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The Social Basis of the Woman Question

2012-03-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

Marxists.org

Source: abstract from Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, 1977;
First Published: 1909, as a pamphlet;
Translated and Edited: by Alix Holt;

Leaving it to the bourgeois scholars to absorb themselves in discussion of the question of the superiority of one sex over the other, or in the weighing of brains and the comparing of the psychological structure of men and women, the followers of historical materialism fully accept the natural specificities of each sex and demand only that each person, whether man or woman, has a real opportunity for the fullest and freest self-determination, and the widest scope for the development and application of all natural inclinations. The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position. In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines.

This, however, does not mean that the partial improvement of woman’s life within the framework of the modem system is impossible. The radical solution of the workers’ question is possible only with the complete reconstruction of modem productive relations; but must this prevent us from working for reforms which would serve to satisfy the most urgent interests of the proletariat? On the contrary, each new gain of the working class represents a step leading mankind towards the kingdom of freedom and social equality: each right that woman wins brings her nearer the defined goal of full emancipation. ...

Social democracy was the first to include in its programme the demand for the equalisation of the rights of women with those of men; in speeches and in print the party demands always and everywhere the withdrawal of limitations affecting women; it is the party’s influence alone that has forced other parties and governments to carry out reforms in favour of women. And in Russia this party is not only the defender of women in terms of its theoretical positions but always and everywhere adheres to the principle of women’s equality.

What, in this case, hinders our “equal righters” from accepting the support of this strong and experienced party? The fact is that however “radical” the equal righters may be, they are still loyal to their own bourgeois class. Political freedom is at the moment an essential prerequisite for the growth and power of the Russian bourgeoisie, without it, all the economic welfare of the latter will turn out to have been built upon sand. The demand for political equality is for women a necessity that stems from life itself.

The slogan of “access to the professions” has ceased to suffice; only direct participation in the government of the country promises to assist in raising women’s economic situation. Hence the passionate desire of women of the middle bourgeoisie to gain the franchise, and hence their hostility to the modern bureaucratic system.

However, in their demands for political equality our feminists are like their foreign sisters; the wide horizons opened by social democratic learning remain alien and incomprehensible to them. The feminists seek equality in the framework of the existing class society, in no way do they attack the basis of this society. They fight for prerogatives for themselves, without challenging the existing prerogatives and privileges. We do not accuse the representatives of the bourgeois women’s movement of failure to understand the matter; their view of things flows inevitably from their class position. ...

The Struggle for Economic Independence

First of all we must ask ourselves whether a single united women’s movement is possible in a society based on class contradictions. The fact that the women who take part in the liberation movement do not represent one homogeneous mass is clear, to every unbiased observer.

The women’s world is divided, just as is the world of men, into two camps; the interests and aspirations of one group of women bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections with the proletariat, and its claims for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus although both camps follow the general slogan of the “liberation of women”, their aims and interests are different. Each of the groups unconsciously takes its starting point from the interests of its own class, which gives a specific class colouring to the targets and tasks it sets itself. ...

However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of the contemporary economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women cannot be complete.

If in certain circumstances the short-term tasks of women of all classes coincide, the final aims of the two camps, which in the long term determine the direction of the movement and the tactics to be used, differ sharply. While for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself, equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class. The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the “fair sex”. Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future. The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the joys and charms of life. It is true that several specific aspects of the contemporary system lie with double weight upon women, as it is also true that the conditions of hired labour sometimes turn working women into competitors and rivals to men. But in these unfavourable situations, the working class knows who is guilty. ...

The woman worker, no less than her brother in misfortune, hates that insatiable monster with its gilded maw which, concerned only to drain all the sap from its victims and to grow at the expense of millions of human lives, throws itself with equal greed at man, woman and child. Thousands of threads bring the working man close. The aspirations of the bourgeois woman, on the other hand, seem strange and incomprehensible. They are not warming to the proletarian heart; they do not promise the proletarian woman that bright future towards which the eyes of all exploited humanity are turned. ...

The proletarian women’s final aim does not, of course, prevent them from desiring to improve their status even within the framework of the current bourgeois system, but the realisation of these desires is constantly hindered by obstacles that derive from the very nature of capitalism. A woman can possess equal rights and be truly free only in a world of socialised labour, of harmony and justice. The feminists are unwilling and incapable of understanding this; it seems to them that when equality is formally accepted by the letter of the law they will be able to win a comfortable place for themselves in the old world of oppression, enslavement and bondage, of tears and hardship. And this is true up to a certain point. For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedented rights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in conflict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.

Where, then, is that general “woman question”? Where is that unity of tasks and aspirations about which the feminists have so much to say? A sober glance at reality shows that such unity does not and cannot exist. In vain the feminists try to assure themselves that the “woman question” has nothing to do with that of the political party and that “its solution is possible only with the participation of all parties and all women”; as one of the radical German feminists has said, the logic of facts forces us to reject this comforting delusion of the feminists. ...

The conditions and forms of production have subjugated women throughout human history, and have gradually relegated them to the position of oppression and dependence in which most of them existed until now.

A colossal upheaval of the entire social and economic structure was required before women could begin to retrieve the significance and independence they had lost. Problems which at one time seemed too difficult for the most talented thinkers have now been solved by the inanimate but all-powerful conditions of production. The same forces which for thousands of years enslaved women now, at a further stage of development, are leading them along the path to freedom and independence. ...

The woman question assumed importance for woman of the bourgeois classes approximately in the middle of the nineteenth century – a considerable time after the proletarian women had arrived in the labour arena. Under the impact of the monstrous successes of capitalism, the middle classes of the population were hit by waves of need. The economic changes had rendered the financial situation of the petty and middle bourgeoisie unstable, and the bourgeois women were faced with a dilemma of menacing proportions, either accept poverty, or achieve the right to work. Wives and daughters of these social groups began to knock at the doors of the universities, the art salons, the editorial houses, the offices, flooding to the professions that were open to them. The desire of bourgeois women to gain access to science and the higher benefits of culture was not the result of a sudden, maturing need but stemmed from that same question of “daily bread”.

The women of the bourgeoisie met, from the very first, with stiff resistance from men. A stubborn battle was waged between the professional men, attached to their “cosy little jobs”, and the women who were novices in the matter of earning their daily bread. This struggle gave rise to “feminism” – the attempt of bourgeois women to stand together and pit their common strength against the enemy, against men. As they entered the labour arena these women proudly referred to themselves as the “vanguard of the women’s movement”. They forgot that in this matter of winning economic independence they were, as in other fields, travelling in the footsteps of their younger sisters and reaping the fruits of the efforts of their blistered hands.

Is it then really possible to talk of the feminists pioneering the road to women’s work, when in every country hundreds of thousands of proletarian women had flooded the factories and workshops, taking over one branch of industry after another, before the bourgeois women’s movement was ever born? Only thanks to the fact that the labour of women workers had received recognition on the world market were the bourgeois women able to occupy the independent position in society in which the feminists take so much pride. ...

We find it difficult to point to even one fact in the history of the struggle of the proletarian women to improve their material conditions to which the general feminist movement has contributed significantly. Whatever the proletarian women have achieved in the sphere of raising their own living standards is the result of the efforts of the working class in general and of themselves in particular. The history of the struggle of the working women for better conditions of labour and for a more decent life is the history of the struggle of the proletariat for its liberation.

What, if not the fear of a dangerous explosion of proletarian dissatisfaction, forces the factory owners to raise the price of labour, reduce hours and introduce better working conditions? What, if not the fear of “labour unrest”, persuades the government to establish legislation to limit the exploitation of labour by capital? ...

There is not one party in the world that has taken up the defence of women as social democracy has done. The working woman is first and foremost a member of the working class, and the more satisfactory the position and the general welfare of each member of the proletarian family, the greater the benefit in the long run to the whole of the working class. ...

In face of the growing social difficulties, the sincere fighter for the cause must stop in sad bewilderment. She cannot but see how little the general women’s movement has done for proletarian women, how incapable it is of improving the working and living conditions of the working class. The future of humanity must seem grey, drab and uncertain to those women who are fighting for equality but who have not adopted the proletarian world outlook or developed a firm faith in the coming of a more perfect social system. While the contemporary capitalist world remains unchanged, liberation must seem to them incomplete and impartial. What despair must grip the more thoughtful and sensitive of these women. Only the working class is capable of maintaining morale in the modem world with its distorted social relations. With firm and measured step it advances steadily towards its aim. It draws the working women to its ranks. The proletarian woman bravely starts out on the thorny path of labour. Her legs sag; her body is torn. There are dangerous precipices along the way, and cruel beasts of prey are close at hand.

But only by taking this path is the woman able to achieve that distant but alluring aim – her true liberation in a new world of labour. During this difficult march to the bright future the proletarian woman, until recently a humiliated, downtrodden slave with no rights, learns to discard the slave mentality that has clung to her, step by step she transforms herself into an independent worker, an independent personality, free in love. It is she, fighting in the ranks of the proletariat, who wins for women the right to work; it is she, the “younger sister”, who prepares the ground for the “free” and “equal” woman of the future.

For what reason, then, should the woman worker seek a union with the bourgeois feminists? Who, in actual fact, would stand to gain in the event of such an alliance? Certainly not the woman worker. She is her own saviour; her future is in her own hands. The working woman guards her class interests and is not deceived by great speeches about the “world all women share”. The working woman must not and does not forget that while the aim of bourgeois women is to secure their own welfare in the framework of a society antagonistic to us, our aim is to build, in the place of the old, outdated world, a bright temple of universal labour, comradely solidarity and joyful freedom. ...

Marriage and the Problem of the Family

Let us turn our attention to another aspect of the woman question, the question of the family. The importance that the solution of this urgent and complex question has for the genuine emancipation of women is well known. The struggle for political rights, for the right to receive doctorates and other academic degrees, and for equal pay for equal work, is not the full sum of the fight for equality. To become really free woman has to throw off the heavy chains of the current forms of the family, which are outmoded and oppressive. For women, the solution of the family question is no less important than the achievement of political equality and economic independence.

In the family of today, the structure of which is confirmed by custom and law, woman is oppressed not only as a person but as a wife and mother, in most of the countries of the civilised world the civil code places women in a greater or lesser dependence on her husband, and awards the husband not, only the right to dispose of her property but also the right of moral and physical dominance over her. ...

Where the official and legal servitude of women ends, the force we call “public opinion” begins. This public opinion is created and supported by the bourgeoisie with the aim of preserving “the sacred institution of property”. The hypocrisy of “double morality” is another weapon. Bourgeois society crushes woman with its savage economic vice, paying for her labour at a very low rate. The woman is deprived of the citizen’s right to raise her voice in defence of her interests: instead, she is given only the gracious alternative of the bondage of marriage or the embraces of prostitution – a trade despised and persecuted in public but encouraged and supported in secret. Is it necessary to emphasise the dark sides of contemporary married life and the sufferings women experience in connection with their position in the present family structure? So much has already been written and said on this subject. Literature is full of depressing pictures of the snares of married and family life. How many psychological dramas are enacted! How many lives are crippled! Here, it is only important for us to note that the modem family structure, to a lesser or greater extent, oppresses women of all classes and all layers of the population. Customs and traditions persecute the young mother whatever the stratum of the population to which she belongs; the laws place bourgeois women, proletarian women and peasant women all under the guardianship of their husbands.

Have we not discovered at last that aspect of the woman question over which women of all classes can unite? Can they not struggle jointly against the conditions oppressing them? Is it not possible that the grief and suffering which women share in this instance will soften the claws of class antagonism and provide common aspirations and common action for the women of the different camps? Might it not be that on the basis of common desires and aims, co-operation between the bourgeois women and the proletarian women may become a possibility? The feminists are struggling for freer forms of marriage and for the “right to maternity”; they are raising their voices in defence of the prostitute, the human being persecuted by all. See how rich feminist literature is in the search for new forms of relationships and in enthusiastic demands for the “moral equality” of the sexes. Is it not true that while in the sphere of economic liberation the bourgeois women lag behind the many-million strong army of proletarian women who are pioneering the way for the “new woman”, in the fight for the solution, of the family question the laurels go to the feminists?

Here in Russia, women of the middle bourgeoisie – that army of independent wage-earners thrown on to the labour market during the 1860s – have long since settled in practice many of the confused aspects of the marriage question. They have courageously replaced the “consolidated” family of the traditional church marriage with more elastic types of relationship that meet the needs of that social layer. But the subjective solution of this question by individual women does not change the situation and does not relieve the overall gloomy picture of family life. If any force is destroying the modern form of the family, it is not the titanic efforts of separate and stronger individuals but the inanimate and mighty forces of production, which are uncompromisingly budding life, on new foundation’s. ...

The heroic struggle of individual young women of the bourgeois world, who fling down the gauntlet and demand of society the right to “dare to love” without orders and without chains, ought to serve as an example for all women languishing in family chains – this is what is preached by the more emancipated feminists abroad and our progressive equal righters at home. The marriage question, in other words, is solved in their view without reference to the external situation; it is solved independently of changes in the economic structure of society. The isolated, heroic efforts of individuals is enough. Let a woman simply “dare”, and the problem of marriage is solved.

But less heroic women shake their heads in distrust. “It is all very well for the heroines of novels blessed by the prudent author with great independence, unselfish friends and extraordinary qualities of charm, to throw down the gauntlet. But what about those who have no capital, insufficient wages, no friends and little charm?” And the question of maternity preys on the mind of the woman who strives for freedom. Is “free love” possible? Can it be realised as a common phenomenon, as the generally accepted norm rather than the individual exception, given the economic structure of our society? Is it possible to ignore the element of private property in contemporary marriage? Is it possible, in an individualistic world, to ignore the formal marriage contract without damaging the interests of women? For the marital contract is the only guarantee that all the difficulties of maternity will not fall on the woman alone. Will not that which once happened to the male worker now happen to the woman? The removal of guild regulations, without the establishment of new rules governing the conduct of the masters, gave capital absolute power over the workers. The tempting slogan “freedom of contract for labour and capital” became a means for the naked exploitation of labour by capital. “Free love”, introduced consistently into contemporary class society, instead of freeing woman from the hardships of family life, would surely shoulder her with a new burden – the task of caring, alone and unaided, for her children.

Only a whole number of fundamental reforms in the sphere of social relations – reforms transposing obligations from the family to society and the state – could create a situation where the principle of “free love” might to some extent be fulfilled. But can we seriously expect the modern class state, however democratic it may be, to take upon itself the duties towards mothers and children which at present are undertaken by that individualistic unit, the modern family? Only the fundamental transformation of all productive relations could create the social prerequisites to protect women from the negative aspects of the “free love” formula. Are we not aware of the depravity and abnormalities that in present conditions are anxious to pass themselves off under this convenient label? Consider all those gentlemen owning and administering industrial enterprises who force women among their workforce and clerical staff to satisfy their sexual whims, using the threat of dismissal to achieve their ends. Are they not, in their own way, practising “free love”? All those “masters of the house” who rape their servants and throw them out pregnant on to the street, are they not adhering to the formula of “free love”?

But we are not talking of that kind of ‘freedom’ object the advocates of free marriage. On the contrary, we demand the acceptance of a ‘single morality’ equally binding for both sexes. We oppose the sexual licence that is current, and view as moral only the free union that is based on true love.” But, my dear friends, do you not think that your ideal of “free marriage”, when practised in the conditions of present society, might produce results that differ little from the distorted practice of sexual freedom? Only when women are relieved of all those material burdens which at the present time create a dual dependence, on capital and on the husband, can the principle of “free love” be implemented without bringing new grief for women in its wake. As women go out to, work and achieve economic independence, certain possibilities for “free love” appear, particularly for the better-paid women of the intelligentsia. But the dependence of women on capital remains, and this dependence increases as more and more proletarian women sell their labour power. Is the slogan “free love” capable of improving the sad existence of these women, who earn only just enough to keep themselves alive? And anyway, is not “free love” already practised among the working classes and practised so widely that the bourgeoisie has on more than one occasion raised the alarm and campaigned against the “depravity” and “immorality” of the proletariat? It should be noted that when the feminists enthuse about the new forms of cohabitation outside marriage that should be considered by the emancipated bourgeois woman, they speak of “free love”, but when the working class is under discussion these relationships are scornfully referred to as “disorderly sexual intercourse”. This sums up their attitude.

But for proletarian women at the present time all relationships, whether sanctified by the church or not, are equally harsh in their consequences. The crux of the family and marriage problem lies for the proletarian wife and mother not in the question of the sacred or secular external form, but in the attendant social and economic, conditions which define the complicated obligations of the working-class woman, of course it matters to her too whether her husband has the right to dispose of her earnings, whether he has the right by law to force her to live with him when she does not want to, whether the husband can forcibly take her children away etc. However, it is not such paragraphs of the civic code that determine the position of woman in the family, nor is it these paragraphs which make for the confusion and complexity of the family problem. The question of relationships would cease to be such a painful one for the majority of women only if society, relieved women of all those petty household cares which are at present unavoidable (given the existence of individual, scattered domestic economies), took over responsibility for the younger generation, protected maternity and gave the mother to the child for at least the first months after birth.

