Since January of 2012, residents of Delhi University’s largest postgraduate women’s hostel, University Hostel for Women (UHW) have been waging a battle against outright suppression of their democratic rights by, both, their hostel authorities and the University’s Proctorial Committee. Since the hostel’s Chairperson is also the Proctor of the University, the Proctorial Committee has been intervening in the matter, not as a neutral party, but in complete connivance with the hostel authorities. There are two issues which are central to the ongoing struggle of the women students, namely, the imposition of a union constitution by the authorities, and the existence of archaic and conservative rules in the hostel. In the process of their struggle, the women hostellers have been individually victimized to a ridiculous extent by the hostel Provost, Professor Ashum Gupta and the Warden, Dr. Tanuja Agarwala. The Warden and Provost have been sending letters to departments, making misleading phone calls to parents, denying extension of stay to M.Phil researchers in the hostel, verbally threatening their MA students that they will be given less marks for projects and assignments if they continue to support the struggle, etc. As a result, the campaign of the women hostellers has also been geared towards fighting rampant victimization.
Our struggle began when on 22 January, 2012 a six page document was pasted on various notice boards inside the hostel. The document was a copy of the Hostel Union Constitution drafted by the authorities in consultation with the hostel’s Managing Committee. While such a crucial piece of document can only be put into force after being passed by a two third majority of the hostel residents, who are the actual constituents of the union, no such procedure was followed in our hostel. To make matters worse, the hostel authorities tried to hold this year’s hostel union election on the basis of this imposed Constitution. While the authorities claim that they are implementing procedures followed during other student elections of Delhi University (such as DUSU, etc.), the structure of the Hostel Union Constitution reveals something very different. For example, the Constitution drafted by the authorities allows for the outgoing union president to continue on the new hostel union as an ex-officio member! Similarly, before the residents began challenging the authorities, the newly announced election criteria consisted of stipulations which seriously prevented the formation of a strong, independent students’ union. The new election criteria were an unhealthy combination of the stringent Lyngdoh committee stipulations, as well as certain disqualification criteria formulated by the authorities themselves.
A “valid” candidature was, hence, ascertained according to the Lyngdoh recommendations on age and attendance to a course, as well as the system of memos (i.e. the issuing of warning letters for the smallest breach of hostel rules—most of these rules being highly unpopular and contested). The receipt of 5 such memos was arbitrarily made a criterion for disqualification. It is only because the women students united to fight this imposition of a hostel union constitution that certain non-Lyngdoh election stipulations (like disqualification on the basis of memos issued and number of years of residence in the hostel, etc.) were taken back by the authorities. Unsatisfied with this partial victory, the women students have pursued their struggle because apart from the arbitrary introduction of Lyngdoh recommendations, the Constitution imposed by the authorities allows for extensive control of the hostel authorities on the union. Since the attempts of the authorities has been to minimize the autonomy and strength of the students’ union, the hostel residents collectively decided to submit a signature petition to the hostel Warden and Chairperson.
The second issue on which UHW residents have been campaigning is existing hostel rules. Most of the rules in force are those formulated way back when the hostel was started in 1970. The current residents in the hostel are challenging rules such as ‘no exit after 8:00pm’, submission of leave applications approved by Head of Departments for more than one week’s absence from the hostel, the tedious procedure of gate pass and double-locking of rooms which does not exist in the men’s hostels, the limited number of late nights and nights out, closing off the canteen to visitors, etc. Many of these rules such as not being able to exit after 8pm are illogical, especially when we consider how the same authorities allow the residents entry up till 11:00pm under the late night provision. An archaic rule such as ‘no exit after 8pm’ prevents women students from stepping out for urgent work, or even something as simple as getting photocopies from the nearby market, Patel Chest.
However, apart from this, certain the rules (such as closing off the canteen to Miranda House and other college students and staff) have also worked towards making Chhatra Marg (where the hostel is situated) a more isolated place, and hence, unsafe. Certain other rules which are implemented solely in the women’s hostels, like the submission of leave applications approved by Head of Departments for more than one week’s absence from the hostel, are being misused to such an extent that the women hostellers and department heads are unnecessarily burdened with additional paperwork. It is, in fact, shameful that adult women are being made to seek approval from their departments even for personal matters such their travel/vacation plans.
Of course, under the pressure of the ongoing struggle, the University has decided to implement, from the new academic session, certain changes in the rules prevalent in women’s hostels. However, since these adjustments were discussed and formalized without any consultation with women students, they continue to create hassles for the women hostellers. Indeed, apart from a few proposed changes, most of the rules stand the same. In fact, not only will tedious procedures like gate-pass, double locking of rooms and issuing of memos for the smallest breach of hostel rules persist, the University’s new administrative order also proposes a hostel fee hike. Understandably, the women hostellers continue to agitate and raise their democratic concerns.
Typically, the collective struggle of the students has been trivialized and demeaned in several ways. Students’ democratic methods like calling meetings, circulating signature petitions, etc. are constantly projected by the authorities as “illegal” activities that spread “disturbance” and “disharmony”. Basically, when we take the initiative to raise our opinions and discontent, our authorities only see “untoward” activity…OUR VOICE IS NOISE FOR THEM!
Furthermore, ever since the women hostellers have been voicing their democratic aspirations, the authorities have viciously gone after individual students in the bid to transform UHW residents into a captive mass which has no democratic voice. The logic behind the multiple techniques of victimization is the need for the hostel authorities to break the collective will of the students and to project their collective struggle as that of a few individuals. In order to break the collective will and efforts of the residents, the authorities have been threatening individual students to withdraw from the struggle, and have tried to project the students’ legitimate struggle as a smear campaign pursued by one or two students who have some mysterious “agenda”. The techniques of victimization used unhesitatingly so far, include: (i) vicious character assassination, (ii) phone calls to parents and departments, (iii) accosting individuals on the stand they have taken and refusing to cooperate with them regarding the smallest of procedural work within the hostel, (iv) denying extension of stay to M.Phil researchers, (v) bombarding the more active students with show cause notices on every alternate day, etc.
For many of us these victimization techniques are equivalent to the techniques embraced by the management of private companies seeking to break the collective voice of their employees. Considering our hostel Warden is a faculty member of the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), it comes as no surprise to us that typical labour management formulas are being applied on us students. Haranguing individuals, involving the families of the protesters, threatening individuals with a series of show cause notices, applying multiple pressure on individuals by involving a not-so-neutral third party (in our case, the Proctor’s office, and in the case of workers, the Labour Office), etc. are very similar to the methods used by factory managers who seek to crush the collective voice of their employees. Using such labour management methods, the hostel authorities went out of their way to expose their unethical and undemocratic nature on two particular occasions. One such occasion was on 14th February when a large number of women hostellers boycotted dinner in protest. Rather than being concerned about the condition of the residents boycotting dinner, the hostel authorities ‘rewarded’ those who refused to support the campaign with an extra lavish dinner, and spent the entire day calling individual students to the office in order to force them to withdraw their support for the boycott.
The second occasion on which typical labour management techniques were unleashed on the hostel residents was on the 13th of March. On this day, members of the hostel’s Managing Committee, two Deputy Proctors, the Warden, Provost and Resident Tutor huddled into office to hold a Managing Committee meeting, as promised in writing. Ironically, rather than allowing the students to select and send their representatives to the meeting, the hostel Warden handpicked two students to represent the students’ point of view in the meeting called to ‘resolve’ the issues raised by the residents. As expected these students’ ‘representatives’ were not the more vocal of students, and were forced to compromise as they were outnumbered in the Managing Committee meeting, and were, in fact, locked into the office area during the course of the meeting. Disrespect for amicable dialogue and the strong desire to create a docile mass of women students are clearly reflected in such cases.
As the situation stands, individual victimization continues on a daily basis. For example, despite verbal assurances given by the Dean of Colleges, Prof. Pachauri, on the 16th of March, the hostel Provost has continued to contact supervisors and Head of Departments. The hostel authorities also released a list on the 19th of March of M.Phil researchers who will not be provided an extension of stay, despite the precedent being that the hostel provides such extension in strongly recommended cases. The hostel authorities continue to run UHW as if it were their personal fiefdom. There really seems to be no way to check their authoritarian, undemocratic and unethical practices, unless the larger Delhi University community extends support to the women students.
WE, HENCE, APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED UNIVERSITY MEMBERS AND ALUMNI OF UNIVERSITY HOSTEL FOR WOMEN (UHW) TO STAND WITH THE DEMOCRATIC ASPIRATIONS OF THE WOMEN STUDENTS, AND TO HELP PREVENT DELHI UNIVERSITY’S AUTHORITIES FROM REDUCING STUDENTS TO A VOICELESS, DOCILE MASS. In the larger context of the backlash against all democratic voices in this University, the ongoing struggle of women’s students emerges as a litmus test for democracy— do we as a University community want to create docile University youth, or right-bearing, politically conscious University youth?
Your contribution to this democratic struggle could consist of the following:
(i) Writing letters to the University’s Vice Chancellor that press for the prevention of individual victimization in its myriad forms, and for an amicable resolution to the issues raised by the students;
(ii) Writing letters to the University’s Vice Chancellor and Dean of Colleges that press for the removal of the hostel Provost and Warden since the two continue to derail a healthy dialogue process by victimizing individual students;
(iii) Writing letters to the media which highlight the sheer lack of tolerance for the democratic issues raised by the women students like the right to draft, amend and ratify their union constitution;
(iv) Discussion with colleagues and other faculty members so as to create a public opinion against how women’s hostels are being run according to the diktats of an authoritarian and conservative set of DU faculty members;
(v) Build students’ resistance against de-unionization and conservative rules, as in UHW, in other DU hostels as well.
Issued by Residents of University Hostel for Women (UHW)
COORDINATION COMMITTEE FOR WOMEN’S HOSTELS IN DELHI UNIVERSITY
Contact: 9350272637, 9818900179
To,
The Warden
University Hostel for Women (UHW)
University of Delhi
15.03.2012
Dear Dr. Tanuja Agarwala,
I am in receipt of a number of letters in which I have been asked to explain/clarify my “conduct” over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, none of these letters issued by you reflect a willingness to understand the issues raised by the hostel residents, and to see them as a democratic expression of the residents’ collective will. Your last letter (dated 12.03.2012) has asked me to clarify why action should not be taken against me, based on the alleged complaint that a few students were “misled” and misinformed into signing the Memorandum calling for a boycott of dinner on 14.02.2012. Your letter categorically refuses to consider the 14th February Memorandum as an expression of the students’ collective will. The very evidence of this fact is that I have been identified as a “culprit” who needs to explain her position, lest action will be taken. I do not wish to be identified as a “hero” of the hostel campaign or a person who can be identified as the “potential victim”. It is high time the authorities of the hostel restrain themselves in identifying individual “culprits” and in scuttling the collective democratic voice of the residents.
