the most important instruments for the maintenance of class rule.”(10)
The global division of labour and the US hegemony reduced the Venezuelan economy to mere accumulation of oil rents, thus making proximity to the state the only viable route to economic success. In such an economy, the statist tendencies are bound to be very strong and entrenched in every layer of society. To complicate the matter, revolutionaries in Venezuela found themselves at the helm of the bourgeois state by following its rules, not by any insurrection. In such a situation, reformist tendencies will definitely be stronger among the ranks of the Bolivarians, who find revolutionary measures futile and even adventurist. These tendencies did suffer a temporary setback during the attempted coup of 2002, but as time elapses the cautious self-critical forces begin to find safe-play, gradualism and tactical compromises essential to consolidate power and achievements and to pre-empt any such drastic attack by counter-revolutionaries in future.
The left Chavistas, on the other hand, stress on the task of smashing the bourgeois state from within while positing a new state from below based on co-management of social and economic life. Like the ‘endogenous right’ they understand the need to consolidate, but for them consolidation is not separate from the destruction of the existing state form. Like Russian revolutionaries, they emphasize the development and independence of the working classes and their organs of self-activity, because only in this way can the workers protect their state, while protecting themselves from it! The defeat of the 2002 coup also demonstrates the impact of the unleashing of popular energy and self-activity and what that could achieve. Moreover, unlike in Russia, the state in Venezuela remains a bourgeois parliamentary state, which is alienated from the everyday life of the revolutionary masses.
IV
Among several valuable insights that Ron Ridenour’s text provides regarding the nature of contradictions that pervade the revolutionary transition in Venezuela, there is an important point on the Venezuelan state’s approach to the struggles of the Colombian guerrillas, the FARC. Ridenour hints at the vacillation in this approach. However, such anomalies are numerous, especially when it comes to international relations. Throughout the globe, post-1998 developments in Latin America have been watched very intently, with a lot of hope and expectation. The consistent defiance of US hegemony by the Chávez regime has been a source of inspiration for various progressive movements everywhere. At least with regard to its position on the American manoeuvrings globally, nobody can fault the Venezuelan state—it never wasted any time to decry the imperialist interventions anywhere in the world.
But this has led to a genuine rise of expectations for support from progressive Latin American regimes (if not materially, at least through statements) for local movements against their particular oppressive states, even when there is no direct western backing to these states. In recent years, with many states lining up to define their own ‘war against terrorism’ in order to crush local critical voices and movements against them, the stance of the Venezuelan and Cuban states has not been supportive of the oppressed. In fact, any official voice from the West critical of the local states has many a time provoked statements from the progressive Latin American regimes that are supportive of the southern states like Iran, Libya, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka even when these are highly oppressive. This has greatly frustrated the solidarity movements—some even going to the extent of calling the Latin American revolutionary processes ephemeral.
However, one must understand that the revolutionary process is not linear and smooth. It is not something homogeneous, and its targets are not just external. The intensification of revolution is the heightening of contradictions that constitute it. In fact, these constitutive contradictions internalise the so-called external elements—’alien’ class interests, the vestiges of old regimes, etc. Any attempt to avoid contradictions is a conservative attempt from the ‘endogenous right’ to homogenise the revolutionary voices behind the new institutions, alienating them from their organic roots in class struggle, thus giving birth to new bureaucracies—the agencies of the new order. It is the ‘endogeneity’ of this tendency that forces the revolutionary leadership to reassess the coordinates of the contradictions time and again. A fine discrimination of these coordinates in the revolutionary process gives an insight into the apparent anomalies. It was not for nothing that the 20th century revolutionaries time and again stressed the need to differentiate between the state (which even well into the first phase of communist society safeguards the bourgeois law) and the revolutionary masses. An understanding of this aspect is crucial in order to comprehend the problems and prospects of policy designs under a revolutionary regime, including its foreign policy and international relations.
It must be noted that revolutionary internationalism of the working class is an important weapon with which a revolution generalizes itself and resists its degeneration into nationalist statism by not allowing ‘revolutionary passion’ to die out. But it is not simply a subjective aspiration to generalize that gives birth to internationalism. Rather, it “is a necessity arising out of the fact that the capitalist class, which rules over the workers, does not limit its rule to one country.”(11) Thus, internationalism is a result of the class struggle going global—it is an endeavour to thwart the capitalist strategy of intensifying capitalist accumulation by segmenting the working class and its consciousness. It is in this regard that a revolution can be termed as international both at the levels of its causes and impact. It represents a crisis for the capitalist system.
Solidarity efforts in support of revolution beyond the immediate location of its occurrence, along with ‘indigenous’ revolutionaries’ support for movements beyond their location are crucial even for the survival of the revolution as a revolution. It can survive as such only by constantly asserting its international character, its inseparability from international class struggle. Otherwise, it will implode or be reduced to a mere regime change.
It is interesting to see how revolutionaries have time and again talked about the foreign policy of a revolution, not just that of the state. And this has been assessed by the revolution’s galvanising effect on the struggles of the working class and the oppressed in other locations. While criticizing the foreign policy of the Provisional Government (that emerged after the February Revolution of 1917) for conducting it with the capitalists, Lenin remarked:
Yet 1905 showed what the Russian revolution’s foreign policy should be like. It is an indisputable fact that October 17, 1905, was followed by mass unrest and barricade-building in the streets of Vienna and Prague. After 1905 came 1908 in Turkey, 1909 in Persia and 1910 in China. If, instead of compromising with the capitalists, you call on the truly revolutionary democrats, the working class, the oppressed, you will have as allies the oppressed classes instead of the oppressors, and the nationalities which are now being rent to pieces instead of the nationalities in which the oppressing classes now temporarily predominate.(12)
It is in this regard that many struggling peoples across the globe find the foreign policies of the progressive regimes in Latin America wanting. Especially, Cuba and Venezuela, the countries which are in the leadership of the anti-imperialist realignment in the post-Cold War era, have been criticized for not standing against the oppressive regimes of the Global South. They have been chastised for their frequent open support to these regimes, whenever they are attacked by the so-called international community.
The genuineness of these criticisms can hardly be questioned; however, they must go further and explain these stances in terms of their material foundation, rather than locating them in some sort of ideological and personality-oriented tendencies as many have done, who reduce the Chávez phenomenon to populist demagoguery and the Cuban regime to Stalinism. The existential anxiety of these regimes in the face of a strong imperialist unity against them is definitely one reason that must be considered. This makes them wary of any interventionist strategy on the part of the ‘international community’ against any regime. Further, the existentialist need to have an oppositional bloc in the international forums puts them in the company of strange allies.
However, we will have to make a fine distinction between the revolutionary process itself and the institutions, states and individuals that come up during this process. We cannot reduce the revolutions to their particular passing moments. We will have to recognize and accept that these revolutions are marked by intense internal contradictions, whose astute descriptions we find in Ridenour’s travelogue. The states in themselves have a conservative agenda, even when they are deeply embedded in the revolutionary process. They have the task to defend what has been achieved, and in mounting this defence they frequently fail to differentiate between the actual enemies of the revolution and the revolutionaries who are aware of the dilemma, of which Rosa Luxemburg talked about:
“Either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution.”(13)
Notes
1. George Rudé: Revolutionary Europe 1783-1815. Fontana/Collins, 1964.
2. Michael Lebowitz: The Spectre of Socialism for the 21st Century (2008). Available online at: http://links.org.au/node/503/1594%20.
3. Marta Harnecker: Rebuilding the Left. Monthly Review Press & Daanish, 2007, p. 35.
4. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer: What’s Left in Latin America? Regime Change in New Times. Ashgate: 2009, pp. 192-3.
5. Tamara Pearson: “Venezuelans to Debate Patenting Laws after Revelation that Companies Conspired in Firing of Radical Minister,” http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6490 (September 15, 2011).
6. The system of co-management envisages social control against any competitive congealment of sectionalist interests over economic activities. Under this system the economic sectors are co-managed by workers with the community at large.
7. Michael Lebowitz: Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. Monthly Review Press & Daanish, 2006, p. 116.
8. Petras and Veltmeyer, op cit, p. 234
9. Marta Harnecker, op cit, p. 36.
10. Georg Lukacs: Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. Verso, 1970.
11. V.I. Lenin: Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party (1895-96). Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 109.
12. V.I. Lenin: Speeches at First All Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (June-July 1917). Collected Works, Vol. 25.
13. Rosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution (1918). Available at www.marxists.org.
Prof. R S Rao (74), retired professor from Sambalpur University, a long time intellectual of radical politics in India passed away on 17 June 2011 in New Delhi. He had suffered a stroke and was in the ventilator for around twenty days. The inevitability of death takes away from us his lively and jovial company and the sharp intellect combined with unswerving commitment to the cause of the common people.
Remembering the critical Marxist tradition of R S Rao, we would like to argue herein that it would not be appropriate to portray him as an uncritical loyalist of Maoist politics in India. On the other hand, it would be more appropriate to view him as someone who upheld the critical tradition of questioning and debates within the movement, something which is not commonplace in the Communist movement in India today.
It was a rare combination that R S Rao was a teacher of quantitative economics who taught econometric techniques in the class room and was a theoretician of Marxist political economy outside the class room. Quite uncharacteristic of economists in general, he was an economist who used to speak a lot about people and people’s agency. He used to say, Stalin hardly spoke about people but about material goods. He had a strong historical sense and was optimistic to the core. He believed that systematic application of methodology, as while doing a Ph.D., hampered creativity. He himself never did a Ph.D. He was not overwhelmed by scholarly papers in national and international journals. Rather he attached greater value to articles in activist publications because ‘they have a sense of purpose’, as he put it. He seldom contributed to the mainstream press.
Prof. Rao used to say that in order to understand, we need to focus not on the aspect of light but on the aspect of shade. In life too, he had moved from the light of the Gokhale Institute in Pune to the shade of Sambalpur university located in a backward region. During the hype of developmentalism in the early Nehruvian period, when there were many who praised the building of big dams, he focused on the shady aspects of displacement and misery caused by the Hirakud dam project which he considered as a symbol of exploitation. He had said that even in the ‘modern temples’, those who built them have no entry. Prof. Rao was steadfast in his commitment to the cause of the people until his last days. It may be recalled that he was one of the mediators in the case of the abduction of Collector, Vineel Krishna by Maoists in February 2011.
Although my personal encounters with him were limited to those in late 1990s, they were memorable and intellectually enriching. I would miss Prof. R S Rao, especially since I could not meet him for so many years now. As it is said, Prof. Rao had an ability to leave a strong impression on some people even in one meeting or two. About his person, I remember not only his personal habit of continuous smoking but also his non-hierarchical attitude and the hearty laugh he had, showing his toothless gum. He had a Socratic quality of intellectually guiding the youth through sharp and timely questions. This was very important about his personality since it is said that he still operated mainly within the oral tradition since his writings are few and far between.
His first collection of essays, Towards Understanding Semi-Feudal, Semi-Colonial Society was published in 1995 with a famous essay, ‘In Search of the Capitalist Farmer’. He has also co-edited with Venugopal Rao a collection on 50 years of the History and Development in Andhra Pradesh. Of late, five books and some essays by him have been published in Telugu. In his socio-economic analysis, he had an ingenious way of drawing insights from Telugu literature.
In March and April 1998, he had taken a few parallel classes for some interested students at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His analysis of Marxian dialectics and his observations on how the semi-colonial relations related to the semi-feudal ones in the Indian context were insightful. It still resounds in my memory how he summarised Marxian dialectics in three terms: totality, contradiction, change or movement in time.
During those days, once he chanced to find me with a book of P J James (1995), Non-Governmental Voluntary Organizations: The True Mission. He asked me to review this book for him. So I wrote a review of this book. The main idea of the book was that NGOs were serving the cause of imperialism by diverting people away from the path of class struggle. R S Rao guided me by posing mainly one question: ‘In what specific way(s) do the NGOs turn diversionary?’ He guided me into thinking that they turn diversionary by having no sense of primacy among social contradictions. For example, they would not address the land question but would rather address social contradictions as related to caste, community and gender i.e., those relating to social liberation movements, not directly counterpoised against the State but against one or the other dominant section in society. He had approved my book review, saying it required only some editorial corrections. But unexpectedly, I had to get into a heated argument with a prominent mass leader of the Maoist movement, specifically on the political line of this review. He was very angry and became very personal in his criticism because he felt that I was being too generous towards the NGOs in spite of recognising the neo-colonial agenda many of them were promoting. After this argument, I lost my confidence and did not send the article for publication anywhere. But I could not help wondering how much divergence of views can be there within the same political movement, among those with the same ideological persuasion.
Probably, Tariq Ali was right in pointing out in a recent book review in New Left Review (2010, Nov.-Dec.) that it was something tragic that happened to Communist Parties across the world that they became established mass-based parties in the 1930s and ‘40s during the high tide of Stalinism. The organisational methods they adopted, influenced as they were by Stalinism, stifled dissent and suppressed debate. Probably, this explains how the Communist movements the world over moved away from the early Bolshevik tradition of vibrant debates within the party and in the Indian case, from the vibrant intellectual tradition that characterised Bhagat Singh and his comrades.
It is worth recalling an exchange of views in late 1990s between Prof. Rao and a trade union activist working in the industrial areas in and around Delhi. This comrade-activist had left CPI-ML (Red Flag) in Kerala and joined the stream of Andhra Naxalites. He had left the Red Flag group specifically on the question of this group giving up the policy of armed struggle. Prof. Rao asked him what were the differences which led him to leave Red Flag. He listened to him very carefully and at the end of it, he asked quite emphatically, ‘Is your line a political line or a military line?’ Probably, what he meant was that the political line needs to have primacy over the military line. This is a question worth repeating over and over again today in the context of a neo-liberal State on the one hand, hell-bent on wiping out the Maoists, who are branded as ‘the greatest internal security threat’ and the Maoists on the other, confining their resistance mainly to the military realm rather than on primarily engaging in mass mobilisation around their political line, focusing on the question of people-oriented development. Maoists could be better off if they had primary focus on the political line involving mass movement wherever possible since the State has much less legitimacy in this respect although it is immensely more powerful militarily.
It is ironical that one has to speak about bureaucracy within the Maoist movement because it is a far cry from the Mao’s own ideas of party as a contradiction and party developing through contradictions. But whenever I did talk to Prof. Rao about the problem of bureaucracy within the movement, he was kind enough to tell me not to get discouraged since there are many sincere persons in the movement who are quite self-critical about the movement. He pointed out how (late) Shyam, one of the Central Committee members of CPI-ML (People’s War) was such an honest person who during the peace talks, was willing to accept criticisms about mistakes committed by the movement.
It is not to be missed out that from within the stream of radical politics, Prof. Rao had also come under criticism for not focusing sufficiently on the ‘semi-colonial’ which was gaining increasing ascendency over the ‘semi-feudal’ under ‘liberalisation’. But he seemed to have been more concerned about how one is related to the other. It was not easy to brush aside his argument about a process of ‘re-feudalisation’ in culture and institutions, including the State with the increasing incursions of capital. We could also justify his position from an entirely different angle: Even if the ‘semi-colonial’ or imperialism is considered as the principal contradiction, the struggle for fixed productive assets/natural resources – land, forest and water resources – could constitute the principal task of social transformation in a crisis-ridden and highly unpredictable world order of today.
There would have been times when the movement imposed blinders upon his process of thinking even as it must have enabled him other ways. Although there are those both within and outside the Maoist movement who would like to appropriate Prof. Rao as an uncritical loyalist of the movement, I would like to remember him as someone who belonged to the stream of critical thinking within the movement – an early Bolshevik legacy in the international communist movement and also a legacy left behind by Bhagat Singh in India.
These reminiscences are based on the author’s experience of having worked in the mass front of the Maoist movement. It has also drawn on some of the ideas of G. Haragopal, Vara Vara Rao, Venugopal Rao, Dandapani Mohanty and Rona Wilson during the condolence meeting at JNU, New Delhi on 18 June 2011. The author can be contacted at: gilbertseb@gmail.com
Between 1948 and 1973, real GDP for the U.S. (measured in 2005 chained dollars) economy grew at a compound annual average rate of about 3:98 percent per annum; between 1973 and 2010, the corresponding growth rate was only 2:72 per cent per annum. While the 25 year period of high growth after the Second World War has, with some justification, earned the epithet of the “Golden Age” of capitalism, the period of relative stagnation since the mid-1970s has been characterized by heterodox economists as a neoliberal capitalist regime (Dum´enil and L´evy, 2004, 2011; Harvey, 2005; Kotz, 2009).
Three characteristics of neoliberal capitalism have attracted lot of scholarly attention. First is the marked trend towards growing financialization of the economy, by which is meant a growing weight of financial activities in the aggregate economy. Figure 1 presents some well-known evidence, for the period 1961-2010, in support of this claim. The top left panel plots the share of value added that is contributed by the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector in the value added by the total private sector of the U.S. economy: between 1961 and 2008, the contribution of the FIRE sector increased steadily from about 16 per cent to roughly 25 percent. The top right panel gives the share of financial sector profit in total domestic profit income in the U.S. economy, which shows a steady increase since the early 1970s (interrupted briefly in the early 1980s). It is only during the financial crisis in 2007-2008 that this share declined for a brief period; it is noteworthy that the share started a rapid ascent in 2009, and has recovered much of its loss since then. The two figures in the bottom panel provide evidence, for the period 1988-2009, of the growing size of the stock market: both stock market capitalization and total value traded, as a proportion of nominal GDP, has trended up since the late 1980s, providing clear evidence of the growth of financial relative to real activity.
