Radical Socialist
Mamata Banerjee, Trinamul Congress and the Politics of Rape
Soma Marik
Long before the Nano was even a gleam in Ratan Tata’s eye, Mamata Banerjee had emerged as the most determined opponent of the Left Front in West Bengal. Rape and violence on women were important weapons in her arsenal in those days. Her discourse was always totally different from the discourse of the feminists or women’s movement activists. But it was clearly an appeal to Bengali middle class sentiments about how under the rule of the CPI(M) women were unsafe, they could be raped so easily. One can point to at least two very well known incident. On 7 January 1993, Ms. Banerjee went to the Writers’ Building with a hearing and speech impaired girl, who had been raped, and was pregnant. Ms. Banerjee claimed that the rapist was a CPI(M) man. Mamata Banerjee was then a Union Minister and youth Congress (I) leader in West Bengal. She led a three hour demonstration in front of the Chief Minister’s chamber at Writers’ Building, the seat of the government in West Bengal. Eventually she was violently thrown out and arrested, some members of the press manhandled, and the Press Corner demolished thereafter. Mamata Banerjee vowed she would never return to the Writers – and she returned only as Chief Minister, eighteen years later. The rape victim gave birth to a child brought up in a Home.
In 1998, Ms. Banerjee asserted that Champala Sardar, a TMC activist, had been raped by CPI(M) men. This was (of course) vigorously denied by the CPI(M), the ruling party of the Left Front and eventually, in 2003, all the accused were acquitted. Not that that means much. In India, most rape cases are not reported to the police. And that minority of rape cases actually reported to the police see progress among only a handful. Convictions are very few. There have been numerous reasons for this. The law on evidence for one. Till very recently the victim’s words amounted to little unless a foresnsic test backed her up. The difficulty in ensuring immediate forsensic test for another. This is a complex thing and one which many victims are not prepared to undergo immediately after a rape. Sexism of the administration and sections of the judiciary for a third. Ever since the Mathura Rape Case, now close to four decades old, the women’s movement in India has seen how courts, particularly though not solely lower courts, have dealt with rapes. In the Bhanwari Devi case, the court simply ruled that middle aged upper caste men do not rape lower caste women. That sexual violence and women’s bodies are routine weapons in political battles in India require little proving. So with a party deeply entrenched in power for decades, getting police compliance was often not very difficult, and proving rape charges very difficult indeed. What remains true is that one woman, Champala Sardar, risked her reputation to come out into the open and state that she had been raped. Ms. Banerjee made much of this, and it was part of the 2001 TMC election campaign.
But now that she and her party are in power, it seems that West Bengal has already attained Nirvana, or has become Paradise. From 2009, the slogan of change was what brought her to power. But just what are the changes for women? When any problem is mentioned, she treats it either as a legacy of the CPI(M), or as a false charge manufactured by the CPI(M) or some other political opponent.
When babies die, Ms. Banerjee is heard remarking that those babies were conceived while the Left Front was still in power. In other words, instead of investigating whether child care is being done properly, she is trying to find some utterly illogical plea by which to shrug off the responsibility of the Government health department. When farmers commit suicide she declares it has nothing to do with indebtedness. And when a woman was raped in Park Street, she commented that the incident was contrived and intended to malign her government. It is therefore hardly surprising that her Minister for Transport as well as Sports, Mr. Madan Mitra, accused the women of using the accusation of rape as a blackmail bid. As he told Star Ananda on 16 February, “She has two children and so far as I know she is separated from her husband. What was she doing at a night club so late in the night?” Thus, he asserted all over again that in a patriarchal society, it is the woman who is always accountable. It is she who must answer why she had not followed an unwritten code (as though even that keeps women safe).
From Ms. Banarjee, little more is to be expected. This is the person who a short while back, during the Calcutta Book Fair, said in public that books and wives (boi aar gharer bou) should not be lent out as they will be used before being returned. Yet, with the large adoring middle class fans she has gathered, there are few voices being raised against her. Her callous and potentially damaging comment over the Park street case indicates that for her, rape was an issue vital only as a stepping stone to power. Now that it is her government, she has no time for sensitive approach to rape victims. Since there were discrepancies in the testimony, the woman must be viewed as part of a conspiracy.
It is unfortunate that far too many even of social movement activists are seeing things in binaries, suggesting that too strong a criticism of the TMC government would mean their being viewed as CPI(M) supporters. This is the logic that has led to calling a halt to secular laws for fear of being branded as BJP (e.g., an adoption law that does not require any specific religious identity). This logic would silence or minimize all protest movements for fear of being accused that the movement is sponsored by one opposition party or another.
Given that the arrests on 18th February have conclusively proved that Ms. Banerjee and Madan Mitra were the ones playing fast and loose with the truth, one wonders what is going to happen. Will the rights movements demand at least the resignation of Mr. Mitra, who alleged that a woman was using a rape charge to simply blackmail someone? Will Ms. Banerjee apologise publicly, not only to this particular woman, but to all women, since her utterance has made it unlikely that in future raped women will dare to go to the police with a complaint? Or will she tell the media again that this is now a 15 day old case so she has no time to comment on any aspect of it, including the sexism and flagrant falsehood displayed both by herself and her minister?
The following article appeared in the December 31, 2011 issue of OCTOBER REVIEW, published in Hong Kong by Chinese revolutionary socialists. Their website can be reached athttp://www.october-review.org/
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On September 14, 2011, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made a high-profile plea for political reform when he attended the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as the Summer Davos Forum, in Dalian, a coastal city in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. Wen offered his "five points of political reform": 1. ruling the country by law, and ensuring separation of the party and government; 2. promoting social justice, addressing unfair distribution of wages and closing the gap between the rich and the poor; 3. ensuring an impartial and independent judiciary; 4. protecting the democratic rights of the people and expanding grassroots elections; 5. opposing corruption, requiring government officials to make public their financial affairs.
For the past two years, Wen repeated his idea about political restructure in different public events. Wen presented himself as a modest reformist within the Chinese Communist Party, whose position is similar to Zhao Ziyang. In 1989, Zhao, accompanied by Wen, visited the students and protesters on Tiananmen Square. Later Zhao stepped down and Wen disappeared from sight for a long time.
President Hu Jintao’s speeches to mark the 30 years of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone supported Wen, to a certain extent. Hu stressed that China should push for economic, political, cultural and social reforms. On the other hand, the conservative faction of the leadership dismissed any notion of political reform. Wu Bangguo, the chairman of the National People’s Congress, advocated the five NOs: “no multi-party election; no diversified guiding principles, no separation of powers, no federal system and no privatization."
Modest reformists such as Zhao and Wen urged resolving the serious tension between the bureaucracy and the people. But it is still extremely difficult to restructure the political system.
In the absence of political reform, social unrest is everywhere. The Beijing International City Development Institute has recently released China’s first Social Stability Risk Assessment Index System Report, at the International City Forum 2011 in Beijing on September 15. Lian Yuming, president of the Institute, warned that because of the incubation period and uncertainty of these risks, crises could be massively spread and magnified if risks are not solved now.