Of course, there is always a general possibility that in campaigns/movements there are some individuals who are inconsistent in their position on the issues raised, and therefore, change their position during the course of time. This may explain why some individual residents retracted from their position on the boycott of dinner. However, a change in the position such individuals hold does not mean their earlier position was wrong, or that they were misled into the earlier position they took.
Having said this, in the case of our hostel there is a specific possibility that the authorities resorted to individual intimidation to get some residents to change their position on issues raised. We have indeed come across versions of this intimidation wherein individual residents were called to the hostel office and categorically threatened to withdraw from the campaign otherwise they would not be given extension, their parents would be contacted, their departments intimated, etc. In fact, few parents were called and asked to restrain their daughters. Such draconian, coercive and high-handed practices of the authorities have led to widespread fear amongst a section of the students. It is under such conditions of fear and actual acts of victimization that individual residents were asked to give in writing that they consent to withdraw from the campaign. What else can explain the simple fact that few individual residents began to retract from the boycott call after a lengthy visit to the hostel office? It is another thing that despite all the efforts of the authorities, we are still confident of the support of the majority of students, and therefore, will continue to assert the democratic rights of the residents.
To your allegation that some residents were misinformed into signing the concerned Memorandum, I and several other residents who have studied your letter, have only one thing to say, which is that we find such views unacceptable. This is because residents of this hostel are educated adults who never go around signing documents and memorandums in a fit of absent-mindedness. The Memorandum explaining why a dinner boycott was being called, was properly attached to the signature petition. There were regular announcements made inside the hostel mess, as well as individual dissemination of the boycott’s details during breakfast on the 14th of February. Subsequently, postering on the boycott was also carried out in the hostel on the 14th, which shows that rather than being misinformed and misled into boycotting dinner, individual residents were coerced by you to give up their decision to boycott dinner.
Most importantly, it is wrong to claim that because some students changed their opinion due to victimization or due to certain personal calculations, I and other students are causing “disturbance” in the hostel, and should hence, be punished. It should be recalled that on the 20th of February when the authorities and a section of the students exchanged undertakings in writing, there was a tacit acceptance of the fact that there were two parties of opinion on the issues at stake. It goes against the notion of jurisprudence where a party in conflict of opinion bestows upon itself the power to punish the other party for raising their opinion. Such an approach is neither impartial nor democratic.
It is high time the authorities concede the point that genuine issues are at stake and that there is a collective of women residents who are raising these issues. Elections at the earliest, adoption of the Constitution submitted on 03.02.2012, and the change in hostel rules (such as no exit after 8pm, gate-pass system, issuing of memos, mess rebate, etc.) must be addressed, and should not be trivialized any further. We will not let the hostel authorities victimize individuals or sideline the issues raised by the residents. The authorities have already broken their promise of not indulging in such victimization, as well as their assurance of calling a Managing Committee meeting where a proper discussion can happen with the residents.
Of course, if the authorities still feel certain residents have been misinformed into taking a stand in support of the hostel campaign, then they should ascertain this by holding a secret ballot referendum on the issues raised by the campaign. Perhaps, this is the only way in which UHW residents can prove to all that they are indeed thinking individuals.
Lastly, I am directed by concerned residents to inform you that if any action is taken against me, your office must be prepared to see the struggle continue as well as escalate. This is because when the collective spirit and democratic aspirations have embodied themselves in all the residents, the physical removal of one person makes little difference to the struggle. The authorities should, hence, be under no illusion that by subduing one individual the quest of the residents on their democratic demands will terminate. At the most, it is only for some time that your office will be able to scuttle the democratic voice of the students. Your actions against individuals will always remain a moral defeat in permanence. Hope a better sense prevails.
Concerned Residents of University Hostel of Women (UHW)
Since January of this year, students of Delhi University’s (DU) largest postgraduate women’s hostel, University Hostel of Women (UHW) have been involved in a militant struggle involving several fundamental democratic demands. One of their particular demands carries larger significance on the issue of democracy in the university campuses. This demand pertains to the right of the students to decide the contours of their student union constitution. As constituents of the union, the students have been contesting the fact that their hostel authorities have imposed a union constitution which the students’ have not ratified themselves. They have contested the union constitution on the grounds that it allows the authorities’ extensive control on the students’ union, thereby overriding the chances of a strong and independent students’ union coming into power.
In the process they have also questioned the enforcement of Lyngdoh recommendations in the hostel. After scrutinizing the Lyngdoh recommendations as well as Supreme Court judgments on the implementation of these recommendations, the students believe that they amount to a breach of the fundamental right to form an association [Article 19(1) a and c, Constitution of India]. According to the Constitution of India [Part III], the state can only infringe upon fundamental rights in certain exceptional and concrete conditions, none of which exist in the context of the hostel. Following from the specifications mentioned in the Constitution of India, the students have reached the conclusion that Supreme Court judgments are being unnecessarily taken out of context so as to curb democratic aspirations, independence of student unions as well as the power of resistance.
Apart from the issue of the union constitution, the women students have also been raising the demand to change age-old, conservative rules of the hostel. Currently, the residents cannot step out of the hostel after 8pm. Ironically, such a rule is enforced to ensure the safety of the women students. However, the same authorities persistently fail to curb the filthy and offensive rally taken out by men hostellers on the day of Holi. Under the University’s Ordinance XV-D, such an act by the men hostellers outside the women’s hostel amounts to sexual harassment.
As of now the students have been told that new rules are being brought into force across women’s hostels. However, in the high powered committee constituted by DU to formalize such common rules, no women students were called for discussion. One can only expect that in such an exclusive meeting, the DU authorities have come up with a series of rules which are not pro-students.
Lastly, in the bid to stem the tide of rampant victimization by the authorities, the women students have escalated their struggle, and taken their struggle outside the walls of their hostel. They have been protesting against the unwillingness of the authorities to see the campaign as a collective struggle, and, to subsequently, pick out individuals whom they can victimize. On the 16th of March, they also protested outside the Vice Chancellor’s office. Now they are in the process of involving and uniting students of other women’s hostels of DU.
TIMELINE
14th Jan: First Notification of the Hostel Union elections for 2011-12.
20th Jan: Clarification Notification put up by authorities specifying that residents with 5 memos or more cannot stand for elections.
20th Jan: First Meeting of residents on the issue of the election criteria specified by the authorities. Decision taken by residents to draft a memorandum & collect signatures in support of reverting back to the election criteria that prevailed earlier in UHW.
22nd Jan: Second Meeting of residents. Drafted memorandum is discussed, and additional points added in response to the Constitution put up by the authorities on 22nd Jan. Residents express concern on how: (i) this hostel union constitution was amended by the authorities without gathering the consent of the residents through a GBM; and (ii) that a change in the election criteria was arbitrarily introduced without ratifying it first in a GBM which had a proper quorum, i.e. a sizeable number of hostel residents present and voting.
23rd Jan: A delegation of 5 residents submits the memorandum to the hostel authorities. The memorandum carried 193 signatures of hostel residents. Authorities decide to go ahead with the election on a provisional basis, and give verbal assurance that the residents’ objections will be forwarded to DU’s legal advisor.
25th Jan: Third Meeting of students to discuss next course of action as well as other pressing concerns as strict implementation of hostel rules. More than half the residents attend the meeting and resolve to put up posters on Republic Day expressing their dissent, as well as sit on protest on 27th January, 2012. An organizing committee is constituted to manage the preparations for Saraswati Puja as the residents resolve not to involve the outgoing union members whose tenures have lapsed and who no longer reside in the hostel.
26th Jan: In response to the posters some of the hostel authorities make aggressive speeches after the flag hoisting. Angered residents assemble in the badminton court in large numbers, and decide to again approach the hostel authorities on the issue of hostel elections, the union constitution imposed by them, and the need for the authorities to attend a meeting addressing concerns of the residents with respect to hostel rules, etc. The authorities agree to: (i) postpone elections till the issue of the election criteria is resolved; (ii) forward the residents’ written objections as well as the constitution drafted by residents, to the Legal Advisor; and (iii) meet ALL the residents together via a meeting within a week.
27th Jan: Drafting Committee chosen by the residents starts drafting the hostel union constitution keeping the democratic interests of the residents in mind. The committee also drafts the constitution in a manner which allows for a strong and independent union to be elected into office.
31st Jan: The authorities put up a notice withdrawing certain elections criteria previously announced, but continue to uphold the Constitution that was introduced by them without gathering the consent of UHW residents.
1st Feb: Residents in large numbers attend the Meeting called to ratify the Constitution drafted by the Drafting Committee. In the Meeting residents also voice the need to amend certain hostel rules. In the process of this discussion it was decided that further suggestions and feedback should be collected.
3rd Feb: The Constitution drafted and ratified by residents is submitted to the hostel authorities. 221 signatures, which constitutes an Absolute Majority of the present hostel population, are collected in support of the Constitution. In the covering letter the residents request for a speedy response, i.e. a response within one week.
6th-10th Feb: A survey to collect the residents’ opinions on hostel rules is circulated in all the blocks. Nearly 160 residents fill out the survey. Almost all the residents opt for some kind of change in hostel rules.
13th Feb: Due to the delayed response of the authorities, and lack of any communication from them, another Meeting of the residents is called. All those present and voting agree to boycott dinner on 14th February.
14th Feb: After collecting more signatures of the residents in support of the boycott call, the memorandum intimating the authorities of the boycott is submitted to avoid wastage of food. Almost half of the hostel residents agree to boycott dinner on 14th. Rather than being concerned about the condition of the residents boycotting dinner, the authorities spent the whole day individually intimidating those who support the boycott call. The students were compelled to write application saying they withdraw from the boycott. Even after submitting such applications, many such students continued to boycott dinner. This clearly reflects the moral victory of the residents.
16th Feb: A secret poll is held during dinner time by the residents to ask the residents whether they want to carry on with the protest or not. Residents in full strength supported the continuance of the campaign. The polling is intervened by the Warden trying to take pictures and intimidate the girls. Then, around 9.30 pm Asst.Proctor Mr. Kasim walks in with the Warden and the Resident tutor. He invites the residents to talk. A discussion takes place where he is intimated of all the issues of the campaign and the individual victimization of the residents who had signed the memorandum for boycotting dinner on the 14th. He invites a few residents to the Proctor’s Office the next day, to talk to the Proctor, with their memorandums. The residents were unable to understand the reason for the intervention of Proctor’s Office as it was not a law and order situation, yet they agreed.