In opposing the legal and sacred church marriage contract, the feminists are fighting a fetish. The proletarian women, on the other hand, are waging war against the factors that are behind the modem form of marriage and family. In striving to change fundamentally the conditions of life, they know that they are also helping to reform relationships between the sexes. Here we have the main difference between the bourgeois and proletarian approach to the difficult problem of the family.

The feminists and the social reformers from the camp of the bourgeoisie, naively believing in the possibility of creating new forms of family and new types of marital relations against the dismal background of the contemporary class society, tie themselves in knots in their search for these new forms. If life itself has not vet produced these forms, it is necessary, they seem to imagine, to think them up whatever the cost. There must, they believe, be modem forms of sexual relationship which are capable of solving the complex family problem under the present social system. And the ideologists of the bourgeois world – the journalists, writers and prominent women fighters for emancipation one after the other put forward their “family panacea”, their new “family formula”.

How utopian these marriage formulas sound. How feeble these palliatives, when considered in the light of the gloomy reality of our modern family structure. Before these formulas of “free relationships” and “free love” can become practice, it is above all necessary that a fundamental reform of all social relationships between people take place; furthermore, the moral and sexual norms and the whole psychology of mankind would have to undergo a thorough evolution, is the contemporary person psychologically able to cope with “free love"? What about the jealousy that eats into even the best human souls? And that deeply-rooted sense of property that demands the possession not only of the body but also of the soul of another? And the inability to have the proper respect for the individuality of another? The habit of either subordinating oneself to the loved one, or of subordinating the loved one to oneself? And the bitter and desperate feeling of desertion, of limitless loneliness, which is experienced when the loved ceases to love and leaves? Where can the lonely person, who is an individualist to the very core of his being, find solace? The collective, with its joys and disappointments and aspirations, is the best outlet for the emotional and intellectual energies of the individual. But is modern man capable of working with this collective in such a way as to feel the mutually interacting influences? Is the life of the collective really capable, at present, of replacing the individual’s petty personal joys? Without the “unique,” “one-and-only” twin soul, even the socialist, the collectivist, is quite alone in the present antagonistic world; only in the working class do we catch the pale glimpse of the future, of more harmonious and more social relations between people. The family problem is as complex and many-faceted as life itself. Our social system is incapable of solving it.

Other marriage formulas have been put forward. Several progressive women and social thinkers regard the marriage union only as a method of producing progeny. Marriage in itself, they hold, does not have any special value for woman – motherhood is her purpose, her sacred aim, her task in life. Thanks to such inspired advocates as Ruth Bray and Ellen Key, the bourgeois ideal that recognises woman as a female rather than a person has acquired a special halo of progressiveness. Foreign literature has seized upon the slogan put forward by these advanced women with enthusiasm. And even here in Russia, in the period before the political storm [of 1905], before social values came in for revision, the question of maternity had attracted the attention of the daily press. The slogan “the right to maternity” cannot help producing lively response in the broadest circles of the female population. Thus, despite the fact that all the suggestions of the feminists in this connection were of the utopian variety, the problem was too important and topical not to attract women.

The “right to maternity” is the kind of question that touches not only women from the bourgeois class but also, to an even greater extent, proletarian women as well. The right to be a mother – these are golden words that go straight to “any women’s heart” and force that heart to beat faster. The right to feed “one’s own” child with one’s own milk, and to attend the first signs of its awakening consciousness, the right to care for its tiny body and shield its tender soul from the thorns and sufferings of the first steps in life – what mother would not support these demands?

It would seem that we have again stumbled on an issue that could serve as a moment of unity between women of different social layers: it would seem that we have found, at last, the bridge uniting women of the two hostile worlds. Let us look closer, to discover what the progressive bourgeois women understand by “the right to maternity”. Then we can see whether, in fact, proletarian women can agree with the solutions to the problem of maternity envisaged by the bourgeois fighters for equal rights. In the eyes of its eager apologists, maternity possesses an almost sacred quality. Striving to smash the false prejudices that brand a woman for engaging in a natural activity – the bearing of a child – because the activity has not been sanctified by the law, the fighters for the right to maternity have bent the stick in the other direction: for them, maternity has become the aim of a woman’s life. ...

Ellen Key’s devotion to the obligations of maternity and the family forces her to give an assurance that the isolated family unit will continue to exist even in a society transformed along socialist lines. The only change, as she sees it, will be that all the attendant elements of convenience or of material gain will be excluded from the marriage union, which will be concluded according to mutual inclinations, without rituals or formalities – love and marriage will be truly synonymous. But the isolated family unit is the result of the modem individualistic world, with its rat-race, its pressures, its loneliness; the family is a product of the monstrous capitalist system. And yet Key hopes to bequeath the family to socialist society! Blood and kinship ties at present often serve, it is true, as the only support in life, as the only refuge in times of hardship and misfortune. But will they be morally or socially necessary in the future? Key does not answer this question. She has too loving a regard for the “ideal family”, this egoistic unit of the middle bourgeoisie to which the devotees of the bourgeois structure of society look with such reverence.

But it is not only the talented though erratic Ellen Key who loses her way in the social contradictions. There is probably no other question about which socialists themselves are so little in agreement as the question of marriage and the family. Were we to try and organise a survey among socialists, the results would most probably be very curious. Does the family wither away? or are there grounds for believing that the family disorders of the present are only a transitory crisis? Will the present form of the family be preserved in the future society, or will it be buried with the modem capitalist system? These are questions which might well receive very different answers. ...

With the transfer of educative functions from the family to society, the last tie holding together the modem isolated family will be loosened; the process of disintegration will proceed at an even faster pace, and the pale silhouettes of future marital relations will begin to emerge. What can we say about these indistinct silhouettes, hidden as they are by present-day influences?

Does one have to repeat that the present compulsory form of marriage will be replaced by the free union of loving individuals? The ideal of free love drawn by the hungry imagination of women fighting for their emancipation undoubtedly corresponds to some extent to the norm of relationships between the sexes that society will establish. However, the social influences are so complex and their interactions so diverse that it is impossible to foretell what the relationships of the future, when the whole system has fundamentally been changed, will he like. But the slowly maturing evolution of relations between the sexes is clear evidence that ritual marriage and the compulsive isolated family are doomed to disappear.

The Struggle for Political Rights

The feminists answer our criticisms by saying: even if the arguments behind our defence of the political rights of women seem to you mistaken, is the importance of the demand itself, which is equally urgent for feminists and for representatives of the working class, thereby reduced? Cannot the women of the two social camps, for the sake of their common political aspirations, surmount the barriers of class antagonism that divide them? Surely they are capable of waging a common struggle against the hostile forces that surround them? Division between bourgeois and proletarian is inevitable as far as other questions are concerned, but in the case of this particular question, the feminists imagine,, the women of the various social classes have no differences.

Feminists keep returning to these arguments with bitterness and bewilderment, seeing preconceived notions of partisan loyalty in the refusal of representatives of the working class to join forces with them in the struggle for women’s political rights. Is this really the case?

Is there a complete identity of political aspirations, or does antagonism hinder the creation of an indivisible, above-class army of women in this instance as in all others? We have to answer this question before we can outline the tactics that proletarian women will employ in winning political rights for their sex.

The feminists declare themselves to be on the side of social reform, and some of them even say they are in favour of socialism – in the far distant future, of course – but they are not intending to struggle in the ranks of the working class for the realisation of these aims. The best of them believe, with a naive sincerity, that once the deputies’ seats are within their reach they will be able to cure the social sores which have in their view developed because men, with their inherent egoism, have been masters of the situation. However good the intentions of individual groups of feminists towards the proletariat, whenever the question of class struggle has been posed they have left the battlefield in a fright. They find that they do not wish to interfere in alien causes, and prefer to retire to their bourgeois liberalism which is so comfortably familiar.

No, however much the bourgeois feminists try to repress the true aim of their political desires, however much they assure their younger sisters that involvement in political life promises immeasurable benefits for the women of the working class, the bourgeois spirit that pervades the whole feminist movement gives a class colouring even to the demand for equal political rights with men, which would seem to be a general women’s demand. Different aims and understandings of how political rights are to be used create an unbridgeable gulf between bourgeois and proletarian women. This does not contradict the fact that the immediate tasks of the two groups of women coincide to a certain degree, for the representatives of all classes which have received access to political power strive above all to achieve a review of the civil code, which in every country, to a greater or lesser extent, discriminates against women. Women press for legal changes that create more favourable conditions of labour for themselves; they stand together against the regulations legalising prostitution etc. However, the coincidence of these immediate tasks is of a purely formal nature. For class interest determines that the attitude of the two groups to these reforms is sharply contradictory. ...

Class instinct – whatever the feminists say – always shows itself to be more powerful than the noble enthusiasms of “above-class” politics. So long as the bourgeois women and their “younger sisters” are equal in their inequality, the former can, with complete sincerity, make great efforts to defend the general interests of women. But once the barrier is down and the bourgeois women have received access to political activity, the recent defenders of the “rights of all women” become enthusiastic defenders of the privileges of their class, content to leave the younger sisters with no rights at all. Thus, when the feminists talk to working women about the need for a common struggle to realise some “general women’s” principle, women of the working class are naturally distrustful.

The Question of Women’s Leadership in People’s War in Nepal

2012-03-07T09:10:00.001-08:00

By Hisila Yami (writing under the name Parvati). She is the wife of current Nepalese Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai and is a leading figure of the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (née the CPN (Maoist)) in her own right, making many important contributions to the study and practice of women’s liberation. She is also the author of important work People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal.

Monthly Review

The question of women’s leadership in CPN (Maoist)

The question of women’s leadership became more and more important in Nepal as revolutionary united fronts were replacing the reactionary state machinery at village and district levels. It was seen that women were joining the movement in unprecedented numbers, showing tremendous endurance, sacrifice and devotion; however they lacked expert knowledge to lead the movement. With the establishment of a central level United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC) to co-ordinate the activities of all the united fronts at various levels, this question became all the more pertinent. Also with the creation of higher military formations within the People’s Liberation Army, the question of women started being raised by the women themselves. This has become more important as military formations have now reached the level of Brigade, and there are separate women’s platoon and sections with the brigade. It is seen that while men are continuing to develop in the military field even when they have reached beyond 40 years of age, women are hardly seen to continue in this field beyond 25 years. While from the field, objective conditions were demanding the need of developing women’s leadership qualities from the women cadres, within the Party itself there was a theoretical debate on women’s role in the communist movement. It was in the Second National Conference, in the process of analysis and synthesis of achievements of PW in Nepal which led to the adoption of Prachanda Path, that women’s role in institutionalization of continuous revolution and their role in preventing counterrevolution were seriously discussed. In fact the creation of separate women’s department is the product of Prachanda Path. Their role in the three instruments of revolution—Party, Army and United Front—was discussed. The Party being the most decisive amongst the three instruments, the question of developing revolutionary women leaders in Communist Party was given prominence.

The leadership question and women

Leadership is basically actualization of political ideology, hence in the Communist Party it is the command in ideology that determines the leadership quality. This quality is developed through continuous class struggle, inner-party struggle and inner-struggle. Hence real tested leadership can only come in countries where there is class struggle, where the Party thrives on healthy inner-party struggle demanding a higher level of transformation of individuals through relentless inner-struggle. Indeed Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, Chiang Ching were all products of intense class struggle and inner-party struggle that was being waged in Germany, Russia and China in their time. And being women in addition, they had to wage a more complex inner-struggle than the men of their time.

The question of leadership is also linked to objective necessity and the chance factor. In the dialectical relationship between the two, it is true that the objective condition necessitates birth of a leader but the question of who emerges as a leader is left to chance. It is here that the women’s leadership question becomes slightly complicated. It is seen that revolutionary communist movements have always unleashed women’s fury, but they are not able to channelize this energy into producing enduring women communist leaders. The question has been raised again and again as to why there are so few women leaders in communist parties when Marxism offers such a deep penetrating analysis and solution to women’s oppression. Hence the question arises as to why the chance factor is constrained in producing women leaders in communist parties despite growing objective conditions for it? This needs deep analysis.

Women are late arrivals in the political arena

Right from the period of the slavery system men from the privileged class developed their skill in running political state affairs. They developed their leadership quality at the cost of women of both classes and the enslaved men. This continues to this day, in some form or other. Here it is worth remembering Engels, who said that the overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex and that men took command in the house also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. By virtue of their sole right over property men became the rulers, the women upon losing their historic mother-right became the ruled. The prevailing division of labor, according to which men undertook mental work, while women were relegated to physical work, led to cumulative experience of men in the field of analysis and synthesis of the world, while women were lost in the hidden world of household activities. Men thus monopolized the field of worldly knowledge; they have been actively involved in not only defining the world but changing it too. Consider this—women got voting rights long after it was achieved by men. Even in today’s 21st century, women in Kuwait do not have the right to vote. With the imperialist countries backing religious medieval feudal rulers like the Taliban in Afghanistan (now replaced by a coalition of smaller feudal lords under Hamid Karzai) and sheiks in Gulf countries, women are restrained from entering public life. Also in Western countries, despite much noise being made by feminists, there are few women leaders in political parties. Take the case of Nepal where women are denied the right to rule right from the womb, because of the feudal monarchical system prevalent here. All these have a cumulative effect on the struggle for developing women’s leadership in political parties, even in the communist parties whose history is comparatively recent and which are so antagonistic to the prevailing mainstream political parties.

Prevailing mode of production is not favorable

The base and superstructure of the present society is based on exploitation in general and in particular on exploitation of women’s reproductive and domestic labor. In property relations women are looked upon as maintainers of men’s property and producers of sons to pass on the property within a male lineage. The prevailing superstructure, such as the social, cultural, educational, and political system, are all geared to support this exploitation. Take the example of the marriage institution. It is an alliance of convenience for men to perpetuate their hegemonism in property relations. For women the same alliance in fact marginalizes them to domestic slavery. Sadly this holds true amongst the communists too, although to a lesser degree.

Nepal with strong left movements has periodically produced many women activists, but they seem to vanish as soon as they are recognized. One of the most apparent reasons is the institution of marriage, which has robbed us of promising women leaders. People’s War seems to be changing that pattern, however, even within PW the question of continuity of women’s leadership keeps coming up, especially when they get married and decide to have children. This is because in countries like Nepal, where the feudal patriarchal system is yet more oppressive than the capitalist patriarchal system in advanced countries, the married life of women communists can be more complex. Although the element of the notion of private property is slowly disappearing in Nepal with the waging of PW, however the cultural root of feudalism eventually creeps in in many forms, such as the conventional division of labor in the name of necessity. Added to this is the unilateral burden a woman has to carry when she becomes a mother. With the birth of every child she sinks deeper into domestic slavery. In fact many women who have been active in People’s War in Nepal are found to complain that having babies is like being under disciplinary action, because they are cut off from the Party activities for a long period. In this way many bright aspiring communist women are at risk of being lost in oblivion, even after getting married to the comrades of their choice. This is specially so in white dominated areas [areas still dominated by the local traditional elite-ed.] where women seldom get support system from the mass as well as from the Party to sustain themselves in their reproductive years. However, it is heartening to see that this problem is being solved in the base areas of Rolpa and Rukum, where the mass support and the consolidation of the Party has made it possible for the Party and masses to support such maternal burdens of women leaders. Another aspect of Nepalese feudal society is that there is a strong pressure on women to bear children, especially sons. With the launching of PW this aspect has been negated to some level, however, there is still pressure to have at least one child.

There is also the tendency to create pressure on women cadres to get married covertly or overtly as unmarried women draw lots of suspicion from men as well as women for their unmarried status. This results in marriages against their wishes or before they are ready to get married. Also there is a tendency to take sexual offenses more seriously than political offenses.

Women’s struggle is more complex than men’s

For communist women, it is not enough for them to participate in class struggle, inner-party struggle, and inner-struggle. Often they may remain in the minority even if they belong to the majority line within the party. And because they are the product of this patriarchal structure, hence their inner-struggle consists in not only struggle against themselves as individuals but also struggle against the effect of patriarchal values on them, such as fatalistic tendency, inferiority complex, guilt syndrome, victim syndrome, etc. They have to face an even more complex struggle if they happen to be single, divorced or married more than once. This is well documented in Alexandra Kollantai’s collection of articles. In fact she represents the best example of revolt against such marriages. She left her first husband and child in order to concentrate more on revolutionary work, then later she left her second (communist) husband on the ground of his stereotyped expectation of the marriage alliance. And because of her rebellion against conventional marriages she not only faced difficulties with the bourgeois society but also from conservative communists as well. As a result Alexandra Kollontai is more known for the “glass of water theory” (the theory that sex should be as easy and uncomplicated as drinking glass of water) among the conservative communists than her contributions to the communist movement and the proletarian women’s movement. Take another example, that of Chiang Ching. She had to face slander from the bourgeois press and personalities because of her past marriages, and even within the Party she was not received kindly. Chiang Ching had to agree to political isolation for many years as a condition for her to marry Mao. This decision was taken when the rightist Liu Shao Chi was in the Party headquarters.