Furthermore, Lian pointed out that the gap between the rich and the impoverished was widening, and the Gini Coefficient exceeded 0.5, seriously challenging social tolerance. Second, social contradictions were increasingly emerging. Third, public security problems were severe, with protests by disgruntled people on the rise. Fourth, the social mentality of resenting the rich, officials and the authorities could result in social crises. Fifth, unconventional security hazards were becoming main threats of society.
Lian also remarked that nine categories of disputes — land disputes, relocation disputes, property disputes, restructuring disputes, medical disputes, labor disputes, pollution disputes, loan disputes, and disputes between locals and foreigners — could easily be transformed into social risks. He examined that these disputes are caused by the complicated and profound roots of economic and social development process.
Civic disputes and social tragedies forced the People’s Supreme Court to issue an emergency notice on September 9 that all people’s courts should seriously settle the cases and solve the disputes based on law. However, scuffles have continuously broken out between police and protesters. For example, Wukan villagers of Guangdong Province protested against the land grabbing by the local government and a Hong Kong capitalist. Longtou villagers also complained about the illegal land confiscation by the developers. Irritated by land disputes, Yilong villagers attacked the developer’s industrial park. There are many social conflicts yet to be disclosed.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed a serious mistake in implementing capitalism with corruption and negligence. The mushrooming growth of factories brought harm not only to people’s health but also to the environment. For example, the Dalian PX protest was a public protest up to 80,000 people against a toxic PX (paraxylene) chemical factory built inDaliancity. The government agreed to move the factory out of the city, although the new location of the factory and the date of its move were not announced. More than a thousand people blocked the main road in Gutian county, Fujian Province, to protest the death of tons of fish in the river Min, caused by the discharge of chemical waste.
Worse still are the most destructive and widespread pollutants — tiny particulates widely known as PM 2.5. According to the research of China Environmental Science Institute, cities in the Pearl Delta, Yangtze Delta, Sichuan plain and northeast region are seriously affected by PM 2.5. Air particulates with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (hence "PM 2.5") have serious health implications. They are small enough to penetrate human lung tissue and can cause asthma, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. The research states that 58% of cities in China have exceeded five times the standard for PM 2.5 set by the World Health Organization. In 2004, air pollution killed 358,000 people.
Public health services have become worse. China Central Television reported that hospitals made fivefold profits from the most 20 popular drugs, some even 65-fold. Doctors were involved in sharing the profits. People’s Daily, dated 1 September, reported two cruel medical events. In Wuhan city of Hubei Province, a doctor immediately tore open the stitched wound of a peasant worker once he admitted he did not have enough money. In Anguo-City of Hebei Province, a mentally handicapped street girl was abandoned into the remote area by a hospital. She died soon after. It is not only a question of morality, but also a question of the public health system because of the implementation of a market economy in which profit-making is the first priority.
Capitalist economy has led to social indifference, moral decline, profit-orientation and selfishness. In Foshan City of Guangdong Province, a two-year-old girl, Yueyue, was knocked down by two cars, but the 18 passengers all turned a blind eye. In Shandong Province, a five-year-old boy was dying due to the collapse of the house, but no one gave him a hand. These events stirred national debates about moral decline. Wen Jiabao criticized the moral decline but the editorial of Guangming Daily refuted the fact. Nonetheless, according to Wen Wei Po dated 23 October, research conducted by the Global Net and Global Public Opinion Research Center found that 86% of respondents thought moral standards have largely declined in today China, and officials, doctors and businessmen were considered to be the most immoral groups.
Other figures prove that there is widening gap between the rich and the poor in China. The Gini Coefficient has already gone beyond 0.4, the acceptable line. [The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, mathematically measuring income inequality. In the United States, after taxes, the Gini coefficient hovers around 0.38. Hence inequality in China today is somewhat greater than in the USA.]
According to Wen Wei Po dated 6 December, the gap between the highest income group and the lowest income group in the city is also enlarging. It increased from 2.9 times in 1985 to 8.9 times in 2009. According to Xinjing Daily dated 8 December, the research conducted by Guangzhou Popular Opinion Research Center showed that in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the elites with high income were 81% satisfied with the situation, but at the grassroots only 18%. Meanwhile, Fang Xiaojian, the head of Poverty Alleviation Office of the State Council, estimated that at the end of 2011, there would be 128 millions rural poor, accounting for 13.4% of whole rural population.
According to the research on peasants in current development situation conducted by Central China Normal University in Wuhan, the percentage of peasants who felt they were respected by doctors, officials and the rich were respectively 4.7%, 3.7% and 2.5%; even when they were shopping, only 10.7% felt they were respected. They were not interested in national policies that did not concern peasants, and only half of them had heard of the 12th Five-year Plan.
From the above, we can conclude that the political system has caused serious consequences and it should completely be reformed. But the conservatives within the party refused to make any change even when reformists such as Zhao and Wen proposed modest reforms. Hence, only radical reforms will be the solution to solve the problem.
2 December 2011
In the following 20 days, Wukan villagers continuously protested and then self-organized in the “Temporary Representative Council.” Other villages also followed suit. It seems that a new peasant movement has appeared. At last, Guangdong’s deputy Party secretary Zhu Mingguo met with the protest leader and agreed to make concessions: (1) to release those arrested within three davs: (2) to disclose the postmortem report of Xue Jinbo who died in custody; (3) to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Temporary Representative Council. This is indeed a victory of the people, which will affect the struggle for democracy and livelihood in China.
The new convert is often the most aggressive. So it is with Purnendu Basu, ex-Naxalite who was once a believer in boycotting elections as a matter of principle. Now that he has himself been elected, and even blessed with the great fortune of becoming Minister of Labour, the usual post reserved for ex-left turncoats, Basu has been blustering quite a bit about labour rights. He has suddenly discovered that government employees are not workers, and they cannot have trade union rights. He has also exclaimed that government employees cannot publicly oppose the government. He is, in fact the focal point through which the West Bengal government is signalling to the ruling class the real meaning of West Bengal’s ‘parivartan’.
For liberal theory, nobody has the right to form a union, and nobody has the right to strike. According to liberal theory, labour contracts are freely arrived at between the contracting worker and the owner. To form a union is to coerce the free initiative of the individual. There can be little doubt that this is true. Whoever has heard of workers getting pay rise and other benefits because of sweetness and generous nature of the boss? A strike is a coercive instrument whereby the exploited stand up, collectively, to force or wring out of the unwilling hands of the exploiters what individual pleas cannot get. A trade union is therefore the most heinous of all institutions, and cannot be given the recognition of being a civil society association, unlike that paragon of organisation, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Now that Basu has finally found the light, therefore, he is willing to go to all lengths to stop false unions. He has even informed us that government employees are not workers. Probably he might even start talking about whether they produce surplus value or not.