The second notable characteristic of the neoliberal regime has been the veritable explosion of the flow of credit (and the build-up of the stock of debt) in the economy. One important dimension of the growth of credit has been the unprecedented increase in the credit flowing to (working class) households. Figure 2 presents evidence in support of both these claims by plotting the time series of outstanding debt (measured as total credit market liabilities) of three crucial sector of the U.S. economy: the nonfinancial business sector, the household sector, and financial business sector. While the business sectors display an increasing trend since the early 1960s (along with large fluctuations at business cycle frequencies), the household sector debt starts a secular rise since the early 1980s (with almost no business cycle fluctuations), and the financial business sector also displays a secular rise till the onset of the Great Recession. The last chart in Figure 2 plots the time series of the ratio of outstanding household debt and outstanding debt of the nonfinancial business sector. The ratio shows a clear upward trend since the mid-1970s, with household debt increasing from about 85 percent of nonfinancial business debt in the mid-1970s to about 140 percent just prior to the start of the Great Recession.
The third important characteristic of neoliberal capitalism has been stagnation of real wages for the bulk of the working class. In the face of rising productivity, this has entailed a massive redistribution of income away from working class households, leading to widening income and wealth inequality. Figure 3 presents evidence in support of this claim. The top panel plots an index of productivity (measured real output per hour) in the total nonfarm business sector of the U.S. economy. There is an increasing trend in productivity over time, with a marked acceleration in growth since the mid-1990s. This is in sharp contrast to the evolution of real wages of production and nonsupervisory workers plotted in the bottom panel, who comprise about 80 percent of the U.S. workforce. The hourly real wage has barely increased between the early 1970s and the late 2000s; the weekly real wage has in fact declined during this period.
The main question that this paper wishes to explore is the possible connections between the slowdown in economic growth on the one hand and the three characteristics of neoliberal capitalism on the other? Heterodox economists have been interested in this question for at least the last three decades, and the main contribution of this paper is to extend that literature by presenting a theoretical model to address this question. Building on and extending Foley (1982, 1986a), this paper develops a discrete-time Marxian circuit of capital model to analyze the link between financialization, nonproduction credit and economic growth. It is demonstrated that increasing financialization and the growth of household credit (a component of nonproduction credit) can reduce the growth rate of a capitalist economy. Hence, this paper offers a novel explanation, rooted in a Marxian circuit of capital macroeconomic analysis, for the slowdown of the U.S. economy during the neoliberal era.
Werner Bonefeld A Talk to the London Anarchist Bookfair, October 2010
I
I want to start with a quotation from a Socialist Workers Party poster that I saw on the way to the Anarchist Bookfair. It said: ‘Fight Back the Wrecking Tory Cuts’. There is no doubt that the cuts have to be rejected and will be opposed; society will try to protect itself from misery. ‘Fight Back the Wrecking Tory Cuts’ says something disarmingly obvious, and yet there is more to it than it seems. What does ‘fight back the cuts’ entail as a positive demand? It says no to cuts, and thus demands a capitalism not of cuts but of redistribution from capital to labour; it demands a capitalism that creates jobs not for capitalist profit but for gainful and purposeful employment, its premise is a capitalism that supports conditions not of exploitation but of well-being, and it projects a capitalism that offers fair wages ostensibly for a fair days work, grants equality of conditions, etc. What a wonderful capitalism that would be! One is reminded of Marx judgment when dealing with the socialist demand for a state that renders capital profitable without ostensibly exploiting the workers: poor dogs they want to treat you as humans!
This idea of a capitalism without cuts, a benevolent capitalism in short, is of course as old as capitalism itself. In our time, this idea is connected with the so-called global financial capitalism that came to the fore in the 1970s. At that time, Bill Warren, for example, argued that all that needed to be done was to change the balance of power, of class power, to achieve, as it were, a socialist hegemony within capitalism – a strangely comforting idea, which presupposes that the hegemony of capital within capitalism is contingent upon the balance of class forces and thus changeable – ostensibly in favour of a socialist capitalism achieved by socialist majorities in parliament making capitalism socialist through law and parliamentary decisions. What an easy thing socialism is! All one has to do is vote for the right party, shift the balance of forces in favour of socialism, and enact the right laws. With the left enjoying hegemony, the state becomes a means to govern over capital, or as Warren saw it, to make money work, not for profit but for jobs, for wages, for welfare. This argument makes it seem as if money only dissociated itself from productive engagement because of a certain change in the balance of class forces. And the crisis of accumulation that began in the late 1960s – what do we make of this?
In the 1980s Austin Mitchell demanded the same thing in his book Market Socialism. He says ‘we need a state who will make money its servant, so that it is put to work for growth and jobs, rather than the selfish purposes of the merchants of greed.’ Later this became a demand of the anti-globalisation movement, from economists such as Joseph Stieglitz to proponents of the Tobin Tax, from journalists such as Naomi Klein, who wanted no logo, to political economists such as Leo Panitch who wanted the state to de-commodify social relations by putting money to work on behalf of workers within protected national economies – protected from the world market.
In the last 20 years ‘fighting back finance capitalism’ was a rallying cry for those who declared to make money create jobs, conditions, employment, that is, to create – in other words – the capitalism of jobs, of employment, of conditions.
Within the critical Marxist tradition, this sort of position is associated with the social-democratic conception of the state. This conception focuses on the way in which social wealth is distributed. It has little to say about the production of that wealth, other than that the labourer should receive fair wages for a fair days work. The perspective does not take into account the way in which we as a society organize our social reproduction; the question of the economic form of our exchange with nature is seen as a matter of benevolent state intervention.
This separation between production and distribution presupposes something that is not taken into account: distribution presupposes production. Distribution presupposes a well-functioning, growing economy, that is, capitalist accumulation. So the social-democratic position, which I outlined earlier with Panitch, Bill Warren and others, including the SWP, in fact translates working-class demands – for conditions, for wages, for security, in some cases for life – into the demand for rapid capitalist accumulation, as the economic basis for job creation.
Let’s talk about the working-class, this class of ”hands’ that does the work. Does the critique of class society entail an affirmative conception of class, which says that the working class deserves a better deal – employment, wages, condition. Is class really an affirmative category? Or is it a critical category of a false society – a class society in which wealth is produced by a ‘class of hands’ that have nothing but their labour-power to sell? To be a productive labourer is not a piece of luck, it is a great misfortune. The critique of class does not find its resolution in a better paid and better employed working class. It finds its resolution only in a classless society.
Class analysis is not some sort of flag-waving on behalf of the working-class. Such analysis is premised on the perpetuation of the worker as seller of labour power, which is the very condition of the existence of capitalist social relations. Affirmative conceptions of class, however well-meaning and benevolent in their intentions, presuppose the working-class as a productive factor of production that deserves a better, a new deal.
As I stated right at the start, it is obviously the case that the more the working class gets the better. For it is the working class that produces the wealth of nations. It is the class that works. Yet; what is a fair wage?
In volume three of Capital Marx says something like this: ‘price of labour is just like a yellow logarithm’. Political economy in other words is indeed a very scholarly dispute about how the booty of labour may be divided, or distributed. Who gets what? Who bears the cuts? Who produces capitalist wealth, and what are the social presuppositions and consequences of the capitalist organization of the social relations of production, an organization that without fail accumulates great wealth for the class that hires workers to do the work.
II
I want to step back a bit to 1993, just after the deep recession of the early 1990s and the second of the two European currency crises. It was on 24 December 1993 that the Financial Times announced that globalisation – a term which hardly had any currency up until then – is the best wealth-creating system ever invented by mankind. And it said, unfortunately two thirds of the world’s population gained little or no substantial advantage from rapid economic growth.
In the developed world the lowest quarter of income earners had witnessed a trickle up rather than a trickle down. So since the mid 1970s, and Warren picks up on this, we have a system where money, the incarnation of wealth, is invested – incestuously as it were – into itself, opening a huge gap, a dissociation between an ever receding though in absolute terms growing productive base. This created something akin to an upside down pyramid where a great and ever increasing mortgage, an ever greater and ever increasing claim on future surplus value accumulated – mortgaging the future exploitation of labour. This mortgage tends to become fictitious at some point when investor confidence disappears – when, in other words, the exploitation of labour in the present does not keep up with the promise of future extraction of value.
It is against this background that Martin Wolf argued in 2001 ‘what is needed is honest and organised coercive force’. He said that in relationship to the developing world. And Martin Wolf is right – from his perspective. In order to guarantee debt, in order to guarantee money, coercion is the means to render austerity effective. Or as Soros said in 2003: ‘Terrorism provided not only the ideal legitimisation but also the ideal enemy for the unfettered coercive protection of a debt ridden free market society’, because, he says, ‘it is invisible and never disappears’.
So the premise of a politics of austerity is in fact the ongoing accumulation of humans on the pyramid of capitalist accumulation. Its blind eagerness for plunder requires organised coercive force in order to sustain this huge mortgage, this huge promise of future exploitation, here in the present.
Martin Wolf’s demand for the strong state does not belie neo-liberalism, which is wrongly caricatured as endorsing the weak and ineffectual state. Neo-liberalism does not demand weakness from the state. ‘Laissez faire’, said the late Sir Alan Peacock, formerly a Professor of Economics, ‘is no answer to riots’.
‘Law’, says Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher of Nazism, ‘does not apply to chaos.’ For law to apply order must exist. Law presupposes order. Order is not the consequence of law. Law is effective only on the basis of order. And that is as Hayek put it in the Road to Serfdom: ‘Laissez faire is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based.’ ‘The neo-liberal state’, he says, ‘is a planner too, it is a planner for competition’. Market freedom in other words requires the market police, that is the state, for its protection and maintenance.
Capitalist social relations, Schmitt claims, are protected by an enlightened state, and in times of crisis a more or less authoritarian direction becomes unavoidable. Chaos and disorder create the state of emergency which call for the establishment of a strong, market facilitating, order making state. The state is the political form of the force of law – of law making violence.
For the neo-liberals, disorder has nothing to do with markets. It is to do with what they perceive as irrational social action. That is, they see the democratisation or politicisation of social labour relations as a means of disorder, it undermines markets and renders state ungovernable. The state however, argue the neo-liberal authors, has to govern to maintain order, and with it, the rule of law, the relations of exchange, the law of contract. Free markets function on the basis of order; and order, they argue, entails an ordered society; and an ordered society is not a society that is politicised, but one which is in fact governed – by the democracy of demand and supply, which only the strong state is able to facilitate, maintain, and protect.
III
What is the alternative?
I think the difficulty of conceiving of human self-emancipation has to do with the very idea of human emancipation. This idea is distinct from the pursuit of profit, the seizure of the state, the pursuit and preservation of political power, economic value and economic resource. It follows a completely different idea of human development – and it is this, which makes it so very difficult to conceive, especially in a time of ‘cuts’. One cannot think, it seems, about anything else but ‘cuts, cuts, cuts’. Our language, which a few years ago spoke of the Paris Commune, the Zapatistas, Council Communism, and the project of self-emancipation that these terms summoned, has been replaced by the language of cuts, and fight back, and bonuses, and unfairness, etc.. And then suddenly, imperceptibly it seems, this idea of human emancipation -in opposition to a life compelled to be lived for the benefit of somebody’s profit, a life akin to an economic resource, – gives way to the very reality that it seeks to change and from which it cannot get away – a reality of government cuts and of opposition against cuts. Government governs those who oppose it. Human emancipation is however not a derivative of capitalist society – it is its alternative, yet, as such an alternative it is premised on what it seeks to transcend. The SWP poster, with which I started, focuses this premise as an all-embracing reality – cuts or no cuts, that is the question.
What is the alternative? Let us ask the question of capitalism differently, not as a question of cuts but as a question of labour-time. How much labour time was needed in 2010 to produce the same amount of commodities as was produced 1990? 50 percent? 30 percent? 20 per cent? Whatever the percentage might be, what is certain is that labour time has not decreased. It has increased. What is certain, too, is that despite this increase in wealth, the dependent masses are subjected to a politics of austerity as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence. What a calamity: In the midst of ‘austerity’, this rational means to perpetuate an irrational mode of production, in which the reduction of the hours of labour needed for the production of the means of subsistence appears in reality as a crisis of finance, money and cash, the struggle over the appropriation of additional atoms of labour time pursues as if the reduction of the life-time of the worker to labour time is the resolution to the crisis of debt, finance, and cash flow. Indeed it is. Time is money. And if time really is money, than man is nothing – except a time’s carcass.
And here, in this calamity, there is hope. The hope is that the struggle against cuts, is also a struggle for something.
What does the fight against cuts entail? It is a struggle against the reduction of life time to labour time. The fight against cuts is in fact a fight for a life. For the dependent masses, wages and welfare benefits are the means with which to obtain the means of subsistence. The fight against the cuts is a fight for the provision of the means of subsistence. And that is, it is a conflict between antagonistic interests, one determining that time is money, the other demanding the means of subsistence. This demand, as I argued at the start, might well express itself uncritically as a demand for a politics of jobs and wages, affirming the need for rapid accumulation as the means of job-creation. It might not. It might in fact politicize the social labour relations, leading to the question why the development of the productive forces at the disposal of society have become too powerful for this society, bringing financial disorder and requiring austerity to maintain it. Such politicisation, if indeed it is to come about, might well express, in its own words, Jacques Roux’s dictum that
“freedom is a hollow delusion for as long as one class of humans can starve another with impunity. Equality is a hollow delusion for as long as the rich exercise the right to decide over the life and death of others.”
Editorial Note: The talk develops some insights from the Communist Manifesto, and is loosely based on the following publications by Bonefeld:
‘Anti-Globalization and the Question of Socialism’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Thought, no. 38, 2006, pp. 39-59.
‘Free Economy and the Strong State’, Capital and Class, vol. 34 no. 1, 2010, pp. 15-24.
‘Global Capital, National State, and the International’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Thought, no. 44, 2008, pp. 63-72.
‘History and Human Emancipation’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Thought, vol. 38, no. 1, 2010, pp. 61-73. A version of the article was initially published in Radical Notes.
A Conference on
Rural Labourers in Neo-liberal India
18-19 December 2010
XIMB (Xavier Institute of Management – Bhubaneswar), Orissa, India
Supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
and XIMB, Bhubaneswar, Orissa
Neoliberalism has affected India’s rural areas and the agrarian sector particularly harshly. Not only are peasants being dispossessed of their rights to land, water and forests, and of their meager entitlements from the state. But also rural labourers are being subjected to ruthless levels of exploitation on the farms and in agro-industrial units where they produce commodities for the rich domestic elite and for export to rich (and imperialist) countries. While the story of dispossession of peasants has (rightly) attracted much attention in recent times, what has often been neglected is the issue of the production of commodities, the associated process of exploitation, and therefore, the life of the labourers.
Without land or other forms of property and with dwindling welfare benefits from the neoliberal state, rural labourers find themselves in a precarious situation and form a major part of the ‘Republic of Hunger ’. They work as long as they live, and they live as long as they work. Many are footloose labourers constantly in search of work. In many places, employers even take away labourers’ freedom to sell their labour power, in order to cheapen the only commodity they possess and to discipline them. This is the case with bonded and child labourers. As well employers make use of gender and caste/tribality to lower wages of low-caste, women and tribal labourers and to pit one group of labourers against another. These social distinctions are no less used by political parties of the rich property-owning classes to divide and disarm the rural working class electorate. But at the same time, rural labourers (and poor peasants), in spite of them being geographically scattered, are engaged in an ‘uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight’ against exploitation and oppression.
The topic of rural labour in imperialized, poorer countries such as India indeed cries out for serious critical scrutiny. This must place rural labour (including semi-proletarian labour) at the center of our attention in terms of primitive accumulation which produces it and the capitalist accumulation process which exploits it, and in terms of its democratically organized struggles against capital and the neo-liberal state.
Papers are invited which speak to one or more aspects of the situation described above in the specific context of India . Specific topics of interest include:
1. ‘Primitive accumulation’ in relation to labour
2. Rural migrant labourers (working in villages and/or in urban areas)
3. Labour process in export-oriented agricultural production sites
4. Labourers in floriculture and aquaculture
5. Contract farming and rural labour
6. Rural reserve army of labour and neo-liberal accumulation
7. Technological change, rural labour and politics of production
8. Ruralization of capital in the age of ‘new’ imperialism and its effect on labour
9. Environment (e.g. climate change issues, including heat wave) and rural labour
10. Life and livelihood of the unemployed in the villages
11. Poverty/hunger of rural labour households
12. Credit relations (formal and informal) and rural labourers
13. Female labourers, neoliberal state and neoliberal capital
14. Capital and dalit/adivasi labour
15. Rural labouring bodies in pain: capital’s corporeal effect on labour
16. Reduction in state welfare provision and its impact on labourers
17. Government rural wage-employment generation programmes (e.g. NREGS)
18. Development NGOs and rural labour
19. Representation of rural labour in media and popular culture
20. Struggles of rural labourers and poor peasants against capital, landowners, and neo-liberal state
21. Rural labourers in progressive art and media
The original deadline for the submission of abstracts has passed. Though 5th December remains our deadline for receipt of the completed-papers from the authors whose abstracts have been accepted, some slots are now available with us for considering directly-submitted completed-papers from those that did not submit abstracts or whose abstracts did not get accepted; the deadline for these is 15th November.