Manifestation of patriarchal values in communist party

Since the feminist movement is the product of the bourgeois revolution, quite often communist parties tend to become hyper-sensitive to women’s issues. As a result they fall prey to patriarchal values even while agreeing in theory to women’s liberation. This is manifested in many ways. For example instead of taking women as reliable long-term equal partners in the communist movement it takes women’s role as supportive. As a result the Party is often found overemphasizing the class struggle at the cost of gender exploitation, forgetting the dialectical relationship between the two. There have been cases of delaying the formation of separate women’s organization or even temporarily dismissing existing women’s organization within communist parties. In parties where separate women’s organization exists, there are cases where the women’s mass front is not given the required degree of freedom so as to make their own plans and programmes, thus robbing them of initiative and creative power. This ultimately breeds alienation and tailism in the Party. This can also take place by not coordinating the women’s programme with the party programme and as a result the party programme gets priority over the women’s programme. Conservatism in the party can also be seen through relegating women cadres to only women related work, thereby robbing them of the chance to develop in party policy matters and other fields.

In the practical front, this leads to spontaneity whereby women’s issues are addressed but not implemented because one leaves it to circumstances, leading to gradualism. Often it is seen that the party does not actively intervene in the existing traditional division of labor between men and women whereby men take to mental work while women are left to do physical labor. This is also manifested in taking men and women as absolute equals by not being sensitive to women’s special condition and their special needs. This becomes all the more apparent when women are menstruating or are in the reproductive period.

Lack of subjective effort on the part of women cadres

Women have to wage a longer struggle because of their double oppression. However due to lack of subjective efforts they lose half way. For example, where they have successfully rebelled against feudal values, they have not been able to sustain themselves in class struggle. And where they have been able to wage class struggle, they have not been able to sustain in inner-party struggle. And by not participating or participating poorly in inner-party struggle they lose sharpness on ideology, thus robbing them of their chance to determine the course of the communist movement, which has so much relevance to their own liberation. Their lack of subjective effort is manifest in many ways. In the field of ideology, they fall prey to pragmatism, economism, sectarianism because they are not serious enough to study theoretical knowledge and be involved in inner-party struggle to overcome their objective conditions, which in turn breeds these tendencies because of their past objective conditions.

In the practical field they often fall into tailism whereby they follow the directives of the party blindly without questioning, just as traditional women have been following their fathers when unmarried, and their husbands when married, and their sons when widowed. They thus become the victims of circumstance. This manifests in unplanned motherhood, which affects them most if they are in the military field. It manifests in following the husband’s political line blindly instead of developing one’s own political line, thereby affecting their independent political life. By not being assertive of their rights they fall into the trap of traditional division of labor. As a result they covertly become the vehicle of traditional conservative ideas leading to counter-revolution. In many cases they take marriage and motherhood as a break in their political/military career as if it is temporary work. Similarly they become willing partners to their husband’s field of work thereby losing hold of their own previous work. Hence frequent change of place and work affects them more than men. The effect of all these tendencies leads to developing an inferiority complex among women which is counter-productive to the revolution.

Men’s willingness to give up their special privileges

While women cadres have the problem of asserting themselves, men cadres have the problem of relinquishing the privileged position bestowed on them by the patriarchal structure. This is manifested in many ways. This is mainly seen in the form of formal acceptance of women’s leadership, while in essence not accepting their leadership. Thus there are delays made in establishing women’s leadership in the Party, PLA and United Front. This also results in their being impatient with women’s mistakes and general lack of skill in fields from which women have been excluded. Often they relegate women’s issues to women as if it does not concern them. This is manifested in not reading literature on women’s issues, and not taking part in implementing programmes given by the women’s mass front. Sometimes this covertly is seen in the form of being overprotective about safety of women cadres when it is not warranted and by undertaking women’s mental work on their behalf. This is also seen in their sticking to old traditional division of labor, without relinquishing their monopoly on mental work and relegating women to everyday drudgery work. Not wanting to give up their privileged position they tend to discourage promising wives from taking up independent work, which would take them far off from their husbands.

Political line and the question of women’s leadership

It is the correct ideology and policy of the communist party that will determine the quality of women communist leaders produced and the path of women’s liberation. It was the correct political line of the Bolshevik Party headed by Com. Lenin that produced fine women communist leaders like Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, Inessa Armand, Krupskaya, etc. It was the correct political line because of which communist women leaders like Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg were able to evolve the concept of celebrating 8th March as International Working Women’s Day every year globally, the decision being taken by the first international socialist women’s conference in Stockholm in the year 1910. And it is being followed by not only communists but also the bourgeoisie (in their own way) even till this day.

It was the correct political line of Com. Rosa Luxemburg of exposing and struggling against Bernstein in her book “Reform or Revolution” and later her struggle against Kautsky that brought her to the notice of revolutionary communists of the world. She dared to warn Lenin that bureaucracy may breed in the structure of the Party if the question of centralism and democracy are not understood in their dialectical relationship and under the specific condition of the individual country where it is applied. With the occurrence of counter-revolution in previous socialist states and with the tendencies of bureaucracy which seem to sap revolutionary parties engaged in PW time and again, her warning seems to have relevance even today.

Similarly it was the correct political line carried by Com. Mao which heralded Cultural Revolution that unleashed women’s fury. It was a woman who put up the first poster denouncing Liu Shao Chi heralding the revolt against rightist headquarters. It was the Cultural Revolution that unleashed Com. Chiang Ching’s suppressed leadership quality making her one of the resolute fighters against the capitalist roaders until her death (or murder?). One must also remember that in the period of occupation of headquarters by the rightist Liu Shao Chi, he was the one who ordered women to go back home in order to solve the unemployment problem that was looming large. It was the rightist policy, Perestroika, and the capitalist policy of Deng which slowly introduced commercialization of women thus bringing back prostitution, gambling, beauty contests etc. in Russia and China.

Having said all this, let us not forget that just as women themselves are divided into different classes, so are the communist women divided along rightist, centrist, and revolutionary lines. Due to anti-working women’s liberation policy taken by the rightist and centrist line, those women who belong to these lines are eventually marginalized in their own parties and remain exposed outside the party because of their anti-women’s stand. Whereas those women who stood by the revolutionary line even while failing to make revolution in their own country remain popular. Take the case of Rosa Luxemburg, who is the most popular woman communist leader so far. She was killed before she could realize her dream; this all the more enhanced respect for her as a devoted woman communist leader in the communist world. Similarly it was the tough stand taken by Chiang Ching who defended Mao’s revolutionary line even in her captivity until her death in revisionist China that made her the defiant heroine.

It is interesting to observe that revolutionary communist women have always been on the offensive when they are fighting against the revisionists. The reason may be because they are painfully aware that revisionism breeds bureaucratization, which in turn strengthens patriarchal values, ultimately negating women in politics.

It should be noted that in third world county like Nepal, where class differentiation is not sharp enough, inner-party struggle may often appear in the form of gender, ethnic, regional struggle. Hence the gender issue becomes quite an important component of the class issue. In such a case dismissing the gender issue as an alien force will ultimately affect class struggle.

Private property and the question of women’s leadership

It is time and again seen that women masses do come in a tide to participate in revolutionary movements producing some potential women leaders. But this tide along with the prospective women leaders seems to recede once the revolution is completed or is defeated. The chief reason behind this phenomenon is the existence of the concept of private property. As long as private property remains women will always have to go back to tend individual household activities, maintaining private property for men, no matter how many social revolutions take place. Hence the concept of continuous revolution until one reaches communism has strategic relevance for women, because it is only then that private property gets abolished, unleashing the creativity of women. That is why it is important to make conscious efforts by revolutionary parties of the world to create a conducive environment for developing revolutionary women communist leaders so that they can play a role as catalyst agents in arriving at communism. Hence the question of developing women communist leaders cannot be left to chance, they need to be consciously nurtured, cultivated and safeguarded.

Some experiences of women’s leadership in Nepal

Realizing the importance of revolutionary women and their role in the communist movement, CPN(Maoist) has come forward with some encouraging results. Today there are several women in the Central Committee of the Party. There are dozens of women at the regional level and hundreds in the district levels, and several thousands in the area and cell levels in the Party. In the People’s Liberation Army there are many women commanders, vice commanders in different sections within the brigade, platoons, squads and militia. There are separate women’s sections in the brigade: women platoons, women squad teams, women militia teams functioning in the field. In the United Revolutionary People’s Council, which is an embryonic central people’s government organizing committee, there are four women out of 37 members. Women’s participation in all levels of People’s Councils has been made mandatory.

Just to give some idea about their participation in different fields, let us take the Western region of Nepal. This region alone has 1500 women’s units. The total number of women membership in the women’s mass organization is six hundred thousand. In the military field there are ten women section commanders in the main force, two women platoon commanders in the secondary force and several militia commanders in the basic force. The team commander of the health section of the battalion force is a woman. The women there have started a campaign called “One village, one unit, one house, one friend.” This has helped in organizing and politicizing village after village. Similarly in the field of production, there is a campaign called “Where there is contact, there is organization; where there is organization, there is production.” Hence women are also involved in production activities. They are actively involved in conducting people’s courts where informers, drunkards, gamblers, womanizers, and cheaters are punished. In such trials usually local women militias are actively involved together with the villagers. Hence one can say the objective basis for producing women leaders in various fields are ripening in western region.

Today more and more women are encouraged to rebel against their oppressive marriages, and politically incorrect marriages. Take the case of Com. Shilpa, who was first a commander in a guerrilla squad and later a sub-regional committee member of the Party and vice-chairman of a district level people’s committee. She had a heroic death while laying an ambush against the reactionary armed forces in May 2002. She dared to denounce and divorce her husband who had reneged against the revolution after being captured. There is an increasing trend of widow remarriages [condemned by orthodox Hindu tradition, ed.]. The definition of the family of martyrs has now been extended to those wives of martyred comrades who have remarried without forsaking the revolutionary cause. This has indirectly helped widows of martyred men to remarry without feeling guilt. Take the example of Com. Shilu, the commander of the historic women jail breakers in Gorkha in March, 2001. She has remarried another comrade after losing her husband Bhim Sen Pokharel who got martyred while giving protection to Com. Basu, the first martyred politburo member of CPN(Maoist). There have been cases of husbands and wives being given challenging works. It is worth mentioning that Com. Phul Maya BK, who was a section commander of a battalion in the historic Dang Barrack attack on November 23, 2001, was martyred along with her husband Com. Bijok in the same battle. Also it is worth mentioning that the political commissar for the Satbaria barrack attack in Dang in April 2002 was a woman. In the course of promulgation of the Emergency and military mobilization many husbands, wives and sons and daughters have been martyred, this also indicates the level of politicalization of the family in Nepal.

Conclusion

From the above it can be concluded that the importance of revolutionary women’s leadership in the communist party has strategic importance as they are a reliable, long term and mass based force which will help push the communist movement from New Democratic Revolution to socialism, and from socialism to stateless and propertyless communism where complete women’s emancipation is guaranteed. Taking on the relationship between communism and emancipation of women, Inessa Armand has rightly said that if the emancipation of women is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without the full emancipation of women. The concepts of right to rebel, cultural revolution, continuous revolution, overall revolution, mass based politics etc., all have strong appeal and application for women because of their double oppressed status. Their double oppression and the continued false promise of equality given to them by the ruling class (including the revisionist left parties) keeps them alert and on their toes to check any counter-revolution or revisionism, because they have seen the gains of women’s rights slowly eroding with every capitalist stand taken by the party in both Russia and China.

The Communists should be politically aware that if patriarchal values are not checked periodically through rectification campaigns then it may slowly breed bureaucracy in the party. The result of bureaucracy in the party is that it gets cut off from the masses. Once the party becomes an end in itself, serving the interest of its own existence, it will eventually strengthen revisionism. This will result in the party becoming the vanguard of the exploiting class instead of the exploited class, thus losing both class and gender perspective.

For the communist movement to flourish it is not enough to produce individual outstanding women communist leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg or Clara Zetkin, but also equally important to produce women communist companions like Krupskaya and Chiang Ching, who were leaders in their own field, who stood by their husbands who were leaders of the communist movement. They were not only providing their husbands with comfort and companionship but were also actively engaged in two-line struggle in the party. We also need women like Jenny Marx who stood by her husband like a rock in the hours of political and personal turmoil, and helped him in whatever capacity she had. For in order to preserve the gains of revolution and its continuous advancement, we need to not only produce revolutionary women leaders but also equally it is important to sustain and preserve revolutionary communist men leaders. Let us not forget that it was also revolutionary men like Karl Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Lenin, Mao etc. who provided deep analysis of women’s oppression and have shown the path of women’s emancipation.

Also it is important to note that just as communist women know that for every gain in the proletarian people’s power there is a relative gain in women’s power, similarly communist men should know that the revolution and the gains of revolution can only be preserved and furthered when more and more women join and lead the revolution. Similarly just as the proletarian movement needs the input of all those who have rebelled against their class outlook, similarly the proletarian women’s movement needs the input of all those who have not only rebelled against their class outlook but also against their stereotyped sexist outlook. Hence the alliance between revolutionary men and women is not only to be desired but is also historically necessary. This is all the more necessary in producing revolutionary women communist leaders.

Lastly it is important to note Mao’s remark “keep being dissatisfied, the world belongs to the dissatisfied.” This is all the more true for women revolutionary leaders who have to tread a longer and more complex path of class struggle, inner-party struggle and inner-struggle.

Com. Janaki: “People’s War Has Shattered the Hesitations of the Women of Dandakaranya!”

2012-03-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

This interview with Com. Janaki (Anuradha Gandhy) is from the March 2001 issue of Poru Mahila, the organ of Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan, DK.

People’s War has shattered the hesitations of the women of Dandakaranya!

(In this issue of Poru Mahila we are introducing to our readers Com. Janaki who had been working in the urban movement and had come to Dandakaranya to observe the adivasi peasant movement and to participate in it. Com. Janaki had led the guerilla squads directly as a divisional committee member of South Bastar from 1997 to 2000. Poru Mahila chatted with her on her experiences in the urban movement and in the adivasi peasant movement. We are here presenting the main features of that conversation – Editor, Poru Mahila).

Po. Ma: Com. Janaki, would you please first explain to us the oppression faced by urban women?

Com. J: Though all women in India are under feudal, capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal oppression, it is seen in various forms in different areas, the urban and the rural areas. The working class and middle class women in urban areas have some specific problems.
Firstly, if we look at the problems inside the family, even in urban areas women are oppressed by the feudal culture.

Though the oppression of this culture may be less severe, still the majority of the young girls and women do not get the right to take important decisions regarding their lives from the family. The unmarried girls are under pressure to marry men from the same caste and same religion according to the decisions of the family. If a girl decides to marry a man of her choice from another caste or religion she will be subjected to a lot of pressure. She would have to face severe opposition from the family. Even if a woman wants to work outside home she will have to take the permission of her father, brother or husband. People of some castes and religions (for e.g. the Muslims and Kshatriyas) do not like their woman to do jobs. So it becomes inevitable for women to fight even for economic independence.

In addition since capitalist values have spread widely man-woman relations have also become commercialized and women are facing severe problems. The dowry and other items which have to be given to the grooms’ family before and after marriage has become a big problem for the parents who gave birth to girls. Added to that, it had become common to all communities to harass women for dowry both physically and mentally. When the wife’s life can be measured in money and gold killing her for their sake is not far behind. This terrible situation can be found in many households in the urban areas now-a-days. Especially since the past 25-30 years may be India is the only country in the world where the new crime of burning brides for dowry has come into vogue.

One thing we have to observe is that a part of women belonging to the working class and the middle classes do not get an opportunity to go out and take up jobs. All their time is spent in house work and working for the family. As a result they depend on others for their living. Socially they depend on their husbands. That’s why they don’t try to do anything independently. There are so many restrictions on them to venture out or step outside the threshold. And if we look at the women who take care of their children’s studies it is almost like a machine. All her work revolves round her husband, the children’s studies and sending them to tuitions.

The conditions of the working class in urban areas are pitiable. The main reason is the severity of the problem of not having a place to stay. So the poor are forced to set up house illegally in open places. Many of them build a hut on the sides of the roads, railway tracks and sewers (even on top of sewers). In narrow lanes and the sides of the roads hundreds of families are living by building shacks. There is not even an inch of space to build a bathroom or a place which can be called a verandah.

As the towns expand slums keep increasing on the sides of roads, on rocky places and on the small hills inside the town. They do not have toilets or water facilities. Crowded people, polluted environment, and lack of basic amenities – women do their work facing all these problems. Fighting for water is a common sight. In bastis like these goodaism and their harassment is another problem they face. But above all the biggest problem is the demolition of these bastis by the municipal and government authorities on the allegation that they are illegal. Usually it comes upon the women to oppose these demolitions. Because when officers come in the daytime with the police and bull dozers it is usually the women and children who are at home. The capitalist system does not recognize the right to have a household as a basic right.