The issue is not debating Basu. Basu is not some erring Marxist or leftist who has got his theories and ideas scrambled. The issue is to resist and fight back for Basu is here simply the voice and hand of the ruling class. Government employees are among the most organised in West Bengal. It is their strength that has been key to the inflation being at least partially set off for a considerable part of the salary/wage earning masses, through the regular Dearness Allowance that the government pays. Behind Basu’s bluster is this hard reality.
Of course, the ideology behind which the bourgeoisie is hiding globally today is the rhetoric of democracy. Evan Saudi Arabia has joined hands with the US to establish democracy in Syria. As we all know, Saudi Arabia is the bastion of democracy. So, nobody will say openly that they are opposed to democratic rights. But the democratic counter-revolution that liberalism wants today is one that tears away a significant part of democratic rights. As Basu and Ananda Bazar Patrika have both remarked, they are opposed to political parties entering the workplace. Unions mean parties. So what they are willing to live with, at the moment, are tame “associations” that have no teeth and that are purged of politics. We too would like a single union in every trade. But for the opposite reasons and in the opposite way. We would like all workers to be united in democratically organised multi-tendency trade unions, in which all political currents whom the workers themselves accept can function openly. The claim that there should be no politics in the workplace itself is a political claim. It is based on a model of bourgeois pariaentary politics where only parties with massive funds can contest elections and go to the Assemblies and parliament. They alone will decide policy. This will enable the ruling class to successfully get rid of a whole range of issues that working people raide through their forms of politics – issues like freedom of organisation, opposition to capitalist financialisation and policies that pump money from the poor to the rich, from workers and poor peasants to the bourgeoisie.
The attack on government employees is part of a wider attack – attacks on students’ right to contest union elections, attacks on campus democracy in the form of changes in University Acts that have resulted in throwing out many of the sectors involved in education from policy making bodies, and so on, but above all attacks on the working classes and their livelihood. That basu was not merely a neo-conservative cured of his former Naxalite thinking, but a genuine mouthpiece of the ruking class, has been established by Ms. Mamata Bandyopdhyay, who has gone further ahead to declare that she and her government will not tolerate bandhs. Apparently, they create problems for ordinary citizens. Obviously, a general strike will create problems. But it is not the ordinary citizen of the imagined liberal universe who is most put off by bandhs. The capitalist leaders have repeatedly complained that strikes make it harder for them to invest. So in rapid succession, we are now seeing many efforts under way to silence all protests by workers. What we need immediately are public shows of resistance. Government employees and especially their militant unions have a responsibility – to discuss the issues with other sectors, and to launch, not one off actions or token demonstrations, but sustained drives for wider unionisation and resistance to the fiats of the government. But all unions have to resist these moves. The most serious responsibility falls on those trade unions and those political forces who understand that this is no matter of sectoral battles, but a battle of class against class. They are the ones who have to take the initiative in forging the widest united front of all organised unions, including, wherever the slightest possibility exists, even of workers supporting the INTTUC or government employees associations supporting the Trinamul Congress. Any sectarianism, any call for united front that excludes the CITU and the INTTUC are erroneous. The question is not of the bourgeois leaders of the INTTUC or the renegade social democrats of CITU. The question is of ensuring that workers in these unions are involved in struggles. If those workers had already been ready to break with their leaders, the unions would have been empty shells. But the reality is, those unions still have the support of big contingents of workers, indeed more workers than the radical unions. So sectarianism to these union leaders is actually sectarianism to the workers behind them, and a self-defeating exercise if we want to build real mass struggles. Radical socialist pledges to fight for the rights of all employees to organise, to organise democratically in multi-tendency unions, and to express their political views without the threat of sackings, breaks in service etc being held out against them.
Radical Socialist, 5.2.2012
The silence of West Bengal’s intelligentsia, and that of rights activists, is eloquent. It is after all still the long drawn out honeymoon affair with Mamata Banerjee as the Chief Minister of West Bengal. So minor flaws, as almost everything is being labelled, must not be blown up.
And therefore, whether it is suicide by peasants, ban on trade unionism, public insult to women as a collectivity, or the curbs on freedom of expression, one must remain silent or be branded as a CPI(M) supporter or an “ultra-left”. The Chief Minister said, on 25th January, that one should not lend books, brain or housewives (gharer bou). She also said, reportedly, that if one lends out wives they are used before being returned. Whether she wants to lend books or brains are separate issues. But to use the term lending out wives is so unequivocally offensive to women, that any sensible person, anyone with even a little notion of democratic rights and gender rights, was bound to ask, how could a Chief Minister, and a woman at that, publicly make such a comment. This comment first of all reduces women, or at least all married women, to the status of a housewife. Secondly, it then proceeds to turn women from human beings into objects that can be possessed (by their husbands) and looks at the dangers of “lending them”. One would think that not only the feminist movement, but all previous efforts at improving women’s standing in society, their dignity, their rights as equal and full human beings, have simply not existed.
The politics of Ms. Banerjee are well known, if in recent times buried by her old backers as well as her new found admirers. She shot into fame after she led an attack on J. P. Narayan’s car when he had come to Calcutta. While it is often claimed that she is a woman who rose up without links with male politicians, this is only a half truth. She belongs to the ranks of the Chhatra Parishad- Yuva Congress cadres who had been patronised by S.S. Ray during a particularly black period of West Bengal’s history. That is the political culture she represents, under changed circumstances. S.S. Ray’s regime saw massive torture on political prisoners, hunt for political activists including murder of many of them, and torture of women activists, whether belonging to the Naxalite camp or the reformist left. That she has scant respect for gender rights is not something to be surprised at.
When a Chief Minister makes a pronouncement from a public place, however, it cannot be taken as an ill-mannered comment by some private person. It has to be taken up seriously, for it suggests the kind of values and attitudes surrounding women’s rights and women’s issues that the present government has/will promote. For her, it seems, wives are property, belonging to the husbands – property of a sort that can be lent out though that is fraught with the risk of being “used”. If one looks at the TMCs election manifesto, one would see clearly that it has no discourse of rights when talking about women, but only a rhetoric of izzat. How better to save izzat than to keep wives locked up in rooms. For to let them go out in the open air is to risk other males “use” them as ill-gotten property. This is a particularly extreme version of the total discursive shift she and her party members are trying to carry out in the political and social field in West Bengal.
What is also at stake is the credibility of West Bengal’s so-called democratic media and the civil social movement. When CPI(M) leader Anil Basu had made an obscene comment about Mamata Bandyopadhyay, we had protested. So had many of these civil social forces. This time, though, we saw neither Star Ananda, that unofficial Public Relations team for Mamata Bandyopadhyay, organising a debate on her propriety, with half a dozen critics present; nor did we see articles and statements pouring out from the “biddotjans” (the preferred term for intellectuals these days). The fundamental questions we need to ask are simple?
Demand that Mamata Banerjee must apologise and retract her words.