Released by Delhi State Committee, Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS), A Unit of All India Revolutionary Youth Organization (A.I.R.Y.O.)
We have not abandoned purely student demands,
but the best way to bring THE UNIVERSITY INTO QUESTION
is to intensify the workers’ movement. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre Duteuil, March 22nd Movement, 1968
KYS’s polemical tract, What Is Ailing University Democrats!, has received many responses, and having read through them closely we have drafted the following. Not all responses were productive for the ensuing debate but there were some that reflected a serious engagement with what KYS had argued. We are happy to reiterate some of the points raised in such responses and to develop them further. With respect to the other responses received, such as those from New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and from University Community for Democracy (UCD), we have some detailed clarifications to make, and of course, some new observations to highlight. Nevertheless, the principal segment of this response is dedicated to the much more significant debate on the nature of working class politics and forms of its alignment with the petty bourgeois section in a given society. We have done this, because those who have sincerely reflected on our observations deserve further elucidation of our position. For those interested mainly in our response to UCD’s rejoinder, we suggest a close reading of Sections 1 and 2. To those concerned with the debate on Marxism’s deployment of class analysis, student-youth politics and the way ahead for the working class movement, please use your discretion and move to Sections 3, 4 and 5.
1. Some Simple Facts for Those Who Harp About Being Factually Sound
To begin with we would like to emphasize that KYS has absolutely no misconceptions about the nature of University Community for Democracy (UCD). We see it as a forum dominated by certain tendencies. It was these dominating tendencies that we constantly confronted in meetings and which we critiqued in our paper. It was very clear to us that right from its inception the functioning and constitutive logic of this forum was heavily influenced by New Socialist Initiative (NSI). With each day of participation in UCD, it became clearer still that the space was not an “open” one. This was because many of us, who joined UCD later, i.e. around July of this year, were continuously considered and treated as outsiders. We will underscore this fact shortly by quoting from minutes of the meetings. We attribute UCD’s functioning and form of politics to the way NSI shaped the contours of UCD. In the interest of its liberal politics (articulated best in its approach to NGOs, the media, the politics of alliance-making, etc.), NSI did not simply propose action plans for UCD to ratify, but even upturned decisions of UCD’s general body meetings in undemocratic ways, hence rendering consensus building in UCD a meaningless endeavour.
The following are references to minutes of meetings and emails exchanged in response to them, which prove the observation highlighted above:
i) In the 24th July meeting it was recorded that some people objected to the extension of an invitation to NGO persons to speak at the July 30th protest meeting. Instead of NGO persons it was suggested that students should be asked to speak. The consensus reached after discussion was that the NGO speakers suggested by NSI would not be called for the protest meeting. For NSI the discussion on NGOs was deemed “unnecessary”. They were unhappy with what was obviously a disruption in their preset plan for the protest meeting. This is why on July 27th an email was sent out by a member of NSI that as UCD’s “most active participants” they had decided to organize a program in Ramjas College, on the same day as the protest meeting (in the morning), for which the disputed NGO person was invited.
Note the repercussions of such a manoeuvre—UCD’s decision on not calling any NGO person as a speaker for the July 30th program was undermined. In Ramjas College the forum was, by force, allied with NGO politics (after all, in such a program UCD would be discussed, and hence, would be sharing a discursive space with NGOs—a space it had decided not to share till it was more clear on the credentials of certain NGOs). Needless to say, KYS was against the inclusion of any kind of NGO and paid ‘activism’.
ii) On the night of 29th June, i.e. 8:52 p.m., a message was put up on the facebook account/google group (many UCD participants were not members of these at the time), asking people to come for a meeting the next morning (30th June) at 10 a.m. We will highlight the contents of this meeting but before that what needs to be noted is that on 29th June, which was the first meeting of the UCD on campus, it had been decided by consensus to meet on the 3rd of July. In the rushed and poorly coordinated meeting on 30th June it was decided by those present (mostly NSI and its sympathizers) that Gandhi Ashram should become a concrete project of the UCD, that creating communes was part of UCD’s vision, etc.
On the contrary, in the 29th June meeting it had been decided to slow down on the Gandhi Ashram and commune issue till there was substantial participation on behalf of affected students. This point has been hidden in the minutes of the 29th June meeting, and in fact, the minutes only discuss grand plans on how the ‘commune’ would be run. The hastily called 30th June meeting was basically aimed at clinching the commune issue even before the 3rd July meeting. After this 30th June meeting a team constituted by “UCD” went ahead to speak with the Gandhi Ashram management. In this regard, this “emergency meeting” was simply held to preset the agenda of the larger meeting to be held on 3rd July. Clearly, there was an overt attempt not to take all of UCD’s participants into confidence when strategizing UCD’s politics and action plan. Perhaps now the reader can understand why KYS has taken the position that coordinating a forum through cyberspace is highly problematic. As an organization, we strongly feel that it is a space that is actively used to undermine the consensus building initiatives of those who take out the time to present themselves in general body meetings. We do not buy the argument that such a meeting was called in haste because there were many Mirandians in dire need of alternative arrangements. Why don’t we? Well, because we knew that the number of students still in need of a PG was negligible—a point proved by the poor response of students to the Gandhi Ashram plan. We knew that such a meeting was actually called to exclude many from UCD’s decision making process.
iii) On 20th July it was noted by Aashima who was recording the minutes of the meeting that “there was a BRIEF [emphasis added] discussion about what our approach should be gradually, if we should focus on hostel evictions or also give more prominence to the issue of unregulated rents and problems in the neighbourhood since many students live in private accommodation.” Ironically, immediately post this meeting it was held that UCD had developed a detailed and important [emphasis added] position on the problem of escalating rents. KYS and CSW were consequently denounced for running a “parallel” campaign on the issue of rent and for compromising UCD’s attempts in this direction. There are two points we would like to clarify here. The first that NSI’s Commonwealth Games-University centric approach ensured that when rent was taken up by UCD it would be done so as a student specific issue/concern. That is why rent is mentioned in the first UCD parcha in precisely these terms—“It (University) has thus become an accomplice in the larger processes of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of become a ‘global city’. This has left students [emphasis added] at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well…” Indeed, raising rents as only a student specific concern is the brainchild of UCD. KYS was trying to point out this unfortunate fact in its last pamphlet, and was least interested in establishing a copyright on the issue of rent control.
The second point we would like to highlight here is that by conceptualizing rent as a student-University specific issue, UCD has not been pursuing a feasible or a desirable campaign for rent regulation. In that sense KYS’s initiatives on rent control cannot be compared or considered “parallel” to those of UCD for it conceptualizes rent as a generalized problem for migrants in city. Why is the UCD campaign not feasible or desirable? It is not feasible because the rents of one area, i.e. the University area, cannot be regulated without the regulation of rents across the city. The UCD campaign is not desirable either because its approach to rent does not take into consideration the majority of tenants in the city. After all, for the scores of DU students living with their families on rent it is not at all desirable that rent be perceived as a University-neighbourhood problem alone. In contrast to UCD and its many constituents, KYS has been mobilizing both students and non-student youth who live on rent. Considering rent regulation is the responsibility of the Delhi Government, we have approached the Chief Minister on the issue. Although the Chief Minister has given certain assurances, we know for a fact that to pressurize the government into action, the struggle for rent regulation across the city has to be further intensified.
Having drawn on these references we would like to highlight, in brief, the nature of KYS’ contribution to UCD and at what conjuncture we finally withdrew from the forum. We do this to put at rest certain presumptuous accusations about our “negative” or “non-proactive” role in UCD. As an organization with other commitments to attend to, KYS sent three to four of its members to UCD meetings up till the point it decided to move out of the forum. Yes, in that sense we didn’t seek to bombard the platform with our physical presence just so as to ensure that UCD’s contours mapped down to what had been pre-decided from before. Again, for UCD activities (such as area-campaigning in Vijaynagar or college campaigning) we sent our members. KYS also circulated UCD’s parcha independently at the SC/ST admission counters in Arts Faculty and amongst students living in Sangam Park-Gurmandi area. This area is a working class neighbourhood in which many students enrolled in Satyawati Morning and Satyawati Evening College, stay on rent. Furthermore, our fraternal organization, CSW also distributed the UCD parcha in University Hostel for Women.
When our participation was not possible during UCD activities such as attending DUTA’s GBMs, we informed other participants well in advance. There have been references to us sabotaging UCD’s campaign on the 21st of July, i.e. the first day of the academic session. If certain participants in UCD were not so hell bent on writing off KYS’s participation they would accept that there was a confusion that day about where to assemble first for college campaigning. KYS members had not checked their email accounts on the night of the 20th which is why they were under the impression that UCD campaigners were to assemble at Khalsa College first, watch the street play, and then move onto the other colleges slotted for campaigning that day. This is why KYS’s member reached Khalsa and not Daulat Ram College on the morning of July 21st. Post this incident our members checked posts of UCD on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the resentment continued on the part of “UCD”.
By the end of July, conditions were such within UCD’s functioning that KYS no longer considered it feasible to participate in the forum. Firstly, two consecutive meetings (22nd July and 24th July) were channelized in a way to literally flush out KYS from UCD (you would only get glimpses of this in the minutes—the real witness to this are the participants themselves). In such a hostile atmosphere no organization can consider serious participation possible. Secondly, and more importantly, the NGO-ization of UCD was something KYS refused to tolerate. Keeping the July 30th Ramjas program (especially its repercussions) in mind, KYS decided to withdraw from UCD. It attended the 30th July protest meeting but only its fraternal organization, CSW sent a speaker. By the end of the 30th July protest meeting even CSW decided to completely withdraw from UCD. So, for those who hinted that our non-participation in the “relay hunger strike” was noted by all, we would like to emphasize that KYS had withdrawn from the forum by then, like many others. Now that the ‘graph’ of our participation has been drawn for all to see, you will observe that claims of us not being supportive and pro-active, are based on wilful misconceptions.
Of course, what we also need to highlight here are the conscious attempts to frustrate the efforts of KYS and others to pave the way for UCD to come on its own. More than one person in their response to KYS’s earlier mail (such responses being quite a significant retrospective critique of UCD), have accepted that corner meetings prior to or after UCD’s larger meetings were actively pursued. We have shown above that such a practice was encouraged by NSI so as to control UCD’s political process—a control/influence not based on substantive debate and ideological consensus building but on apolitical ties of familiarity/friendship. When such apolitical influencing measures showed signs of breaking, NSI actively projected KYS’s arguments which were raised in UCD meetings, as an articulation of “pre-existing resentment”. Many in their email responses have revealed (intentionally or unintentionally) that NSI actively spread this rumour. Unfortunately for NSI, many individuals drawn to UCD could not be fooled for long about the real nature of KYS’s arguments, i.e. on the compromised form of NSI-influenced politics and the sectarianess of UCD’s constitutive logic. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to UCD coming on its own was the umbrella formation NSI had forced upon the forum, in the interest of promoting its own liberal politics.
Let us now draw attention to some crucial details that will elucidate KYS’s position further. Firstly, the crux of KYS’s critique (which some people failed to understand), pertains to how struggles demanding “democratic space from the University”, are elitist and sectarian. We have been arguing this because such struggles entail the following: i) demanding democracy for a privileged minority, i.e. 7 percent youth (i.e., the percentage of youth making it to higher education in India), whose inclusion in the University system is actually based on somebody else’s exclusion; ii) demanding from the University something it does not have—the real power residing somewhere else. Of course, the conclusion to be drawn from these two insights is not that University politics should be shunned, but rather, that the form of such politics be transformed. The solution lies in a politics that is based on uniting non-student youth and University students (please see our discussion below, on the DTU students’ protest and on the issue of fee hike. Also see section 5). Undeniably, for such politics to materialize, organizations will have to stop focusing on the University alone, and more importantly, will have to mobilize University students on issues that unite them with youth excluded from the education system. We do hope that in the near future there are more organizations like KYS, which along with work in the University; pursue neighbourhood work amongst youth residing in working class localities.
Secondly, KYS in its earlier pamphlet highlighted the tokenism prevalent in UCD’s approach to workers and workers’ issues. We stand by our earlier critique. With respect to some of the comments made by UCD’s participants regarding the forum’s approach to workers, we support what Naina highlighted in her mail on September 3rd. However, we would like to further problematize UCD’s position that there is nothing wrong/destructive in perceiving workers (their issues, etc.) through a petty bourgeois lens. Indeed, such practices are a serious obstacle in the path of progressive struggle. We would like to prove this by drawing attention to the highly problematic political and theoretical roots of such an approach. Politics based on petty bourgeois notions of empathy (sympathy, etc.) is nothing but the repetition of Bogdanovian tendencies in the working class movement, which were based on the neo-Kantian notion of verstehen. Such tendencies have always been criticized for their anti-revolutionary potential, and Lenin himself presented a devastating critique of these tendencies in Empirio-Criticism.
To elucidate—when you are seeking to understand the working class, you merely end up gathering empirical information on workers (i.e., how they feel, and how you would feel being in their shoes, etc), rather than perceiving the objective condition of the being of the working class (i.e. the conditions that create and reproduce the class in the first place). It is precisely because of this empirical fact-finding that you fail to reach the condition where you realize the organic connection between your oppression and the working class’s exploitation. Of course, the by-product of not reaching this condition is that the petty bourgeois class, as a whole, fails to realize the revolutionary potential of the working class, especially its ability to liberate all classes from the oppression of capitalism. As a result, the petty bourgeoisie continues to suspect and maintain ideological distance/discomfort with working class politics, and at most, engages with working class politics in patronizing ways.
Furthermore, we would like to reiterate that there is often little ‘good intention’ involved in practices like slum work/tutoring working class children, etc., for bodies like Women’s Development Cells, Social Service Leagues/NSS cells, etc., tend to institutionalize such activities into extra-curricular ones. Indeed, such bodies tap on the sensitiveness of certain individuals and draw them unnecessarily into the network of NGOs. Sadly, this is a huge loss for the working class movement since it doesn’t need youth who, through social work, continue to work within the system. Instead, the movement needs youth who engage with the process of class and realize the need for class struggle. Thus, the intention behind bringing these points to the attention of UCD members was not so much to “mock” their endeavours, but to reveal to them the drawbacks of their form of politics.
Thirdly, by raising the issue of the Miranda House construction workers we sought to establish how necessary workers are for launching a successful struggle against the Commonwealth Games (CWG). Unfortunately, in their response UCD completely elided this issue. In fact, they resorted to highlighting meaningless gestures made by them with respect to workers’ issues. We quote, “…[W]e have stood against construction work in the University that violates legally sanctioned labour standards and have integrated it into our demands…” Indeed, this ‘integration’ with no participation in actual workers’ struggles, amounts to tokenism. UCD and its dominant subset, i.e. ‘new’ socialists, may not be running a trade union, but really, should their pre-decided programs (“hunger strikes, etc.) be so inflexible that they cannot be part of a struggle for which they otherwise mouth support (especially when such a struggle is taking place just down the lane)? Furthermore, UCD’s choice of words while describing its support for workers is troubling indeed, for it reflects a non-engagement with workers’ real issues. It is assumed by the forum that provision of legally sanctioned labour laws means an end to workers’ exploitation. In reality, even when workers are employed according to legally sanctioned labour standards, the process of work itself is highly exploitative. In fact, as observed by our trade unions, sometimes legally sanctioned labour laws like those pertaining to overtime, accentuate workers’ exploitation. In the case of laws pertaining to overtime, contractors use them to exploit their existing force of workers, rather than employing more workers for the job.
You speak of boycotting the Games, yet you fail to support the most productive and meaningful attempts to stall the Games. Really, how can you boycott something that has boycotted you?! A boycott would result in substantial losses in the gains of all those profiting from the Games. Take for example the boycott of foreign goods during the Non-Cooperation movement; it led to a massive dip in sales, followed by a huge loss of profits earned by British manufacturing units, and hence, to a weakening of the colonial state’s position in the market. However, your ‘boycott’ doesn’t have any such repercussions, and it is you, in fact, that are bearing all the losses (the hostels have been taken away and you couldn’t stop it; the prices of everything you consume have risen and you couldn’t stop this either; etc., etc.). This has happened precisely because your ‘boycott’ has been envisaged in an isolationist manner (best captured in students/teachers buying anti-CWG badges and T-shirts). Friends, this is a crucial time and workers are far from silent. For a fact pending construction work at the numerous CWG work sites is not so much due to the rains/corruption (as highlighted by the media), but due to spontaneous and frequent protests by workers employed there. Imagine if these one lakh workers were organized, and then launched their struggles…there would be no Games. In this context, should we be content buying/selling badges, filing RTIs, etc, or, should we be helping bring in the real tides of change? Realizing the necessity of involving workers in the struggle against CWG, KYS and its fraternal organizations like Mazdoor Ekta Kendra and Delhi Nirman Mazdoor Sangharsh Samiti, have been mobilizing workers across different CWG sites. Our intervention in six CWG sites have met with success, but only one was highlighted by the media, i.e. the struggle of Miranda House construction workers. Indeed, the few ‘progressive’ newspapers that covered the workers’ protest did so not because they were interested in highlighting the workers’ demands, but because they were interested in highlighting the active participation of Miranda House students. So much for the media!