17th Feb: A delegation of residents goes to submit the memorandum at around 1.30 pm. They are called again by the Asst. Proctor at around 3.30 pm to talk. They talk to him in detail about the issues covered in the memorandum. The Proctor was not available and so the residents were not able to meet her then. At around 4.35 pm the Proctor herself called the residents to meet her at the Proctor’s Office. The residents went and started to brief her about the issues, but the Proctor was in a haste to leave for a meeting at 5.00 pm and left this meeting mid-way. Thus no conclusion was reached on this day. Bu the Proctor’s Office did assure that individual victimization of the resident will certainly stop.
18th Feb: Despite the given assurance that no victimization will take place, the Warden called up the parents of a number of students. In this conversation the picture painted was such that the residents were portrayed as ruckus makers. The residents of the hostel come from different sections of the society and such a false picture may be taken apprehensively by some households.
20th Feb: Since the authorities did not stand by their own words and the victimization continued, the residents agreed to hold a Mass Meeting outside the Vice-Chancellor’s office on the 21st February. In the evening of the 20th, the Provost comes to the hostel and called for a meeting with all the residents immediately. The only conclusion that could be reached was that the authorities gave it in writing that a managing committee Meeting will be held between 8th March and 15th March to resolve the issue. In return, the residents gave in writing that they will not hold the protest outside the VC’s office because they were assured that no victimization shall take place and that the meeting would be held within the given dates. The residents mentioned that they reserve the right to intimate the Vice Chancellor about the situation in the Hostel.
29th Feb to 12th March: Despite the assurance that no resident would be asked to explain her stand on the campaign, Maya John, a C-block resident is given letter after letter, asking her to explain her stand and to give clarifications for different allegations put on her.
13th March: Without informing the residents, the promised Managing Committee Meeting is held on this date in a very hushed up manner without any student’s representative, without the knowledge of the residents. This meeting continued for an hour and no notice was put up about the results of the meeting.
Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS)
All India Revolutionary Youth Organization, Haryana State Committee.
ITI-Polytechnic Students’ Committee,
Munshi Premchand Library, Dharodi, Distt. Jind, Haryana.
Ph. :07206621090
Comrade Sonu Gurjar,
Red Salute,
We, the students of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and Polytechnic institutes of Haryana, heartily congratulate you for the struggle you have waged against the oppressive, unjust and adamant Maruti Management and extend revolutionary greetings to your struggle. We have been following the struggle you have waged through strike and other means for the legitimate demands for the last four months, are in constant touch with it and getting inspiration from it. We are well aware that we will be joining the factories in one or two years and we will be facing the same oppressive conditions that you are fighting against, whether it is a question of low wages, long working hours, unequal pay for the same work, or the question forming the union. Thus if your struggle attains victory, it will be a victory not only for you but it would a victory for the future of many of the students who are studying in ITI and Polytechnic. We are also aware that the Maruti Management is trying all legitimate-illegitimate means to weaken your struggle. They are enrolling new recruits to continue with the production on the one hand and weaken your struggle on the other.
We assure you that until the Maruti Management agrees to concede on your demands and our struggle is victorious, none of the student will apply for job in Maruti industry and will not allow Maruti Management to hold campus placements in ITI and Polytechnic institutes. If we go and work in Maruti now it will not only be your defeat but our own defeat and it will be a setback to our future.
We, the students of ITI-Polytechnic, once again extend our full support to your struggle and hope that the victory will be ours.
Inquilab Zindabad.
Bahadur,
For Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS),
ITI-Polytechnic Students’ Committee.
THE workers, both permanent and contract, of Maruti Suzuki Industries Ltd. in IMT Manesar, Haryana are struggling against the company’s exploitative and repressive ways of functioning and the willing state government, administration and police. They demand the recognition of their Union, oppose the termination and suspension of workers from August 29th for their just demands, and the company’s baseless charges on workers who raised their voices and false propaganda that production has resumed even as it is practically at a halt. They stand united as Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU) which is rallying the workers of the company, as workers and Unions in the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera-Bawal industrial belt and all over India stand in support.
Today, 11th September, the MSEU after its joint meeting with representatives from around thirty Unions, reiterated its demand of the right to organise and unionise, to withdraw the charge-sheet, termination and suspension of 57 workers, and to stand with the just demands of the contract workers for their wage-hike and withdrawal of suspensions and against the company’s easy hire-and-fire policy and that till these are met, they will not enter the factory.
The MSEU has given a call for a rally and blockade of Gurgaon tomorrow morning 12th September at 10am. All Unions and workers in the area will join with the struggling Union’s effort.
WE, all student and youth organisations and concerned individuals, condemn the exploitative ways of Maruti Suzuki and stand in solidarity with the legitimate demands of the workers for the right to unionise, the unconditional withdrawal of charge-sheet, termination and suspension of 57 workers, the withdrawal of the good-conduct bond, and the just demands of the contract workers.
WE call upon all students and youth to join the rally of the workers of Maruti Suzuki tomorrow 12th September in Gurgaon in solidarity with its struggle. It will start at 10 am from Kamala Nehru Park in Gurgaon.
signed jointly by:
Krantikari Naujawan Sabha (KNS)
Democratic Students Union (DSU)
All India Students Assiociation (AISA)
All India Students Federation (AISF)
Students For Resistance (SFR)
Vidyarthi Yuvajan Sabha (VYS)
The story of those who make all stories possible is a simple one of every moment’s struggle. The around 3000 workers in Maruti Suzuki in Manesar, Haryana, more than half of whom are hired on contract, are extremely angry, and this collective anger is one of the most lethal arms that they possess. It arises from discontent of the unending days and nights of alienated labour, reduced to being mere parts of the machine, torn from his fellow workers by the attack on the right to organise. The worker lives and bleeds to death, faces insults and feels fatigue, thirsts for water and suppresses his urine, all this, only so that the assembly line goes on. In this nerve centre of the automobile industry, the Plot no.1, Phase 3A of the Industrial Model Town Manesar, a Swift and an SX4 model car is assembled in 38 seconds. 1250 squeezed out per day. Super-profits of the bosses. Efficiency. Development. Growth. Consumer satisfaction. A ‘happy’ middle class family.
Maruti Suzuki Industries Ltd., the biggest automobile company in India with a passenger car market share of over 45%, promises a “way of life”. For this, it spent a reported Rs. 2000 crores on advertisement alone in a year (so the bent-back welcome to its lies from Wall Street Journal to all the so-called objective corporate media in India). As its profits soar in geometric progression, its financial statement says it spent a mere 1.9% as total employee cost in the year 2010-11, down from 3.5% in 2001 and 2.3% in 2008. When in June this year, the young workers all in their 20s, demanded their right to organise, and filed for Union registration on 3rd June, the company sent its ‘bouncers’ to literally arm-twist the workers into signing a blank sheet of paper to give up their demand for this minimum of respect. The workers struck work on June 4th and continued a sit-in inside the factory for 13 days till June 16th. The suspension of 11 workers was revoked.
Made to cower down momentarily in face of the workers’ fight, the company, with blood on its hands from crushing the workers movement in early 2000 in its Gurgaon plant, plotted revenge and Shinzo Nakanashi, the MD threatened that workers must be “educated”. Cockroaches and dead flies begun to be found in the food in the hurried lunch-break of 30 minutes that workers earn in the canteen ½ km from the working station. The tea was without tea leaves or sugar in the 7 minute break, as workers would go to the bathroom running with a snack in the mouth, tea cup in one hand, unzipping with the other hand, before the bell rings and the assembly line resumes. The company doctor would give heavy doses of ‘instant’ medicines even on any minor complaint by a worker, only so that disruption of work could be prevented. The disease then returns in greater degree and one day’s wage cut of Rs.1500, two days Rs.2200, three days cut of Rs.7-8000 is implemented, so that almost the total month’s wage is cut. One second late into punching-card entry is a day’s wage cut, but he cannot then go out of the factory but has to give his full production for that day too.
Meanwhile, with ‘development’, ‘growth’, ‘consumer satisfaction’ involved, the willing State too lends its full support (rejecting the minimum demand for registration of the workers’ Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU) as a pre-independence day gift on 14th August; police force of 500 send to occupy the factory to ‘prevent violent activities’ as a pre-emptive measure on August 28th night). The company then terminated 11 workers and suspended 38 on August 29th and 30th on false charges demanding a ‘good-conduct bond’ (read: humiliation by law), with the state police and administration, the media (which is singing the management’s tune that production has resumed), and ‘bouncers’ on its payroll as its willing pawns.
Inside the factory, with cameras even in the bathrooms, the company’s evidence-less charges of ‘indiscipline’ and ‘sabotage’ or go-slow in production are baseless. Is it remembering the death penalty for ‘industrial sabotage’ implemented in an emerging industrial England with the 1812 ‘frame breaking act’, that corporations clamour for more ‘solid’ laws? The language now is ‘flexible’ labour laws for a more insecure and ‘mobile’ labour force. In fact, contractualisation of labour is fast becoming the definitive burning issue before the working class. The workers, both permanent and contract, in Maruti Suzuki however stand united in this struggle.
In such a situation, the current demand of the recognition of a Union that the workers feel represents their interests becomes the first step towards demanding the end of such despicable working conditions and back breaking extraction of labour which make profit and strength of the company possible in the first place. The Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU) is demanding as an immediate measure, the withdrawal of the charge-sheet, termination, suspension of the 49 workers. The workers are sitting day-and-night at the factory gate, peeling off the layers of Maruti Suzuki’s “way of life”.
The significance of the current struggle in Maruti Suzuki’s assembly plant where workers anger and corporate-state power battle, can only be fully comprehended in view of its impact in the vast network of arteries of the industry in the area and beyond of which Maruti sits at the centre, exhausting a low paid, ‘mobile’ workforce with the normalcy of exploitation. On 1st Sept, on the call of the MSEU, in solidarity with all the workers of MSIL, Manesar, over 5000 workers assembled at the factory gate no.1 for a dynamic gate meeting and juloos that followed in the IMT Manesar area. On the 5th September again, around 4000 workers rallied till the highway to block it. The Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera-Bawal industrial belt in Haryana is stirring up in solidarity and protest by workers and Unions in the area. The social power of these young workers is tangible with the thunderous camaraderie that erupts when workers and others join in solidarity.