Radical Socialist 3 February 2012
Maoists and the Indian State: Is Peace Possible?
Kunal Chattopadhyay[*]
Breakdown of an Opportunist United Front:
Two former fellow combatants, D. Bandyopadhyay and Sujato Bhadra, have written articles, independently of each other. Bandyopadhyay’s article appeared in The Statesman on 14th January[i]. He accused the CPI(Maoist) of using force and violence against ordinary people. Rather belatedly, he has now also argued that they had been murdering CPI(M) members because of their objections to the CPI(M). Supportrers of the CPI (maoist) as well as those of the TMC, along with many civil societal activists, had been either ignoring this dimension in the past, or simply arguing, some directly, some obliquely, that all those murdered by so-called peoples’ courts etc were invariably evil people deserving their fate. His conclusion is clearly a simple one – India has a functioning democracy for over six decades, so parties that do not agree to function within democracy have no space in India. In a remarkable realignment of political voices, Bandyopadhyay, who was rooting for the Trinamul Congress and inveighing against the Left Front till the other day, now finds himself in good company with the Left Front. Kalantar, the CPI daily, wrote on the same day, in a news item where the writer could scarcely conceal her/his glee, that the state government was contemplating banning the PCAPA, the Matangini Mahila Samiti, and the USDF, a students’ organisation accused of being a front for the CPI(Maoist).
Sujato Bhadra, probably the face most identified with the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, regardless of whoever is the General Secretary, was also closely involved with the anti-Left Front campaigns, to the extent that he decided that notwithstanding his widely known identity as a civil rights activist not aligned to any party, he needed to throw in his weight behind the TMC’s campaign in 2010-11. In Mainstream Annual Number 2011, Bhadra has an essay, ‘Peace-talk Process in Junglemahal’[ii]. Bhandra still feels, clearly, that the TMC led government has greater commitment to democracy than the previous regime. We thus read, in connection with a reference to the role he and a few others were asked to play, of being mediators: “We had readily agreed to accept the assignment for three reasons: 1) this new government, being sincere to its electoral pledges, has clearly recognised the political nature of the conflict, which is a definite break from the past; 2) repeated insistence on opening of dialogue to end the killings and sufferings of the people of the area and bring peace; 3) we fought against the misdeeds of the Left Front Government to the best of our ability over the years; so, it was our responsibility also to bring peace and help the new government build the infrastructure for development of the area”.
Yet Bhadra, for all his contortions, has to now take a stance somewhat different from Bandyopadhyay, if he wants to retain even a shred of his image and integrity. I begin with Bhadra and Bandyopadhyay, not because they are the principal actors, but because I want to emphasize that unless one recognises the basic issues in the conflict, one is apt to end up as either irrelevant or a s a fifth wheel in one or other of the principals’ cars. The second reason for placing them against each other is to argue that a united front very often begins to unravel at the moment of its victory. The enemy who had brought such disparate forces together is routed, if only for the moment. So the erstwhile allies fall out. But in an opportunist united front, the nature of the alliance is not clearly explained, so its falling apart also comes as a curious process.
Waging a War on its People: The Indian State, Democracy and Capitalist Development
Bourgeois democracy is never what its starry eyed defenders think about it, including those would-be Marxists who believe that there is some ideal bourgeois democracy in which the entire people get plenty of rights, and by which standard they want to condemn existing bourgeois democracies, notably the one in India, as inadequate. The inadequacy is actually built into the very structures of bourgeois democracy.
At least once in the twentieth century there was a serious attempt to consolidate bourgeois democracy and to proceed further forward. It is only by thoroughly distorting the tragic Chilean experience, which confirmed so many previous lessons of history, that so-called communist parties in large parts of the world, including in India, as well as centrist formations and the social democrats, push the strategy according to which the working class movement can fully attain its goals within the framework of bourgeois parliamentary institutions, through reliance on parliamentary elections and gradual conquest of "positions of state power" within these institutions. This has to be energetically opposed and denounced for what it is: it is a cover-up for abandonment of the struggle for the conquest of state power by the proletariat; a cover-up for abandonment of the struggle for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, for abandonment of a policy of consistent defence of the class interests of working class; a substitution of ever-more systematic class collaboration with the bourgeoisie for the policy of consistent class struggle; a disarming of the proletariat in the face of violence unleashed by the capitalist class; and, consequently, a growing tendency to capitulate to the class interests of the bourgeoisie at moments of decisive economic, political and social crisis. From an initial argument about defending democracy it turns into arguments for defending the most odious attacks of the bourgeoisie on the working class, so long as that might enable the “left” to cling on to ministerial berths. Far from reducing the "costs of social transformation" or from ensuring a peaceful, albeit slower, transition to socialism, this policy, if it should decisively determine the political attitude of the toilers in a period of unavoidable overall class confrontation, can only lead to bloody defeats and mass slaughters of the German, Spanish, Indonesian, and Chilean type (in the German case, additionally caused by the criminal ultra-left "social-fascism" theory and practice of the Comintern).
The Indian state has not been a neutral umpire, nor even merely an abstract entity that either side can tilt in its own direction at will. It has been a key element in the strategy of the Indian capitalist class since the independence of India. In the present essay, we lack the space to examine all of this in detail. However, there is a need to discuss some issues.
From the closing years of the 1960s, the global economy had entered into the declining phase of a long wave that had seen, in the previous years, a spectacular boom. As part of that, the Indian capitalist class had organised its own growth using protectionism, even as it promised some types of state action, however limited, to some sections of the working people. But the downward phase of the long wave, the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement about the gold-dollar standard, and the slump of 1974, changed the situation drastically. The initial response of the big capitalist powers to the crisis was to try and administer new doses of Keynesianism. But this proved unviable. Class struggle under these circumstances sharpened everywhere. Between 1967-68 and 1974, working class struggles in many of the imperialist countries was massive and powerful. A miners’ strike brought down the conservative government of Edward Heath in Britain. Capitalism too learnt its lessons.
On the economic field, it was Paul Volcker, the Keynesian who was however also a pragmatist, who administered the sharp monetarist shock in his role as chief of the US Federal Reserve. His sustained tight money policy led to the imposition of austerity on a global scale and a sharp recession in the US in 1981-2. He had been preceded by the pilot model in Chile, after General Pinochet took power, and was advised by Friedman and other enthusiasts of economic liberalism. In UK too, Margaret Thatcher came before Volcker. But given the centrality of the US economy it was Volcker’s initiative that had a global effect. Austerity was taken up by the IMF and World Bank and became the global slogan. And this was done everywhere, formally under the banner of the free market, but in fact through huge state action. In the USA, Ronald Reagan smashed a major strike by air traffic controllers. Volcker hailed it as the best support given to his effort by the state. He was right. The fear of losing one’s job is what weakens unions. The breaking of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization ) through firing over 11000 or the thirteen thousand PATCO members, Reagan decisively changed the relationship between capital and labour in the USA.