Women in urban areas have many opportunities to step out of home and work. They get jobs in factories, offices, schools, hospitals and shops. But in many jobs they are not paid equally with men. Or the salaries are so low that they cannot run a household with that. Many working class women work in the construction industry under the contractors. Many women work as maids. All these works come under unorganized sector. These do not have any job guarantee or a guarantee for salary.

On top of it they have to face harassment from the contractors and the men under whom they work. This takes place in many forms. Not only the working class women but even educated middle class women are facing such harassment. Women are harassed with such pressurizing tactics as threatening to oust them, not giving them work, transferring them, writing bad remarks in their records etc. Very few women are able to share such things with others.

Now-a-days in big cities electronic industries of the imperialists have come up on a large scale. Girls are employed in many of them. But the problems of more labour, less salaries and ban on organizing are present in these industries. So they have to fight even for the basic right of forming unions.

In the past some industries like beedi making and agarbatti making were thriving in households. Now even many new companies are giving most of the work to do at home. The poor housewives are taking up these jobs thinking they can earn a bit while being at home. There is lot of exploitation in this work. Even if they work all day long with the help of their family members it is difficult for them to earn even 20 rupees. The labour power of poor women is paid very less. They are being exploited a lot is what I want to say.

Lastly, another point is the influence of imperialist culture is very great on the urban women. They are not only influenced by consumerism but are also victims of it. This is increasing day by day. Instead of human values they are giving more importance to beauty and beauty products. As a result there is an environment of insecurity due to atrocities and harassments in the urban areas. The young women are facing a feeling of insecurity to step out of the house. In an urban life women are suffering from many such problems. But there are very few organizations which fight against them at present.

Po.Ma: Tell us about the various trends in the women’s movement.

Com.J: Around 1980s there was a spontaneous outburst of women’s movement in many parts of the country, especially in the cities. This movement was an indication of the increasing democratic consciousness and anti patriarchal consciousness among the women. After the Naxalbari movement dealt a severe blow to the semi feudal, semi colonial system in India, there was an outburst of working class and student movements and there was the Emergency and the social, economic and political crises of the ruling classes – the women’s movements sprung out of this background.

Internationally also there was the influence of the student and women’s movements. Mostly the student, middle class and professional women participated actively in these movements. Out of these spontaneous democratic movements many small and big women’s organizations also took birth. But in the past 20 years there have been many changes in the women’s movement, their political character and in these organizations. Later the women’s liberation movement dependent on the urban middle class women split into various political and ideological streams. In the nationality movements, especially in the Kashmiri struggle for their self determination the active participation of women has increased considerably. Women are playing a prominent role in exposing the inhuman atrocities of the police and army.

Under the leadership of the party revolutionary women’s movement has developed well in the rural areas especially in Dandakaranya and North Telengana. Even the BJP and RSS have recognized the strength of women and are paying attention to spreading decadent social values and vicious politics among them.

Many women who had spontaneously participated in movements against dowry deaths, sati and harassments drawing the attention of the nation towards such problems had withdrawn from the movement. But many out of them have gained a name for themselves as researchers and ideologues on women’s issues both in India and abroad. Many of them founded voluntary organizations (NGOs). They are getting funds from international agencies for women studies and emancipation of women.

But they have a feminist viewpoint and a feminist ideology. Now they have become propagandists for feminism, meaning patriarchy is the main problem of women, we have to fight only against patriarchy. But patriarchy has its roots in class society. In all societies it is perpetuated by the exploiting classes, i.e. feudalism, capitalism and imperialism. So fighting patriarchy means fighting against these exploiting classes. But the feminists are against recognizing this. They believe women’s conditions in this society can be changed by politically lobbying with the governments and by propaganda alone. In reality this feminist stream today is representing the class outlook and the class interests of the bourgeois and upper middle class
women in the country.

The women organizations of revisionist parties like CPI, CPM and Liberation are working actively in some cities. They run movements on social and political issues of women. Along with issues of women’s oppression they even take up processions and do dharnas on problems like price rise etc. They are different from the feminist stream, because they don’t give importance only to struggles against patriarchy. But they are also completely reformist organizations.

Because of their revisionist politics they are not linking the women’s liberation with revolution and are working with the belief that by changing governments they will be able to improve their conditions inside this existing social framework itself. For e.g. for the past 2, 3 years they have concentrated all their activities on gaining the right of 33 percent reservation for women in the parliament. Actually the common people have lost confidence on the corrupt parliamentary system long back. It has also been proven that whoever gets elected to the parliament will always serve the exploiting ruling classes and not work for the rights of women or those of poor people.

There are some organizations in the urban areas which are working actively basing themselves on Marxist analysis, seeing the roots for the exploitation and oppression of women in the class society and recognizing the link between women’s liberation and social revolution. Since a decade they have been working among the working class, students and employees among women. Especially they are working very well in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. They are not only taking up movements against women’s oppression and other problems but also doing extensive propaganda among women about their rights and about the exploitation and oppression perpetuated on them.

It is an alarming phenomenon for the democratic and revolutionary women’s movements that the Hindutva forces are also working among women. They are reinstating age old feudal values in the name of opposing western culture. In the name of Hindu traditions and Bharat Mata they are suppressing the growing consciousness of women. Not only that, they are carrying vicious propaganda against religious minorities among them. They are even giving them military training in the name of Nari Shakthi.

In brief, the women’s movement is divided into various ideological streams all over the country. We have to study them and build up a strong women’s movement by fighting against the wrong ideological trends in them.

Po.Ma: How much do the outside people know about the revolutionary women’s movement? What is its impact?

Com.J: The adivasi women’s movement emerging in the Dandakaranya since the last decade has a lot of prominence in the history of contemporary women’s movement in India. The vigor and initiative of Kashmir women is more than in other parts of the country. Thousands of women are coming into the streets opposing the cruel repression of the army and all kinds of atrocities. After the political activeness of Kashmiri women it is the Dandakaranya adivasi peasant women who are playing active role socially and politically. They are organized on a wide scale in large number of villages. They are opposing the age old patriarchal traditions inside the Gond adivasi society.

They are participating in the armed struggle against the exploiting government and its army and in political campaigns. This is a big victory of the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan.
But it is very sad that very little is available outside about the extent of the KAMS and about its activities. The CPI (ML) (People’s War) members and sympathizers in other states know little about it. The party put in some efforts for this. The paper written for the Patna seminar (it was published in Telugu and Hindi), the book on women martyrs and some stories and short stories helped in propagating it. But information about this revolutionary women’s movement is not going out regularly. Even your magazine ‘Poru Mahila’ is seen outside very rarely. It is necessary to plan its distribution outside the movement areas also.

Nevertheless whatever little information they maybe getting but those belonging to democratic and revolutionary organizations are very much enthused about it. They are getting influenced by the determination and courage displayed by adivasi women. Widespread propaganda about KAMS and its activities is much needed. Through that we can give a fitting reply to the government bad propaganda about the approach of revolutionary parties towards the women’s question.

Po.Ma: Tell us about your experience in DK.

Com. J: Before coming to DK I read articles and reports about the women’s movement here. But I did not have an assessment that it was so widespread. That’s why I was very happy to seeing the size of this movement. I must tell you something. In the lessons taught about tribal societies in the colleges they say that the Gondi society is very liberal. But after observing the Muria, Madia and Dorla people from close quarters I understood how patriarchal the tribal society was too. I understood how important it is to study the problem of women’s oppression deeply. Though the participation of adivasi peasant women in the production process is very huge patriarchy had curbed their rights.

While writing about the women’s movement during the war for new democratic society in China Jack Beldon, the American writer and journalist had written, ‘The Chinese Communist Party has got the key to the victory of the revolution. They have won over the most oppressed section of the Chinese society’. When I saw the women’s movement in DK it were these words of Beldon which came to my mind. In fact, after the Chinese Revolution it was the revolutionary movement in DK that has proven that where there is a people’s war, where there is armed struggle against the feudal, comprador, imperialist system for the victory of New Democratic Revolution, the working class women participate actively on a large scale for the emancipation of the whole society as well as for their own emancipation.

People’s War had shattered the hesitations of the women. It doubled their strength. It showed the path for the liberation of women. There is a link between the semi feudal semi colonial society and women’s oppression. It has been proven once again by this victory of the DK party that the Marxist principle that we can carry forward the fight against patriarchy only along with the fight to end this system is correct.

Wherever the party is working systematically, we can see that the participation of women is more in all political activities and movements. In 1998 due to the severe famine conditions in South Bastar many women had migrated to Andhra Pradesh for daily wage work. There were KAMS range committee members too among them. But when we asked them to come for March 8 meetings, in one place 700 and in another 450 had attended. Before that in rallies against famine conditions thousands of them had participated. When I was there women got recruited into PGA on a large scale. In some places the recruitment of young women was more than the young men.

The thing which influenced me the most was that the wives of married comrades who were already in the squads are also getting recruited. Many of them had given away even their little children to their relatives and are becoming guerilla warriors in the ongoing great People’s War for changing this society. And, I have seen many women comrades who stood steadfast with the People’s War without looking back even though within a few months their husbands had died in police encounter or in some other accident. By breaking away from the traditional, dreary, narrow confines of the family they like this new life more though it is full of dangers. In that manner their life and their existence is becoming meaningful. I have seen many comrades taking training and taking up new responsibilities.

Building up KAMS units in every village, election of their committees, election of Range Committees in range conferences, sending the unit members to villages for propaganda campaigns, participation in bandhs and other protest activities, giving them military training – all these are victories of this movement. But what I have observed in my experience is that since the AC members are engaged without respite in various kinds of responsibilities and due to some routine work style KAMS work is being neglected. We have to think of new methods to involve the elderly women in the villages. Women and their children are facing a number of health problems. By increasing their understanding in these matters and by paying special attention to their welfare we can increase their zest. We have to increase their participation in the village level meetings. Many people call the KAMS as an organization of young women. Widening their narrow knowledge of society is another challenge in front of us.

Likewise there is a need to give special social and political training to women members in the squads and platoons. We have to plan to give them continuous education in scientific knowledge regarding health problems. Though there are discussions on these topics due to lack of time and due to getting immersed in various works they get postponed. We can get rid of their inferiority by giving them scientific knowledge and imbibing wide social thinking among them.

Po.Ma: What is your message to the women working in squads and in KAMS in DK?

Com.J: Our adivasi women comrades in DK are building a new history today. Though it is most backward area of the country it is in the first place in the ongoing women’s movement in the country. They are answering the guns of the police in fitting manner by fighting equally with the men comrades in the armed struggle to free this country from the vicious grip of imperialism, feudalism and comprador bourgeois clutches. In the villages they are standing up for their rights by facing the threats and pressures of village elders. They are weakening patriarchy in Gondi adivasi culture.

Though they are opposing such big enemies and forces, the shyness and sense of subordination whose remnants are still present, are also their big enemies which are obstructing their development. Inferiority complex comes out of these. Its roots are very deep. What I want to tell my KAMS colleagues is that they should increase their self confidence. They have to fight against the enemy inside them. In the coming days KAMS will be facing many big challenges. The state repression is already there.

Apart from that, the government will try to keep the adivasi society and culture in backwardness with the help of village elders and through adivasi leaders. It will become necessary for the KAMS to face them politically. Likewise the KAMS should keep itself ready to put forward its understanding regarding true liberation of women by intervention in the women’s movement which is going on in the form of various streams in the country. To face all these challenges our women comrades should attain political and ideological maturity and have self confidence.
***

(Translated by Nallamma.)

The Cuban Revolution & Women’s Liberation

2012-03-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

With the final victory of the courageous revolution of January 1st 1959, lead by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara and which saw heavy participation and leadership by women, the protracted process of uprooting patriarchal social relations and liberating women in Cuba was begun. As Castro himself once said ““a people whose women fight alongside men – that people is invincible.”

This piece is a quick look at the historical struggle for women’s liberation on the island nation of Cuba.

By Virginia Brown

The ongoing socialist revolution in Cuba is an inspiring example of what can be achieved for women’s rights when the capitalist agenda no longer dictates. From 1959, when the Cuba Revolution achieved political victory over the US-backed Batista dictatorship, women have both defeated preconceptions that they can’t be revolutionary leaders, and helped their country lead the world in the areas of feminism, environmental sustainability, political participation, health and education.

The brutality of the Batista regime propelled many women to join the revolutionary struggle. Their initial roles in non-combatant underground work and caring for the male soldiers did not satisfy many of the women and they demanded equality in the armed struggle, against the opposition of many of the men. Fidel Castro spent one seven-hour meeting persuading leading opponents that women had the discipline (in fact, more of it) – and also the right – to fulfil this role . The women’s platoon of the Rebel Army became known for its discipline and courage, sometimes leading ahead where men feared to go. Thus it was early in the revolution that many men were forced to change their opinion of women’s capabilities.

On January 2, 1959, the day after the general strike which forced Batista and his cronies to flee Havana for the US, Castro called for the end of women’s oppression and – for their full participation in the nascent revolution. “A people whose women fight alongside men – that people is invincible”, he avowed in a speech from the Santiago de Cuba city hall. However, the expectations that both men and women generally held at that time were those of the capitalist world. The capitalists needed working-class women to assume primary responsibility for unpaid domestic labour in rearing the next generation of workers so as to reduce pressure on the capitalist state to direct wealth towards social welfare and away from private profits. They therefore promoted the view that women’s “natural” social role was being mothers/carers subordinate to their husbands – the “breadwinner” – within each individual family unit.

General acceptance that working women should be restricted to low-status and low paid work was also important in reinforcing the idea that women primarily belonged in “the home”. Capitalist dominance of the media and other cultural products, capitalist laws and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba all helped reinforce these ideas. The Cuban revolutionaries recognised that the impact of capitalism’s needs and the sexist ideas it promoted on women’s lives was so far-reaching and oppressive that fundamental changes were needed.

From the beginning of Cuba’s new revolutionary democracy, women assumed leadership roles, involving themselves in the popular militias to defend the revolution, and in the neighbourhood-based Committees in Defence of the Revolution. But this initial demonstration of women’s leadership capacity was recognised as inadequate for eradicating the discrimination against women that was thoroughly ingrained into Cuban social life. A group of women revolutionaries founded what was to become the main women’s rights organisation in Cuba, to build on the gains for women made during the struggle against Batista.

The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), a non-government organisation open to all women over the age of 14 and numbering nearly 4 million, organises at every level of society. The FMC works on various issues directly affecting women such as access to jobs and domestic violence. The Cuban constitution guarantees it an “advisory” role in the formulation of government policy, and the National Assembly of People’s Power tends to adopt most of its proposals. It is hard to find a comparable situation in any other country.

Partly via the FMC, women led the revolution from its early days, spearheading national literacy and health campaigns in which tens of thousands of FMC members led other Cubans in health and literacy brigades to rural areas, helping the rural workers and peasants in their daily work while teaching them to read and educating them about disease prevention, and decreasing infant and maternal mortality rates. As a result of the 1961 national campaign, the Cuban adult literacy rate increased from 75% in 1959 to 96% by the end of 1961. Today, the literacy rate is 99.8% and Cuba leads the world in the ration of female to male enrolments at all educational levels, at 121%.

And Cuba now has an outstanding health system which places a high priority on women’s needs. Women have access to many forms of contraception, and abortion is legal and accessible. Very few people in Cuba have HIV or AIDS, and less than a quarter of those are women. All healthcare is free, a remarkable achievement given that the criminal US blockade on Cuba includes a trade ban, 90% of which encompasses medical supplies and food. The UN Statistics Division records the infant mortality rate at four per thousand, lower than the US rate of six per thousand.

Children are educated about sex in Cuba from the elementary level, and encouraged to develop attitudes about sex that encompass mutual respect, the idea of sex as human expression, and safer sex. This stands in sharp contrast to the sexist moralism of pre-socialist capitalist relations, which embraced the sexual double-standard, tended to treat women as sexual objects, and threw women to the fate of enforced child-rearing or backyard abortions. Divorces are easily obtainable and usually initiated by women.

The Cuban Revolution also took steps to get women out of prostitution, providing them with alternative livelihoods. Revolutionary Cuba has heavy penalties for pimping. Prostitution was nearly eradicated, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The USSR was previously Cuba’s largest trading partner, on which Cuba had enormous reliance as a consequence of the crippling US economic blockade. With Cuba’s increased reliance on international tourism to earn foreign currency, the problem of prostitution and sexist advertising to promote tourism re-emerged.