This struggle erupts as a continuation of rising tide of workers` struggles in Gurgaon-Manesar with the most prominent being the police attack on a demonstration of Honda (HMSI) workers in July 2005. In May 2006, immediately after a five day occupation at Hero Honda by 3,000 contract workers, tools were laid down in the supplying plant of Shivam Autotech. Similar situations at HMSI and Delphi have also arisen after that. The Rico Auto 43-day strike happened in September 2009 with one lakh workers in the area going on a one-day general strike which shook not only the entire area but stopped production lines in General Motors in the US. This present struggle thus, more than itself, is important in the possibilities it shows ahead for working class struggle and the struggle of the masses in crisis.
We know and realise even better with the ongoing struggle in Maruti that profit depends on one most significant variable- exploitation of working people. This is true from POSCO Orissa to Maruti Manesar, where the potentiality of the masses is violently disrupted on one hand by displacement and uprootedness, and then boxed up in daily routines, shift rhythms and distorted social relations. We realise that exploitation is not an event or a spectacle but married to how ‘normalcy’ is produced. As young women and men faced with the crisis of the system as it stands, we realise that this and other such struggles of the workers and masses expose the skeletons on which the grand houses of riches are built. As a youth organisation, Krantikari Naujawan Sabha, seeks to expose the limitations of the present system from a left revolutionary perspective, seeking a living political process. Rather than ending up ‘interpreting’ Marx’s 11th thesis “Philosophers have only interpreted the world so far. The point however is to change it”, a direction is sought towards really changing the world.
With the struggle in Maruti Suzuki, we stand as part of the larger solidarity effort and forum which is in coordination with the Union’s effort. We call upon all to join us in the solidarity meeting with the struggling workers in Kaveri mess, JNU, tonight 9th September at 9.30pm.
100 hr Barricade by Students and Youth Against Corruption and Corporate loot. Thousands of students were detained and later released in order to prevent them from carrying out their 100 hr barricade at night. An interview with Sandipan Talukdar (AISA).
Organised by Student-Youth Campaign Against Corruption at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi after a nation wide campaign. Interview with Aslam Khan, Student-Youth Campaign Against Corruption
Organised by Student-Youth Campaign Against Corruption at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi after a nation wide campaign. Interview with Kavita Krishnan of CPI (ML)Liberation
DO WE KNOW WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING IN OUR DEPARTMENT?
WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT?
Do we support of the Department becoming a Police State?
NO!
Do we support the presence of Bouncers in Faculty meetings?
NO!
Do we voice our dissent?
NO!
Silence in the face of Totalitarianism is equal to Support for Totalitarianism.
Is this who we want to be?
An apathetic and apolitical body of students?
Do we care?
THE NEED OF THE HOUR is to MEET.
Take time to look beyond busy exam schedules at the big picture,
Recognise the value of having an academic space which allows faculty and students to express opinions.
its time we put an end to this long silence.
what are we doing? what exactly are we doing? an MA? running desperately towards a degree? with as much speed as possible?
the only thing that can really get us into gear is exams! i wished we could do better than that. else, we could do much better in the apathetic corporate sector and science colleges we so critique for their “apoliticalness”. are we, the literature students, who theorise and tear authors and critics apart, better just because we STUDY lit.? for we dont seem to be any more political than the table in my room.
facebook is the platform for our protests. upcoming exams, bad syllabi, lack of chairs in classrooms and unsatisfactory IA – all of it goes on facebook. and of course, we expect our techie teachers to take the hint and sort our problems for us. we, helpless souls are limited to our computer mouses. thats as far as we move our fingers. the only time we draft petitions are when we want exams to be postponed, even when it is a perfectly comfortable date sheet. that’s as far we theory people can delve in practice. of course, we expect some of the practioners to see our protests on face book and demonstrate it physically for us.
and surely we do not waste our time organising seminars or attending the ones which were painstakingly fought for by the “over-enthu” and apparently not-so-studious few for their own fun.
why would the messy MA admission process bother us once we are done with it?
why will the semester system issue for UG level bother us, for we are Post Graduate students!
why should it matter if the dept is in a state of chaos, for we will get going soon enough. and if there are those who want to stay here, its their problem.
and if our teachers and mentors who have helped us through so many different things, why should we feel grateful? after all, its their job?
NO. its not their “job” to deal with our questions outside the class. its not their “job” to push for a better IA mechanism or organise a students seminar, or listen to our personal problems, as a lot of them do.
but we do ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on their plight on FB. and surely, as students, busy preparing for our exams (which probably cant happen if these teachers were not there), we cant be expected to do more! poor, helplessly busy us.
we cant speak for ourselves, we cant speak for anyone else. and of course we are students of English Literature who specialize in being articulate, in making coherent theoretical arguments and speaking for the rights of the “mute” subaltern. well, charity begins at home. start speaking for the rights of the environment you are a part of, even if provisionally.
can we please, for once, get over ourselves, our petty goals, our exam phobias and take responsibility for our political positions. for, inaction and silence does not mean NEUTRAL GROUND. it is very much a position. it is very much a choice!
can we, for once, try to take our grudges beyond our comfortable computer tables and fb groups and actually step out to express the beliefs and critiques we so well write down to get a 60%?
can we for once think of a future beyond exams? we are not half as messed up as we will be in the time to come, if we keep shirking from our political responsibilities, if we are not willing to interfere in the course things take in our work/study places, if we are self-obsessed enough to allow the flow of things to drown us.
we have actually read very little, and perhaps understood even less. for if we had understood, we wouldnt have been in the pitiable shape that we are, letting ourselves down as we have.
At the end of 2010, tens of thousands of university students have demonstrated in central London and all over university campuses in the UK, against the coalition government’s proposals to raise tuition fees up to 9,000 pounds. Government and Media coverage of the protests has focussed primarily on two factors – the violence of a minority of protestors and the apparent ‘privileged’ profile of a few student protestors. ‘Rich rioting students’ was just one of the headlines describing the demonstrations. A panellist on BBC’s Question Time described protestors as ‘just a bunch of middle class students’. Michael Gove, the Education Minister, defending the planned increase in tuition fees posed the question: ‘Is it fair to ask a miner to subsidise the education of someone who can go and become a millionaire?’ The irony of this analogy can surely not be lost on those who remember how brutally Gove’s Conservative Party, in its previous incarnation, destroyed the heart of British working class mining communities.
One of the most passionate, but misguided, commentaries on the recent student protests comes from Julie Burchill (the Independent, 16 December), who made a plea to the public to ‘spare us these pampered protesters who riot in defence of their privilege’. Focusing on one student, Charlie Gilmour, who has been singled out by almost all the British media because of his connection to a famous rock star, Burchill vents her anger at so called ‘middle class’ protestors at the same time as dismissing university education as a wasteful time of ‘boozing and bullshitting funded by the taxes of people who had the actual gumption to remove themselves from the playpen of education and get a job as soon as legally possible’. She goes on to suggest that for many working class youth, university education has made little difference to their prospects of getting a job.
Burchill is right to question the success of government-sponsored schemes such as widening participation which critics argue has done little to equalise educational outcomes. All the research suggests that while working class students are more likely to attend university than they did 10 years ago the class gap has not necessarily diminished. Working class students are more likely to attend newer universities, to be part-time students and to study for more vocational subjects. But to dismiss university education for the masses as completely irrelevant is surely wrong. Burchill is also wrong to dismiss the current protests as entirely middle class-led. The fact that some students from middle and upper class families join the student protest does not make the whole student protest an action of the privileged few in defence of their privileges. University students, whatever social class their parents are from, historically tend to act together as ‘students’, and for most part for progressive causes as in the case of the 1968 student protests. At first in 1968 too, the governments and media also sought to portray the student protests as work of radical students and small groups of middle class troublemakers.
The protests over the last few weeks have seen large numbers of working class students (some of them school students) protesting because it is they who have the most to lose from the proposed public spending cuts. Further, to get so hung up on the notion of a so-called middle class-led protest serves to support Gove’s and the coalition government’s attempts to create an ideological standpoint, presumably on the side of the ordinary working people, from which position to launch a wholesale attack on all the social and economic achievements of the previous generations, like the universal child benefit, housing benefit, disability benefits and similar other measures.
The current representation of the protestors as middle class serves a deeply ideological and manipulative function of deflecting attention away from the stark realities of the public cuts and their real causes. Many people who oppose the cuts simultaneously accept the argument that there is no alternative but to sacrifice education and other public services in order to save the economy. Further, a large section of the British public and media appear to have accepted the line presented by the government that the total package of cuts worth £128 billion by 2015-16 was ‘unavoidable’ because of previous administration’s careless spending, and almost self-made huge deficits. Until the financial crash of 2008, however, the Labour governments had succeeded in keeping national debt below the 40 percent of GDP target that they set themselves. In 2006/07, public sector net debt was 36.0 percent of the GDP. In 2008, it rose rapidly primarily because of ‘financial interventions’ to bailout of Northern Rock, RBS and other banks, because of lower tax receipts, and because of higher spending on unemployment benefits, all caused by the global recession. The current deficit was caused primarily by the recession not by previous administration’s pre-crash careless spending. It currently stands as 63.7 percent of National GDP, and was projected to peak at 74.9 percent in 2014-15.
Massive cuts to the NHS, local government, and education budgets are not the inevitable solution to national debt. During the Second World War, the UK national debt reached much higher figures of up to 150 percent of the GDP. It is not uncommon for countries to borrow more during the time of serious national and international crises, like wars, or economic upheavals like the one currently affecting the world, and to pay back the debt over a period of time once the economy starts to grow again. In this sense, budget deficits can be an effective way to deal with shocks such as wars, financial crashes and deep recessions. If anything, the problem of low economic activity is the real, and more urgent, issue than the fiscal stability.
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ programme offers an ideological justification for the massive public spending cuts which are about much more than just deficit reduction. The pretence of ‘there is no alternative’ offers a means for the Conservative project to radically transform the state and to transfer more services and money from the public to the private sector. If the real intention was to take the British economy out of the crisis, then such massive cuts would not be the answer. There are alternatives: we need to find a fair and sustainable path out of crisis. Budget deficits will more or less automatically heal with the economic recovery. Trying to cut the deficit quickly, in the midst of a serious recession, will damage the economy and extend the crisis. The government instead should concentrate on growth and allow growth to reduce the deficit. Cuts will not reduce the deficit, investment will. Recently, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced that it expects economic growth in 2011 to be much slower than previously predicted. A much weaker consumer spending, resulting from massive unemployment and lower wages in 2011, is described as the main reason for this. Cutting too far and too fast will mean more people out of work, fewer jobs in the economy, lower level of taxation from workers and businesses, and more people on unemployment benefit, which will cost the government more. The real challenge is to introduce constructive ways to restructure the national economy so that it can deliver strong and consistent growth.