Volcker’s successor as Federal Reserve chairperson, Alan Greenspan, said in 2003: Perhaps the most important, and then highly controversial, domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981. The President invoked the law that striking government employees forfeit their jobs, an action that unsettled those who cynically believed no President would ever uphold that law. President Reagan prevailed, as you know, but far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.
What is significant in the Indian case is that the Indian capitalist class followed a closely parallel path. In 1974, working class combativity in India had reached a peak. The number of workdays lost owing to all industrial disputes in India touched 40 million in 1974, more than double that recorded in any single year during the preceding decade. In the Railways, government patronage of the two dominant unions led to two developments that provoked the upsurge of workers in 1974. One, the distance between the officially recognised unions and the rank and file widened because workers no longer saw the unions as representing their interests before the government. Secondly, the government's patronage of the officially recognised unions, at the exclusion of all other voices of the working class, led to a complete blockage of possibilities of the redress of the grievances of ordinary workers. The situation was thus fertile for an explosion of anger from below. Although on paper more than 70 per cent of the 1.4 million rail employees (permanent ones) were members of the two official unions on the eve of the strike, they led the leadership to the strike.
The Railways, although government-owned, remained an island in which the accepted worldwide standard of an eight-hour working day was violated with impunity. In fact, when the crafts unions raised the issue, they demanded a 12-hour working day for loco running staff. Besides this, there were other issues. Pay scales in the Indian Railways had remained stagnant, unlike those in the public sector companies and in departmental undertakings. In February 1974, the National Coordinating Committee for Railwaymen's Struggle (NCRRS) was formed to bring all the railway unions, the central trade unions and political parties in the Opposition together to prepare for the strike to start on May 8, 1974. The workers' resolve was matched by the government's determination to put down the strike with a heavy hand. This was revealed in its obdurate stance on the demands raised by the workers. Even as negotiations were proceeding, the government queered the pitch by arresting Fernandes at the Lucknow railway station on May 2. Across the country thousands of railway workers were arrested. The draconian provisions of the Defence of India Rules and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) were used against the workers. The Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Provincial Armed Constabulary were deployed in the labour township. There were also instances of workers forced by terror to work. Instances of train drivers who were shackled in their cabins were reported at the height of the strike. Victimisation of railway workers during the 1974 strike was quite ruthless- 46000 were dismissed, 9000 were suspended, 19000 were arrested and out of over 15 lakhs who participated in strike, 8,63,000 employees suffered from break in service.
The defeat of the railway workers removed or significantly lowered the possibility of a countrywide general strike. Then in 1982 came the long struggle of Bombay textile workers. Once again, disgust with a bureaucratic union, the INTUC affiliated trade union, and the collapse of the old red flag union, led to flocking under the Datta Samant banner. Once again, this was somewhat illusory. It was not Samant who led. Rather, workers in factories and chawls set up committees debated, and made policy. Samant was virtually forced to go along. This democratic unionism was utterly unacceptable to the rulers. That was why, though Samant was considered close to Abdur Rehman Antulay, it was decided to crush his movement.
The defeats of 1974 and 1982-3 broke the working class for a considerable period. These struggles, in bourgeois historiography, when at all mentioned, are treated as pawns of high politics. Thus, the railway strike is seen as part of the attempts by the opposition to weaken Mrs. Gandhi’s government, refusing to accord agency to the workers. But it was as a result of these defeats that new forms of capital accumulation became easier. The final years of Indira Gandhi saw the beginning of a turn to economic liberalisation, an impetus strengthened by Rajiv Gandhi. This was the period when computerisation was pushed in a huge way. And, contrary to the traditional perception that the Congress necessarily stood for a more statized economy while it was the Swatantra, Jan Sangh et al who were pro-free market, economic policy underwent a transformation in which Congress and opposition had little difference.
From the mid 1980s, in other words, lagging only slightly behind the major capitalist countries, the Indian capitalist class was therefore orienting to neoliberal policies. The defeats of earlier years, together with the paralysis of the left in the face of the collapse of the bureaucratised workers states and their transformation into capitalism, meant very poor resistance from large sections of the organised blue collar working class.
I mentioned this rather long history for three reasons.
The Indian state has brutalised and exploited adivasis systematically, because, on one hand, as P. Chidambaram stated very bluntly recently, the elite wants to exploit natural resources, and on the other hand, because the adivasis form a significant part of the large source of cheap labour.
The Maoist Bogey and Repression on Adivasis:
It is this reality that must be grasped when we talk about the responses of the Indian state to the CPI(Maoist). For many a well meaning Gandhian, political liberal, or civil societarian, it is simply a failure of this or that government, a failure to recognise that certain issues are political and not just law and order issues, that has led to so much bloodshed. If only the issues were duly recognised as political issues, they sigh, there could be a dialogue between people of good faith. This overlooks that all talk of law and order is also, precisely, a political talk. The repression of the CPI(Maoist) is not just a repression of a party. It enables the state to send in huge masses of paramilitary forces, terrorise adivasis, and try to push through the agenda of Indian and international big capital. Hence, for example, the difference between how Chidambaram and his fellow ministers handled Singur and how they handled Lalgarh. In the case of Singur, the central government could afford to have a destabilisation of the provincial government headed by an opponent political group, since the outcome would not destabilise the system as a whole. In the case of Lalgarh, by contrast, Chidambaram went out of his way to cooperate with Buddhadev Bhattacharjee.
We also need to situate this in an all-India context. In Chhattisgarh or Madhya Pradesh, places where the Left are not and have never been in power, the left parties have campaigned in support of adivasis. There, roles have been reversed. What is important is that while reformist ideology, populism, or various factors may have led some parties, some politicians (CPI in Chattisgarh, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal) to declare seeming support for exploited adivasis, the state has in all cases been forthright in using violence. The long drama over the incarceration of Binayak Sen, the utterly ludicrous charges against him, and the way the state agencies hounded Nandini Sundar when she went on a fact finding mission to Chhattisgarh, all show this. Beyond the well known hounding of reputed individuals, though, are the repressive measures on far greater numbers of people. A statement issued by the Campaign for Survival and Dignity remarked, on this subject: [I am providing only extracts, not a full and continuous quotation]
“The government tells us that this offensive will make it possible for the “state to function” in these areas and fill the “vacuum of governance.” This is grossly misleading. The Indian state is very, very active in these areas, often in its most brutal and violent form. A vivid example is the illegal eviction of more than 3,00,000 families by the Forest Departments a few years ago.”
“This war is not about “national security”; it is about ‘securing’ the interests of global and Indian capital and big business. Any government worried about security would send its troops against mining mafias, the forest mafias, violent vigilante groups like the salwa judum and others. Rather than being curbed, these killers are in fact supported by the police. Have the security forces ever been deployed to defend the people struggling to protect themselves, their forests, their livelihoods and their futures? The answer is no. The notion of “security” being advanced by the government clearly has nothing to do with the people.”