On a last note, we would like to emphasize that KYS brought out many other problems with respect to UCD’s campaign. On the question of how certain teachers were participating in UCD we hardly got a satisfactory response. Since Paresh Chandra in an email explained very well the problem with a certain form of teachers’ participation, we do not consider that any further arguments are needed on our behalf. Even on the issue of Gandhi Ashram we received a poor response from UCD, which basically, amounts to no response. For factual details and elaboration on the problems with the Gandhi Ashram project, please see Paresh’s response on September 3rd. Of course, on the question of the “relay hunger strike” we received no suitable reply. If UCD continues to hold on to its own definition of what such a hunger strike is then we have one suggestion to make. We know of a student who hails from an agrarian worker’s family and travels every day by train, from Sonepat (Haryana). He is able to eat only in the morning and is able to have his next meal only when he returns at night. Please also involve him since he is perpetually on hunger strike, i.e. according to your definition. Indeed, it will suit your politics of spectacle.
KYS would also like to object to the misrepresentation of some of its arguments. We have never claimed that only a dalit/poor/muslim/gay/tribal can speak on the issues of the oppressed. UCD has once again missed the point and quoted our arguments out of context. Kindly remember the exact context in which Sujit spoke of his Dalit background. He was replying to someone called Bala.poorna who alleged that Communists (including those in our organization) were upper castes and lacked commitment on the question of caste oppression. When responding to this diatribe our member highlighted his own social position so as to prove that not all Communists are upper castes, and that Bala, in fact, was writing off the voice of the oppressed by resorting to baseless accusations. Interestingly, the real nature of our arguments, were not lost on those who gave it proper thought. Individuals like Naina were quick to pick up our point and have argued very convincingly in our support. We reiterate, it is the form of politics which is important for all participants in a movement (be it the petty bourgeoisie or workers).
2. More About NSI’s Role In UCD And Its Real Position In India’s Left Circuit
In India’s Left movement, New Socialist Initiative (NSI) has been long identified as a bourgeois oppositional formation. We highlight this fact simply because in both NSI’s and UCD’s response we saw some unjustified/unsupported claims to the contrary. Despite its ambitious claims NSI is no longer considered a part of Communist League of India (CLI) camp. For more on politics of NSI please see Lal Salaam (a theoretical-political journal). It is interesting to note that one reason why NSI has been identified as such is due to its “official” or “unofficial” support (see report of CASIM) of political fronts like Indian Social Forum (ISF) and even World Social Forum (WSF). Both ISF and WSF are platforms severely criticized for their rainbow political formations in which NGOs and their funding play a big role in delegitimizing several (armed) people’s movements. In fact, in terms of the form of its politics, NSI is a mirror image of such platforms. In this context, we have one immediate question for all those who wrote off KYS’s observations as “malicious”—are critiques on NGOs and NGO-ised forums, presented by persons such P.J. James, James Petras, Shashi Prakash and many others, simply ad hominem attacks? Can everything be reduced to malice or does that accusation stem from your inability to respond to most of the political questions raised?
Moving on, we would like to flesh out the details of how NSI has actively shaped UCD as a mirror image of itself. We do not buy the argument that UCD is a loosely constituted body or “a composite group of left organizations, individuals, liberals, progressives”…blah, blah blah. We don’t, for the simple reason that UCD’s functioning has revealed something very different. The forum’s being and existence is best explained by drawing an analogy to the Chinese doll (with its several folds). NSI, an archetypal liberal organization, was the core of UCD (the doll according to the analogy being drawn), and from the very beginning different liberal positions were congealed around it. In spite of its claims of debating and then accepting/rejecting questions/programs, “as per the larger consensus in UCD”, NSI did not succumb to these liberal gestures at all. Acting as a vector of the liberal virus itself, it did not merely support ideas/suggestions but actively initiated and consolidated certain developments in UCD. Let us draw on some references which shed light on this not so innocent contribution of NSI in UCD. For instance, NSI members actively proposed the entry of NGOs in UCD’s campaign. Similarly, they supported and promoted NGOs as bodies that build “more nuanced bridges of understanding”. One of NSI’s members, in his adamant support and promotion of NGOs, even boycotted an ongoing discussion during a UCD meeting (24th July to be precise). And to top it all, many NSI members work for NGOs—a reality that orients them towards NGO-izing whatever platforms they are part of. Another revealing example comes to mind and this pertains to the way the media was approached and perceived by NSI. Instead of criticizing the media in its bourgeois form, NSI members went to the extent of identifying newspapers like Tehelka as “friends”/”part” of the campaign! One NSI members even said that Tehelka, if involved extensively, will make the process of the campaign “smooth” (29 June 2010). Expectedly, this perception also became that of UCD, as reflected in some emails exchanged during end June and early July. Of course, we would not have said anything if such statements on the media had not come from an organization that claims to be Marxist. Isn’t it a Marxist axiom that in the process of resisting capitalism we should not reproduce the spirit of bourgeois thinking?
3. How Marxism Identifies the Position of the Working Class vis-à-vis Identities
While upholding KYS’s critique of the form of politics represented by the main tendency in UCD as well as KYS’s understanding of the relationship between identity and class struggle, Paresh Chandra, in his most recent response differs on some of the specificities of KYS’s prognosis. His main difference with our position is that students’ class position cannot be identified on the basis of their class background and the kinds of colleges/institutions/courses they end up in. For him the main defining feature of student [all]- as- worker is the very condition they (students) are being ascribed within the university/education system (more on this later). He further accuses us for identifying the class position of students only on the basis of their background whereby reducing class to a “sociological fixity”. The end result being that we read class as a static sociological entity which can then be found more in some institutions/courses than the others. On the contrary, we had argued that ‘student’ is an identity comprising of different class positions and if we don’t see the different class positions within (and its implications) we will end up reducing university politics into an identitarian one (having identifiable common interests vis-à-vis other social entities and the state). To further elucidate, it is the different class trajectories (journeys) that determine the being of a student. These trajectories are based not only on class background but on the class process itself (i.e. the process whereby one’s class position is subject to change, depending on changes in the contingent factors in the economy). Thus, what kind of student one will end up being is determined by the combination of one’s class background and the class process (something which creates possibilities of contradictory class positions, particularly with respect to the middle strata, i.e. the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, etc.). To simplify the matter, there can be different kinds of students: working class, petty bourgeois, peasant, bourgeois, etc. We will restrict our discussion to working class and petty bourgeois students because of their particular bearing on the nature of university politics that exists in general.
Working class students find themselves in a condition where they get admission to lower grade educational institutes, and even when they enter the threshold of better institutions their inability to cope up causes them to perform badly. Considering this, their pursuit of higher education is such that they take with them merely the basic skills required to survive in the job market. Their education is directly based on them being future bearers of labour power/producers of surplus value, and hence, the logical conclusion of their education is them becoming workers. On the other hand, some petty bourgeois students, through education, come to acquire skills (as a property form), which then helps them share with the bourgeoisie, surplus value produced by workers. Characteristically, petty bourgeois students regard the future as relatively bright, and instead, complain of the drudgery of the present (for them the immediate is what is visible and troubling, i.e. the rigors of the education system and the fact that they sometimes receive less pocket money than what workers earn). Bourgeois students pursue an education so as to acquire the etiquettes which will help their further integration into the ruling class. Thus, their coming to universities to study does not make them part of the working class or petty bourgeoisie.
However, arguing from his position of student-as-worker, Paresh contends that our class analysis of students led us to project class as a sociological entity. To begin with, Paresh has unfortunately misread our historical empiric, i.e., a level where things will only appear as a sociological entity. We never equated class with what simply appears as a sociological entity, and, in fact, see it as a process which is bolstered by state policies seeking to fulfill the needs of the labour market. We concretely think class is a historical accumulation of humankind that has a determinate relationship with other classes, which might or might not appear as sociological entities in their different moments of congealment in the trajectory of their unfolding. In fact, in the paragraph quoted by Paresh, we have talked about students as a sociological entity, hence, requiring a class analysis. If only you had managed to go beyond the phenomenological level (where you have hypostasized our historical empiric) you would have definitely realized that our historical empiric is linked to how ‘student’ as a sociological entity, is connected to government education policies and the education market. For example, when we talked about youth who have studied in government schools, come from the Hindi medium background, rarely get admission to college hostels and struggle to cope with increasing college fees and English medium teaching/coursework, we were hinting at the existence of a dual education system (prevalence of both government schools & private schools). We were also hinting at the cut off system, an administrative process in which students coming from different backgrounds are distributed among graded colleges. Because of the cut off based admission process, many students coming from the working class get admission to low grade colleges, and do not get admission into hostels because such colleges do not have any.
In more ontological terms, we are saying that the state is the constitutive element in the expanded reproduction of the system, which requires different forms of labour to be produced through graded education. Indeed, how else can one explain that only 7 percent of all youth who clear the twelfth class examination, find their way into higher education, and that even at the level of higher education the Radhakrishna system of ‘centres of excellence’ prevails? How else would we explain that our school education is hierarchically arranged in the following manner: Charvaha Vidyalas/Ekal Schools for children of agrarian workers and poor peasants; Navodayas for children of agrarian elites; Sarvodayas for children of the urban working class; KVs (Central schools) for children of central government employees (a strata itself divided into a petty bourgeois and working class position); and expensive private schools like Woodstock, Doon, Mayo, Modern, DPS, etc. for you know whom.
Now that we have clarified what we meant to say in our quoted sentences, let us clarify what Paresh is actually saying in the paragraph quoted from Correspondence’s pamphlet. Paresh quotes, “When Marx says ‘working class,’ does he mean only the ‘male, white, industrial proletariat?…” Kudos to you, your move to go beyond Marx with Marx has allowed you to throw suspicion on Marx’s understanding. This is an infliction of the liberal virus on revolutionary ideas; ironically something you yourself criticized UCD members for. To relieve you of your (mis)reading of Marx, we leave you with Marx’s own words: “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (Capital, Vol. I). Clearly, Marx had an understanding of the working class being both white and black. Numerous writings of both Marx and Engels will also prove that they believed the working class was constituted of all sexes. And as far as the industrial proletariat is concerned, Marx always considered it a subset of the working class, albeit the most important and essential force in the working class struggle.
Having said this we also wish to highlight another tacit misunderstanding of Paresh, that Marxism is just about Marx and for that matter what other great Marxist leaders have to say. In reality, Marxism is a summation of different experiences of the working class in its conflict with capital. It is a synthesized articulation of the concrete. This synthesized articulation was used by Marx in philosophical debates (German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach), in the critique of political economy (Ricardo), in debates on socialism (Proudhon), and in debates on political forms (Eighteen Brumaire, Civil War in France, Critique of Gotha Program). This synthesized summation was continued and applied by different leaders of the international proletarian movement as well as by numerous militant activists in the movement.
Moving on, in his own piece, Paresh bestows the working class position as a whole onto some identities, especially students. Though Paresh many times concedes (here and there) that TENDENCY has some relationship with class POSITION, in his endeavour to apply the epithet of working class on students as a whole, he ultimately detaches tendency from class position. He comes to define tendency as “control on one’s life”, which almost becomes a quasi-behaviourist analysis of stimulus response. To quote him further on this, “in some [students] the petty bourgeois tendency is stronger while in others it is weaker and this varies in proportion to the degree of control an individual has over his/her life.” Having achieved this abstraction Paresh goes onto provide a solution to the thorny question of consciousness. To quote him, “a class conscious student would see herself/himself as a member of the working class and in that will leave behind determinations like prehistory and family.” We really wonder why a class conscious student belonging to a petty bourgeois class position will not develop a petty bourgeois class consciousness! Some (not Paresh) have even come to argue that the petty bourgeoisie can be de-classed and a different consciousness can be imputed in them. Indeed, these two positions might look dissimilar, but they do have kin affinities because both positions tendentially make class position unimportant for one’s consciousness.
We also wonder what the operative part of such analysis could be. One possible form that comes to our mind is the whole notion of “Campus Democracy” (supported by many Left liberals and ‘Left’ organizations on campus), which is achieved through struggles of students, teachers and other staff members to control the university (more on this point in section 5). We cannot actually be sure of whether this analysis is based on the summation of any past or contemporary, concrete experiment in student politics. Let us take the example of the most radical student movement of all time, i.e., the 1968 French student revolt. Many in their nostalgic account of this movement fail to identify the core experiment of the movement—one that should be generalized. The real essence of this movement is best projected in the pamphlet titled, THE MARCH 22nd MOVEMENT, which identified the demand to ‘Defend the common interest of all students’, as illusionary. This essence can also be extracted from statements made by some of its leaders. For example, one of the most radical French student leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in an interview taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that students’ seats in hostels (Cites) should be given to workers and apprentices, and that “well to do students in law and science-po go elsewhere”. Again in his interview to Herve Bourges, he vehemently asserted, “I do not believe in student unity for there are no objective interests common to all students”. In response to another question in the interview he criticized UNEF (considered a Left wing formation), for representing the bourgeoisie, and called it a pseudo mass movement because it did not represent real demands and aspirations of working class students. Cohn-Bendit clearly made a distinction between the November strikes and the Nanterre movement which emerged from the Nanterre campus located outside Paris, i.e. amongst the neighbouring slums. The students here were socially divided between affluent students from the wealthy quarters of Paris and students from working class backgrounds. So, ultimately, inheriting what can be termed the best of the 1968 legacy, we want to assert that the relationship between students and class struggle could take two forms: (i) working class students aligning with rest of the working class outside university campuses; and (ii) working class students uniting against the provision of facilities to a few privileged students, and thereby, demanding for the provision of these facilities to all.
Further we believe the views presented by Paresh stem from a particular (mis)understanding of the working class position and the ontological configuration of identities. This understanding of class is based on a highly problematic understanding of capitalism itself, i.e. of capitalism as a carceral continuum. Due to this conceptualization of capitalism in Foucaultian terms, an identity such as ‘students’ becomes a working class position. This is reflected in expressions such as students being monitored/regimentalized or losing the right to self-determinism—an incarceration considered emblematic of the working class position. It is also present in expressions such as “the working class is that section of people on which [sic] work is imposed”, and this working class with its continuum of subjectivity can be found “beyond localized time and space”. In these terms, the ancient slave, medieval serf and peasantry, i.e. on whomsoever work is imposed, is the working class! Clearly, people who argue from such positions, such as Paresh, actually forget the historicity of the modern working class. Marx clearly identified the working class as distinct from other laboring masses both in terms of time and space. In this regard he identified the working class as a section devoid of property (means of production), and hence, “free”/compelled to sell its labour power.
If we extend the logic of Paresh’s arguments, we will see that they assume that an identity such as ‘students’ is not divided amongst several class positions, but is the working class position itself. To highlight the danger of holding onto such a position we would like to draw immediate attention to the fact that such an “axiom” (if applicable) would apply even to capitalists. After all, capitalists too are bound by social etiquettes of the time and also complain of being caged in by prevailing social norms. In this regard do we attribute to them the working class position as well? We do not, and know that you too will agree to the same.
We suspect that a certain petty bourgeois discomfort with the formidable logic of Marxism, in particular, its notion of generalization, is the cause of this “status”/position borrowing. Rather than taking to the working class/proletarian position (in terms of tying one’s own petty bourgeois class interests with the interests of the working class), so as to resolve the petty bourgeois question, certain individuals from the petty bourgeois class have conveniently started calling themselves working class. Marxism as a politics and as a science has never encouraged the concealment or displacement of one’s class position, but has, on the contrary, called for the engagement with one’s class position in the process of class struggle. In other words, Marxism has always called a spade a spade when identifying different class positions and their articulation within different identities. According to Marxism, the petty bourgeois question can only be resolved on the basis of an engagement with one’s petty bourgeois class position in alignment with that of the working class position. The petty bourgeois question cannot be resolved by presuming a working class position itself.
What do we mean by the petty bourgeois question? Well, we believe it is best demonstrated in recent Bollywood movies like Three Idiots and Udaan. What comes across through this rather powerful medium is the present plight of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. growing competition for limited facilities provided by capitalism, and the increasing mechanization of life due to ever growing demands of the system in place. At this historical conjuncture, the need of the hour is not to equate mechanization of petty bourgeois life with the working class position, but to show the petty bourgeoisie how their OPPRESSION ties up with the working class’s EXPLOITATION. Let us take the example of the medical profession for which youth from petty bourgeois families aspire for in large numbers. Indeed most doctors (mostly, self employed professionals) are from petty bourgeois backgrounds. However, to become doctors, these youth have to undergo cut-throat competition. This is because capitalism as a system does not provide healthcare to the majority of people, especially the working class considering its limited buying power. As a result, it makes provisions for limited number of medical educational institutes and jobs in medical institutions. And it is for these limited seats and jobs that petty bourgeois youth are forced to compete. In this context, the working class’s struggle for the provision of more healthcare facilities and investment in the social sector as a whole, indirectly benefits petty bourgeois youth aspiring to be doctors. It creates the condition for the creation of more medical educational institutes (more seats, hence less competition), as well as more hospitals (hence, more jobs). The process, of course, leads to a less mechanized way of life for youth aspiring for such employment. In a crucial way, it will prevent the growing mechanization of children’s lives, who, in the current scenario, lose their youth under the burden of studies/competition, and who have increasingly come to feel they have lost the right to self-determination.
In this context, the objective interest of this petty bourgeois section lies not in identifying itself as working class. Instead its objective interest lies in uniting with the emancipatory politics of the working class. Such unity is feasible and desirable because in the process of fighting for its own liberation the working class can build a system, annihilating class society, in which other sections of society will have freed and equal access to opportunities and resources.