One response by the National Assembly was the adoption of the FMC’s proposed measures to reduce sexist advertising. The FMC has also implemented outreach programs to the women engaged in prostitution, and made other recommendations to the government about adjusting its legal responses and overseas advertising to tourists. The lasting power of centuries of sexist socialisation under capitalism also gives the Cuban Revolution ongoing feminist tasks. Men still fail to take enough responsibility for contraception and don’t avail themselves of the free vasectomies available to them. It is not only sex tourists to Cuba, but also some Cuban men, who believe it is acceptable to hire women to deliver them sexual pleasure.

Writing of Cuba’s approach to the misogynist violence it inherited from the capitalist world, Cuba solidarity activist Donna Goodman explains in the March 2009 Dissident Voice that, “Crimes of violence against women, especially rape and sexual assault, are severely punished in Cuba. The Federation of Cuban Women travels the country to find out if there is hidden violence and to set up mechanisms for reporting and for community intervention.” She notes that discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or religious preference is outlawed by the Cuban constitution, and further laws back other measures of gender equality.

Although most Cubans no longer hold the pre-revolutionary attitude that women should stay at home and not engage in broader society, the assumption that women should assume most responsibility for domestic tasks is enduring. Some Cubans have been reluctant to elect women to some of the national leadership bodies because they think their domestic responsibilities would impede their leadership activity. One response to this problem was the 1975 Family Code, which set into law equal participation in domestic tasks. Another response has been the “best candidate” media campaign run by the FMC, aimed at urging voters not to allow historical expectations to affect their decisions. Cuban feminist leaders recognise the importance of continuing this work to change ingrained attitudes.

Despite this, Cuba still leads on most feminist measures. As a consequence of decades of taking women seriously as revolutionary leaders, it has the third-highest proportion globally of parliamentary seats (in a lower or single house) held by women, at 43%. As of December 2010, the US rate is 17% and Australia’s is 25%. Women represent 49.5% of all graduates at higher educational levels and 62% of university students.

In 1956 women made up only 17% of the paid workforce. Today they comprise 46.7%. This is partly enabled by the FMC which runs free childcare services for children under seven years – a far cry from Australia’s expensive childcare. And unlike in Australia, women don’t tend to take the worst-paid jobs – 65.1% of professional and technical staff, and 43% of scientists are women. They also comprise 51% of Cuba’s doctors. In fact, efforts to get women to study medicine were so successful that in 1999, when over 70% of medicine graduates were women, Cuba had to introduce quotas for men!

Source

The Cultural Revolution & The Struggle to Liberate Women

2012-03-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

On account of International Women’s Day (March 8th) Socialistplatform is posting this article, which is part 7 of the MLM Revolutionary Study Group’s Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future. As usual the posting of it should not be taken as an endorsement of the MLMRSG or its particular analysis.

During the Cultural Revolution women made substantial gains. Many broke into higher-paying jobs in industry, developed as political leaders, challenged ideas of women’s inferiority, and began to dig up the Confucian-patriarchal roots of women’s oppression in China. But to understand how far the liberation of women had come, and how far it still had to go, it is necessary to refer back to the pre-Liberation period.

According to Confucian doctrine, men were respected, women were despised. Women had no economic or political rights; all but a few women from wealthy families were denied education; and they were subordinated to their fathers, husbands, brothers and in-laws. The brutal custom of foot binding ensured the physical and economic dependence of women on men. Forced marriages of young girls, wife beating and rape by landlords were accepted practices. According to an old folk saying, “A wife married is like a pony bought—I’ll ride her and whip her as I like.” Peasant women were slaves of slaves.

The victory of the revolution in 1949 ushered in a new era for China’s women.

In the land reform campaign of the early 1950s, Women’s Associations encouraged peasant women to lift their heads and “speak bitterness” about their treatment at the hands of big landlords. Tens of millions of women received their own share of land and left the household to work for the first time. The literacy rate for girls and women rose sharply as more schools were built. Prostitution was eliminated in a short period of time. New ideas of socialist equality challenged the traditional views of women’s inferior status. As one woman described it, “It was as though not only their feet but their minds had been bound.”

The Marriage Law passed by the People’s Republic in 1950 prohibited forced marriage and marriage of young girls, bride prices, domestic abuse, and gave women the right of divorce. When these reforms ran into resistance from male peasants, workers and party cadre, the CCP launched a mass campaign in 1953 to implement the Marriage Law. Still there were limited gains, especially in the countryside where patriarchal customs were deeply rooted. Divorce, for example, was not easy to obtain when the husband’s family had paid a steep bride price for their new daughter-in-law.

In 1958-59, the Great Leap Forward brought millions more women out of the home and into the labor force. On the people’s communes, networks of nurseries and kindergartens were built to enable women to work in the fields and on construction projects. As women joined the workforce with the support of local Women’s Associations, more women became leaders of their production teams and were recruited into the party.

Ten years after Liberation, great progress had been made by Chinese women as a direct result of the socialist transformation of Chinese society. At the same time, the prevailing belief in the CCP was that the full participation of women in the labor force was the key ingredient for attaining equality between women and men. This conception underestimated the continuing strength of patriarchal ideology embedded in the family and the social and economic inequalities between men and women that still existed in socialist society. Many still believed that men were more capable of difficult work and quicker to learn than women. In industry, the majority of women worked in lower paying jobs such as textiles and in “street industry,” small shops where women did not receive the same wages and benefits as the mostly male workforce in state-owned factories. In agriculture, the work-point system, which determined income received by peasants, favored the job categories such as tractor drivers and construction workers usually occupied by men. In many cases, peasant women did not receive the same work-points as men doing the same jobs.

Of great importance, the traditional Chinese family was still intact in most respects, particularly in the countryside. Household work was still mainly women’s work. Thus, women worked the “double shift” familiar to working women all over the world—doing the cooking, cleaning, shopping, sewing clothes a nd child-rearing that was extremely laborious and time-consuming in China at the time. Responsibility for household work was a major impediment to the full participation of women in political life and to their development as leaders in their workplaces, neighborhoods and in society as a whole.

With its egalitarian thrust and emphasis on the role of ideology, the Cultural Revolution provided favorable conditions for challenges to male supremacy in all areas of society. The early upsurges of the Cultural Revolution drew women, especially young women, into political life in unprecedented ways:

Freed from family control, young women Red Guards moved across the landscape more widely and in greater numbers than at any time in Chinese history. Like their male counterparts, they were encouraged to challenge parents, teachers and officials, and to act with a confidence and enthusiasm probably never before permitted adolescent women in China.

These young women’s activism was supported by official policy, especially two oft-cited statements by Mao: “Women hold up half the sky” and “Times have changed, and today men and women are equal. Whatever men comrades can accomplish, women comrades can too.”

The concept of being youth–“qingnian” as opposed to “funu,” or women— enabled young women to work and act without being defined and limited by their gender.

According to an educated qingnian who left Shanghai to work on a state farm on Chongming Island:

Young women like me sensed few gender constraints in our devotion to the revolution. Numerous young female leaders emerged on this island with eight farms. This cohort never believed in female inferiority and was free from social expectations of the roles of wife and mother….We never worried about being seen as unfeminine for surpassing men in our job performance. When young female and male leaders got together at meetings or training sessions, we talked about our work and discussed Marxist theories on equal terms.

As the Cultural Revolution spread to the working class in 1967, women workers in Shanghai, where they comprised one-third of the workforce, organized against oppressive policies in their factories and participated in power seizures from rightist managers and party officials. Thirty-two year old Wang Xiuzhen, a 32 year old technician in a textile mill, was the Vice-Chair of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee.

“Iron Girls Brigades,” teams of young women who took on the most demanding and difficult tasks, were formed in many enterprises. National publicity was given to these women as they broke into all-male jobs such as oil drilling, repairing high-voltage lines, and building bridges. Increasing numbers of women worked in heavy industry, joined the militia and the PLA, and became technicians and assumed positions of leadership in the textile factories. Half of all doctors and “barefoot doctors” in the countryside were women.

Girls as well as boys in middle school received military training, and joined the People’s Militia in large numbers after they graduated. According to one observer, “These men and women were organized for [military] training, for brigade infrastructure projects, and for cultural and sports activities…. The training was practical and organizational, and cultivated a team spirit, a sense of purpose and discipline.”

New advances, particularly in the cities, were made in providing childcare.

In some factories there were nursing rooms for infants, and 24 hour nurseries for children from two months to four years old. In one nursery, an American visitor was told that children learned to “care for each other, love and help each other” through stories, pictures and play. Factories usually ran canteens and dining halls. It was understood that socializing childcare and other household tasks not only freed up women to work outside the home, but allowed them to develop as political activists and leaders.

A birth control campaign distributed free or low-cost contraceptive devices and advocated later marriages and smaller families—two children was the ideal. This was aimed not only at limiting the growth of China’s population, but freeing up women to participate in political life.

While some enterprises reached the official target of women making up 30% of the revolutionary committees, this was not achieved in most areas. In part this was due to resistance by men. Particularly in the rural areas, some male cadre claimed that it was not worthwhile to train and recruit women into the party because they would drop away after they married. A more common attitude, among both women and men cadre, was that leadership was to be judged on the basis of political consciousness and experience, not because a person was a man or woman—and that women were still catching up with men in these areas.

At higher levels of leadership, women’s representation was lower. At the Party Congresses held in 1956, 1969 and 1973, the women’s membership of the CCP’s Central Committee rose from 4% to 10% to 13%.

Women in the Countryside

In the rural areas, the influence of patriarchal ideas and customs was much stronger than in the cities. This was in part due to the prevalence of traditional extended families headed by men. While many urban married couples were able to establish new households, when young rural women married, they generally left their villages and joined their husbands’ families. Families still valued sons, since they would stay with and provide for the family. There was stronger male resistance to equality with women in the countryside, creating a suffocating political atmosphere in the home that undermined women’s self-confidence and leadership abilities.

In addition, a lower level of economic development obstructed rural women’s progress. Less childcare was available and many children were cared for by their grandmothers. Fewer peasants than urban workers had pensions, building in a stronger preference for sons who would be able to take care of them in old age. In addition, household work was more onerous than in the cities.

The Cultural Revolution addressed this situation both materially and politically. New tractor, fertilizer and food processing plants served agriculture and provided more income for social services on the communes. Increased mechanization eliminated some of the heavy hand labor for which men earned more work points. As discussed in the section below on “barefoot doctors,” health care services for women, men and children dramatically improved. Abortions were available on request, and were most common in families that already had the number of children they desired. Collective sewing groups with newly purchased sewing machines and the mechanization of grain grinding reduced the time women spent doing household work.

In many communes, Iron Girls Brigades were organized, and women workers became more assertive in demanding equal pay for the same work done by men. All-women study groups and leadership training programs furthered this process. In some rural counties, there were three times as many women in leadership positions as there were before the Cultural Revolution.

Traditional ideas of a woman’s place were challenged by the more than eight million young educated women who were sent to the countryside as part of the “xia-xiang” movement to work with and learn from the peasants. Without the burden of family responsibilities, they were able to take on jobs as teachers and medical workers as well as assume leadership positions in their production and village units.

These educated women also served as models for their sisters in the villages.

In a visit to Liu Ling village in 1969, two Swedish journalists wrote about the transformation that a 39 year old woman experienced as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Now a member of the revolutionary committee, she explained why she had not previously been active in the brigade management board to which she belonged:

I was selfish. I had my household and my children to look after. I thought of my own private interests and was not an active member of the board.,,, But from studying Chairman Mao I realized what a mistake I’d been making, to sit silent at the meetings of the management board, thinking of my own household instead of the affairs of state. Before the Cultural Revolution women were too tied to their own homes. Now we read newspapers and discuss things. Formerly it was only the men who discussed things when resting from their work in the fields….
For the older of us, who never went to school, it’s hard. The younger women study with us, though, and teach us from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung. The young women say we women must be capable of making up our minds and arriving at decisions.

As women emerged as political activists in the course of the Cultural Revolution, recruitment of women into the party and revolutionary committees, and into higher positions of leadership, was stepped up. In 1972 and early 1973, the Women’s Federation was reestablished up to the provincial level in most of the country.

This helped create a political base for further transformations.

In 1974, a more frontal attack on the patriarchal oppression of women took place in the course of the “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” campaign. The national media highlighted the links between Confucian ideas of male supremacy and the patriarchal ideas and customs still prevalent in Chinese society. An essential part of this campaign was the women’s associations at the local level where women were able to speak more freely about the discrimination and extra burdens they faced. Many county-level party committees established “women’s work offices” whose tasks focused on holding political study classes for women. In one Beijing neighborhood, it was reported that over 60,000 women were engaged in the study of Marxist theory.

The understanding that women gained through their study of Confucianism was used to attack gender-based inequalities in public and family life. The household roles of women were questioned, leading to the widespread promotion as role models of men who cared for children and did housework while their wives studied or attended political meetings.

The institution of marriage and the concept of equal pay for equal work were subjected to new scrutiny. In Hopeh a province-wide campaign was launched by the Women’s Federation to carry out work in three areas:

(1) the promotion of free-choice marriage, late marriage, the abolition of bride prices and traditional marriage rituals symbolizing the “sale” of women; (2) the promotion of equal pay for equal work for women, include a major effort to redefine “equal work” as “work of comparable value” rather than the “same work,” since much work in rural China is sex-typed; and (3) the establishment of year-round nurseries and kindergartens, along with agitation for the idea the men should share in household chores.

A closely related issue raised during the anti-Confucius campaign was the promotion of intra-village marriages, which challenged the feudal tradition that women had to “marry away” in another village. This allowed young women to choose their own marriage partners from school, work, the militia and youth groups in the village. It also allowed them to stay, and develop as leaders, in their native villages.

As was true of all the “socialist new things” that emerged in the course of the Cultural Revolution, these attempts to uproot traditional male chauvinist attitudes and practices in family and public life made more headway in some areas than others. According to an American social worker who talked to women in childcare centers and factories in urban areas, divorce was freely available. On the other hand, an American scholar whose fieldwork was in the countryside reports that contested divorces, usually initiated by women, were granted only after a long process of informal and formal mediation aimed at reconciling the parties.

The issue of Chinese women and sexuality often comes up during discussions of the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, there was no commodification of women as there is in capitalist society. There were no women selling goods on billboards or their bodies on the streets. Women’s clothing was functional, not designed to differentiate or attract. The urban women that an American visitor met in 1971 wore dark pants, a white blouse and a simple button-up-the-front jacket—all loose fitting. An American newspaper editor who visited China in 1972 made a revealing comment: “In twenty three days in China, I didn’t see a single grown woman in a skirt. And a bosom line is almost as hard to find.”

For women in socialist China, freedom was thought to mean freedom to work outside the home, freedom to engage in political life and struggle, freedom to build a socialist society, and freedom from being treated as sex objects, but not sexual freedom. Other than in the course of birth control campaigns, there was almost no public discussion of issues of sexuality. Sex before marriage was off limits; young women who violated the requirement of chastity were severely ostracized. Traditional ideas about “proper behavior” tended to restrict social interactions between youth, including public displays of affection. However, these restrictions may have been more pronounced in the urban areas. According to Mobo Gao:

It is true that even in traditional China the rural poor of both sexes were never as sexually restrained as the educated elite. But the participation in political life by women and their liberation in terms of self-expression and self-fulfillment were never as extensive and obvious as in the period of the Cultural Revolution in Qinglin, and Gao Village. For example, it was through local militia training sessions that Gao Chaoxin and Jiang Tonger fell in love with each other and got married.

To the extent that tight social restrictions for youth still existed, they undermined the idea of a free choice of partners for marriage, and denied young women and men the power to control their own sexuality. Another example of this narrow view of “socialist morality” was that public discussion about homosexuality, even the existence of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people in Chinese society, was unheard of.

In sum, in one generation, the material conditions and quality of women’s lives in China had taken a great leap ahead. It was understood during the Cultural Revolution that this was the result of the sweat and struggle of men and women alike to build socialism, and that full equality for women could only be achieved through the development of collective socialist institutions.

At the same time, there was an underestimation of the need for extensive, ongoing political mobilizations and campaigns to root out male supremacist ideas, overcome social inequalities between men and women, and develop powerful women’s leadership in all areas of society. An important part of this is understanding the critical importance of women’s organizations in bringing these issues to the fore within the revolutionary movement, in socialist as well as capitalist society.

As we make these critical observations, they must be placed in historical perspective. Revolutionary women in China during the 1960s and 70s were trying to find the way forward to the full liberation of women in a socialist society that had just emerged from feudalism, permeated with a thousands year old system of ideas and customs that subjugated women in all ways.

During the same years, bourgeois and revolutionary women in the U.S. were contending over the road to, and the nature of, liberation in an imperialist society with a much higher level of economic development, a different culture, and a different mix of mechanisms for perpetuating women’s inequality. Thus, the struggle of Chinese women during the Cultural Revolution cannot be viewed through a U.S. or European lens. The areas of great progress, and slow progress, of Chinese women during the Cultural Revolution must be evaluated on the basis of the actual challenges they faced at that time.