“The government knows perfectly well that it cannot destroy the CPI (Maoist), or any people's struggle, through military action. How can the armed forces identify who is a “Maoist” and who is not? The use of brute military force will result in the slaughter of thousands of people in prolonged, bloody and brutal guerrilla warfare. This has been the result of every “security offensive” in India's history from Kashmir to Nagaland. So why do this? And why now? Unless the goal has nothing to do with “wiping out the Maoists” and everything to do with having an excuse for the permanent presence of lakhs of troops, arms and equipment in these areas. To protect and serve whom?”[iii]
The killing of Azad after initiating Peace talks was evidence that the government is not interested in peace. As the above quoted statement in fact shows, the government does not want peace with the CPI(Maoist). The CPI(Maoist) and its armed forces are the pretext for maintaining huge forces of repression across a big part of India, and forcing toilers to obey rulers including the mafias in the name of law and order. Naïve people, or ex-Marxists who now desperately want to forget the reality of class struggle, can talk about sincerity of governments. The reality is, within bourgeois democracies, working people have won rights only when they have fought for those rights. At the time Azad was killed, there was a complexity. The TMC, though a partner in the central government, was in the opposition in West Bengal. And Ms. Mamata Banerjee had realised, through the experiences of past electoral battles, that neither an alliance with the BJP, nor one with the Congress, were adequate to topple the CPI(M). She had turned her party into a populist party. And she was willing to form alliances with the dissident left and the extreme left as well as with others on the right. It is well known that Kishenji, the CPI(Maoist) leader, had expressed the hope that she would become the Chief Minister of West Bengal and that many of the Sujato Bhadras had been gung ho about supporting her at all cost.
The TMC and Mamata Banerjee: An Exceptional Case?
The illusion had never been Ms. Banerjee’s. She had on one occasion said she was using the “brains of Naxalites”. It was the dissident and extreme left, or large sections of it, that, as a result of the continued hold of Stalinist ideology, created illusions for itself. It (or sections of it) saw the CPI(M) as “social fascist” ( a criminal theory that cast reformists as fascists and let real fascists off the hook, a theory originating with Stalin and resulting in the rejection of a working class united front against Hitler by the Communist Party of Germany).[iv] It simultaneously accepted in some form or the other the ideology of popular frontism according to which democratic or progressive bourgeois forces can be allies. The TMC was cast into that role by the SUCI, de facto also by the CPI (Maoist) which for example said in areas where it was strong TMC would be allowed to campaign but not the party of harmads.
In 2006, when the Singur movement started, the picture had been very different. But forces on the radical left, with small exceptions, decided that they were tired of trying to build class struggle currents against the CPI(M). Hatred of the CPI(M), whose reformism had turned into social liberalism, a hatred that in itself was a positive thing, turned into the terrible error of deciding that any force was better than the CPI(M) and should therefore be supported in order to topple it. What this meant was that struggles where a militant class struggle orientation could have been built through patient work were given up, and these forces ended up accepting the leadership of the TMC. In these days of televised politics, this transformation was easy to see, with so many former ex-radicals publicly taking stances that brought them within microscopic distance of TMC politics. Some ended up joining the TMC, while others were content with being friends and hoped they would remain friends ever after.
But the Maoist bogey was too good to let go. Ms. Bandyopadhyay, who holds the position of not only CM but also Home Minister in her government, took full personal responsibility for what followed. Of course, it was dressed up as a sad but necessary action in view of the obduracy of the CPI(Maoist). But paramilitary action was reintroduced. Even before the murder of Kishenji, the writing on the wall was therefore clear.
What is objectionable (not surprising, since Bhadra is trying to save his own reputation as well) is Sujato Bhadra’s argument, even after the killing of Kishenji and the full-blown return to militaristic strategy, that
“2. We have reasons to hold that attempts are on to impose the logic of the war economy forcibly on the newly-born government. The government has to overcome this pressure.
3. The government has also to tackle effectively the potential spoilers—a part of the media which has been manufacturing public consent for declaring war on its own people, and a section of the police and bureaucrats, who stand to gain from the war economy and war mentality. The people of the State know that this section of ‘trigger-happy’ police and bureaucrats was a part of the state terror during the LF regime. They have no experience of peace talks, and they, we are afraid, are not interested in taking lessons from history.”
Have we not met this rhetoric earlier, from soft critics of the left front, that it was not the government that was bad, but the rotten police and bureaucrats, the carryovers of the S.S. Ray era, and the central government? To recollect what Marx once wrote, the second occurrence of this rank pathetic apologia is a low farce. Bhadra is thereby still exonerating the West Bengal government and misleading his readers, using whatever remains of his reputation as a historic fighter for democratic rights. The Maoist bogey is now what is uniting the TMC led government with all other governments. Ruling class needs are more significant here than any so-called goodwill.
What about the CPI (Maoist)?:
A peace talk, in order to be serious, requires two sides both willing to be parties to the talk. In the case of the Indian state, I have argued, the CPI(Maoist) is necessary to carry out violence on adivasis. That is why it will not want any peace talk until its real strategic goals are met or until class struggles force its hands. But the CPI(Maoist) is also not in a position to be very serious about peace talks. Built on solidly Stalinist-Maoist lines, it has no idea about socialist democracy.
Stalinist ideology was created as the ideology of the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR and taken over by other ruling bureaucracies, including in the Peoples’ Republic of China. This ideology of the bureaucracy - of which the key idea is the rule of the single party acting in the name of the working class - although not always explicitly formulated can be summarised in the following terms:
a) That the "leading party" or even its Central Committee has a monopoly of political consciousness at the highest level, if not a monopoly of knowledge at least at the level of the social sciences, hence the party is always right. One ios told to learn from the masses, but the learning is done by that very party leadership and nobody else.
b) That the working class, and even more the toiling masses in general, are too backward politically, too much under the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology and "imperialist propaganda," too much inclined to prefer immediate material advantages as against long-term historical interests, for any direct exercise of state power by democratically elected workers’ councils to be tolerable from the point of view of "the interests of socialism." Genuine workers’ democracy would lead to capitalist restoration or at least damage socialist construction.
c) That therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat can be exercised only by the "leading party of the proletariat," i.e., that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the party, either representing an essentially passive working class, or actively basing itself on the "class struggle of the masses," who are nevertheless considered unworthy, unwilling, or incapable of directly exercising state power through institutionalised organs of power.[v]
d) That since the party, and that party alone, represents the interests of the working class, which are considered homogeneous in all situations and on all issues, the "leading party" itself must be essentially monolithic. Any opposition tendency necessarily reflects alien class pressures and alien class interests in one form or another (the struggle between "two lines" is always a "struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie inside the party," the Maoists conclude). Monolithic control of all spheres of social life by the single party is the logical outcome of these concepts. Direct party control must be established overall sectors of "civil society."
e) A further underlying assumption is that of an intensification of the class struggle in the period of building socialism. From that assumption is deduced the increasing danger of restoration of bourgeois power even long after private property in the means of production has been abolished, and irrespective of the level of development of the productive forces. The threat of bourgeois restoration is often portrayed as a mechanical outcome of the victory of bourgeois ideology in this or that social, political, cultural, or even scientific field. In view of the extreme power thereby attributed to bourgeois ideas, the use of repression against those who are said to objectively represent these ideas becomes a corollary of the argument.