Returning to the specific question of the working class position and the ontological configuration of identities, we would like to reiterate that it is wrong to perceive different identities as a subset of the working class. Rather than conceptualizing identities (woman, student, Dalit, OBC, Black, delinquents, etc.) as momentary congealments of the working class position, it is important to read them as multiclass entities—as sites of struggle in which contradictory class positions are in conflict with each other. The latter is the precise way in which Marxism conceptualizes identities. This is because it realizes that the different identities in existence have different ontological depths. For example, Marxism believes that the identity ‘woman’ is not the same as another identity, say that of ‘Dalit’, and that the two identities encompass a somewhat different (in terms of degree, etc.), conflict of varied class positions within them. Indeed, unlike the popular perception of Marxism as an epistemology, Marxism is the synthesis of multiple epistemologies that extract experiences emanating from different sites of struggle, i.e. from different identities. By extracting these varied experiences it actively unites the working class/proletarian experience (collective will of the class) that is spread across the different identities (just like other class positions are).
Having said this, let us trace the larger theoretical source of such analysis of identities vis-à-vis the working class position. The theoretical source from which Paresh’s arguments about students as workers emerge, is Negrian clap trap based on the mixing up of Foucault with Marx. In other words, such views stem from earlier endeavours to re-ontologize Marxism, i.e., going beyond Marx with Marx. Negri carries to the extreme the ideas of Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti (great leaders of the Italian working class movement), in particular, their analysis of the political class composition of workers. For Negri, class composition is not just based on determinations like labour power as variable capital, but also on determinations like the historical and social level of labour power’s reproduction. In other words, for him, determination of class composition should include, together with the wage structure, other structures that reproduce labour power.
Marx made a distinction between labour forms which are heterogeneous and take place in different concrete conditions. Hence, concrete labour. But these different heterogeneous labour forms, in capitalism, are commensurate at the level of value they produce, expressed in the price of the commodity at a given equilibrium level. Hence, abstract labour. Abstract labour expresses, therefore, certain relations of production, i.e. relations between producers of commodities and the capitalists who own the means of production and appropriate the surplus value created by labour. For Marx this dual character of labour (abstract and concrete labour) is conditioned on the skewed property relationship which forces a worker to work for a capitalist. Thus, in capitalism concrete labour forms a dialectical unity with abstract labour. Outside the relationship of production this duality cannot exist. Hence, for Marx, destroying the property relations is the precondition for liberation of labour from a condition where one person’s labour becomes another person’s profit.
Negri calls this conceptual distinction a qualitative and quantitative distinction. In this context, he argues that the theory of value, as a form of equilibrium, seizes to have any remaining validity in our time. Negri takes a clear cut Morishimite position. To quote Morishima “…as soon as heterogeneity of labour is allowed for, the theory of value is seen to conflict with Marx’s law of equalization of the rate of exploitation through society, unless the different sorts of labour are reduced to homogenous abstract human labour in proportion to their wage rates, ” (Marx’s Economics). Negri considers Marx’s labour theory of value simply as the refining of concepts developed by his contemporaries. He argues that there is another conception of labour theory of value present in Marx’s work (Grundrisse), which according to him departs radically from capitalist theories and Marxist theories, and focuses not on capitalist processes of valorization, but rather on the processes of labour’s self-valorization. To quote him further “Marx considered the value of labour not as a figure of equilibrium but as an antagonistic figure, as a subject of the dynamic rupture of the system. The concept of labour power is thus considered as valorizing element of production, relatively independent of the functioning of the capitalist law of value…This means that although in the first theory value was fixed in the structures of capital, in this second theory labour and value are both variable elements.” Having freed labour from the distinctively exploitative relationship to capital in the circuit of capital self valorization, Negri reduces Capital to an elementary expression of command. For him changing the property relationship within which the labour process takes place is no longer relevant. Again to quote him, “the notion of foundational war of all against all is based on an economy of private property and scarce resources. Material property, such as land or water or a car, cannot be in two places at once: my having and using it negates your having and using it. Immaterial property, however, such as an idea or image or a form of communication is infinitely reproducible…Some resources do remain scarce today, but many, in fact, particularly the newest elements of the economy, do not operate on a logic of scarcity,” (Multitude). The clear cut meaning to be drawn from this is that resources are scarce which is why they are owned by capitalists, but the newest elements of the economy such as immaterial property can be owned by anyone for self-valorization of one’s labour.
Again to quote him extensively, “The most important general phenomenon of the transformation of labour that we have witnessed in recent years is the passage toward what we call the factory-society. The factory can no longer be conceived as the paradigmatic site or the concentration of labour and production; laboring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society. In other words, the apparent decline of the factory as the site of production does not mean a decline in the regime of and discipline of factory production, but means rather it is no longer limited to a particular site in society. It has insinuated itself throughout all forms of social production, spreading like a virus. All of society is now permeated through and through with the regime of the factory, that is, with the rules of the specifically capitalist relations of production. In this light, a series of Marxian distinctions need to be reviewed and reconsidered. For example, in the factory society the traditional conceptual distinction between productive and unproductive labour and between production and reproduction, which even in other periods had dubious validity, should today be considered defunct,” (Labour of Dionysius).
Having detached his ontology of labour from the circuit of capital’s self-valorization and its actualization in circulation, Negri comes to posit that a working class subjectivity for autonomy and self creation is now expressed in a new class composition. In his chronology of capitalism’s development there emerge, (i) Mass workers: all workers working for different capitalists spread over different junctures in the supply chain; (ii) the Collective worker: anyone on whom work is being imposed, and basically, anyone who helps reproduce labour power, (whether within or outside the circuit of capital accumulation and the labour process, such as women doing domestic labour, peasants, students, self-employed professionals, etc.). In a recent avatar, with increasing detachment from the existing working class movement, Negri, once a working class militant, has now come to sermonize from his position as a university democrat. His earlier collective worker has now metamorphosed into “multitude”, and hence, signifying that whomsoever is rejecting work and any control on their life, ARE CREATING a new world—his communism within capitalism (!).
Clearly, Negrian analysis includes playing with (distorting) certain key Marxist categories of analysis and arguments in the attempt to establish the petty bourgeois section (our term)/immaterial labour (his term—which itself is divided in petty bourgeois and worker), as the pivotal force in contemporary times. Of course, there will be an acceptance of the tangible presence of agricultural and industrial labour. To quote Negri, “Agricultural labour remains…dominant in quantitative terms, and industrial labour has not declined in terms of numbers globally. Immaterial labour constitutes a minority of global, and it is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe. Our claim, rather, is that immaterial labour has become hegemonic in qualitative terms,” (Multitude); [emphasis in original]. By extension, this analysis means that the fight against capitalism is not against the property relationship within which the dual character of labour emerges, but SIMPLY AGAINST the daily transformation of our doing/our activities into abstract labour. Furthermore, only this so called hegemonic immaterial labour is in the position to do this. This model is best propagated by John Holloway in his article “Doing In-Against-and-Beyond Labour”. To quote Holloway, “…it is not just in the workplace: life itself is a constant struggle to break through the connections forced by abstract labour to create other sorts of social relations: when we refuse to go to work so that we can stay and play with the children, when we read (or write) an article like this, when we choose to do something not because it will bring us money but just because we enjoy it or consider it important. All the time we oppose use value to value, concrete doing to abstract labour. It is from these revolts of every day resistance, and not from the struggles of activists or parties that we must pose the question of the possibility of ceasing to create capitalism and creating a different sort of society.”
Of course, we sincerely doubt that Paresh is succumbing fully to such views. However, what we wish to point out is that a road somewhat half traveled with Negri, is a grave mistake for those committed to Marxism. If all the identities have simply entered into the reproduction structure of labour power then we can claim, based on this understanding, that all identities are equally subordinated to the rule of capital. And this is precisely what Paresh has almost come to argue. To quote him from his article, “Through and Beyond: Identities and Class Struggle”: “the problem of identities is the way it exists in the current conjuncture…all equally [emphasis added] subordinated to the rule of capital”.
However, contrary to Paresh’s analysis, for Marxism identities are not simply part of the whole (in the sense that they seamlessly flow into the whole, i.e. the working class position), but “parts” divided amongst different classes (Dalits, peasants, women etc. are all divided amongst different classes). In other words, all these identities cannot be axiomatically assumed to be part of the working class and hence, equally subordinated to the rule of capital. They should, instead, be seen as products of heterogeneous forms of labour and their alignment with different moments of capital. To illustrate this it is best to talk in terms of some concrete examples that reveal the multiple class positions present in identities and how these positions articulate themselves in a given social reality. Let us begin with the identity ‘peasant’ and how class differentiations within it are being overlooked by certain left organizations, in particular, Maoist organizations. Indeed, eliding the issue of class differentiation within the peasantry (akin to overlooking class differentiation within students) has been a perpetual problem in the Indian communist movement. Whenever movements have emerged and then intensified, communist organizations have often failed to address the issue of class divisions within the peasantry, thereby allowing rich peasants to curb the radical potential of such movements. As a result of this class collaborationist position, movements that are at junctures which can lead to further unfolding of radical and transformative politics, are withdrawn or die a natural death under the hegemony and dominance of rich peasants. It is this precise class collaborationist position vis-à-vis peasant politics that can be identified as revisionism in the Indian communist movement. Some details of this unfortunate process are discussed below.
At present, in many parts of India we can see Maoist politics at work. The problem with this politics (as highlighted by us on several platforms) is its promotion of a conglomeration/alliance between peasants (ignoring the class differentiation within), regional bourgeoisie (considered as national bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the wrongly ascertained All-India bourgeoisie/big bourgeoisie as comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie), petty bourgeoisie (itself divided tendentially into polarizing class processes), and the working class. The crux of our argument is that this form of alliance amounts to singing old songs in new times. This is because since the time of 1947 (the “transfer of power”) the Indian bourgeoisie has come on its own after successfully hegemonizing the Indian national liberation struggle. Following this, in the period of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, heightened conflicts emerged between the different sections of the Indian bourgeoisie under the aegis of the federal form of state. By this time a rank of regional bourgeoisie had emerged in stiff opposition to the big/All India bourgeoisie. The roots of the regional bourgeoisie lay in the transformation of property forms held by the rank of rich peasants. For example, after gradually acquiring property owned by poor peasants, the class of rich peasants moved onto diversifying their capital. No longer did they remain merely rich peasants but became petrol pump/cinema hall owners or entered the lucrative business of transportation, hardware, construction, etc. In this context one can say the tumultuous years post Independence were characterized by struggles based on competitive claims of different moments in the being and becoming of India’s capitalist class. Ironically, many a time Communists wrongly identified these struggles (constitutive of both friend and enemy classes), and formed united-fronts with them.
India’s Independence from colonial rule was based firmly on a multi-class alliance. Post this historical conjuncture, Communists came to make several mistakes while reading crucial moments in the process of class. Their misreading of historical moments for what they were, led them to make a series of dangerous alliances with the Congress, etc. Many such alliances led to the erosion of the Communist Party’s support base in constituencies such as those of the depressed classes. In reaction to the growing inertia and revisionism within the Communist movement, the militant Naxalbari struggle emerged. This militant struggle spread like fire and took the form of a prolonged movement, which actively sought to strengthen the anti-revisionist forces in the Communist movement. To coordinate the anti-revisionist tendency in the Communist movement a front called the All India Coordination Committee for Communist Revolutionaries (A.I.C.C.C.R.) was formed. Unfortunately, this body was dissolved. In its place emerged the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) which was based on a party program that continued to project the Democratic Revolution as communist strategy. Splinter groups that have subsequently emerged follow some form or the other of this party program. One can say that by deferring the Socialist Revolution the progeny of the Naxalite movement are actually devouring their mother (i.e., the militancy thrown up again and again by dispossessed tribals and agrarian labour).
Take, for example, the Telangana movement in which two tendencies prevailed; one, which sought to keep the alliance intact by neutralizing the claims of agrarian workers who were key participants in the movement, and two, which sought to continue the struggle based on agrarian workers demands (1). The Communist Party came under the sway of the former, and the Telengana movement was withdrawn, hence, firmly establishing the Party (its legitimacy, etc.) on the rank of rich peasants. Post this maneuver the Communist Party came to be identified as the party of Kamma and Reddy—these being the two castes to which rich peasants (and later the regional bourgeoisie) belonged. Jokes circulating in the Dalit circle such as, “he is a Kama-Red” etc., reflect this unfortunate fact. Furthermore, if we trace the history of many rich peasant families involved in the early phase of the Telengana movement, we will find that many were transformed into the regional bourgeoisie. For example, the owner of one of the biggest drug companies in the world today, i.e., Dr. Reddy, hails from a rich peasant background. Similarly, the owners of Nagarjuna, a construction company, are from rich peasant families. They started out by outbidding Birla for the construction of the Nagarjuna Dam and have subsequently become one of the biggest construction companies in the world with several projects in war ridden Iraq and Afghanistan. Ramji Rao is also a notable example. His family participated in the Telengana movement, and he himself, was a state committee member of the CPI (later joined NT Rama Rao). Interestingly, he is now the owner of a 2000 acre film city—the biggest film city in the world!
Another historical blunder comes to mind. This time we speak of Maharashtra and the linguistic struggle that emerged in the early 1960s. The Communist Party supported the movement, and in fact, many workers became martyrs for the movement under the illusion that they were fighting for “Workers’ Raj”. In reality, the movement was in the hegemony of the emerging Maratha regional bourgeoisie/rich peasantry which was opposed to the older Marwari-Gujrati bourgeoisie based in the ‘Maharashtra’ region. All the working class got in return for their martyrdom was betrayal, embodied most cruelly in the celebration of Maharashtra Day on May Day, i.e. May 1st.
Indeed, if 1947 was the tragedy, the compromise in the Telangana movement was a farce. Similarly, the CPI-ML party program and its continuation are farcical repetitions where revolutionary zeal emanating from dispossessed tribals and agrarian workers are galvanized to proclaim deferment of the socialist revolution, and hence, to keep the form of Indian revolution perpetually at the democratic stage.
In this context, we believe that Maoists in India are communists only at a nascent stage of their struggle, i.e. when they begin to emerge from the struggles of dispossessed tribals and agrarian workers. We say this because once their influence in a region grows (i.e., with the formation of ‘liberated zones’), they come to make dangerous alliances with regional elites, and their politics increasingly fails to engage with differentiation present within the tribal and peasant population. It is a fact that the tribal population, for example, is not a homogenous group as often projected by Maoists. Tribal elites ally with the private business sector and become stakeholders in the lucrative forest-goods trade, or become contractors /transporters /moneylenders /suppliers of essential commodities in the region. In pursuing their business these tribal elites do not hesitate in exploiting their poorer tribal ‘brethren’. Similarly, rich peasants in Maoist-influenced regions, rake in significant profits through poppy cultivation, etc. They too openly exploit agrarian labour and poorer tribals employed by them. Though we as a tendency in the larger Left movement will always stand by the proletarian content in the Maoist movement, (and hence, oppose any state repression against them), we continue to criticize their class collaborationist line with respect to enemy classes (unity and struggle). Thus, as argued in this discussion on Maoist/peasant question, taking any sociological entity or identity as homogenous and then constituting a united front, leads to neutralization of the working class position and decimation of the movement’s radical potential.
4. Detailing the strategy and tactics of United Front
This brings us to the very important question of strategy and tactics of United Front. United Front is crucial for the working class movement because it ensures unity between different sections of workers spread over different identities, and also because it unites the working class with other oppressed sections in society. Although United Front ensures the working class is not isolated in its struggle against the rule of capital, it prevents the neutralization of the working class’s position, and hence, keeps intact the foundational logic of the progressive movement (i.e. the impulse of going beyond the system). We believe the dialectics of certain entities determine the form of United Front. These entities are: geopolitical formations (agrarian, forest, urban, slums, factories, universities, etc.); class (rich peasants, small peasants, agrarian workers, tribal contractors, dispossessed tribals, industrial and commercial capitalists, rentier petty bourgeoisie, slum proletariat, workers); different demands and tendencies; and different forms of politics. It is only through concrete analysis of the dialectical process of these entities that we can establish what form of United Front is Rational, Desirable and Feasible. No abstract and ahistorical generalization on the form of United Front and the participation of Communists in it is productive. Having said this, certain general features of any United Front can be summed up and synthesized in practices which we undertake, using, of course, the past experiences of the Communist movement. In the muddy history of United Front its formal conceptualization by the Comintern Congress of 1921 is often lost. Its essence is best retrieved from the report of this Congress in which it is conceptualized as maneuver designed to build unity between workers, given the historical context of the time. According to the Comintern Congress, United Front stood for the minority of communists trying to win over the majority of non-revolutionary workers (2). Later the basic thrust and spirit of United Front was applied by the Comintern to resolve the question of national liberation/nationalities, race, etc. According to its principles, communist workers were to ally with non-revolutionary workers and other sections of society in struggle against oppression, keeping their independence intact. So, the unity could not be based on the neutralization of one’s position. In other words, autonomy of action and will was emphasized. Furthermore, it was argued that with the spread of the working class will amongst non-revolutionary workers, communists would be in the position to expose to the workers the hollowness of non-revolutionary organizations that would obviously rebel against activities embodying the working class will.