The current crisis and the way some other parts of the world economy have been dealing with it successfully, and all social and cultural legacies of this turbulent process have highlighted, like never before, the crucial role of education. The financial and economic crisis has had a particularly strong impact on young people with low levels of education. Investments in education pay large and rising dividends for individuals, but also for economies. On average, a young person with a university degree will generate £77,000 more in income taxes and social contributions over his/her working life than someone with a high-school degree only. Even after taking the cost of university education into account, the net public return from an investment in tertiary education is £56 000 for a male, in generated income taxes and social contributions over his working life. Enhancing tertiary education attainment can therefore help governments increase their fiscal revenues, making it easier to boost their social spending, in areas like, for example education. As the global demand for jobs shifts up the skills ladder, it has become crucial for countries to develop policies that encourage the acquisition and efficient use of these skills to retain both high value jobs and highly skilled labour. Burchill is right to suggest that ‘clever working class youth of this country [have] been socially and spiritually ‘kettled’ – hemmed in, suffocated and stifled’ historically by ‘the privilege and entitlement’ of the likes of elite. But does the answer really lie in cutting away higher education for working class students altogether?
Britain’s total investment in higher education, even before the current cuts of the Coalition government, was 1.3 percent of the GDP which is behind the OECD average of 1.5 percent. Despite the student numbers rising by approximately 25 percent in the last 15 years, the UK has slipped from third to fifteenth position in numbers graduating among industrial countries because investment in higher education has risen much rapidly elsewhere. Within Europe, the UK is already falling behind France, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Portugal and Netherlands, among others. Other Western governments, most notably the United States and Germany, have viewed the global financial and economic crisis as a sign not to retrench but to invest in their higher education systems as a necessary part of investing in the skills that will be needed for recovery in near future. In the UK, however, it was education that was first in line for cuts in spending: the cutting of the Future Jobs Fund, the cancellation of school building and refurbishment, the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and now funding cuts in university teaching budgets, fewer university places and a massive increase in university tuition fees. All these draconian measures will ensure that talented people from working class backgrounds will not achieve their full potential. The poorer you are the more scared you are by the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds of debt. It seems this is exactly what the Coalition government wants- to keep education for the rich and privileged. And this is what tens of thousands of students are protesting against. If we want British economy to recover and take its place in a much more competitive world, if we want Britain to be ‘open for business’, we should make higher education available for everyone, regardless of their social class. The more skilled people we have, the more likely companies will be willing to invest in the UK.
Bulent Gokay is a Professor of International Relations, Keele University and Farzana Shain is a Senior Lecturer, Keele University
Following is the video of a seminar organised by Correspondence and Kudos, the Literary Society of Hindu College (University of Delhi) on 4th March, 2010 with the aim of initiating a discussion on radical student and university politics.
Paramita Ghosh talks to Prasanta Chakravarty, who teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi, on the current state and dynamic of the Indian publishing industry, contemporary fiction and the culture of reading.
Paramita Ghosh (PG): Your project Humanities Underground is an attempt to rescue the Humanities from the skill-oriented courses that university education is slowly turning into. One would have thought this is more rampant in professional courses like management and so forth. But we see publishing, which is supposed to promote literature, is also going the same way with the birth of categories like chick-lit, books to be read in the metro, page-turners to be gobbled at the airport-lounge. How does one explain this attack or shift in emphasis in the arts/humanities/publishing?
Prasanta Chakravarty (PC): First of all, Humanities Underground is a collective umbrella and much will depend on the enthusiasm of a large number of people who are in their own little ways being affected by this onslaught on the varied and nuanced world. It is also about nurturing a critical, oppositional edge that humanities provide. But we are not trying to rescue anything. No one can and should get in that kind of a saviour mode. It is an online forum for sharing ideas at this point, a venture to see whether there is enough interest in facing the variegated and uncertain world that we live in. The initial signs are quite encouraging. We are receiving a collective surge of questions and commentaries and from different parts of the country and the world too. Debates are happening. Our aim is modest at this stage: to create a space where interested people can share ideas and imagination and work out strategies in order to take on the rapid watering down of reading habits and writing styles, without being self-congratulatory.
The shift you are referring to is interesting. Now I think this dichotomy between classical and popular is often fallacious. The idea of taste is often constructed. In that sense the emergence of the genre of novel itself in the 19th century was a popular venture, or the genre of ‘essay’, which started even earlier as a modest attempt to reflect and ruminate, is now solidly mainstream. So, in that sense this rush for chick-lit or graphic novels show an interesting shift and may become important markers of our times. But the point is about homogenisation. Young and old are often looking to merge in with the available, with the herd rather than look for possibilities. There indeed are publishers, often in regional literatures, who are still taking chances with the subtleties and criticality that literature, art and performance provide us. We have a generation of students who are not even bilingual though they routinely learn French or Sanskrit as a second language in school. What is this strange phenomenon? In Delhi University we are noticing with intrigue that some of our best students who receive astronomical grades in schools and colleges often cannot even write correct English, and notions of style have disappeared from the canvas all together. Humor, for instance, as an art, is a rare commodity. Something strange is happening which Humanities Underground is trying to fathom and explore.
PG: Writing and being a writer is such a glamorous profession these days. Why does everyone want to be a writer? Has the increase in number of publishing houses, the volume of publishing, the appearance of so many literary ‘forms’ contributed to the sense that everyone has a story to tell, everybody can tell stories? Why has this particular approach to ‘form’ become so important in literature now?
PC: There is this democratisation of writing in New India, which is great. This is not unlike the phenomenon that now our best cricketers and popular singers are coming from every region of the nation. Quizzards need not gruel in a Siddhartha Basu type format; KBC will and have replaced that kind of prime-time investment in the esoteric and variegated sense of trivia sharing. Literature likewise has become more user-friendly and accessible: from the potential authors’ standpoint as well as from the reader’s perspective. But this logic of massification, instead of democratisation and freeing literature from its shackles, is actually narrowing down possibilities. Shelf life has diminished and that is fine by the author and the publisher as long as they can fill it up with the next miraculous uproar. In actuality, forms are always changing, they evolve. The logic of this kind of assembly line plays safe and is often brilliantly finessed to homogenise forms. The argument is always democratic and making a quick buck for everyone, which is a formidable one to surpass. This is what we are witnessing in non-vernacular writing at this point. How many of us routinely read poetry or plays? The glamorous always stood out and reserved a maverick space at one point. That idea is being overturned by playing onto the logic of reaching out and by hammering accessibility.
PG: Do you see this phenomenon as a lack? Does it have to do with our culture of reading, which is changing or is India really turning into a nation of writers?
PC: Again, this is not a story of crisis. I would see it as a shift in sensibility as we, as a nation, accommodate to a more conservative and individualised time. I believe Indians still read a lot and a variety of things too. It is a truism that we are an extremely conscious people, politically and aesthetically. Good or hard-hitting artistic production will be appreciated at the end of the day. But that is not coming into focus because people who matter are actively interested in suppressing these factors. Some of our best minds are thus missing on the variety and depth and criticality that even contemporary literature provides. The popular always helps to redistribute the classic. The habit of being in touch with the enduring also means you are in touch with pulse of the everyday life. One is not opposed to the other.
PG: Has the thin dividing line between popular/commercial and ‘high’ fiction confused Indians? A couple of decades ago, for example, a James Hadley Chase pulp story and a Graham Greene novel would not have the same production value, imprint and publishing hype—as they now do if we draw equivalences in current writings. Chick-lit space is eating into, say the shelf space that could accommodate the likes of Amitav Ghosh or Rohinton Mistry. We are producing more of the Chetan Bhagats than Vikram Seths.
PC: Yes, it has perhaps. The confusion, as you call it, is deliberate and well worked out, as I said, but we cannot afford to be judgemental on the buyer and clamp down with the Seths and the Ghoshs of the world onto him. That will be an enormous exercise in misplaced condescension. And besides we all grew up on Hadley Chase and the likes! But we also read voraciously—all kinds of other stuff. That is the more difficult but sure-shot way of tackling the blundering homogeneity that we see in the marquee these days. The idea of choice is quite narrow, if seen closely. All conscious Indians must push each other to carry on with the habit of greedy reading. Old book stores and the newest one on the street are equally important institutions. Variety fosters thinking, and thinking, in turn, breeds criticality and opposition to our herd-instincts.
PG: If one is to push a bit further, one notices two kinds of writers that are getting rejected—those who obviously can’t write, but also those who can ( I am thinking of radical/avant-garde) have little scope to be noticed. I guess I am making this claim because I find it really hard to believe that in 25-30 years of mainstream English language and fiction publishing we have few exemplary writers, and even those whom we can’t really claim as ours often. Why do you think ‘serious literature’ is no longer coming out of our publishing houses? Is the logic that no one is interested in more reflective stuff valid? What do your students in Delhi University, for example, read outside of their course work?
PC: Yes, it is selective usage of the radical that the market prefers. Some writers are pegged as radical and hence their saleability. But I do not see much of avant garde writing in the modernist sense of the term in English langauge writing from India at least. Avant garde does not necessarily mean radical or let us say, such a kind of radicalism is much more bohemian (not busy and straightforwardly progressive) and experimental in form and style. I mean, G.V. Desani’s All about H. Hatter was truly avant garde. Not very often now in fiction we see that kind of devil-may-care approach, at least. You still see that, but in vernacular writings. Serious literature does come out of certain English press too but the problem is reverse: they are but too self-consciously serious. People who subscribe to them, missionaries of sorts, are likely to create a false dichotomy of the classic and the popular and wallow in their cocooned world.
True, many of my students do think in terms of course work but a large section of them in fact indulge in all kinds of readings too: from philosophy to history to various forms of contemporary literature. Writings from Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa are extremely popular with many of my students, which I see as a continuity of sorts with the earlier generation. There is a fair investment in Urdu and Hindi, which is wonderful. Some of them invest in translated works. Many participate in a variety of literary and analytical activities on the internet. But as I said, reading habits often need some kind of jumpstart from time to time; the milieu has to be fostered. That could be done possibly by sharing and exchanging ideas, by deepening debates.
PG: There has been a similar publishing culture in the West—similar turbulence and shifts, one would think. But why is it that in India there is no space or culture for promotion of independent, parallel publishing like, say, Zubaan and Katha? The US does, for instance, have a publishing house like poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, does it not?