All these assumptions and dogmas are unscientific from a general Marxist point of view and are untenable in the light of real historical experience of the class struggle during and after the overthrow of capitalist rule in the USSR and other countries. But they had become nearly universally accepted dogmas by the CPs in Stalin’s time and they have never been explicitly and thoroughly criticised and rejected by a CP since then. These concepts continue to linger on, at least partially, in the ideology of many leaders and cadres of the CPs. They continue to constitute a conceptual source for justification of various forms of curtailment of democratic rights of the toiling masses. In the case of the CPI(Maoist) it has used force, not against ruling class elements alone, but against every attempt at independently organising the masses in areas where it is strong. Santosh Rana for example has spoken out publicly against this politics of violence over toiling masses.
Given its ideology, which involves the belief that any struggle other than “armed struggle” ( to be precise, struggle through armed combatant groups created by the party, not armed struggle as the result of culmination of mass movements under certain circumstances) is revisionist, a sell out to the rulers, the CPI (Maoist) cannot engage in fruitful peace talks.
I reproduce below, as one example, an extract from a statement issued by the Central Military Commission of the CPI (maoist).[vi]
“Beloved workers, peasants, adivasis, toiling masses, women, students, youth and intellectuals! Thousands of people, particularly adivasi peasantry are rallying into struggles with the aim of defeating the ‘War on People’ - OGH which was unleashed by the central and state governments. All classes and sections of the toiling people must integrate themselves with these struggles. Extend support to the! Rally actively to stop the brutal attacks of the mercenary police who are massacring hundreds of adivasis and looting their properties, dignity and everything dear to them like a pack of wolves attacking a flock of sheep, in the name of fighting terrorism. Maoists are not advocates of violence. In fact, they would be in the forefront among those who wish for peace. Do not believe a word of the vicious propaganda unleashed by the bourgeois media on Maoists! Stand firmly with the revolutionary movement! If we do not defeat this enemy offensive, if we do not defeat the conspiracy to wipe out the revolutionary movement, Maoist party, PLGA, alternate people’s power organs and mass organizations, then all the valuable fruits won by the revolutionary movement would be destroyed. So, play your role in isolating and defeating the enemy! Join the PLGA in huge numbers, increase its force manifold and strengthen it! Integrate with the deluge of mass movements rising in several areas in our country with the slogans land-power-democracy-building of people’s army and self-reliance! Join hands with them! Stand shoulder to shoulder with the armed resistance struggles of PLGA! There can be no fundamental change without completely destroying the exploiting classes. The reforms thrown by them as bread crumbs are useless and would only destroy the lives of the people further. Let us advance for an alternative new democratic society by declaring that reforms are part of the conspiracy to damage the unity of the people and fight them back! Come! Dare to fight and ultimate victory belongs to the people!”
Readers should note the following:
So is Peace Impossible?:
I am not actually arguing that peace is impossible. But I do argue that the meaning of peace has to be redefined, and itys contents examined closely. It is impossible to have peace between the Indian state and the CPI (Maoist) as if they alone are the principal players – the idea with which we started this essay, since that is the idea beind the current rhetoric on peace talks. At the same time, we cannot of course exclude these two from any idea of peace talks.
As long as the ruling class is strong enough to impose its will without serious contestation, it will try to deepen its primary accumulation of capital, and therefore it will require some kind of systematic violence on adivasis, on whom the CPI(Maoist) in turn hopes to bank for that very reason.
So they first key to challenging the state, to forcing it to rethink its strategy, lies in developing mass workers and toilers struggles – both in those areas and elsewhere – so that the state is compelled to recognise the power of fighting workers and to negotiate with them. Then would it be possible to force the state to move back from its open war against the people – at least for the moment, while the balance of forces is no longer favouring the rulers so blatantly. It is therefore unacceptable when someone claims, as Bhadra does, that
“…we are optimistic. That is because all stakeholders, including the government, seem to have finally recognised the value of peace. However, we have miles to go before bringing the stakeholders to the negotiating table. We do hope that using the tools of patience and flexibility with unwavering determination the government and Maoists can bring peace and development in Junglemahal. This example will surely inspire other States and peace-loving citizens of India to move forward with the slogan of peace.”
We on the other hand are optimistic, because workers across India are forging new instruments of struggle in place of the worn out old instruments. Organisations like the New Trade Union Initiative, the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers , the Vangujjar Kalyan Samiti, or others have been replacing, though only in part, older, bureeaucratised and co-opted unions and other organisations. It is their struggles, along with those by other similar organisations of the oppressed and exploited, that will compel the state to move in the direction of peace. In the same way, any attempt to develop mass organisations of this kind, mass struggles conducted democratically, should they succeed, will sap the strength of Maoist politics with its commandist, authoritarian model of leading party and “led” masses. To survive in a changed milieu, the CPI(Maoist) too would have to undergo a paradigm shift.
As long as we stick to the assumptiuon, however, that the state and the CPI(Maoist) alone are principals, and the only other factor is a chorus of pious civil social actors, we are condemning ourselves to futility. In its current state, the State wants and needs to use violence, and the CPI (Maoist) believes in only the primacy of armed guerrilla warfare. To preach goodwill to them may be a nice Christmas gesture, given the date of the Mainstream number, but little more.
[*] Editor, Radical. A slightly edited version has been put up in the website of /frontier Weekly and is slated to be published in a collection of articles around this theme.
[i] Mao and the Maoist ‘Depredation’ A Conscious Deviation, http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&show=archive&id=396751&catid=38&year=2012&month=01&day=14&Itemid=66 (accessed 15.01.2012)
[ii] Mainstream, vol.L, no. 1, December 24, 2011, http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3221.html (accessed 15.01.2012)
[iii] http://www.forestrightsact.com/statements-and-news/69-a-pretext-for-brutal-repression (accessed 15.01.2012)
[iv] On this see my article ‘The Communist Party of Germany, the Comintern and Hitler’s Rise to Power’, History, Journal of the Department of History, Burdwan University, vol.1, 1997
[vi] Let us intensify People’s War with the aim of defeating “Operation Green Hunt” – War on People ! http://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/index.htm#2011
The defence of the earth, the ecosystem and biodiversity is one of the most important topics on the agenda of the social movements in Latin America today and that is precisely what is at stake in the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development Rio +20, which will take place in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro. The thematic Social Forum ’capitalist crises, environmental and social justice’, which concluded on Sunday 29 January in Porto Alegre (Brazil), served to establish the basis for mobilisation for this key date.