Following the Comintern Congress, the principles of United Front found their way into many struggles as well as theses on the combined struggle of the working class and other classes in society (see Roy-Lenin Thesis on Nationality Question, the Dimitrov thesis of 1934-35 where the concept of popular/national front is discussed, Blum Thesis, National Front Thesis by Ho-Chi Min, etc.). In China the first United Front was formed between 1924 and 1927, and was based on the alliance of KMT and CPC. In 1937 the second United Front was formed between the KMT and CPC, which lasted till 1943. From the Second United Front (of KMT and CPC) many insights can be drawn regarding the Chinese communist strategy; many of which are applicable today and should be generalized. The Second United Front was based firmly on the basic thrust and spirit of the Communist International, and thereby, a Leninist position. As a result the Second United Front was based on the expansive hegemony of the proletariat and was characterized by endeavours to continuously work amongst the masses so as to wean them away from the enemy’s fold.
In this rich history of varied experiments with United Front, the so called Gramscian position is often picked up and emphasized. Gramsci’s writings were the product of a particular historical conjuncture, and were composed at a time when he identified the Southern question as the key problem of revolution in Italy. The whole question was centered on how to make the national-popular come on its own. According to Gramsci the failure of the ‘national-popular’ to come on its own amounted to the bourgeoisie winning over the petty bourgeoisie/peasantry. This failure of national popular or the new nation state (after the unification of Italy) was the result of a passive revolution based on the mass of peasantry giving only a passive and limited consent to a new political order. This limited consent of the peasantry led to a weak basis for a new political order, resulting in the Italian Risorgimento which relied increasingly on force. In this context, Gramsci defined as the special historical project of the proletariat, the helping of the nation to come on its own and the re-articulating of the demands and aspirations of the peasantry. With this project in hand the proletariat would come to form a new historical bloc based on continuous endeavours to win the heart and mind of the peasantry (also known as a war of position that came before a war of movement, or frontal attack). Unfortunately, Gramsci’s position on related practices led him to support National Socialism (Mussolini). In fact, precisely because there are fragmentary and inconclusive statements in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks about the extent to which working class hegemony can or must be developed before state power is transformed; his views have since then often been used to propel social democratic trends like Eurocommunism. Nevertheless, (leaving aside his momentary lapses-support for Mussolini and his appropriation by Eurocommunism), for Gramsci the central concern for the United Front was the weaning away of the petty bourgeois class/peasantry from the clutches of the bourgeoisie into the fold of the communist working class movement. (In this way Gramsci remained within the overall tradition of the early Communist International)
Unfortunately, Gramsci’s position, once detached from its concern for the working class movement, is often translated into different kinds of alliance building (Rainbow Coalition, etc.) in which different sections are sought to be won over by neutralizing one’s own demands. In other words, to resolve the antagonism that comes with alliance building, the neutralization of one’s own position is actively pursued. The so called Gramscian position has also been translated into a second form of alliance, i.e. the so called Democratic Alliance. This form of alliance building is based not on the neutralization of one’s demands but on the notion of equivalence of dis/content. An excellent example comes to mind—students are being evicted, so are basti people, and hence, the two can unite. In fact, it is assumed that wider the chain of equivalence, the wider the democratic alliance, and hence, the wider the collective built. However, the problem with such a position lies precisely in its assumption that equivalence in content (quantity) means the equivalence in form (quality). In reality an engagement with the form in which discontent exists in different sites/demands is very important; otherwise a de-materialized so called dialectics will make us believe that a certain level of discontent (quantity) is translatable into qualitatively different forms of articulation. To prove this let us draw on immediate events/incidents before us. Students have been evicted from college hostels in the wake of the Commonwealth Games, yet despite their obvious discontent they have not come forward to stop evictions taking place in other parts of the city (according to the golden rule of equivalence of discontent, they should have). Similarly, more the eviction of students, the more students should have aligned with others evicted. However, this has not happened either. Indeed, evicted students do not see an equivalence in the eviction of slum dwellers. The reason for this is the material constraints created by the complexities of varied class positions. We draw an analogy to elucidate how material constraints exist on the dialectical flow of one “part” into the rest of the whole: A small cat when it grows will become a big cat that meows and not a lion that roars.
The third form of alliance building would be the Leninist position, which is based on expansive hegemony of the working class. According to this position, the expansive hegemony of the working class can only be forged in the alliance by one medium, i.e. uniting of the different sections of workers scattered across different identities. It is the ability to unite heterogeneous labour forms that allows for the emergence of collective will (communist subjectivity). The highest development in the form of this collective will is embodied in Communist parties, whereas in its lowest level of development it is embodied in the communist subjectivity present in individuals, small organizations etc. So, it is only when this medium is acquired that we can make a successful alliance with other oppressed sections in society. For the sake of elucidation we refer to communist organizations’ political work amongst the Dalit community.
As an organization KYS is sensitive to the fact that ‘Dalit’ is an identity divided between a petty bourgeois class position and a working class position. In fact, we see the identity of Dalit as an articulation of United Front. Within this United Front, either the working class’ expansive hegemony can exist or the petty bourgeoisie’s expansive hegemony can exist. Currently, it is the latter that is in force. In the case of the petty bourgeoisie, the understanding of Dalit identity is based on the persistence of the identity across time and space. This position is best articulated by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (see ‘Note by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar on the Depressed Classes’, in Indian Franchise Committee, Vo.I, Calcutta, 1932, pp 202-11). In this piece Ambedkar argued against using any economic criterion for defining the depressed classes, citing examples of many well off persons amongst untouchables. Simultaneously, he argued against the universal voting right saying that the so-called better off amongst the untouchables would equally represent the poorer untouchables. Interestingly, due to the retention of the property qualification only 3.56 percent of untouchables were given voting rights in Bombay Presidency. Even today, the myth of representational politics is being kept alive within the Dalit community which is best projected in slogans such as “DM se CM, CM se PM!” etc. In reality, despite Dalit MLAs, MPs and CMs coming into existence, the material social conditions of majority Dalits remain the same.
Apart from the issue of voting rights we can see petty bourgeois hegemony articulate itself within reservation and the labour market. By demanding proportionate reservation the petty bourgeois section of the Dalit community has created ample space for its own upward mobility, and none for the working class segment of this community (who are in the majority). For example, the crème de la crème of the Dalit community are the first to pick up the few government jobs reserved for Scheduled Castes (i.e., according to the principle of proportion). In no way does their upward mobility in the labour market uplift the conditions of the majority Dalits, i.e. working class Dalits, who to this day toil on other people’s fields or do back breaking and degrading work like manual scavenging. Again, at the level of education, reservation works in the favour of this petty bourgeois section. The fifteen percent reservation provided to Scheduled Caste (SC) students in government institutes for higher education works in the following way: out of every hundred seats, fifteen are reserved for SC students, and for these fifteen seats both petty bourgeois and working class Dalits are made to compete. Considering that the total number of Dalits who seek admission is always greater than the number of seats, the reserved seats end up being distributed according to ‘merit’. In this context the seats go to Dalits from the petty bourgeois class since they have had access to better schooling etc., and hence, are more ‘meritorious’.
In opposition to this expansive hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie is the work of Communist organizations. In the debate on franchise, for example, the Communist Party of India argued vociferously from the proletarian position. Communist leader Ranadive argued that all Dalits should be allowed to vote, and at a particular historical conjuncture even supported separate electorates. Ranadive openly criticized the representational form of politics supported by Ambedkar, and posited, instead, direct democracy to all people (with special provisions to the oppressed section having specific requirements). Communists also worked extensively within caste associations of the time such as the Mahar Samaj Sewa Sangh, thereby, strengthening endeavours of the Dalit movement to fight casteism prevalent at cultural and social levels. Joint teams, comprising of both “upper” castes and “untouchables”, were consciously sent to the anti-caste movement’s various sites of struggle (the Nasik Temple Satyagraha, etc.). It is also a fact that to unite the working class movement against casteism, communist trade unions made many individuals from “untouchable” castes the leaders of Mill Committees, and also, Presidents of All-India Conferences (Comrade Bhise, who was made President of the All India Textile Workers’ Conference, is an important example). In this regard, Communists also fought against the exclusion of “untouchable” castes from certain jobs. For example, during the 1928 general strike (the first general strike to be led by Communists) they demanded that Dalits be employed in the weaving department of textile mills across Bombay. Communist organizations also invested in and promoted individuals from the Dalit movement, who later became cultural icons of the Communist movement. The strategy of the Communist movement (embodied in the several tactics mentioned above), was tremendously successful in weaning away many Dalit leaders and activists from the folds of the petty bourgeois dominated Dalit movement. Indeed it was these Dalit communist leaders who led many landmark anti-caste struggles. For the record, it was Comrade R.B. More’s efforts which led to Dr. Ambedkar’s participation in the Mahar Satyagraha. R.B. More went onto join the Communist Party of India and represented a formidable link between the Dalit and Communist movement.
Similarly, in today’s context, we as a Communist youth organization actively send joint teams to protests against caste atrocities. To unite working class youth against casteism it consciously promotes leaders from Dalit working class backgrounds. This is why both its Delhi and Haryana state committees are headed by Dalit youth from families of agrarian workers. In the University context, the organization has been arguing for a change in the form in which reservation is implemented. By raising this particular demand on several platforms (including those hegemonized by the petty bourgeois class of Dalits), as well as through its neighbourhood work in working class colonies, KYS has constantly sought to expose the class divisions within the Dalit community. This strategy stems from the fact that its cadre base comes from working class youth.
Indeed, we are the only Left organization in Delhi University (DU) that invests considerable energy/resources (in terms of the number of cadre mobilized, monetary funds spent, etc.) in the admission process of SC/ST students. In fact, we are the only Left organization which remains available to Dalit students from day one of the registration process to the last day of the counseling session. Our demand for a different form of reservation’s implementation stems from the detailed observations we have made during this admission process (in particular, the exclusion of Dalit working class students). Considering the limited seats made available to Dalit students, we have found that most working class Dalits, i.e. children of agrarian labourers who come from neighbouring states like Haryana, Western U.P. and Rajasthan, are denied admission to DU. In this context we have come to demand two things:
i) That reservation should be modeled on a roster system, according to which seats are first allotted to working class Dalit students from government schools.
ii) That there should be an overall increase in the number of seats provided to Dalit students, and to those from the general category.
While the former demand is an important step in revealing the immediate tension between the two classes present in the Dalit community, the latter is a crucial step for building organization work/influence amongst the (discontent) working class segment present in upper castes as well (3). The latter demand helps the organization to expose the hollowness of upper caste pride as well as the lack of unity within upper castes due to the presence of class divisions within them. The synthesis of these two maneuvers not only helps build a successful anti-caste front but also develops a potent opposition to capitalism embodied in capitalist education policies. While a Dalit front can be co-opted by the system, an anti-caste front constituted of Dalit and non-Dalit working class and its allies will go beyond, both, the caste system and capitalism.
Hence, the synthesis of the two maneuvers mentioned above is what amounts to the medium highlighted earlier, i.e. uniting of the different sections of workers scattered across different identities. It is this medium that subsequently paves the way for a successful alliance to be forged with progressive sections of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. an alliance based on the expansive hegemony of the working class.
To prove how necessary such an alliance is even for the petty bourgeoisie, we would like to draw attention to the recent struggle of engineering students enrolled in Delhi Technical University (DTU), or the erstwhile, Delhi School of Engineering, of which many of our members were part of. Early this year, students of DTU carried out a prolonged and very militant struggle to prevent the conversion of their institution from a central government recognized institute to a state government recognized institute. For a month the students’ struggle persisted and they even ensured hundred percent boycott of the annual examination. However, despite its militancy the students’ struggle met with failure. The reason behind this defeat was the failure of the engineering students to ally their struggle with the concerns of other oppressed and exploited sections in society. The movement remained student/university specific, thereby, failing to become a trans-local one. When participating in the DTU struggle, KYS highlighted the need for the engineering students to reach out to government schools students in the city. We argued that for students aspiring for higher education, the devaluation of the engineering degree was a genuine concern, and that it was necessary to galvanize school students on the issue. The rationale behind approaching government school students (working class students, to be precise) was that they depended heavily on central government-subsidized higher education. With DTU becoming a state government run institution, a massive fee hike was introduced along with several other detrimental changes. Working class school students would have been a crucial fighting force against this gradual privatization of education. Their presence in the DTU struggle would have terrorized the Delhi and central government into accepting all the demands of the movement. Perhaps, if we had more extensive work in government schools in the city, we could have won over the DTU students regarding this strategy of alliance. Currently, our youth organization has work amongst only four government schools and some polytechnic institutes in Delhi.
Friends, this is precisely why we are concerned with the question of United Front, albeit with a notion of the hegemony principle. Indeed, we are concerned with the petty bourgeois question, and this is namely for two key reasons. Firstly, because we are not sectarian, we do not attempt to raise working class struggles in isolation. We obviously think that any isolationist stand will simply reduce working class militants into smaller sects/progressive clubs. Secondly, we realize the petty bourgeois section is being proletarianized gradually, which then creates possibilities for its mobilization either by the working class movement, or, by fascist forces (that seek to keep alive the hegemony of the bourgeoisie).
To talk in more concrete terms of the situation in universities like Delhi University (DU), we do recognize the north campus as a site of struggle, where ‘students’ as a sociological entity (within which different class positions are present) is constituted by administrative policies like cut-offs, funding for hostel facility only in certain colleges, the provision of limited number of seats in existing college hostels, the subsequent exclusion of a large number students from hostels, and thereby, the compulsion for them to live on rent. In this context, we see two concrete demands emerge, which, if given a proper political form by a Left organization, have tremendous potential. One of these demands is rent regulation in Delhi and the second is the demand for more hostels. The issue of rent regulation is a unifying factor for it unifies petty bourgeois students (living on rent in PGs) with working class students and their families who live on rent. From this unity, more hostels can also be demanded and fought for effectively. In the context of DU another pertinent issue emerges, i.e. the problem of fee hikes. This issue, unfortunately, has not been properly theorized and tapped on by many Left student groups. The fact that ‘Left’ student organizations have been unable to tap on the issue and mobilize effectively on it, is because they have made the target of this struggle (i) second and third year college students who are not affected by fee hikes (considering college administrations introduce such hikes for first year students), and are hence, least interested; (ii) first year students whose admission is confirmed on the basis that they pay the hiked fees, and are hence, more interested in “moving on”. Thus, the issue of fee hike is best raised amongst government school students or those who are going to join DU, and hence, have an objective interest in fighting for subsidized higher education. Our larger point is that the constituency of university struggles lies, both, in students enrolled in the university and those outside the university, i.e. school students. This has been KYS’s strategy with respect to Delhi University, and in concrete terms, we have been going to school students with the following demands: (i) abolition of the cut off system; ii) roll back of fee hikes in universities.
We hope this detailed exposition of our understanding on student-youth politics, clears any doubts about our political credibility and the feasibility of our political initiatives. Perhaps, for a distant observer our critique of UCD may have initially seemed liquidationalist in “sectarian” tenor. However, how can we be accused of liquidating a forum that was self-contradictory, and thereby, collapsed under its own weight? In that sense the purpose of triggering the debate was simply to show the fact that UCD had collapsed.
To straighten the record, once and for all, wish to reiterate that our position on UCD is based on the fact that UCD lacked spontaneity of form. If there was a chance for spontaneity in the form of UCD’s politics to emerge, i.e., if evicted students themselves had started a movement, or, participated in large numbers, then we would have definitely waited and continued to participate in the forum. Nothing of this kind happened. Some independent Left-leaning individuals and representatives of different organizations came together to form a JOINT FORUM/FRONT, which should not be conflated with United Front (4). This is a fact well brought out by a UCD member, Devangana, in a lengthy introspective mail. According to such accounts, even before the initial meetings in D-School, the contours of UCD were being fixed by a circuit of people familiar with each other. Considering this, we as participants, insisted that the constitutive logic of the forum be left open to further discussion and debate. Unfortunately, this intervention on our behalf was continually written off by a subset of UCD, and we quote them on this, “…basically the KYS saw itself as an advisory committee whose only role would be to teach us how to conduct ourselves…” The tenor of such comments are really like the old saying “Don’t just talk, do something!” In reality, the problem was not that KYS “was not doing something” (we were taking initiatives both inside and outside the forum, as everyone was free to do), but that we were challenging preset agendas of UCD and its goals and direction. Indeed, there were many who played an inactive role in UCD, and KYS was not one of them. We were identified to the contrary because in the process of actively participating, we were constantly questioning the preset contours of UCD. However, now that the edifice of UCD has collapsed and the “new” socialists are in disarray, there are many well intentioned individuals like Devangana who are hopeful of evolving a better strategy and building a new form of politics. In this context, what comes to mind is Mao’s motto, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent”.
5. University Democracy or Going Beyond: A Contribution to the Critique of the University System
To sum up, we have been arguing that for student politics to become truly transformative (anti-systemic), it is imperative that Left organizations (and Left leaning individuals) address the class divisions present within the student body. It is only with consistent political work amongst working class students and working class youth (those who are not enrolled in universities) that organizations can build a stable and formidable base for a consistent anti-systemic movement. In this way, by connecting the university with the issues of youth excluded from it, organizations are building a unity which lasts despite the momentariness of student life and peculiarities of the university cycle. Further we have argued that without this political strategy, left organizations cannot build a base within non-working class students; the reason being that a form of politics which is devoid of working class students’ radicalism can only lead to partial (fleeting) radicalization of petty bourgeois students. As a result, it is only when a strong base has been created within working class students and youth that the issues of other students can be galvanized (forming United Fronts), effectively into an anti-systemic movement. In this context, we believe that perceiving university politics through the prism of campus democracy (something which all ‘Left’ organizations espouse to) is a self-defeating endeavour. In a polemical vein we have raised the following question: What ails university democrats? The answer: the disease is university (social) democracy itself.