PC: I am not an expert on publishing but there may be a variety of reasons. One, as always, it is really difficult to survive in India on a small publishing space even if you are idealistically motivated. In Kolkata, in the past few years, a wonderful independent publishing house has emerged: Gangchil. But they do not even have a temporary space to work on and distribution is a perennial headache. This is a pretty standard story all around the nation. City Lights has evolved over a period of time. It could have sputtered but for the brilliant editorial and marketing intervention of Nancy Peters in 1971. The point is independent publishing too must innovate and professionalise within its ideal and radical space. In India sometimes independent publishers have tried to come under a common umbrella for distribution and so forth. For instance, The Independent Publishers’ Group (IPG) is a partnership of 10 small/medium publishers and publisher-distributors based in Delhi that started a few years ago. Daanish, LeftWord, Samskriti, Social Science Press, The Book Review Literary Trust, The Little Magazine, Three Essays Collective, Tulika, Women Unlimited, Zubaan and Kali for Women comprise the IPG.
Often more upcoming mainstream houses like Yoda, Navayana or Seagull are also publishing interesting and tantalising stuff. Or sometimes motivated zeal make things happen, where financial worries could be handled in other ways: as the Writers Workshop experiment has successfully depicted.
The other side is readership. It is often difficult to build up a loyal and solid base of readers who would be interested in the forms of writings that independent press have often traditionally supported: poetry, pamphlets, non-fiction, plays and so forth. It takes time and energy for such a long haul. The investment is thankless. It is really a culture around the variegated that I return to, which one tries to develop and inculcate. Oppositional and critical publishing houses are fewer, as you say, but that space is more alive in the vernacular. It is possible to conceive such locales in the English speaking world too. I am hopeful.
Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher).
We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors.
But however agonizing the situation of the indebted, the debt is growing. As of September 2010 total student loan debt amounted to $850 billion, having just surpassed credit card debt by about $20 billion for the first time. And it is rising at a catastrophic rate, e.g., by 25% in 2009 to meet the rising cost of tuition and other college fees. Even the Great Recession has not put an end to this financial explosion. On the contrary, while credit card debt has leveled off, student borrowing has continued to grow to cover the rising costs of living as well as the tuition fees, especially by unemployed workers who are “going back to school” to get a “better,” or at least some, job in the future.
Logic, therefore, makes the remission and abolition of student loan debt a necessary demand for the university student movement, especially in an era when the need for “an educated work-force” has become an institutional axiom. However, student loan debt abolition (for instance) was not a focus or prominent issue in the student mobilization that peaked last spring, especially in California. This constitutes an impasse for the movement, since meeting after meeting it has become clear that refusing the blackmail of the debt and calling for abolition of tuition fees are pivotal to every form of struggle on our campuses. Students holding three jobs to repay (or avoid) loans or taking as many credits they can fit in their schedules to reduce the length and cost of schooling, can neither be active in campus protests against budget cuts and the commercialization of education nor can they engage in self-education and the creation of “knowledge commons.”
In this contribution to the Edu-factory network’s discussion of debt I think beyond this impasse, asking why an organized debt abolition movement does not exist in the US and what needs to be done to assist its formation.
A first consideration is that the very conditions that would call for mass student protest against indebtedness have so far contributed to preempt this possibility. Even before the time to pay back is upon them, the debt has profound disciplining effect on students, taylorizing their studies and undermining the sociality / and politicization that has traditionally been one of the main benefits of college life (Read).
An even more important consideration is the fact that student loans are constructed so that students do not pay them back while they are students. Student loans are time bombs, constructed to detonate when the debtor is away from the campus and the collectivity college provides is left behind. Once we recognize this we can also see that there is a hard-fought struggle around the student loan debt throughout the US, but (a) it operates in a non-communal, micro-social, serial way, mainly through default; (b) it is a struggle that involves subjects other than students, taking off precisely once students cease to be students, for only after they leave the campus do the debt collectors show up at their doorsteps. In other words, while the visible student movement has not so far made debt abolition its goal another movement with that goal has been growing to a large extent underground. One former student after another is rejecting loan payments through default, but they are not publicly announcing it. “For fiscal year 2008 the default rate increased to 7.2 percent, compared with 6.7 percent in 2007 and 5.2 percent in 2006” after a long period of decline from 1990, when it hit a peak of 22.4%, and 2003, when it hit a trough of 4.5%. (NB: These somewhat misleading statistics are calculated according to “cohort” years. For example, the 2007 cohort default rate is the proportion of federal loan borrowers who began loan repayments between October 2006 and September 2007, and who had defaulted on their loans by the end of September 2008. Therefore, they dramatically underestimate the true default rate) (Lederman).
As typical of “invisible” movements, statistics fail us in drawing its proportions. We have no estimate, for instance, of how many have been driven to suicide or how many have been forced to go into exile due to their student debts. Nor do we have a measure of the social impact of the growing de-legitimation of the student debt machine. We can only speculate about the consequences of disclosures concerning the collusion between the university administrations (especially in the case of “for profit” institutions) and the banks, now commonly acknowledged in the media as well as in congressional investigations. For sure, blogs and web-groups are forming to share experiences and voice anger about student loan companies like the biggest one, the Student Loan Marketing Association (nicknamed “Sallie Mae”). On Google alone, there are about 9,000 entries under the rubric “Sallie Mae Sucks,” and another 9,000 under “Fuck Sallie Mae.” Browsing through the chat rooms, with their harrowing stories of wrecked lives and mounting frustration against the operations of Sallie Mae, makes it clear that the potential for a debt abolition movement is high. So far, however, most attempts that have been made to give an organizational form to this anger have largely demanded the application of consumer protection norms to the management of the debt.
A well-known example is StudentLoanJustice.org (SLJ.org) that systematically compiles testimonials on the subject, organized state-by-state, revealing in graphic detail the dread, disgust, and humiliation indebtedness generates. These testimonies also reveal why, despite their anger and despair, debtors hesitate to join in an open debt abolition movement. As the founder of SLJ.org, Alan Michael Collinge, points out that there are many obstacles to such course of action:
Even now, the barriers to inciting meaningful political action at the grassroots level are daunting, For one thing, facing large –often insurmountable– student debt is a highly personal matter. Many debtors are too embarrassed or humiliated even to tell their immediate family members and close friends about their situation, let alone join in a grassroots effort challenging the injustice of student lending laws.” (Collinge: 93)
The Kantian imperative that debts ought to be repaid cost what may is also weighing on the minds of the debtors despite the fact that the conditions imposed by student loans companies are often fraudulent and generally unfair. As mentioned, many of the developing student debtor organizations refuse to speak of “abolition.” What fuels their indignation is the arbitrariness and arrogance of the creditors’ management of the debt, not the debt itself. As the “content author” of the SallieMaeBeef.com web-site writes:
Allow me to make one thing clear. This site is not for people who chose not to make their payments. Choosing not to pay a debt is one’s own fault. Sallie Mae, like many companies, makes mistakes. I don’t fault them for that. What matters is how they resolve the problems. They did a terrible job resolving the mistakes they made with my account, and I found out that I was far from being the only person suffering because of THEIR mistakes. I also found that they allegedly prey on borrowers, trapping people into paying 2 to 3 times (sometimes significantly more) what they borrowed. There is simply no excuse for it. (www.SallieMaeBeef.com).
The very choice of the term “Beef” in the title of the organization suggests a complaint or a private dispute, not a demand or a public arraignment. SLJ.org, one of the most publicized student loan protest organizations, also rejects both individual or collective refusals to pay– witness what its founder writes of one of SLJ.org’s members, Robert, whose $35,000 debt became $155,000 through the ploys of the financial company which held his debt : “like most SLJ.org members, Robert absolutely agrees that he should pay what he owes, but he simply cannot deal with a debt of this magnitude” (Collinge: 19).
In other words, prominent anti-student loan debtors organizations re-affirm the principle of the student debt. They believe that the safeguards and regulatory oversight that apply to other consumer loans –mortgages, auto loans, and credit card charges–should be applied to student loans as well, which presently is not the case because of the repeated governmental actions taken to block this option.
*In 1998 Congress made the student loan “the only type of loan in US history non-dischargeable in bankruptcy” (Collinge: 14). This means that presently even after filing for bankruptcy and been reduced to the status of a pauper, a debtor is still deemed responsible for payment on student loans, cost what it may, perhaps even facing a charge of fraud and imprisonment, if some politicians have their ways.
*In 1998 all statutes of limitations for the collection of student loan debt were eliminated.
*Since the beginning of the federal student loan program in 1965, the freedom to change lenders in order to find better terms for a loan has been denied.
Once the commodity approach to education is accepted, the political strategy adopted becomes predictable. According to Collinge, “it is imperative that standard consumer protections be returned to student loans” (Collinge: 20). This means, for a start, that student loans should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy, should have a statute of limitations apply to them, and it should be possible to refinance them with other lenders. These are the demands put forward by SLJ.org since its formation in 2005, supported in varying degrees by a number of liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, and Congressmen George Miller and Danny Davis (see the Acknowledgements section of (Collinge: 151)).
Over the last five years this “consumer protections” strategy has produced significant legislative results addressing some of the grievances listed above. These include the passage of three major acts: The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (that halves the interest rate on federally subsidized loans and cuts lender subsidies and collection fees slightly), The Student Loan Sunshine Act of 2007 (that requires university officials to fully disclose any special arrangements between them and lending companies), and in 2010 the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) (described below). For all these cautious legislative efforts however, SLJ.org and similar organizations have not achieved any of their major objectives. If we add the return to power, as Speaker of the House, of John Boehner, “by far the largest recipient of campaign contributions from student loan interests” (like Sallie Mae) and their most aggressive watchdog, we can conclude that the “consumer protection” approach to student debt has reached its limit. Indeed, when Boehner speaks of repealing the Health Care Bill (whose complete name is the “Health and Education Reconciliation Act”), he certainly alludes also to the education rider hidden in it, as much as to the parts of the bill dealing with health care.
What then are the prospects for the struggle against student loan indebtedness?
Clearly a premise for the rise of an openly organized student loan debt abolition movement is that the organized campus student movement and the student loan debtor movement off the campuses meet. Indeed, they need each other and will be in crisis as long as they remain separated. On the one side, the student movement activists cannot call for the liberation of education without confronting the debt peonage waiting for them and their fellows, and on the other, the student loan debtors movement must go beyond the limits of its stalemated “consumer protections” approach. The sense that a limit has been reached in this regard is indicated by the enormous interest generated in early 2009 by Robert Applebaum’s Keynesian proposal, “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy,” where he called for the government to forgive government student loans and pay back to banks and finance companies the outstanding private student loans (Applebaum).