The offensive of the system, via green capitalism, intensifies in its determination to privatize every aspect of life and nature. And in an economic crisis like the present, one of the strategies of capital to recover its falling rate of profit is based on commercializing the ecosystem. They present new technologies (nanotechnology, biofuels, geoengineering, genetically modified foods) as the alternative to the climate crisis when it will only make the social and ecological crises we face more acute.
All indications are that the Rio +20 Earth Summit will to serve to clear the way for multinational to justify their practice of appropriation of natural resources. Hence the importance of the People’s summit of Rio +20, to be held days before the official event, organized by a large range of social movements which will present alternative programme and rob and roadmap.
In Europe and in the United States the resistance of the indignados focuses mobilisations against cuts to the welfare state, privatizations, banking and the payment of illegitimate debt. Paradoxically these are topics that were central to the movements in Latin America in the decades of the 80s, 90s and 2000s..Putting the question of the ecological crisis and the green economy on the agenda of these new social movements, the indignados and the occupy movements was another issue raised repeatedly at this thematic Social Forum. The need to link the fight for social justice with the fight for ecological justice was a major focus..
One final concern at this forum, which had been latent at previous events which is made more urgent by recent events which is to rethink the World Social Forum process in the context of opening of a new cycle of social protests. The social movements that have emerged in the Arab world and North Africa, Europe and the United States put forward an agenda for action outside the social forum process which were an important instrument in the previous period.
Despite the success of the day of global actions on O-15 (15/10/2011), international co-ordination was rather weak. Ten years ago in contrast, the social forums (and particularly the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum) were one of the main benchmarks of the dynamic global justice and antiwar movements, and acted as the driving force to develop a programme and a series of actions to fight against neo-liberal globalization and war. This is now in the past. And now we need to see what new tools we can create to coordinate this new tide of outrage. What is certain though is that in this journey to develop this new framework and process, the experience of the World Social Forum, the global justice campaigns and the initiatives of the previous period not been in vain but the opposite.
Esther Vivas is a member of the Centre for Studies on Social Movements (CEMS) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is author of the book “En pie contra la deuda externa” (Stand Up against external debt), El Viejo Topo, 2008, and co-coordinator of the books also in Spanish “Supermarkets, No Thanks” and “Where is Fair Trade headed?” among other publications, and a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org. She is also a member of the editorial board of Viento Sur.
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2470
1. The gigantic upheaval that is shaking the entire Arab world since its initial tremors started in Tunisia on 17 December 2010 was determined by a long and deep accumulation of explosive factors: lack of economic growth, massive unemployment (the highest average rate of all world regions), widespread endemic corruption, huge social inequalities, despotic governments void of democratic legitimacy, citizens treated as servile subjects, etc.
The mass of people who entered into action across the Arab region is a composite, encompassing a wide range of social layers and categories that are affected to various degrees by this or that element of this complex set of determining factors. Most share, however, a common aspiration to democracy: political freedoms, free and fair elections, a democratically elaborated constitution – these are the common denominators that unify the masses involved in the uprising in all the Arab countries where it took hold powerfully. (The fact that the single country where these same conditions are lacking to the highest degree – i.e. the Saudi kingdom – has not yet faced a massive upheaval is a testimony to the intensity of dominance and oppression in that country.)
2. Several impressive features of the ongoing upheaval are directly related to the global information revolution. The speed at which the uprising spread to the entire region has been rightly attributed above all to satellite TV, the new factor that gave the linguistic unity of the region much stronger effect, thus giving renewed and much stronger substance to the old concept of an “Arab Revolution.” Transcending states’ boundaries, ignoring state censorship, the new communication technology allowed the populations of the whole Arab-speaking region to follow the events in real time as they were unfolding – in Tunisia initially, and then, on a much larger scale and with much more breathtaking impact, in Egypt, and finally at the level of the whole region. The power of the Tunisian example was magnified by this new ability for millions of people to watch the uprising as it unfolded. The populations of the entire region took part “virtually” in the Egyptian uprising: they were all in Cairo’s Tahrir Square through the cameras and reporters of satellite TV channels, partaking in the joys and anxieties of the gigantic mass of people gathered at the epicenter of the Egyptian Revolution. In instances where repression prevented TV cameras from attending protests, like in Syria, they were supplanted by countless activists using their phone cameras and Youtube in order to project images of struggle and repression on the global virtual sphere from where they were relayed by TV satellites and conveyed to their vast public.
3. Satellite TV and global communication through the Internet allowed the peoples of the Arab region to get much greater access and exposure to the global cultural melting-pot and global realities as well as fictions. For an entire new generation – the first one that grew up in this age of information revolution – this experience has been eye-opening in the extreme. The huge gap between, on the one hand, the aspirations and envies created by this virtual citizenship in the fiction-come-true “global village,” and, on the other hand, the bitter and repulsive real subordination to futureless societies ensconced in medieval cultural traits was a hugely powerful determinant in bringing into action a whole layer of young people belonging to a broad social spectrum ranging from the poor but educated to upper middle class. One more time in world history, young educated people (former and present students) stand at the forefront of social and political protest. This new layer made intensive use of the new communication technologies, especially the “social media.” Facebook in particular allowed them to network with an ease and at a speed that would not have been imaginable a mere decade earlier.
4. A most striking paradox characterizes the “Arab Spring”: whereas it has largely been determined by the above described cultural revolution, it is removing the lids that have been containing the expression and action of religious fundamentalist forces – forces that have been the overwhelmingly dominant organized currents of opposition and the major available vehicles for the expression of protest in the region for the last three decades. Hence the paradoxical result of a gigantic movement of emancipation giving way to electoral victories won by forces of social and cultural – if not political (experience will tell us soon) – repression. This paradox is but the natural outcome of the fact that the lids imposed by the existing despotic and corrupt regimes in the Arab world had created an environment particularly suitable for the growth of this form of opposition and cultural retrenchment. Religion and religious forces have been extensively used by most regimes in the region to quell the remnants of the old nationalist and communist left and prevent the rise of new left forces in the post-1967 era. At a time when progressive political forces had gradually lost all their sources of state support and funding, religious fundamentalist forces had been funded and sustained over the whole region by three regional oil-rich states, which competed in pouring money to them: the Saudi kingdom, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the emirate of Qatar.
5. For this paradoxical state of things to change, it will require that the Arab world go through a new historical experience, during which two simultaneous processes must unfold: on the one hand, regional populations will have to give the religious forces a chance in power and witness their obvious limitations, especially the fact that they lack any programmatic response to the deep social and economic problems that lie beneath the Arab uprising; on the other hand, the new forces of social, political and cultural emancipation that rose powerfully during the upheaval, after taking the lead in igniting and conducting it, will need to build actual organizational networks of political struggle capable of constituting a credible alternative to the religious backlash. For this, they will need to be bold enough to fight the cultural obscurantism of the religious fundamentalist forces instead of accommodating it in the futile belief that they could thus gain access to their constituencies.
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