Let us look more closely at the demand for campus democracy or democratic functioning in the university. As a demand it is present in many forms. We have those who argue that ‘democracy’ is a pertinent issue for all University youth, irrespective of class divisions within them. Thus, according to such formulations, campus democracy is a larger unifying demand with tremendous potential for building transformative politics. On the other hand, we have those who argue that students/university youth as workers have much to fight for against the current university system (internal assessment, regimented class programs, etc.). Here too the struggle for democratic functioning by university youth is considered an important and anti-systemic struggle. In other words, the operative part of this demand of campus democracy is the right of self-determinism, i.e., existing University students, teachers and other staff should have the right to run the University in ways they deem fit.
It is precisely here that the hollowness of campus democracy as a demand and as an agenda emerges. Why? Because campus democracy as an agenda is more Janus-faced than progressive. The call for ‘campus’ democracy is, after all, based on a minority of youth who make it to higher education. Needless to say, the inclusion of this minority that aspires for democracy is based on the exclusion of the majority of youth from the university system (embodied in the cut off system, continuous fee hikes, etc.). In many ways then campus democracy is based simply on the semblance of democracy. Drawing an analogy to the Greek republican tradition, one can say that campus democracy works in the very same way. Just as the Greeks built ‘democratic’ city states based on the division between citizens and slaves, university democrats and liberals of today are basing their university politics on the privileged few who make it to higher education. And just like the saying carved on the Greek academia’s portal, “only those who know geometry can enter”, university democrats and liberals of today are basically saying now that you have made it into the privileged inner circle, let us speak of democracy for us.
Apart from this the problem with campus democracy is also locatable in its emphasis. Its narrative and action plans are clearly based on questions of protocol. In other words, campus democracy’s emphasis is not on locating flaws in the system itself (capitalist education policies that exclude the majority from higher education), but in identifying secondary and contingent deviations such as corruption, violation of set procedure, lack of transparency, etc. Of course, these issues (of corruption, lack of transparency, etc.) can do very little when it comes to mobilization of university-youth. As pointed out by Naina in her last email, there is an obvious limitation to how much students can be radicalized using the demand for campus democracy. If the lifeline of campus democracy is the existing student population then there is a serious problem, for these people are not here to stay for long. Considering the university cycle, majority of students are here for a period of 3 to 5 years (the compulsion to work ensures that most do not have the staying power for further studies or research work), and by the time campus democracy as an issue can radicalize them (if it can), it is time for them to go. What then do we achieve if the base of our struggle itself is unstable?
It is a fact that this university cycle has become so engrained in the politics of ‘Left’ student organizations that now an instrumentalist notion of cadre building has developed within them. In other words, since students are enrolled in the university only for a limited period of time, ‘left’ organizations on campus seek to make their presence felt amongst them using the politics of spectacle. Student organizers have come to count their voting figures as the index of their success, which leads them to use (again and again) temporary political activities as a means to draw attention. The emphasis and political logic of these ‘left’ organizations are no longer based on long term plans for taking youth politics forward, but simply, about gathering electoral support or cadre building (which is very often based on little consciousness raising and ideological training). As a result of planning from one academic session to another, these organizations have failed to work intensively and consistently amongst working class students. This failure is embodied in the fact that despite their existence on campus, these ‘left’ organizations are unable to galvanize the support of working class students. Instead of being seen with ‘Left’ student organizations, working class students can be seen with ABVP goons and NSUI lumpens. Ironically, in the battles to save ‘campus democracy’ we are thrown against working class students (coming from peripheral colleges) who have sided with ABVP goons and NSUI lumpens. This happens because student organizations of the ruling class manipulate to their advantage, the discontent prevailing in working class students. They are successful in doing so because ‘left’ student organizations fail to identify the class discontent of these working class students, and hence, give this discontent a progressive form (and radical articulation). In this context, when working class students, (coming mostly from peripheral colleges but also from some north campus colleges of DU), attack us vehemently during brawls between ‘left’ student organizations and ABVP/NSUI; we must realize why they do so. It is because of an enmity stemming from their class position, which then ultimately translates into them despising ‘leftists’. Their enmity characterizes ‘leftists’ as “cool-daddy’s boys”, liberal, oddly dressed, long haired, persons (weirdos). Until we engage with their class discontent can we really wean them away from fascist forces? And can we win ‘the battle of democracy’ without them?
Indeed, the paradox is that campus democracy itself is not strong enough to save its own tenor from the onslaught of government policies. The problem is that it cannot stand on its own: something is missing in its edifice. We believe the missing link is the involvement of working class students and youth. As highlighted above with respect to the issue of fee hikes and the DTU students’ protest, struggles against the onslaught of capitalist education policies can only meet with success once such struggles spill out of the university. Since such policies affect working class youth the most, it is imperative that university students engage actively with class divisions within them, and persistently connect their oppression with concerns of working class youth who are denied admission to universities. If they do so the content as well as the form of university politics will drastically change, and indeed, change for the better. As long as students from petty bourgeois backgrounds are not exposed to the pull and push of the radicalized working class youth politics, they are liable to be co-opted by the ruling ideology and system in place. With a few relaxations here and there, with a few generous grants released now and then, with every small gesture of ‘democratic’ functioning, the prevailing education system can win over majority of petty bourgeois students. Even as we speak, it is doing precisely this. Thus, the petty bourgeois student’s militancy needs another axis for transformative politics to even take root. It needs another vision and it needs a different set of goals so as to take on the current education system. On allying with working class youth, petty bourgeois students will learn to question the very logic of the system in place (embodied in the principle of exclusion of the majority from education), rather than just raising issues of poor implementation, corruption, etc. They will learn that the working class is not only to be found in villages and slums, but within them and around them, and that victory lies in allying with working class issues.
Friends, let our struggles be based on the demand for going beyond empty notions of democracy. Let us, in other words, struggle both within and outside the university so that youth politics comes to be based on a constant linking of issues within the university with those outside (YET CONNECTED to) it.
Notes:
(1) The latter tendency existed in another variant form, which supported the continuation of the movement on the basis of agrarian workers but called for a change in the methods pursued.
(2) Unfortunately, many times without a close reading of documents, the early Comintern’s endeavours as well as communist activities are wrongly identified as propagating “the praxis of the United Front (from above)”. If this had been the political approach of the Comintern, then, rather than a United Front it would have basically propagated the creation of joint fronts of leaders from different organizations. However, the involvement of the masses and the need to wean them away from bourgeois oppositional formations was the emphasis of the Comintern and its strategy of United Front.
(3) Interestingly, there is a third position on this issue of reservation, according to which reservation should neither be opposed nor supported. Instead, another measure, i.e. education for all, should be pursued. The problem with this position (and its abstract demand) is that it fails to tap on the specific dynamics of class conflict prevalent in different caste identities.
(4) UCD’s formation, at most, can be termed a United Front in proxy or a United Front from above which clearly lacked a mass bass. Considering the nature of the forum, it was imperative for participants who were Marxist, to ensure that the proletarian line was not diluted.
First, an axiomatic assertion: the communist conception of the United Front is by no means meant to enable the politics of liberal consensus to come into its own. If anything, it is meant to extinguish the condition of possibility for such politics. The United Front – at least in the realm of revolutionary communist theory – has always been envisaged as a programmatic concept of advance-through-generalisation for the capital-unraveling politics of the proletariat, even as it steers clear of the trap of substituting overgeneralised sectarianism for real, essential unity among concretely varied working-class locations.
This essence of the communist concept and practice of the United Front is most at stake in the ongoing polemical exchanges between the New Socialist Initiative-led University Community for Democracy (UCD) and the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS). Yet, unfortunately, it is precisely this politico-theoretical essence that has been lost in the fog of those polemics. The NSI, which has to all intents and purposes been the key organising and driving force behind the UCD, clearly envisages socialist United Front politics, discernible in its defence of the current shape and directionality of the UCD, as one of consensus between various social blocs and classes in their ostensibly common struggle against the manoeuvres of dominant politico-economic and socio-political forms of capitalism in the specific location of the university and its neighbourhood. On the other hand, the KYS has, its intentions to the contrary notwithstanding, failed to free the revolutionary impulse – which underpins its otherwise absolutely valid criticism of the UCD as a material embodiment of the politics and ideology of liberal consensus (essentially integral to the hegemony of capitalism) – from the fetish of the historical specificity of its own experience. As a consequence, its otherwise legitimate polemic against the UCD and the NSI has failed to overcome its sectarian tenor and ignite a substantive debate.
Commons, understood generally as the autonomous institutions and practices of people self-organisations and self-help, are the backbone of people livelihoods all around the world. Especially in the global South, without commons people would die, because they would lack access to the basic resources like food and water necessary for life. When we hear the often-quoted statistics referring to the 40% of world population living on less than a dollar a day, we in the North tend to see only victims. We do not see self-reliant and dignified subjects from whom we have a lot to learn. Indeed, how could they live on such a low level of monetary income, if not through the fact that they pool their resources and labour together and build commons, thus overcoming the scarcity that they face as individuals? But to the external and untrained eye, commons are either invisible or opaque, because they are relational fields among a group of people that constitute itself as community, hence build some sort of wall or border around them which obscure its workings or indicate its presence to the outside only as an amorphous cluster.
Obviously, one cannot demand transparency to a commons, unless its activity create negative externalities on other commons, because a commons is not a public institution, and the borders around it — in spite of the different degree of porosity and possibility for an individual to go through — have generally a rational kernel: they represent the contextual limit of the sphere of its activity. On the other hand, we can legitimately demand transparency to a public institution because such institutions ought to benefit all of us, and not only a part of us, ought to be our commons. Hence our demand for transparency in this case implies a demand that we should all be part of its relational field and be able to exercise control over it, whether by sending people reps to its board of directors, or as social movements contesting the effects of its managerial and top-down administration. This is the same as regarding public institutions as distorted commons, i.e. to regard them in an aspirational way, as what, from the commons perspective that understand commons through the lens of commoning and grassroots democracy, they ought to be.
Now, if commons transparency and visibility is not a given property of commons, when commons become visible and invite you to see how they work and what they do, when in other words they come out, celebrate and share among themselves and communicate with others, we know there is something going on, we know that we are in the presence of a social movement that is not made of individual “citizens” or “civil society”, but of . . .commoners.
A social movements of commoners is one that seek to extend the scale of commons, extend the social power mobilised by commoning. In this sense, the struggle undertaken by this social movement is not only one that manifests itself in cathartic street demonstrations, but is also hidden in the daily reproduction of livelihoods. Actually, it is this latter activity that gives this movement both strength and its rhythmical presence into the streets. I do not think we can measure a commoners movement with the yardstick of traditional social movements where we correlate the presence on the streets with the strength of the movement. When we talk about commoners movement, strength seems to be, if not the cause, definitively the material basis of the presence in the streets. While the presence in the streets is produced through events, the strength is reproduced in daily processes, and there is an obvious lag between the time of productive contestation and the time of reproductive commoning. So for example, 500 years of indigenous resistance is not 500 years of daily street battles, but 500 years of value reproducing commoning activity that sustained and reproduced itself in spite of the massive wave of murderous enclosures deployed against it. Commoners movement is a type of social movement and social struggle we should hope to see growing and develop in the next century if any change to our conditions of life and living must occur.
One such a social movement is the one I saw at the III Feira del Agua in Cochabama. And indeed, if anybody had any doubt about the existence and relevance of commons to people lives and livelihoods, well a Fair like this should help dispel any such doubt. Spread along the four sides of a large football pitch and beyond, dozens of community water associations and cooperatives like the one of Flores Rancho that I visited the other day (see previous post) are making their own showcase, with the help of hand-made posters and polystyrene models, to mark their presence and to exchange information, knowledge and technology.
Associations like these form the largest bulk of the third Feira del Agua, held in Cochabamba during the days of 15 and 18 April, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the water war that forced the then Bolivian government to repeal its water privatisation law. Among other participants in this feira del agua, noticeable presences besides some international development NGOs, some associations proposing waterless bio-toilets and some documentation centers, are also Semapa, the municipal water company that is highly controversial for the allegation of corruption and ineffectiveness in providing water, and Misicuni, a consortium of national and international companies that is building a large dam in the mountains North of Cochabamba and that promises to fill the water deficit of the region.
Cochabamba is indeed a region with a water deficit. In spite of all the amazing self-organisation efforts that community groups are doing, they cannot offer water to all the communities. The area of Cochabamba mostly affected is the South, the vast suburban area where about 200000 people live and water provision is poor. In the 1980s and 1990s, a large migration from rural and mines region into cities like Cochabamba occured, this putting pressure on water provisions. Three distinct realities in this region then developed with respect to water. First, the market reality, that is the reality of those who lack access to water, don’t organise and thus depend on private providers. This generally occurs in unsafe and unregulated forms. Water is delivered at home by private suppliers who drive cistern-trucks and is poured in “turril” , i.e. large 200 litres open canisters that households generally keep outside. Here the problems is not only the astronomical cost of this water (up to 30 bolivianos, £3, for a turril, and think that this is not just drinking water, but water for all household usage), but also the water contamination as a result of storage in old and rusty containers and exposure to the elements.
The second reality is of those who self-organise themselves and are lucky to live in areas in which there is water and community wells can be dig. Now, the work they are doing here is quite impressive, since community build from scratch entire water systems, dig deep wells (up to 100m), construct water deposits and connect pumps, lay the pipes for home distribution, monitor the water quality which in this region is always threatened by waste contamination, and manage the entire system. Not bad as a form of commoning! Interestingly, it is generally recognised here that the initiative to dig for water emerges in a population that has recently migrated from the countryside, and therefore has a memory of self-reliance and a relation to nature that is empowering. Rural people always go close to water sources and get their act together to use water. This is not a trivial fact, and I am starting to consider that indeed a crucial aspect of the countryside subjectivity’s everywhere in the world is such a self-reliance and autonomous spirit, one that is lost through successive waves of urbanisation which add mediations between people and nature in the form of money and bureaucratic and legal codes. A point here to be considered in the future: if we do not have the need for one revolutionary subject any longer, we may need a composite one, and one of its crucial components can be found in the self-reliant spirit of indigneous and campesinos wordwide.
The third reality is of those who self-organise themselves but are not lucky to live in areas with water. The commons self-organisation in this case occurs through a system of water collection by cistern trucks. The water is generally purchased from the municipal water company Semapa at far lower prices than those of the market, and distributed in the community. Generally, the community associations also establishes systems of distribution through deposits from which water is piped into the houses. In one case (the Asociation de Produccion y Administracion de Agua y Saneamiento APAAS, a community based organisation set up in 1990) water is fetched 7 km away, and to get the water the community has set up pipes, pomps and deposits along the crest of a mountain down to their suburban neighbourhood.
The different community organisations seem to function in different ways according to different conditions, but all heavily rely on community work besides self-funding and some access to external funding. The need for some socialisation of production in some functions — and therefore of greater scale — is met with associations of the second level, i.e. associations of associations.
This is for the example the case of Asica-Sur (www.asica-sur.org/index.php), one of the main organiser of this feira de l’agua.
Asica-Sur pulls together about 90 community organisations of the second and third category discussed above roughly split in half among those which have access to a well and those that do not. Asica-Sur offers 4 types of services to their members: it offers community associations a platform of organisation and negotiating power vis-a’ vis the state and municipal water authorities; it strengthen the capacity of these water systems by facilitating information and sharing knowledge; provides technical assistance and services, for example through its cistern trucks that it provides to the communities without wells, but also enabling smaller community groups to access government and NGOs funds; and it offers help in the management of water resources, infrastructure and equipment. Its function seems also increasingly to mediate and find political solutions to problems encountered by larger water community systems.
For example, the case mentioned above of APAAS, is now encountering some problems due to recent human settlements along the 7 km pipeline, problems unknown 20 years earlier when it was established. The recent dwellers are allegedly stealing water and pretending that APAAS give them water for free as payment for the fact that the pipes are passing through their territory. Obviously, this water war among the poor need to find some solution, and political processes, rather than abstract recipees, are here fundamental. What situations like these also reveal is that the building of commons in a context ridded with socio-economic trends typical of capitalist systems (such as the continuous migration of the poor) is far from those studied as typical models in the West under the influence of neo-institutionalism. Unlike those cases, here the problem of access to a resource like water is never circumscribed to a given community, and although there is is an appeal to traditional forms of administrations or forms of convivir [living together] “based on ancient cultural rules and customs where the prevailing collective work and active participation in the deliberation and decision making on the assets and affairs concerning the community is under the principles of reciprocity, solidarity, justice , fairness and transparency” (from an Asica-Sur pamphlet), these forms have to deal with a reality in progress and a web of bottom-up and bottom-bottom conflictuous situations that continuously challenge the forms in which these basic principles apply. Here we have a major challenge of commons and commoning as a political paradigm, a challenge that is not envisaged by the many who while subscribing to this paradigm, offers static models as panaceas. The reality is one in which the commons and commoning perspective must embrace the new and the challenges of the times, while at the same time valorising and reclaiming the old and the ancient. The solution is not inscribed in written handbooks of given knowledge, but in the art of negotiation and political and organisational inventiveness of communities. In a seminar I attended I heard a Columbian activist referring not only to Mingas (community collective work) to build and maintain water systems, but also of Mingas of social resistance. And to this what we may add the need for Mingas of inter-communities relations and solidarity. In other words commoning of all types is really the ultimate material force of transformation of our realities.