Since the Cultural Revolution, revolutionaries worldwide have gained new insights into the operation of patriarchy. Important advances have been made in mobilizing women in struggle against all of the forms of oppression they face, and in assuming positions as leading political activists and leaders of revolutionary organizations. These advances in theory and practice will help chart the way forward for future socialist societies to break all the chains of women’s oppression.

Footnotes

[1] As early as 1922, the Chinese Communist Party had established a Women’s Department to help organize and lead women in revolutionary political activity. One of the first tasks undertaken by the Red Army when it entered an unorganized village was to form a Women’s Association. In the liberated areas that were established in the 1930s and 40s, Women’s Associations organized peasant women to spin cloth, sew clothes and shoes, serve as nurses, and to become village-based guerilla fighters. The work of the Women’s Associations included organizing political study groups, and opposition to wife-beating, child marriage and in favor of divorce rights. Women in China, ed. Marilyn Young, 1973, pp. 73-87, 190-191. In Fanshen, William Hinton described the work of the Women’s Association in Long Bow village, Shanxi Province, when it was still occupied by the GMD in the late 1940s. pp. 157-60.
[2] Goldwasser and Dowty, p. 140.
[3] In 1972, an influential article by Soong Ching Ling (Madam Sun Yat-sen) in Peking Review, titled “Women’s Liberation in China,” raised these issues. Part of this article is reprinted in
Ruth Sidel, Women and Child Care in China, 1972, p. 184.
[4] Still, it is interesting to note that the “16 Point Decision,” issued by the CCP Central Committee in 1966, did not mention fighting for the full equality of men and women as one of its points, and the call to criticize the “four olds”–feudal and bourgeois ideology, traditions, habits and customs—did not target patriarchy.
[5] Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s, 1988. p. 4.
[6] Wang Zhen in Some of Us, p. 50.
[7] n the 1980s, in a manner familiar to women everywhere, Iron Girls were derided in the Chinese press as unwomanly, unmarriageable, unattractive “false boys.” Marilyn Young, “Chicken Little in China,” in Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, ed. Kruks, Rapp and Young, 1989, p. 241.
[8] Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women: 1949-1980, 1983, pp. 110, 135.
[9] Mobo Gao, Gao Village, p. 167.
[10] Sidel, pp. 92, 109-126. See also Goldwasser and Dowty, p. 163.
[11] In one model commune, women were 35% of all party cadre and members of revolutionary committees. “Anhui County Women Criticize Lin-Confucius Slanders of Women,” New China News Agency, March 6, 1974. Visitors reported that there were more women on the revolutionary committees in the cities than in the rural areas.
[12] Goldwasser and Dowty, p. 171. Their sample of factories (in which women made up from 12% to 67% of the workforce) found that women occupied from 4% to 18% of the positions on the plant revolutionary committees.
[13] Andors, p. 131, and Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, 1983, p. 190.
[14] Goldwasser and Dowty, p. 173.
[15] Ibid., p. 177.
[16] There are reports that some rural men were determined to overturn tradition. In one commune, “It was really the men who got the new ideas about women. They attended meetings where the Communist Party ‘s policy was explained. When the activists came home from these meetings, they urged their wives to ‘stand up.’.. First the women began to attend our own women’s meetings to hear the revolutionary policy explained. Then soon we began attending the general meetings along with the men.” Jack Ch’en, A Year in Upper Felicity, pp. 144-145.
[17] Andors, p. 143. Joan Hinton, “Politics and Marriage,” New China, June 1976.
[18] Ibid,, p. 133.
[19] Andors, pp. 147-48. Andors relates that young women who married local commune members were praised for defying the traditional prohibition against marrying “lower” than one’s class, and for insisting on freedom of choice in marriage.
[20] Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle, China: The Revolution Continued, The Cultural Revolution at the Village Level, 1970, p. 137.
[21] Johnson, p. 195. The Women’s Federation was disbanded in 1967 due to its narrow focus on family and welfare issues and downplaying the role of women in political struggle Andors, p. 103; Young, Women in China, pp. 170-171.
[22] This campaign drew links between Lin’s political outlook and that of Confucius, who had fought to defend the institutions of slave society 2500 years ago. Confucian ideology, with its rigid social distinctions and insistence that scholars should rule, was an important target of the Cultural Revolution. One of Confucius’s sayings was to “call to office those who have retired to obscurity.” Thus, criticizing Confucius was an allegorical way of criticizing newly rehabilitated capitalist roaders such as Deng Xiaoping.
[23] Andors, pp. 132, 133.
[24] Ibid., pp. 128-129.
[25] Johnson, p. 201-202. See also the account by Joan Hinton of the anti-Confucius campaign in a village near Beijing in “Politics and Marriage,” New China, June 1976.
[26] Ibid., pp. 202-203. There were also concerted efforts to encourage matrilocal marriages, whereby men would join their wives’ families. Much of the impetus for this came from the population control campaign, which sought to lessen women’s fears that they would not be taken care of in old age if they did not have sons. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
[27] Sidel, p. 49; Johnson, pp. 213-214.
[28] Sidel, p. 39. In 1989, a young Chinese woman in Beijing told an American visitor that she had to wear high heels and be one of the “pretty girls” to get an office job. Her grandmother commented that her high heels were just a new form of foot-binding.
[29] Goldwasser and Dowty, p. 159.
[30] According to one account, several boys and girls in the countryside were arrested for talking with each other in the same room late at night. Johnson, p. 183.
[30] Gao Village, p. 166.

Pentagon commander says US special forces in India

2012-03-06T18:53:00.001-08:00

"Do you know the US Army is already conducting exercises at a base in Uttar Pradesh? They openly said they can take the Indian Army with them wherever they want. Who allowed them this audacity? Not me. I am opposing them. I am the real desh bhakt (patriot)" This was said by the great Indian Maoist leader Kishanji in an interview. But then not many took it seriously. Because Kishanji was a 'terrorist'. However now it is clear that the American army is present in India. A pentagon commander himself admits this.

US special forces are present in five South Asian countries, including India, a top Pentagon commander has revealed.

US Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard said the teams were deployed to help India with their counter-terrorism co-operation.

The US and India were working together to contain Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he said.

The US embassy in Delhi clarified that the troops were not stationed in India.

A spokesman told the BBC that there were “no special forces stationed in India”, as media reports had suggested.

The embassy and India’s ministry of defence said a unit from the US 25th infantry division was in India to hold an exercise with Indian forces.

‘Working closely’

Adm Willard said US teams were also present in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives.

“We have currently special forces assist teams – Pacific assist teams is the term – laid down in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, as well as India,” Adm Willard told a Congressional hearing.

“We are working very closely with India with regard to their counter-terrorism capabilities and in particular on the maritime domain but also government to government, not necessarily department of defence but other agencies assisting them in terms of their internal counter-terror and counterinsurgency challenges.”

Adm Willard said Lashkar-e-Taiba was a “very dangerous organisation… so it is a very important threat, and we’re working very closely with the nations in the region to help contain it”.

He said the group was “responsible for many attacks in India, including the horrific attacks into Mumbai, Lashkar-e-Taiba is headquartered in Pakistan, affiliated with al-Qaeda… and contributes to terrorist operations in Afghanistan and aspires to operate against Asia, Europe and North America,” he said.

In the past months, the US has trained Indian counter-terrorist specialists.

The two countries have also been working to counter piracy, conduct disaster response planning and training and holding joint armed forces exercises.

In July last year, Robert Blake, US assistant secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, said counter-terrorism co-operation with India was “a very high priority” for the US.

He said Washington was working with Delhi to ensure that “they have the best systems in place possible to prevent future attacks such as the one in Mumbai”.

Pentagon says US special forces in India; Delhi denies

Sify.com, Saturday, March 03, 2012

Source : IANS

Washington: The US special forces are based in India and four other South Asian countries, a Pentagon commander has said. But India promptly denied it, saying Washington has neither sought nor has India approved stationing of US Special Forces personnel in the country.

The US and India are working together to contain Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar–Taiba, blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attack.

US has forces in five South Asian nations including India, US Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard told a Congressional hearing on Thursday.

The teams were deployed to help India in counter-terrorism, in particular in the maritime domain, Willard said.

“We have currently special forces assist teams – Pacific assist teams is the term – laid down in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives as well as India,” Willard said.

The Indian government challenged the statement.

“The US Government has neither sought nor has the Government of India approved stationing of US Special Forces personnel in any capacity in India,” Syed Akbaruddin, the external affairs ministry spokesperson, said.

“The two countries occasionally conduct short duration Special Forces exercises in India and the US in the context of their counter-terrorism cooperation and capacity building,” he added.

The defence ministry said Willard’s claim that US special teams were based in India was “factually incorrect”.

“The report is factually incorrect in so far as the reference to India is concerned,” a defence ministry spokesperson said in New Delhi. “US special forces teams have never been stationed in India in the past, nor are such teams stationed in the country presently,” he said.

Admiral Willard said Lashkar-e-Taiba was a “very dangerous organisation… so it is a very important threat, and we’re working very closely with the nations in the region to help contain it”.

The group was “responsible for many attacks in India, including the horrific attacks into Mumbai” of November 2008 that left 166 Indians and foreigners dead.

Pentagon commander says US special forces in India

BBC

US special forces are present in five South Asian countries, including India, a top Pentagon commander has revealed.

US Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard said the teams were deployed to help India with their counter-terrorism co-operation.

The US and India were working together to contain Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he said.

The US embassy in Delhi clarified that the troops were not stationed in India.

A spokesman told the BBC that there were "no special forces stationed in India", as media reports had suggested.

The embassy and India's ministry of defence said a unit from the US 25th infantry division was in India to hold an exercise with Indian forces.

'Working closely'

Adm Willard said US teams were also present in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives.

"We have currently special forces assist teams - Pacific assist teams is the term - laid down in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, as well as India," Adm Willard told a Congressional hearing.

"We are working very closely with India with regard to their counter-terrorism capabilities and in particular on the maritime domain but also government to government, not necessarily department of defence but other agencies assisting them in terms of their internal counter-terror and counterinsurgency challenges."

Adm Willard said Lashkar-e-Taiba was a "very dangerous organisation... so it is a very important threat, and we're working very closely with the nations in the region to help contain it".

He said the group was "responsible for many attacks in India, including the horrific attacks into Mumbai, Lashkar-e-Taiba is headquartered in Pakistan, affiliated with al-Qaeda... and contributes to terrorist operations in Afghanistan and aspires to operate against Asia, Europe and North America," he said.

In the past months, the US has trained Indian counter-terrorist specialists.

The two countries have also been working to counter piracy, conduct disaster response planning and training and holding joint armed forces exercises.

In July last year, Robert Blake, US assistant secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, said counter-terrorism co-operation with India was "a very high priority" for the US.

He said Washington was working with Delhi to ensure that "they have the best systems in place possible to prevent future attacks such as the one in Mumbai".

Capitalism’s Real Gravediggers

2012-02-27T06:12:00.001-08:00

Beware the ‘Gush-Up Gospel’ Behind India’s Billionaires

This is a recording of a speech made by Arundhati Roy as a part of the 4th series of lecture under the Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Trust Lecture that was delivered on the 20th of January, 2012 at Xaviers college, Mumbai.

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “pay your respects to our new ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I’d read about this, the most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn – a soaring wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches, bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, “trickle down” had not worked.

But “gush-up” has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2bn, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to a quarter of gross domestic product.

The word on the street (and in The New York Times) is, or at least was, that the Ambanis were not living in Antilla. Perhaps they are there now, but people still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, vastu and feng shui. I think it’s all Marx’s fault. Capitalism, he said, “ ... has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

In India, the 300m of us who belong to the new, post-“reforms” middle class – the market – live side by side with the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800m who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than 50 cents a day.

Mr Ambani is personally worth more than $20bn. He has a controlling majority stake in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of Rs2.41tn ($47bn) and an array of global business interests. RIL has a 95 per cent stake in Infotel, which a few weeks ago bought a major share in a media group that runs television news and entertainment channels. Infotel owns the only national 4G broadband licence. He also has a cricket team.

RIL is one of a handful of corporations, some family-owned, some not, that run India. Some of the others are Tata, Jindal, Vedanta, Mittal, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilt across Europe, central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s largest private-sector power companies.

Since the cross-ownership of businesses is not restricted by the “gush-up gospel” rules, the more you have, the more you can have. Meanwhile, scandal after scandal has exposed, in painful detail, how corporations buy politicians, judges, bureaucrats and media houses, hollowing out democracy, retaining only its rituals. Huge reserves of bauxite, iron ore, oil and natural gas worth trillions of dollars were sold to corporations for a pittance, defying even the twisted logic of the free market. Cartels of corrupt politicians and corporations have colluded to underestimate the quantity of reserves, and the actual market value of public assets, leading to the siphoning off of billions of dollars of public money. Then there’s the land grab – the forced displacement of communities, of millions of people whose lands are being appropriated by the state and handed to private enterprise. (The concept of inviolability of private property rarely applies to the property of the poor.) Mass revolts have broken out, many of them armed. The government has indicated that it will deploy the army to quell them.

Corporations have their own sly strategy to deal with dissent. With a minuscule percentage of their profits they run hospitals, educational institutes and trusts, which in turn fund NGOs, academics, journalists, artists, film-makers, literary festivals and even protest movements. It is a way of using charity to lure opinion-makers into their sphere of influence. Of infiltrating normality, colonising ordinariness, so that challenging them seems as absurd (or as esoteric) as challenging “reality” itself. From here, it’s a quick, easy step to “there is no alternative”.

The Tatas run two of the largest charitable trusts in India. (They donated $50m to that needy institution the Harvard Business School.) The Jindals, with a major stake in mining, metals and power, run the Jindal Global Law School, and will soon open the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. Financed by profits from the software giant Infosys, the New India Foundation gives prizes and fellowships to social scientists.

Having worked out how to manage the government, the opposition, the courts, the media and liberal opinion, what remains to be dealt with is the growing unrest, the threat of “people power”. How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys? The largely middle-class, overtly nationalist anti-corruption movement in India led by Anna Hazare is a good example. A round-the-clock, corporate-sponsored media campaign proclaimed it to be “the voice of the people”. It called for a law that undermined even the remaining dregs of democracy. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, it did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate monopolies or economic “reforms”. Its principal media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from huge corporate corruption scandals and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms and more privatisation.

After two decades of these “reforms” and of phenomenal but jobless growth, India has more malnourished children than anywhere else in the world, and more poor people in eight of its states than 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa put together. And now the international financial crisis is closing in. The growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out.

Capitalism’s real gravediggers, it turns out, are not Marx’s revolutionary proletariat but its own delusional cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. They seem to have difficulty comprehending reality or grasping the science of climate change, which says, quite simply, that capitalism (including the Chinese variety) is destroying the planet.

“Trickle down” failed. Now “gush-up” is in trouble too. As early stars appear in Mumbai’s darkening sky, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appear outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blaze on. Perhaps it is time for the ghosts to come out and play.

Arundhati Roy: Foreword to “Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy”

2012-02-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

“….But Anuradha was different”

–Arundhati Roy

(This is the forward of Anuradha Ghandy’s book ‘Scripting the Change’ written by Arundhati Roy. Book my be purchased from here

That is what everyone who knew Anuradha Ghandy says. That is what almost everyone whose life she touched thinks.

She died in a Mumbai hospital on the morning of 12 April 2008, of malaria. She had probably picked it up in the jungles of Jharkhand where she had been teaching study classes to a group of Adivasi women. In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Ghandy was what is known as a ‘Maoist terrorist,’ liable to be arrested, or, more likely, shot in a fake ‘encounter,’ like hundreds of her colleagues have been. When this terrorist got high fever and went to a hospital to have her blood tested, she left a false name and a dud phone number with the doctor who was treating her. So he could not get through to her to tell her that the tests showed that she had the potentially fatal malaria falciparum. Anuradha’s organs began to fail, one by one. By the time she was admitted to the hospital on 11 April, it was too late. And so, in this entirely unnecessary way, we lost her.

She was 54 years old when she died, and had spent more than 30 years of her life, most of them underground, as a committed revolutionary.

I never had the good fortune of meeting Anuradha Ghandy, but when I attended the memorial service after she died I could tell that she was, above all, a woman who was not just greatly admired, but one who had been deeply loved. I was a little puzzled at the constant references that people who knew her made to her ‘sacrifices.’ Presumably, by this, they meant that she had sacrificed the comfort and security of a middle-class life, for radical politics. To me, however, Anuradha Ghandy comes across as someone who happily traded in tedium and banality to follow her dream. She was no saint or missionary. She lived an exhilarating life that was hard, but fulfilling.