The combination of an underground struggle involving millions of loan defaulters, intensified by mass unemployment and cuts in social spending, and the exodus of thousands of debtors fleeing the debt collectors hounding them, just as the campuses are becoming again places of mass, open agitation, has set the stage for a student loan debt abolition movement that Edu-factory network, for one, has been calling for.
It is the possibility of this encounter, I believe, that prompted Congress to pass SAFRA that was signed into law by President Obama on March 30, 2010. George Miller, the archetypal East San Francisco Bay liberal, surely had a sense of the political winds that were blowing when he introduced the bill into Congress in July 2009, just as the occupations at the UCAL campuses of Santa Cruz and Berkeley were being planned and a 32% tuition fee increase was being discussed by UCAL’s trustees. But he was certainly looking as well at the rates of defaulting loans and what they expressed in political terms, for I could not otherwise understand why its buffering attempt would take the form of a student loan debt reduction bill, when the student movement on the campuses was not openly calling for it.
SAFRA is full of diversionary and ameliorating moves in the struggle between debtors and creditors that attempt to cushion the impact of the Crisis on student debtors.
(i) it replaces the private institutions with the federal government as the creditor, by halting loan-guarantees to the banks –a major source of interest revenue for the latter at no risk to themselves. The billions of dollars that will be “saved” would be used to increase scholarships for low-income students (Pell grants);
(ii) it provides for a reduction of debt payments, from 15% to 10% of discretionary income;
(iii) it provides for more debtor-friendly “forgiveness” conditions (viz., the debt would be “forgiven” for those working in the “private” sector–if payments were made on time–in 20 years instead of the previous 25 years, and in 10 years for those in “public service,” including teaching and the military).
These more favorable conditions are meant to forestall an increase in default rates–for if the “crisis” continues and unemployment rates remain high, the student debt machine is bound to collapse and will force a “bail out” of student loan debtors similar to Applebaum’s “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy” proposal. They are also meant to prevent an escalation of student activism on the campuses and above all to keep the two movements divided. Whether SAFRA will succeed in doing this is not something we can foresee at this stage. We can, however, see some steps that appear necessary to build an abolition movement besides the obvious one of bringing both movements together in a national student loan abolition convention.
Building a student loan debt abolition movement also requires that we reframe the question of the debt itself. A first step must be a political house cleaning to dispel the smell of sanctity and rationality surrounding debt repayment regardless of the conditions in which it has been contracted and the ability of the debtor to do so. Most important, however, from the viewpoint of building a movement is to redefine student loans and debts as involving wage and work issues that go to the heart of the power relation between workers and capital. Student debt does not arise from the sphere of consumption (it is not like a credit card loan or even a mortgage). To treat student loans as consumer loans (i.e., deferred payment in exchange for immediate consumption of a desired commodity) is to misrepresent their content, making invisible their class dimension and the potential allies in the struggle against them.
Student debt is a work issue in at least three ways:
Schoolwork is work; it is the source of an enormous amount of new knowledge, wealth and social creativity presumably benefiting “society” but in reality providing a source of capital accumulation. Thus, paying for education is for students paying twice, with their work and with the money they provide.
A certificate, diploma, or degree of some sort is now being posed as indispensable condition for obtaining employment. Thus the decision to take on a debt cannot be treated as an individual choice similar to the choosing to buy a particular brand of soap. Paying for one’s education then is a toll imposed on workers in exchange for the possibility, not even the certainty, of employment. In this sense, it is a collective wage-cut.
Student debt is a work-discipline issue because it represents a way of mortgaging many workers’ future, deciding which jobs and wages they will seek, and their ability to resist exploitation and/or to fight for better conditions (Williams).
The overarching goal of capital with respect to student loan debt is to shift the costs of socially necessary education to the workers themselves at a time when a world market for cognitive labor-power is forming and a tremendous competition is already developing between workers. Employers’ refusal to massively invest in education in the US is not, in fact, a misreading of its class interests as theorists like Michael Hardt maintain (Hardt). It is the result of a clear-cut assessment of the new possibilities opened up by globalization, starting with the harvesting of educated brains as well as muscles from every part of the world. Capital’s strategic use of student loan debts to enforce a harsher work-discipline and force workers to take on more of the cost of their reproduction makes the struggle for debt abolition one that necessarily affects all workers. Accepting the student debt is accepting a class defeat, for it is certainly marks a major set back with respect to the 1970s when education was still largely financed by the state.
Certainly university teachers (like myself and many readers) and our unions and associations must take an active role in the abolition of student loan debt. For we are on the frontline, but in a compromised position, because we must “save the appearances” and pretend that for the university, cultural formation is of the essence, while we know that the student loan money is the source of much of the university’s budget and that the future debt peonage of many of our students “pays” our wages today (Federici). Just as, hopefully, most professors would object to be paid by a university whose revenue was the product of slave labor, so too must we object to having our students pay us at the cost of their post-graduation bondage.
Finally, debt in general is constructed to humiliate and isolate the debtor (Caffentzis). But demands for its abolition can be unifying, because it is everybody’s condition in the working class worldwide. Student loan debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt: across the world, for decades now, every cut in people’s wages and entitlements has been made in the name of a “debt crisis” of one sort or another. Debt abolition, therefore, can be the ground of political re-composition among workers. If this is the path it takes with respect to student loan debt, the student movement in the US will experience a decisive turning point and opening out to many allies beyond the campus.
Bibliography
Applebaum, Robert (2009). Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy. www.forgivestudentloandebt.com. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Caffentzis, George (2007). Workers Against Debt Slavery and Torture: An Ancient Tale with a Modern Moral. UE Newspaper (July).
Collinge, Alan Michael (2009). The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History–and How We Can Fight Back. Boston: Beacon Press.
Federici, Silvia (2010). Political Work with Women and as Women in the Present Conditions: Interview with Silvia Federici. Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning. Reclamations. Issue 3 (December). www.reclamations.org. Accessed on Dec. 10, 2010
Hardt, Michael (2010). US education and the crisis. Liberation (Dec. 2).
Lederman, Doug (2009). Economy Sinks, Default Rates Rise. Inside Higher Education. September 15. www.insidehigheredu.com/news. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Read, Jason (2009). University Experience: Neoliberalism Against the Commons. In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
Usher, A. (2005). Global Debt Patterns: An International Comparison of Student Loan Burdens and Repayment Conditions. Toronto, ON: Educational Policy Institute.
Williams, Jeffrey (2009). The Pedagogy of Debt. In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
Students are revolting! And quite right too. From the 52,000 strong demo in Westminster on Nov 10 (which went via the Millbank Tory Party HQ- not your average day at the office!) to disciplined and organized student occupations, sit-ins and teach-ins at Leeds, Manchester, Sussex, Middlesex and other Universities, through subsequent Days of Action, to student protests across Europe- Paris, Lisbon, Athens, Dublin. Saying, chanting, acting, demanding, `No to Education Cuts’, `No to (increased) Charges for Education’, `Education should be Free!’ The 10 Nov demo, organized by the National Union of Students and the college lecturers union, UCU, was the biggest student demonstration in a generation.
The next round was Wed 24 Nov, `Day X’. Students at universities, further education colleges, Sixth Forms and secondary schools walked out, and demonstrating against cuts and tuition fees, in a national day of action. Some marched on their local Tory party offices, just as 300 students and trade unionists in Barnet marched earlier on the local Tory Party HQ in Finchley!
The next `Day X’ is the day of the vote in Parliament on 9 Dec 2010 over the fees increase. There’ll be another massive demonstration. The Facebook group `Tuition Fee Vote: March on Parliament’ had 2,300 `attending’ within 45 minutes of being set up! Students and Workers realize this is a common struggle – Day X is supported by the three main anti-cuts umbrella organizations – the NSSN (National Shop Stewards Network), the RtW (Right to Work campaign) and the CoR (Campaign of Resistance) whose 27 Nov London rally of 1300 brought together organizations, socialist/ Marxist parties and groups, national organizations, local anti-cuts groups, students and school students.
One of the most remarkable and inspiring speeches, by 15 year old Barnaby, on Youtube explicitly linked the student struggle to wider struggles and workers struggles.
This time round, students are saying much more than `No Fees’. Saying and chanting `Students and Workers Unite and Fight’, `We are Part of a Wider Struggle!’ A recognition that our struggle is a common struggle for a better, a fairer, not a diminished and crueler, society. Facebook sites such as `School and FE students Against the Cuts’ have brilliant, basic, bold slogans- `Education for the masses not just for the ruling classes!’
What the banker’s crisis, the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism, `making the workers pay for the crisis’, the millionaire Con-Dem millionaire government is doing, is stoking raw anger. Not just among mainly middle class university students, but among working class students at Further Education colleges and Sixth Form colleges.
Raw Anger
There is raw anger at the withdrawal of Education Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) that are currently for low-income working class kids to stay on and study from the ages of 16-19, worth up to £30 per week. Now they are to be scrapped. Nationally 46% of Further Education students get EMAs. In poorer areas like Knowsley, Birmingham and Leicester the figure is 80%. Those affected are kids like members of my family. My grandson is one of hundreds of thousands of working class, low parental income kids, who could not have afforded to stay on to do A levels without the EMA. Millions of working class families will see their EMA support abolished. This is nearly 50 years on from when I received the staying on at school grant that I got as a working class kid staying on at Sixth Form in the 1960s. I couldn’t have stayed on without that grant. Now, almost half a century on, neither will millions of others. This is part of cutting back the social democratic advances won by the trade unions and working class after the second world war. The fight is to save the last vestiges of our post-war social democratic settlement starts here! One benefit, one part of `the social wage’, is being taken away. This is the deliberate culling of educational opportunity.
So, too, is the trebling of fees for university students following the Con-Dem government’s acceptance of the Browne Review. The cap of £3,000 a year tuition fees has been raised to a maximum of £9,000 a year fees! The most expensive state university fees in the world. Leaving students with a projected post-university degree debt of £38,000, that will, inevitably cut out poorer families. And so there is disgust among students at the bankers taking their millions in bonuses while other families agonise over the spiralling cost of what… getting educated!