One thing that it is clear while talking to the many associations and their collective organisations like Asica-Sur is that they all want to do more than what they are doing — whether it is a question of access to water to more members of the community, or of sanitation and water quality. We could say that in these days and age, their social movement is a social movement for growth (not so much “economic growth”, but growth in access to water and the betterment of its quality). This however implies that they all need more resources, i.e. to mobilise more social power. When we look into this more in details, we find that the question of resources and scale necessarily leads as to problematise the question of the construction of commons in relation to markets and states.
A “resource pool” is the first constituent element of a commons, the others being a community and commoning. Pooling resources address a specific need, the need of power to, that is to extend the scale of social production that a given community is able to mobilise for its own reproduction. Now, from the perspective of a community, and given its conditions of material and financial wealth, what are the sources of a resource pool or, which is the same thing, in what ways a community can increase its power to, or extend the social power it is able to mobilise? I think there are two general cases here to be considered. One, that applies to a community, say of fishers, who decide to manage their common fishing waters but in which production is organised by the individual fishers themselves. This is the case dealt with by a large bulk of neo-institutional commons literature, where much emphasis is put to confute Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. The commoning you need to refer to in order to make this confutation is only with respect to decisions and rules and not with respect of working together: the herders still go on the field with their own cattle and in their own time. There is in other words some equity principle at work (“now it is my turn and then is your turn” or, “not more than 5 cows each farmers”) and not some community sharing (“let us share the cows and the work on the field”)). The second case, which interests us here, is one that applies for all those resources that are required to engage in some form of common production.
If I am not missing something, I believe pooling of resources at this level can only occur in one or in a combination of the following ways — leaving out robbery of peers from other communities: a) the members of the community all tip in from their own material or financial savings; b) donors (like NGOs) are found; c) the community subscribe a debt; d) the state pour resources into the community; e) the community expropriate property, occupy, squats (like in the case of brazilian landless movement, MST).
Each of these sources represent challenges and limits from the perspective of scale and social justice, because themselves need to have “sources” and in particular sources of power. The first one, is of course limited by the degree of material wealth of the community, as well as complicated by the division of wealth within the community and the degree of cohesion in spite of wealth difference. The second one, a part from being limited by the money available and the work and know-how necessary to bid for the money, also may require to align local project to international NGOs priorities. The third one tie local community to repayment plans and therefore to markets. The fourth one bring with it the alignment of local communities to the state priorities and may favour their cooptation. The fifth one bring in the threat of repression. Talking to people from different water associations present in this Fair, I had the impression that all of these options have been used in one way or in another, a part from debt. For example, APAAS participated in a competition and won money from the World Bank to fund the purchase of pipes running 7 km. Some community organisations pull savings and buy the land upon which they dig the well partially funded by an NGOs. In another case, the state pour in money for a community water deposit as part of the “Bolivia Cambia Evo Cumple” campaign, and in others some foreign development funds are channelled into community organisations.
In other words, it feels like that in order to grow commons cannot escape development, whether we are talking about transfers from states, supranational institutions such as the World Bank or NGOs, or the need to access money from the market in order to pull savings. In principle, we could of course imagine an alternative process that does not use any state nor markets, i.e. one based entirely on point e) above. In this case, all extension of commons occurs by means of all communities expropriating resources from the wealthy and simultaneously forming direct relations of association among themselves, giving rise to associations of second, third and upper level controlling all forms of social production and distribution made possible by the recently expropriated resources that extend the “pool”.
Obviously, this solution is in principle conceivable not only in moments of intense social revolution, but moments of intense social revolution that do not require an extension of the role of the state, neither in terms of its apparatus in defence of new property configurations against threat of restauration, nor in terms of extension of socialised functions that at the moment of revolution cannot be organised by communities nor by existing markets. Allowing for the state indeed simplifies enormously the problem of transition to a socially just society, as through indirect expropriation (case d) it is possible to fund organised communities of commoners and give rise to an increase in scale of commoning without the use of capitalist markets. This seems the avenue taken by Morales government, although timidly. As I was told by some community associations activists, the government has started to give money directly to grassroots associations and not to local authorities, and this is seen as a great improvement. However, this has happened significantly in areas where there is more opposition to the govenrment — such as Santa Cruz — while in area like Cochabamba — the stronghold of MAS, the party in government — there has been only timid disboursements. However, it may well be the case that the existing power relations and configurations of needs of the people necessitate the state to operate also for the development of market themselves — including capitalist markets — in which case the problems of transition becomes even more complex and risky. This is also the case here in Bolivia.
In any case, ultimately, the “socialist” principle to be a transformational principle must be articulated to the anarchist principles of individual freedom, and the communist principles of community constitution of values through commoning. The extent to which the measuring and valuing mechanisms of capitalist markets overpower the measuring and valuing mechanisms of commoning is a crucial factor to decide whether the “socialist” state is functional to a process of capitalist development or a transformational process towards the development of social justice. In Bolivia I think it is still too early to tell, and the process seems a very interesting process to study. The general question posed by the problems of access to resources becomes how can development be instrumental to the extension of commons, without the latter becoming in turn instrumental to the extension of capitalist development?
The 5 cases listed above apply from the perspective of an association of producers which aim at mobilising more social power than what they have at their disposal, and hope to internalise the means for such a mobilisation. But if we scale up and reach higher levels of association, we discover that there are other ways to extend the social power of commoners. One for example is posed by Asica-Sur with the question of cogestión — co-management. The question of co-management with Semeca is not yet defined clearly, and it raises several eyebrows among some community activists who are afraid that the messing up with the organisational forms of the municipal company would irreversibly contaminate the community organizational values. This would be a case in which the quest for extension of social power would backfire. But the rationale is obvious: to have access to more resources now available to the ineffective and corrupt structure of Semapa. The question is really to find a form that articulates community forms of organisation with this greater urban scale organisation.
Another issue posed, and it is perhaps linked to the question of comanagement, is that the state must allow organisations and firms that have at their disposal means of production and equipment to make it available to smaller organisation who do not have. This is perhaps a type of mild form of temporary “expropriation” that does not damage anybody really, but would give community associations access to fundamental resources and increase the scale of their operations. It is also evidence of a conception that sees the need for private and public property to be communalised, not so much in its formal ownership status, but in terms of the forms of its access and control, allowing us to move beyond old dichotomies.
But mega-projects are also on the horizons and bring new challenges. Misicuni, is a consortium of public and private companies that is building a dam higher up in the mountains around Cochabamba and that promises to fill the water deficit of the area. It is a project that has been in the pipelines for some decades now, but that only in the last few years started to move on. There is some controversy surrounding the project, whether a mega project of this scale was really necessary and whether alternatives could not be found. However in general, all the association representatives I have talked to where happy with the promised water availability promised by Misicuni. I was told by one of the Misicuni representatives present at the Fair, that it will be finished by 2012, a date however that raised some eyebrows of incredulity given the past history. I asked Carlos Oropeza, a dirigente of Asica-Sur, if this development would reduce the need for grassroots associations, but he did not seem to be concerned. “Local coop will buy water and distribute it themselves”, he told me. Asica-Sur is apparently already building the deposits and strengthening the infrastructure for local distribution.
Here we link an important essay that explores Marcuse’s engagement with Surrealism. It was written by a prominent American left activist and scholar, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, Franklin Rosemont, who died last April (12 April, 2009). The essay also contains letters between Rosemont and Marcuse.
During the last twenty-five years of his life, Herbert Marcuse repeatedly affirmed a lively and sympathetic interest in surrealism. His many references to the subject, in Eros and Civilization and in nearly all his subsequent books, as well as in scattered articles and interviews, reveal that this interest was continually expanding and deepening. At least from May ’68 on, as his commentators have conceded, surrealism was central to his vision of revolutionary social transformation.
Marcuse’s letters to the Chicago surrealist in the early 1970s – published here for the first time – constitute his only sustained discussion of the aims and principles, theory and practice, past and future of surrealism. Adding appreciably to our knowledge of the great critical theorist’s mature thought, these letters should also help stimulate a broader discussion not only of surrealism as such, but of the whole complex interplay of poetry, imagination, revolt and revolution – today and tomorrow.
From one of Marcuse’s letters included in the essay:
“The gap which separates art and the people could be reduced to the degree to which the people cease to be “the people” (=those who are ruled) and become freely associated individuals. The real socialist revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries would be catastrophic transformation not only of the material and cultural institutions but also of the sensibility, imagination and reason of the men and women engaged in this transformation. In this transformation, the esthetic qualities would play a decisive part – not as decoration, ritual, and surface but as the expression of the vital needs of the individuals.”
Pothik Ghosh: There is no doubt the Indian Maoist movement – which has erupted in the sense of pure socio-occupational and physical geography in the agrarian-tribal location – has rendered the externalised imposition of a given Marxological/communistological historiography to define (in discourse) and articulate (in the materiality of lived practice) its struggle uniquely determinate to the specificity of its historico-geographic location redundant. But to assert that it has done so by claiming something that is purely autonomous tribal aspiration and struggle would be equally fallacious. For, tribal identities as they exist and pose themselves in and through struggles – both in areas of Maoist influence as also in sangh parivar-infested tribal areas of especially Orissa and Madhya Pradesh – are formed by being inscribed within the determinate, if not discursive, mode of capital. Those identities and their movements are thus either articulated by the specific configuration of dualised and hierarchised capitalist power, or are responses to the respective historico-geographic specifications of such a general configuration of power.
In such a situation, one must speak of rupture, not in terms of romantically reified forms, but in terms of what is yielded through the posing of a continuous critique. The empirically discernible form of the Indian Maoist movement in emergence is clearly a rupture with both the capitalist continuum of history (and thus its historiographic sense) and the established Marxological narrative (an analytic really) of the history of capitalism. But then the subsequent affirmative emphasis on this Indian Maoist form as form, both for its original physical geographic location and outside it, marks a return of the logic of duality via the return of the tendency of representation and the discursive structure of capitalism. This form, therefore, can continue to be the horizon of rupture, which it has been in its emergence, only when it posits its own negation as a form qua form for other specific temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal and socio-occupational moments.
The repeated failure of the Indian Maoist/Naxal movement to not only expand beyond the specific historico-geographic boundaries within which it has emerged, but, therefore, as a result face imminent defeat, if not cooption (the experience of the constituents of Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Jharkhand and Liberation in Bihar would be telling on that score), in its purported historico-geographic and socio-occupational bastions is, if one were to talk in terms of effects, precisely due to this problem of reifying one moment of the process, which is meant to unfold by constituting itself through critique of its reified/abstracted moments, and thus obstruct its critically constitutive unfolding.
The point is, the Indian Maoist movement can be defended or saved as the specific embodiment of the general revolutionary logic of event or rupture that it is, only if that logic unfolds through its critical re-enactment, or reconstitution if you will, for other historical locations through the emergence of forms idiomatically specific to the diverse historicalness of those locations. To that extent, socialism ceases to be a systemic horizon in a teleological sense and becomes a horizon of continuous motion that is not serial but dialectical having to be constantly constituted through critical opposition and rupture. It was not for nothing that Marx in his ‘The Class Struggles in France’ came up with the idea of “revolution in permanence”.
Thus, socialism, as a mobile and open ‘epistemological discourse’, can be aphoristically called a multiplicity of singularities. That is also the epistemological context of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, and his injunction therein to “blast open the continuum of history” must be seen as a critical struggle against the distortionary conflation of labour’s life-world and its history with the textual abstraction of a centred historiography and/or analytic. It’s a struggle to reclaim life and its history from such abstraction and domination and in the same movement pose the idea of life-world in critical opposition to the discourse of textuality, even as we show that the life we live empirically, before its reclamation through critique, is an analytic abstraction or text. This idea of the life-world, which was formulated by Marx as a conceptualisation of the horizon of constantly self-constituting and thus dialectical motion, is something that is constitutively posed in our continuous Benjaminian struggle to disrupt the analytic continuum of history that constantly forms following every successful move to blast it open. The counter-discursive horizon that this continuous critical struggle to overcome the horizon of discursivness or reason in history, which is history as a continuum, poses is what Benjamin called montage and Trotsky narrative in the context of formulating a revolutionary discourse of history. It’s really a narrative (Trotsky) or montage (Benjamin) of singularities, where the constitutive narrative/montage link among them is the fact of them being singularities or events. It’s this horizon of revolutionary history, which is a horizon of constant ruptures, that Foucault posed as “genealogy” against the horizon of conservative and reactionary history, which is canonically called History and is a serial continuum. Foucault’s term for singularities and their repeated self-constituting evental emergence is respectively fragments and archaeology, something that was his active critical-political-methodological engagement, as opposed to a detached discursive-methodological engagement, with history both as it is lived and is formulated as discourse. The generalised horizon that is posited by him for his event-constituting archaeological manoeuvre is termed by him, in a quasi-structuralist kind of way, as the “history of problematics”. My subjective preference is, however, for the Benjamanian concept of gestus over Foucauldian fragment, which as a word still has the whiff of the old whole-fragment (universal-particular) dualised and discursive discourse.
However, to the extent that genealogy, montage or narrative are all discourses of history, they appear as a serialised continuum in much the same way as the analytic-centric form of conservative History. But we must remember that the former is a discourse of life-world, which makes it a discourse of counter-discourse, even as the latter is a discourse of lived life, which in not being critical and in being established, is really an abstraction and thus a textual discourse. Thus in the material operation of empirical living, the former posits continuous critical opposition and rupture with abstract schemas that seek to prevent life from constantly constituting itself critically and thus autonomously; even as the latter seeks to transform lived life into a non-critical piece of the abstract schema of history as it is given in the positive materiality of empirical human lives. Thus motion in the latter is really the continuance of the abstract schema through time. The former is a discourse, as you also seem to be pointing out, of living history while constituting it, while the latter is a discourse of living history as the a priori abstraction in which it is given.
To return, through this theoretical excursus, to the immediate question at hand, is to once again focus on the need to generalise the logic of event or rupture enacted by the Maoist movement and the failure on that count. It is in this context that Arundhati Roy’s Outlook article poses a problematic. The article is a problem, not per se, but in that it enacts a modality of radical politics at the urban location that obstructs the recognition of this need to constantly generalise the evental logic that has found its specific expression for the agrarian-tribal location in the form of the Maoist movement. It is, in fact, more of a problem because this modality of radical politics is fast becoming a dominant modality among urban radicals. The failure to recognise this need for generalisation of the logic encapsulated by the Maoist movement for all other locations beyond the agrarian-tribal geography conveniently enables urban radicals like us to displace the identity crisis and anxiety we experience as denizens of our specific urban ground on to some other ground – in this case the ground of insurgent tribals and peasants – and live our own class rage, without recognising it as such, cathartically and vicariously. That enables such urban radicals to exempt themselves from taking up the more difficult struggle of engaging with and critically opposing the configurations of capitalist class power – which in its myriad ideological forms of culture, economy, society is the real cause of anxiety and crisis that urban creatures face – on their own specific ground to overcome the crisis they experience as city inhabitants.
That, of course, is not the failure of Roy or the Maoists, much less their tribal-peasant base, alone. It’s the failure of all working-class forces, which includes me and my comrades as well, in all other locations. The point is to begin, as Zizek says citing Lenin, from the beginning by recognising this failure.
Pratyush Chandra: One point that interests me in Jairus Banaji’s post in Kafila and the subsequent debate on the post is his focus on labour as the centre of the movement. I think this focus is fundamental in order to ground various local/localised struggles in political economy (or rather in its critique) and to understand the underlying interconnections between them (whether the leadership of these struggles understand them in this manner is immaterial – did not Marx appreciate Paris Commune even when Blanquists were in hegemony?).
Marx’s conceptualisation of labour and of capital-labour relations is rich enough to provide tools for comprehending various struggles against capitalist accumulation (both primitive and normal). He understood subsumption of labour by capital as a process (not some particular fixed states), which starts from being formal to real – from a stage where labour is subsumed through non-capitalist “forms” of exploitation to the actual subsumption in “pure” wage-labour form. Between these two poles, subsumption can take a plethora of forms. Who knows better than Jairus that unwaged labour (reproductive or otherwise) is also part of the capitalist subsumption of labour.
So how do we understand tribals and “peasants” struggles against land and resource alienation within this framework? They are essentially fighting against capitalist efforts to alienate them from their resources, which create (or, better, reproduce) conditions for the subsumption of their labour by capital. Whether they will become wage labourers is not at all essential; if they are not employed, or even employable, they still remain labourers as part of the reserve army of proletarians or surplus population (stagnant, latent and floating) reproducing themselves on their small pieces of land, or by food gathering (in forests or trash cans). Their struggle, in a Marxist sense, can be understood as part of the anti-systemic working class struggle to control the conditions of production and, I stress, reproduction too.
Now coming to the forms of struggle (armed, unarmed, etc), I think we as Marxists (of all hues and colours) cannot act as idealists, by considering only those movements as working class movements or anti-capitalist movements, which are projected in our idioms, and are developing according to our framework of strategic-building. The working class can throw diverse forms of struggles according to its internal constituents or class composition. However, one must critique forms in order to show the limitations and problems of those forms, in order to avoid the problem of overgeneralisation of particular forms, and also in order to undertake the revolutionary task of generalisation seriously, which essentially means to see a revolutionary building up against capitalism within and through all forms of working-class struggles.