The young Anuradha, like so many others of her generation, was inspired by the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. As a student in Elphinstone College, she was deeply affected by the famine that stalked rural Maharashtra in the 1970s. It was working with the victims of desperate hunger that set her thinking and pitch-forked her into her journey into militant politics. She began her working life as a lecturer in Wilson College in Mumbai, but by 1982 she shifted to Nagpur. Over the next few years, she worked in Nagpur, Chandrapur, Amravati, Jabalpur and Yavatmal, organizing the poorest of the poor — construction workers, coal-mine workers — and deepening her understanding of the Dalit movement. In the late 1990s, even though she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she went to Bastar and lived in the Dandakaranya forest with the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army (PLGA) for three years. Here, she worked to strengthen and expand the extraordinary women’s organization, perhaps the biggest feminist organization in the country — the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (KAMS) that has more than 90,000 members. The KAMS is probably one of India’s best kept secrets. Anuradha always said that the most fulfilling years of her life were these years that she spent with the People’s War (now CPI-Maoist) guerillas in Dandakaranya. When I visited the area almost two years after Anuradha’s death, I shared her awe and excitement about the KAMS and had to re-think some of my own easy assumptions about women and armed struggle. In an Foreword essay in this collection, writing under the pseudonym Avanti, Anuradha says:

As we approach March 8, early in the dawn of this new century remarkable developments are taking place on the women’s front in India. Deep in the forests and plains of central India, in the backward villages of Andhra Pradesh and up in the hills among the tribals in the state, in the forests and plains of Bihar and Jharkhand women are getting organized actively to break the shackles of feudal patriarchy and make the New Democratic Revolution. It is a women’s liberation movement of peasant women in rural India, a part of the people’s war being waged by the oppressed peasantry under revolutionary leadership. For the past few years thousands of women are gathering in hundreds of villages to celebrate 8 March. Women are gathering together to march through the streets of a small town like Narayanpur to oppose the Miss World beauty contest, they are marching with their children through the tehsil towns and market villages in backward Bastar to demand proper schooling for their children. They are blocking roads to protest against rape cases, and confronting the police to demand that the sale of liquor be banned. And hundreds of young women are becoming guerrilla fighters in the army of the oppressed, throwing off the shackles of their traditional life of drudgery. Dressed in fatigues, a red star on their olive green caps, a rifle on their shoulders, these young women brimming with the confidence that the fight against patriarchy is integrally linked to the fight against the ruling classes of this semi-feudal, semi-colonial India, are equipping themselves with the military knowledge to take on the third largest army of the exploiters. This is a social and political awakening among the poorest of the poor women in rural India. It is a scenario that has emerged far from the unseeing eyes of the bourgeois media, far from the flash and glitter of TV cameras. They are the signs of a transformation coming into the lives of the rural poor as they participate in the great struggle for revolution.
But this revolutionary women’s movement has not emerged overnight, and nor has it emerged spontaneously merely from propaganda. The women’s movement has grown with the growth of armed struggle. Contrary to general opinion, the launching of armed struggle in the early 1980s by the communist revolutionary forces in various parts of the country, the militant struggle against feudal oppression gave the confidence to peasant women to participate in struggles in large numbers and then to stand up and fight for their rights. Women who constitute the most oppressed among the oppressed, poor peasant and landless peasant women, who have lacked not only an identity and voice but also a name, have become activists for the women’s organizations in their villages and guerrilla fighters. Thus with the spread and growth of the armed struggle the women’s mobilization and women’s organization have also grown, leading to the emergence of this revolutionary women’s movement, one of the strongest and most powerful women’s movements in the country today. But it is unrecognized and ignored, a ploy of the ruling classes that will try to suppress any news and acknowledgement as long as it can.

Her obvious enthusiasm for the women’s movement in Dandakaranya did not blind her to the problems that women comrades faced within the revolutionary movement. At the time of her death, that is what she was working on — how to purge the Maoist Party of the vestiges of continuing discrimination against women and the various shades of patriarchy that stubbornly persisted among those male comrades who called themselves revolutionary. In the time I spent with the PLGA in Bastar, many comrades remembered her with such touching affection. Comrade Janaki was the name they knew her by. They had a worn photograph of her, in fatigues and her huge trademark glasses, standing in the forest, beaming, with a rifle slung over her shoulder.

She’s gone now — Anu, Avanti, Janaki. And she’s left her comrades with a sense of loss they may never get over. She has left behind this sheaf of paper, these writings, notes and essays. And I have been given the task of introducing them to a wider audience.

It has been hard to work out how to read these writings. Clearly, they were not written with a view to be published as a collection. At first reading they could seem somewhat basic, often repetitive, a little didactic. But a second and third reading made me see them differently. I see them now as Anuradha’s notes to herself. Their sketchy, uneven quality, the fact that some of her assertions explode off the page like hand-grenades, makes them that much more personal. Reading through them you catch glimpses of the mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic but was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustices she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. Having decided to do something real and urgent for the country she lived in, and the people she lived amongst, in these writings, Anuradha tries to tell us (and herself) why she became a Marxist-Leninist and not a liberal activist, or a radical feminist, or an eco-feminist or an Ambedkarite. To do this, she takes us on a basic guided tour of a history of these movements, with quick thumb-nail analyses of various ideologies, ticking off their advantages and drawbacks like a teacher correcting an examination paper with a thick fluorescent marker. The insights and observations sometimes lapse into easy sloganeering, but often they are profound and occasionally they’re epiphanic — and could only have come from someone who has a razor sharp political mind and knows her subject intimately, from observation and experience, not merely from history and sociology textbooks.

Perhaps Anuradha Ghandy’s greatest contribution, in her writing, as well as the politics she practiced, is her work on gender and on Dalit issues. She is sharply critical of the orthodox Marxist interpretation of caste (‘caste is class’) as being somewhat intellectually lazy. She points out that her own party has made mistakes in the past in not being able to understand the caste issue properly. She critiques the Dalit movement for turning into an identity struggle, reformist not revolutionary, futile in its search for justice within an intrinsically unjust social system. She believes that without dismantling patriarchy and the caste-system, brick, by painful brick, there can be no New Democratic Revolution.

In her writings on caste and gender, Anuradha Ghandy shows us a mind and an attitude that is unafraid of nuance, unafraid of engaging with dogma, unafraid of telling it like it is — to her comrades as well as to the system that she fought against all her life. What a woman she was.

MORE on the book, Scripting the Change:

Editors: Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen

Year: 2012[2011]
Pages: xxiv+480
Publisher: Daanish Books

About the Book In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Gandhy was what is known as a ‘Maoist terrorist,’ liable to be arrested, or, more likely, shot in a fake ‘encounter’ like hundreds of her colleagues have been … Reading through [her writings]… you catch glimpses of a mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic who was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustice she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. — Arundhati Roy, New Delhi Anuradha Ghandy’s life and work stands as an example for a generation of Indian revolutionaries. But more than that she has directly contributed to the development of the Indian revolutionary movement in significant ways. Take the caste issue. Anuradha was one of the new generations of revolutionaries that in practical political activity gained and formulated an insight that helped the movement to move forward from the former narrow economism in the perception of caste of the old CPI to a new and broader understanding of the class role of the superstructure. ...her writing contains much more. It is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the present situation in India. — Jan Myrdal, Sweden Contents Preface Foreword: “….But Anuradha was different” Arundhati Roy (Download PDF) Remembering Anuradha Ghandy: Friend, Comrade, Moving Spirit Section 1: Caste Introduction Caste Question in India The Caste Question Returns Movements against Caste in Maharashtra When Maharashtra Burned for Four Days Dalit Fury Scorches Maharashtra: Gruesome Massacre of Dalits Mahars as Landholders Section 2: Women Introduction Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement The Revolutionary Women’s Movement in India 8 March and the Women’s Movement in India International Women’s Day: Past and Present Fascism, Fundamentalism and Patriarchy Changes in Rape Law: How far will they Help? Cultural Expression of the Adivasi Women in the Revolutionary Movement In Conversation with Comrade Janaki Working Class Women: Making the Invisible Visible Women Bidi Workers and the Co-operative Movement: A Study of the Struggle in the Bhandara District Bidi Workers’ Co-operative Section 3: Miscellaneous Introduction A Pyrrhic Victory: Government Take-Over of Empress Mills Empress Mills: What Misstatements? Inchampalli-Bhopalapatnam Revisited Season: Tendupatta; Pimp: The State Can Revolution be prevented by Blocking the Roads to Kamalapur? Gagging People’s Culture People’s Struggles in Bastar The Bitter Lessons of Khaparkheda Working Class Anger Erupts Workers’ Upsurge against Changes in Labour Laws Prices Make the Poor Poorer Rape and Murder — ‘Law And Order’ of the Day A Time to Remember Brahmin Sub-Inspector Tramples Dalit Flag Small Magazines: A Significant Expression of the People’s Culture Deaths in Police Custody in Nagpur Cotton Flower … the Best Flower! … ? Practical Socialism: Not Socialism but Pure Fascism Index

Israeli Apartheid Week 2012: Call It What It Is

2012-02-04T01:29:00.000-08:00

A promo video for this year’s 8th annual Israeli Apartheid Week events.

NYPD Admits Using Anti-Muslim Film for Training Nearly 1,500 Officers

2012-01-30T09:55:00.000-08:00

Antiwar.com

Last year, the New York Police Dept. was caught in an ugly scandal when the Village Voice reported it showed a 72-minute film titled The Third Jihad to police as a “terrorist training” video. Officials at the time downplayed the number of officers who saw it, and claimed it was quickly pulled when it was deemed “inappropriate.”

The video condemns Muslims in general and moderate American Muslims in particular, claiming that all non-violent Muslims are part of a secret conspiracy to overthrow the US government and impose Sharia law in its place.

FOIA requests have finally gotten through the red tape, however, and it is now revealed that movie was not an isolated mishap at NYPD, but rather was required viewing for months on end, shown to a minimum of 1,489 officers.

The human rights group that filed the request says the “response was to deny it and to fight our request for information.” The revelation of its use is particularly noteworthy given the number of NYPD scandals related to thesurveillance and persecution of the city’s Muslim residents.

Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Ghandy, and 'Romantic Marxism'

2012-01-28T06:14:00.000-08:00

Monthly Review

by Bernard D'Mello

This is the full-text of the introductory remarks made by the author at the Fourth Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy on 20th January 2012 at St Xavier's College, Mumbai.

I woke up this morning to the chirping sounds of the swallows. Arundhati Roy seems to have brought in those love-birds that come in to Mumbai at this time of the year from the cold environs of the North. The lively spirit of Anuradha Ghandy (Anu, as she was fondly known) is all around us -- that picture of hers reminds me of one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs, "Forever Young". We have here with us Anu's mother -- comrade Kumud Shanbag. Parents abiding by Hinduism usually give their daughters away at the time of marriage in a ritual called kanyadaan. Comrades Kumud and Ganesh Shanbag, rational and progressive, broke with this humiliating tradition; they raised their daughter Anu (Janaki) to decide what she wanted to do with her life and she joined the Revolution (Kranti). One might call what she didkranti-daan, though, I think, daan (donate) is not the right word for it. TheKrantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (KAMS) is justifiably proud of Anu (Janaki). Not long ago, when Arundhati Roy was walking with these comrades, they proudly showed her a photograph of Anu that they were carrying -- she's dressed in fatigues, an olive green cap with a star on it, rifle slung over her shoulders, and smiling, as always.

Anu came a long way, from the Hamil Sabha (the general student body) of Elphinstone College in the first half of 1970s to the Byramgadh area in old Bastar in the latter half of 1990s. For her, dalit, adivasi and women's liberation¹ were part of the fight for "new democracy" -- indeed, for her they were a prerequisite for any kind of democracy. Just as Anu was shaping this policy of the Party -- the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (People's War) -- in the 1990s, Arundhati Roy created a character called Velutha in The God of Small Things (1997). Velutha came from a dalit, attached-labour household. But despite his origins -- Velutha came from the wretched of the wretched of the Indian earth -- he became an accomplished carpenter and mechanic, indispensible to semi-feudal capital's profit register in the small town of Ayemenem. Rahel and Estha, Ammu's children, established a close bond of friendship with him. Ammu was attracted to him, fell in love with him -- he was a passionate lover, he loved her like no one else could ever have loved her.

Velutha is my hero -- for me, he is the classic Indian proletarian. Despite the exploitation and the oppression, Velutha did what he did with devotion -- he kept the creativity and imagination in him alive. For him, like it is for his creator, ingenuity and work became one. This characterisation tells us something about Arundhati Roy, Velutha's maker. In the conception of Velutha, I saw, very early on, signs of a romanticism closely linked to revolution in Arundhati Roy as a writer. That subversive intent was there from the very beginning. From The God of Small Things to Broken Republic, Arundhati Roy is through-and-through a romantic, anti-capitalist writer. There is a basic structure of feelings in her writings that touches my heart.

I don't know if she will agree with me, but I'd like to believe that Arundhati Roy has embraced 'Romantic Marxism'. I know the ideological censors would be frowning at me; for them, there can never be anything like 'Romantic Marxism'; "comrade Bernard, you cannot mix romanticism with Marxism". I differ and in this I am with E P Thompson. And, with Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1959)² and his passionate denunciation of capitalism in Capital, Volume-I -- with a language and imagery that makes the reader realize the need for Kranti. Marx did, after all, also hitched romanticism with his exposition of the structure, the social relations and logic of the inner workings of the capitalist system. At its core, 'Romantic Marxism' brings together Marx's thesis of alienation with his theory of value and welds these with the basic structure of feelings that such a consciousness evokes.

Let me now say a few words about the topic of today's lecture -- "Capitalism: A Ghost Story". Capital is not a work of Marx's imagination; so also, and I'm sure, Arundhati has a real story to tell, and it's going to be a passionate denunciation of really existing capitalism. If we were to look at capitalism from a romantic Marxist perspective, we would see, above all, the total domination of exchange value, the "cold calculation of price and profit . . . over the whole social fabric . . . the death of imagination and romance, . . . the purely 'utilitarian' . . . relation of human beings to one another, and to nature".³ What should be reciprocity in human relations -- love for love, intimacy for intimacy, trust for trust, as it was with Ammu and Velutha -- has been replaced, in capitalism, by the exchange of money for commodities: accumulation and possession is all that matters today. Indeed, beauty, now defined by capital, has also been commoditised; nothing remains unsullied by capitalism, its logic, and its basic structure of feelings. Human beings have been turned into wretched beings -- physically, psychologically and spiritually dehumanised.

We, the Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee members, are old-fashioned Marxists. We continue to insist that wealth comes from the exploitation of human labour and nature. To quote Marx and, keeping in mind the importance he assigns to ecology, include capital's "sucking" of nature too:⁴

Capital is dead labour [and out-of-play nature] that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labour [and extant nature], and lives the more, the more labour [and nature] it sucks.

Value then is nothing but congealed labour and defunct nature incarnate in commodities. And, in the contemporary world capitalist system, we witness the real subscription of labour, nature, and even democratically-elected governments to finance. Yes, the bond markets -- the funds and financial institutions that buy government bonds, not the people who elected the governments -- are able to very significantly influence public policy, for it is they who specify the conditions under which they will buy those governments' bonds. Indeed, the main focus of corporations today is financial, and here, with quarterly reporting on a mark-to-market basis, short-term net worth is all that seems to matter. Add to this stock options-based remuneration of those who manage the huge financial portfolios, monetary policy designed for the benefit of high finance, and rising labour productivity alongside stagnant real wages, and the result is "traumatized workers", "indebted consumers", and "manic-depressive savers"⁵ high on Prozac and Viagra which keep Pfizer's cash register ringing. "Humanity" has become "an appendage of the asset markets", my friend Jan Toporowski writes.⁶ We are reminded of what Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (then editors of Monthly Review) wrote in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash in the US and it seems appropriate to paraphrase their words to apply to the present: "The mess" the world-system is in flows "from capitalism's ruthless pursuit of unlimited wealth by any and all available means, whether or not these have anything to do with satisfying the needs of real human beings."⁷ Indeed, capitalism -- which has metamorphosed into a life-threatening disease -- has become a threat to humanity and other forms of life. The only remedy "is a truly revolutionary reconstruction of the whole socio-economic system".⁸

But, the failures of the revolutions of the 20th century stare us in the face. I have taken more time than I had intended to, and lest I become a barrier between the star-speaker and you, I need to quickly wind up. Let me then not mince words -- revolution is about expropriating the expropriators, and "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one".⁹ But, and more importantly, revolution is also about "human emancipation". It has to create a socialist sensitivity, a socialist consciousness; so forms of violence -- cruelty and brutality -- which negate the very end of revolution must never be a part of the means. Now, while the "seizure of power" and the strategy to achieve this seem to be the central preoccupation of revolutionaries, we need to remember these words of Marx from The German Ideology (1932; written in 1846):¹⁰

Both for the production on a mass scale of . . . communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of [human beings] on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

Rightly, Marx was more concerned about the "human emancipation" that must come about in the process of making the revolution, the kind of emancipation that makes of us a new kind of "human" being, a practicenecessary to found a society that is egalitarian, cooperative, and democratic.

With this "brief" (ha, ha!) introduction, may I invite Arundhati Roy to take the baton.

Notes

1 Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy, edited by Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen, Daanish Books, Delhi, 2011.