The Class System and Education
Schooling, education, universities, even as early as nurseries, serve to sort people out – their futures, their minds. To reproduce the class system. It’s not what the official rhetoric claims of course, and it’s certainly not what teachers and lecturers want. But the actual intent of the ruling/capitalist class is for education to create and reproduce a hierarchically tiered and very differentially rewarded workforce. That’s the economic aim. It’s all about sifting and sorting and allocating – on a (raced and gendered) social class basis, `education for the economy’. Little else is deemed important for the masses. Ah- and mind-control- education as an `ideological state apparatus`. Yes, the social and political aim is a socially compliant citizenry. To teach us all our very different places. In the words of one senior civil servant, `people must be educated once more to know their place’. And, to use Louis Althusser’s distinction between the Ideological State Apparatuses (mainly nowadays, the mass media and the education system, formerly mainly organized religions) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (the Laws themselves, the Police, the Armed Forces, Surveillance and Control mechanisms, state force) – when the Ideological State Apparatuses don’t work, then the police kettle students and protesters, charge demonstrators on horses (I remember that from the Grunwick Strike in 1977), and use their batons. The smiley face of the police officer leading/ liaising with marchers, organizers, demos in Brighton over the last few years is replaced by visored, shield bearing and baton wielding riot police.
In the capitalist world, education is differentially funded on a class basis, with different expectations, life chances, and personality characteristics being encouraged and reproduced. In a nutshell, (most) upper class kids get to private schools and elite universities. There they are trained for the Bullingdon Boy, Eton educated Cameron style of leadership, wealth and power. Born- and educated- to power.
Most `middle class’ kids go to schools that are in some way, formally or informally socially and academically selective, and are trained for lower professions and supervisory and managerial jobs. Around half of my grammar school Upper Sixth form in 1963 went on to become teachers. I don’t think any of my twin brother’s secondary school classmates who had left school at 15 went on to become teachers. Most went straight into the manual job market.
Most `working class’ kids go to the middle and bottom rungs of the ladder of educational schools, expectations and opportunity. Trained for skilled manual, semi and unskilled and routine jobs, earning (in most cases) a fraction of the ruling / upper/capitalist class. Some don’t. Most do. There is some (ever-diminishing) social mobility of course, it legitimates the system and gives the illusion of meritocracy. And, for some, better funded lives.
Most, if not all, of the `working class’, live poorer, sometimes far, far poorer, more materially circumscribed lives, being educated not to expect too much, to obey, to accept life’s inequalities, to accept mind-numbing `celebrity culture’ as a substitute for real news and critique. Cameron’s millionaire cabinet (18 millionaires in the Cabinet) think £30,000 a year is poverty! Tell that to the millions on £15,000 or on minimum wage or on benefits! Who know what being hard-up means on a daily basis.
Some, especially in the Tory party, want to bring back grammar schools. Tell that to the millions who got a second-rate education, second-rate funding, second-rate libraries and less qualified teachers in secondary schools compared with the lucky 20% who got into grammar school.
Yes, I was lucky, passing the 11-plus and getting a first-rate education at a Grammar School, encouraged to reach for the stars, study until the age of 21, and set professional ambitions. I went on to become a university professor of education: not the lifestyle of a banker or billionaire, but very comfortable.
Not so for millions who were separated out for a second-rate education system – like my twin brother, who went to local Secondary Schools.
Most working class kids in the 1960s were ejected at age 15 into factory, shop and building site work. Nothing wrong with that work, but manual workers, then as now, get far less in pay, pensions and benefits than the more highly qualified. Of course, both sets of workers – manual and professional – then and now get paid a tiny fraction compared to the ruling class, “the masters of the universe”, mostly educated at private schools, inheriting and passing on privilege.
That was when I was a teenager, half a century ago. But it’s now, too. At school level, with the market in schools, a socially differentiated system where schools choose the kids rather than parents choosing schools for their kids. And class-based, too. With the abolition of EMAs, more so! With more and more working class kids dropping out of education because they can’t afford to stay in it!
And so too at University. In addition to having a three tier higher education system (elite/ Russell Group universities; other old universities; and a third tier, much more working class, tier of ex-polytechnics). There will be less of them, there will be less working class kids going to universities when fees are raised. The culling of educational opportunity. So people will once again not only know their place, but will be less able to change places!
Resistance
But people resist! Students are rebelling! Some trade unions are resisting cuts! And many teachers, students, workers, retirees, have visions of different utopias, past, present and future. Some remember the hopes and visions of the welfare state, of a free education and health service, free at the point of delivery, available on the basis of need not ability to pay. And some of us want better than that! Not its destruction.
Divisive and divided education for conformity is resisted! Many resist! Many teachers/ lecturers/ `teacher trainers’/ students/ families resist magnificently! (I’ve been involved in teacher education for forty years, I see it). Many try day in day out to raise expectations, refusing to label and stereotype and demean kids from particular class and ethnic backgrounds. The best teachers and lecturers, and other cultural/media workers, try, teach, show that we, and that kids’ and students’ futures, need not just be as compliant cogs in an economic machine.
Many – and it will become millions! – not only want but see the possibilities of a far better, far fairer, far more socially just, far more equal education system, society, politics and economy. Students – and anti-cuts campaigns and groups up and down the country – are prepared to struggle and demonstrate and organize. We’ve got to change this educational and social and economic system. And we can. But not with any of the current main parties!
All three of them want to/ accept slash and burn the welfare state, to reverse hard won historical rights and benefits. That’s where socialist groups and parties and anti-cuts campaigns come in. For me, a way forward is TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and local anti-cuts movements and coalitions – including the example of the students at Sussex University and other universities, sitting in, teaching-in, joining workers and trade unionists on our marches and demos.
One of the brilliant speeches at the CoR rally was by John McDonnell, one of the very few remaining socialist MPs left.
`This generation was meant to be apathetic, only interested in careers…. They’ve taught my generation, that we have been too long on our knees. And it’s time to stand up and fight. You students (who were arrested during Millbank and the kettling), you are not the criminals… The real criminals are the ones attacking our education system… say this to the TUC, it is time to play your role! We want co-ordinated industrial action, co-ordinated strike action across the country. It is time for generalized strike action. We are posing an alternative.… When Parliament refuses to represent. When politicians lie. When governments seek to ignore us… We have no other alternative but to take to the streets. And direct action to bring them down. Take to the streets’.
Local anti-cuts movements, occupations, sit-ins, demonstrations, and national coalitions such as TUSC, if they are organised democratically, can bring together workers, trade unionists, different socialist groups, students, teachers, OAPs – the people! – black, white, men, women, people of all religions and sexualities – in a common fight for equality. The struggle is wider than just over education!
Dave Hill is Professor of Education at Middlesex, and Visiting Professor of Education at Athens and Limerick Universities. Formerly a Labour Parliamentary candidate and Labour Group Leader, he was the TUSC general election candidate for Brighton Kemptown in May 2010, and is active in the Brighton Anti-Cuts Coalition. He was on the recent Education national demonstration, and is involved in Student / Lecturer actions against the Cuts/ at Sussex and Middlesex Universities.
KRANTIKARI YUVA SANGATHAN (KYS)
Haryana State Unit of All India Revolutionary Youth Organisation (AIRYO)
Munshi Premchand Library, Dharodi, District-Jind, Haryana
Email: kys.haryana@rediffmail.com, Ph. : 7876103701
On October 5, students enrolled in Adarsh College of Education, Shadipur (Julana), held a militant protest outside the college along with their parents and youth activists of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS). They were protesting against the college authorities for forcing students to pay Rs. 40,600 for the B.Ed course offered. This amount exceeded what the college had earlier advertised as the fee for the B.Ed course. The youth were also protesting the manhandling of students who tried to meet the college administration earlier and get an appraisal on the situation. The protest successfully drew working class youth from different districts in Haryana.
The protesters argued that as an ‘educational’ institute, it was expected that the college run on the basis of no-profit-no loss/minimal profit. They emphasised that even if the concerned college was a private institution it could not ignore the fact that education is a sector which is based on the notion of service to the society. When mobilising the affected students for the protest, KYS highlighted the fact that the declared fee for the course was already a very large amount and so the extra fees charged was completely unjustified. The fee structure was especially unwarranted considering the fact that most students enrolled were children of agrarian labourers and small peasants.
Indeed, this is no isolated incident, but one which is symptomatic of rampant privatisation of education in Haryana. It is a fact that the government has not been spending adequately on education and health. It is not, for example, creating more of its own institutes for B.Ed/JBT education. Rather than increasing the number of its own educational institutions the government has increasingly allowed private capital to enter the education field. It has been consistently doing this by giving recognition to private institutions that actually refuse to perceive education as a social service. Such private education institutes are well known for their profit-hungry mentality. In the interest of cutting costs to the minimum, these private institutes have no qualms functioning from small, cramped buildings, and in providing minimum teaching facilities. They are simply interested in manufacturing degrees, and are hence, characterised by the lack of teachers, regular lectures and classrooms/other infrastructure.
It is a shocking fact that in Haryana out of the total 459 B.Ed institutes only 19 are institutes funded and run by the Haryana government. Similarly, out of the 20,117 JBT institutes in Haryana only 2620 are government run institutes. Expectedly, in such a situation where government run educational institutions are scarce, the competition is very high and only those with good public schooling make it to the government colleges. On the other hand, students who have studied in badly run government schools due to their working class background are unable to make it to the few government run colleges. As a result, they are forced to enroll in expensive private colleges to pursue higher education. Clearly then, the nexus between the interests of private capital (in the education sector) and the government is a cause of much suffering to lakhs of students and their families.
Unfortunately, while the students were holding their peaceful protest outside the private B.Ed institute, the hired goons of the institution attacked the protest. Some of the protesters were struck by bricks and lathis. Many were bruised in the assault and four were seriously injured. Angered by the administration’s bullying tactics, the protesters decided to approach the District Commissioner. After being apprised of the situation and given a copy of the memorandum, the District Commissioner assured the youth of a positive intervention on his behalf.
Considering how the rampant privatisation of education in Haryana, KYS has decided to intensify its struggle on the issue and mobilise working class youth against the Haryana government’s measures to privatise education. It has been decided to launch a state-wide struggle so as to block the government’s openly capitalist education policy. Indeed, despite the fact that some of the protesting students were returned their money by the college principal on October 9, there remains a strong desire in them to take on the government on the issue of privatisation and commercialisation of education. This is best reflected in the fact that many of the affected youth refused to toe the line of the local panchayat (dominated by wealthy landed elements) which was suggesting a more amicable settlement of the issue. It is also reflected in their decision to march to Kurukshetra University (to which many of these private institutes are affiliated) so as to expose the nexus between the University and the education mafia.
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.