2 One should also mention Marx and Engels' On the Jewish Question(1844) and The German Ideology (1932, writing completed in 1846).

3 See Michael Lowy's "The Romantic and the Marxist Critique of Modern Civilisation", Theory and Society, Vol. 16, No. 6 (November 1987), p 892.

4 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954; a reproduction of the first English edition of 1887, edited by Frederick Engels), chapter 10, "The Working Day", p 233.

5 Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi, "Magdoff-Sweezy and Minsky on the Real Subsumption of Labour to Finance", 2010, at cemf.u-bourgogne.fr/z-outils/documents/communications%202009/AHE.pdf.

6 Jan Toporowski, "The Wisdom of Property and the Politics of the Middle Classes", Monthly Review, Vol. 62, Issue 4, September 2010.

7 Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, The Irreversible Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press), 1988, p. 55.

8 Ibid.

9 This is how Marx puts it in chapter 31 on "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist", in Capital, Volume I.

10 www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm.

Nation sitting on Volcano and the Media Offering opium to Masses

2012-01-24T05:37:00.000-08:00

The Hindu

“The intent is clear. Keep the people drugged so they do not revolt against poverty”

Press Council of India (PCI) Chairman Justice Markandey Katju on Sunday called upon journalists to play a seminal role in promoting scientific and rational ideas in society and raise the intellectual level of the masses by extricating them from the morass of superstition, casteism, bigotry, communalism and feudal tendencies.

Delivering the Jhabarmal Sharma memorial lecture here, Justice Katju flayed the penchant in a section of the media for non-issues — ostensibly to serve its business interests — at the expense of the vital issues which affect 80 per cent of the people in the country facing poverty and unemployment.

“You have lost your sense of proportion, but this cannot go on for long. As your critic and well-wisher, I will bring you to the right path,” Justice Katju told the audience largely comprising journalists and academicians. The venue was Kesargah, which is the headquarters of Hindi daily Rajasthan Patrika.

Taking note of the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival, Justice Katju said the level of participants in the event touted as a mega literary carnival reminded him of Hindi novel Chandrakanta Santati full of fairy-tales and useless anecdotes, which he read in childhood: “What is the level of the people taking part in this festival? Does their work evoke any kind of admiration for them?”

The PCI Chairman regretted that those claiming to be litterateurs had stooped to the level of making indecent remarks on the stage and were justifying perversions. This was happening in the land which had produced illustrious writers and poets like Premchand, Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Qazi Nazrul Islam and Saadat Hasan Manto, he said.

Justice Katju said while the nation was “sitting on a volcano,” the media was offering four kinds of opium to the masses in the shape of religious bigotry, films, cricket and falsehood: “The intent is clear. Keep the people drugged so they do not revolt against poverty and the terrible mess created for them.”

The former Supreme Court Judge felt that the electronic media was dividing the people on the lines of caste and religion by creating an impression that Hindus alone had the first claim over citizenship and others were second-rate citizens. “Minority communities are demoralised in various manners. This is unacceptable in India which is a land of migrants,” he said.

Uttar Pradesh Governor B.L. Joshi and Rajasthan Patrika Editor-in-Chief Gulab Kothari spoke.

4th Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture (Jan 20, Mumbai)

2012-01-16T11:08:00.000-08:00

Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee

4th Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture
by Arundhati Roy
“CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY”

on January 20, 2012
at
St Xavier’s College Hall, Dhobi Talao, Mumbai
at 6.00 pm

International campaign in support of People's war in India commences tomorrow

2012-01-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

A new international campaign in support of the peoples' war in India led by the CPI Maoist is getting underway tomorrow. The communist parties from Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Sweden and Ecuador and several other countries and participating in this week long campaign.

The International Committee to support the people's war in India, that was born on the appeal launched at the International meeting in Paris on January 2010 and gained the participation of comrades from several countries, with the mobilization of the week 2 to 9 of April has shown an international extent and played a role in promoting information and taking side in support of the People's War in India, in the context of the more general situation of class struggle, imperialism and the struggle of the proletarians and oppressed people, decided, in the framework of the protracted campaign, handling the contradictions in the different countries, to launch a new international week of action from 14 to 22 January 2012 with the slogans:

“the repression by the Indian government does not stop but feeds the People's War”

“may the wind of the People's war reach the proletarian masses all-around the world”

The campaign opens the work that leads to the international conference of support planned for the summer 2012.

The campaign includes initiatives and meetings in different countries to collect signatures and organize the participation to the International Conference.

The Committee calls the Icawpi and all the committees of solidarity with the people's war and the Indian revolution to organize this activity together with us.

Adherence, internationally and in each country can be of any organization, political parties, committees that decide to participate, whether individually or as a group or platform of organizations.

The Committee calls on all the blogs and web-sites, that are giving a big contribution to the knowledge of people's war India, the exposure and strugle again st of the Operation Green Hunt, and to widespread the documents of the CPI(Maoist), to play their important role in realizing the campaign and for the success of the International Conference in 2012.

The Committee, taking lessons from the previous campaign in 2-9 April 2011 is primarily aimed at the proletariat and the masses for a massive participation in initiatives.

The Committee invites all the adhering forces to consider that the support for People's War in India is the datum that unites and mobilizes.

The Committee, in particular in the imperialist countries, will mobilize particularly in a campaign against Indian transnationals companies that expand even in the imperialist countries.

The Committee reiterates that it supports in the form of solidarity all the people's wars and the anti-imperialist struggles ongoing in other countries in the world and considers all of them important and decisive in the tsruggle against imperialism.

The Committee will bring in all anti-imperialist demonstrations against the political and economic summit of imperialists and the imperialist war, the support to the PW in India, the propaganda and the invitation to attend the International Conference

International Committee to Support People's War in India

October 2011

Where Ants Drove Out Elephants - The Story of People’s Resistance to Displacement in Jharkhand

2012-01-08T00:47:00.000-08:00

Sanhati

By Stan Swamy

This article is an introduction to the trajectory of peoples’ movements against displacement in Jharkhand in the last few years. As the author writes, the resistance in Jharkhand has resulted in the fact that “[o]ut of the about one hundred MOUs signed by Jharkhand government with industrialists, hardly three or four companies have succeeded in acquiring some land, set up their industries and start partial production.” - Sanhati Editorial

Displacement is painful for anybody - to leave the place where one was born and brought up, the house that one built with one’s own labour. It is most painful when no alternate resettlement has been worked out and one has nowhere to go. And when it comes to the indigenous Adivasi People for whom their land is not just an economic commodity but a source of spiritual sustenance, it can be heart-rending.

A very conservative estimate indicates that during the last 50 years approximately 2 crore 13 lakh people have been displaced in the country owing to big projects such as mines, dams, industries, wild-life sanctuaries, field firing range etc. Of this, at least 40%, approximating 85 lakhs, are Indigenous Adivasi People. Of all the displaced, only one-fourth have been resettled. The remaining were given some cash compensation arbitrarily fixed by local administration and then neatly forgotten.

Independent studies done during the mid-1990s reveal that in Jharkhand about 15 lakh persons have been displaced and about 15 lakh acres of land alienated from mainly Adivasi people. Needless to say, during the last 15 years a lot more displacement of people and alienation of land have taken place. Strange but true, rehabilitation of the displaced was never taken seriously by any govt during all these six decades when the process of industrialization for ‘national development’ has been in vogue. In fact there was no rehabilitation policy at all!

***
MOU-signing spree after the creation of Jharkhand
***

The real reason for the creation of Jharkhand as a separate state in November 2000 was not so much to respect and honour the long cherished wish and struggle of the indigenous people to govern themselves as per their culture & traditions, but in view of opening up the vast mineral resources to national & international mining companies whose pressure was increasingly brought to bear on the government. Quite understandably, one MOU after another was signed between the state government and various companies without any reference or consultation or consent of the mainly Adivasi people in whose land all this natural wealth is stored.

Legal safeguards meant to protect Adivasi land from being alienated to non-Adivasis such as The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908), The Santal Parganas Tenancy Act (1949), the Constitutional provisions through the Vth Schedule, The Provisions (Extension to Scheduled Areas)Act (1996), some significant Supreme Court judgments such as The Samata Judgment (1997) were and continue to be neatly ignored by the central & state govts in generously awarding vast tracts of land to industrialists at their asking. Over hundred such MOUs were signed during 2001 and 2010. Rough estimates indicate that about 1.4 lakh acres of land have been signed off. A cruel betrayal of the Adivasi people for whom land is not just an economic commodity but a source of spiritual/cultural sustenance.

***
Enough is enough . . .
***

In a span of three to four years the Jharkhandi people began to realize that the central & state governments were not for peoples’ welfare but that they were laying steps to sell off peoples’ land, their water & forest resources together with all the mineral riches to corporate houses. They decided to act. Wherever projects together with land requirements were announced, people mobilized and organized themselves and said a definite ‘no’ to the government and companies. People’s Resistance Movements Against Dispacement sprang up in different parts of Jharkhand from 2004 onwards.

Even as people stood together in the form of micro-resistance movements, the industrialists , local administration, police, lower judiciary, most of print & electronic media and the urban middle class joined forces. They began to sing the song of ‘development’ and accused the peoples’ resistance movements as ‘anti-development’. The police started to harass the leaders of people’s movements as ‘obstructing government work’ and as having extremist leanings. It is this situation which brought together activists leading anti-dispacement struggles, some socially concerned intellectuals, a few members of the media, a few folk artists, and some journalists. After a series of discussions & reflections it was decided to bring together the various anti-dispacement movements under some umbrella organizations so as to strengthen people’s struggles and to express support & solidarity to each other. Three to four such macro bodies emerged. Public meetings, rallies, advocacy , press conferences were held to educate and motivate the people in struggle. It was made very clear that these anti-displacement movements will not enter into any dialogue with the government or the company to discuss rehabilitation facilities for particular projects since it would imply that people accept to be displaced.

By 2009 it became clear that companies are not making any in roads in Jharkhand in terms of acquiring land and setting up their industries whereas they are ready with their large investments and latest technology and the only thing they want is land. The corporate houses then started to exert pressure on the central & state governments to take some drastic steps by which this stalemate could be put an end to.

***
Operation Green Hunt . . . meant to hunt out the people and clear their green fields & forests to give to mining companies.
***

A new philosophy was created to the effect that development is not taking place in the tribal belt of central India because of the ‘menace of Naxalism’ and if the Naxals/Maoists can be eliminated, the government will undertake systematic development programs and the tribal population will catch up in the developmental process. Hundreds of police and CRPF jawans were sent into the villages of the so-called “red zone”. They did not have the guts to go deep into the jungles and confront the Naxals. Instead they gave vent to their frustration on the helpless innocent village folk. They harassed them, beat them up, ransacked their houses, humiliated the elderly, dishonoured the women, arrested or shot any young person. They were not accountable to any civil authority. The peaceful life of village communities was shattered.

Protests against state repression by human rights & civic rights groups started in good earnest. During 2010 public meetings, rallies, advocacy work condemning state action against its own citizens were conducted. At the same time, resistance to displacement was also strengthened. The end result was despite the state coming down so heavily on them, the indigenous adivasi / moolvasi people steadfastly refused to part with their land for the industrialists. Out of the about one hundred MOUs signed by Jharkhand govt with industrialists, hardly three or four companies have succeeded in acquiring some land, set up their industries and start partial production. This too they did by dividing local communities, enticing them with false promises or threatening them by using hired hooligans. Most significantly, the big companies which asked for hundreds and thousands of acres of land were turned away empty handed. This is indeed a heroic achievement of the poorest of the poor against the mighty industrialist giants.

***
‘Operation Anaconda’!
***

This operation brought in a change of strategy in the state’s war against the Adivasi people. It was unleashed in August 2011. Anaconda, the huge serpent of the Amazon basin in Latin America, was the code name. A thickly forested area by name of ‘Saranda’ in Singhbhum district which had been under the influence of CPI (Maoists), was chosen as a forewarning of things to come. So now on it will not be a hunt spread out over a large area but pin point smaller compact areas as “terrorist affected” and swipe the Adivasi people out even as Anaconda swipes every thing in its way.

Thousands of police and para-military forces were brought in from the different parts of the country to do the swiping operation. Even the names of these battalions (“Greyhounds”, “Cobras”, “Scorpians”) were supposed to evoke a sense of fright among people. They were mostly outsiders who did not know the culture, language of the Adivasi people and they did not have any sympathy towards the simple village people. Their achievement during these months was three villagers dead, three in death bed, several houses destroyed and granaries incinerated. They swept through village after village, destroyed the straw roofs, drove the people out of their homes, burnt their clothes, valuables, stole their money and killed their cattle.

This cruel action of the state was brought to light and condemned by human rights activists, artists, leftist political parties, press & electronic media. An appeal was made to the National Human Rights Commission which was good enough to respond and made its investigation although its final report is still awaited.

The central & state governments have gone into face-saving exercise, ended the infamous Operation Anaconda, offered some monetary relief to the victims and is now speaking of developing Saranda villages with top bureaucrats in command. The end result of this cruel exercise on people is that the Jharkhand government has allotted iron-ore to 19 steel companies.

At the same time, the Adivasi people who have nothing to lose but the chains of state repression, will continue to resist displacement and land alienation.

***
Where lies the future …?
***

Three apparent possibilities:

1. The “red corridor” is also the mineral corridor. The state, through its war on people, may clear the mineral rich land from the indigenous adivasi and hand it over to mining corporates on a platter. The people will be driven out of their ancestral land and forced to settle down in the slums of towns & cities and eke out a living as casual and contract labour. They will lose their adivasi identity, their culture, their language, their communitarian character. The extermination of the indigenous adivasi will be complete.

2. Flocking to join the Maoist militants as the sole alternative.This is a real possibility insofar as the bourgeois state is bending over backwards to oblige the corporates rather than fulfill its constitutional obligations towards its own people, particularly the indigenous adivasi people who have been the most exploited and oppressed all through India’s independent history. It is this state which has scant regard for those constitutional & legal provisions and some judicial interventions which have sought to protect and safeguard the interests of the indigenous peoples of India.

Is there any wonder then the Adivasi youth constitute 99% of Maoists in Jharkhand and neighbouring states?

3. Drop the gun and start talking to Maoist militants. This is still a possibility if people who cherish the cause of justice will rise up to the occasion. Writers, poets, artists, media persons, human rights activists/defenders, trade/labour union activists, cultural activists, each using their own forums, can surely highlight the inhumanity in the state’s war on poorest of the poor. Justice -oriented legal professionals can well initiate legal action against the state for its violations of constitutional and legal provisions to protect the rights of the indigenous people. Advocacy work can be done with well-disposed legislators, parliamentarians, political parties. Christian churches, whose 90% membership consists of indigenous people in the tribal belt of central India, should surely raise their voice against the unjust displacement of adivasi people and alienation of adivasi land.

In short, It is time to stand up and be counted.

കപ്പലണ്ടിക്കാരന്റെ ആത്മഗതം

2012-01-05T18:18:00.000-08:00

മാധ്യമം ആഴ്ചപതിപ്പ്

കപ്പലണ്ടിക്കാരന്റെ ആത്മഗതം

സച്ചിദാനന്ദന്‍

ബിനായക്‌സെന്‍ ആരെന്ന്
എനിക്കറിയാം, കണ്ടിട്ടുണ്ട്
സഞ്ചിയും തൂക്കി ഞങ്ങളുടെ
മുളങ്കുടിലിനു മുന്നിലൂടെ പോവുന്നത്
ഇന്നലെ ഞാനും പോയി
പാട്ടും പ്രസംഗവും കേള്‍ക്കാന്‍
മൈതാനം നിറയെ ആളായിരുന്നു
ഇംഗ്ലീഷില്‍ പറഞ്ഞതൊന്നും
മനസ്സിലായില്ല
പാവങ്ങളുടെ
ഡോക്ടര്‍
ജയിലിലാണെന്നു മാത്രം
മനസ്സിലായി.

എന്റെ പപ്പായും ജയിലില്‍തന്നെ
ഞാന്‍ ഝാര്‍ഖണ്ഡില്‍നിന്നാണ്
പപ്പായുടെ പേരും ആരെങ്കിലും
പറയുമെന്ന് കരുതി, അല്ല,
ഇത്ര നല്ലയുടുപ്പിട്ട നല്ല മണമുള്ളവര്‍
എങ്ങനെ കേള്‍ക്കാനാണ്
അക്ഷരമറിയാത്ത പപ്പായുടെ പേര്?
'മാ'യെ അവര്‍ മാനംകെടുത്തി
വെട്ടിക്കൊന്നു, പപ്പായെ ജയിലിലടച്ചു
തിരിച്ചുവരുന്നതെന്നോ!

ഞങ്ങള്‍ക്കറിയാത്ത
വഴികളില്ല കാട്ടില്‍;
മരങ്ങളും മനുഷ്യരുമില്ല
ഏതു കിഴങ്ങിന്
എവിടെ കുഴിക്കണമെന്നറിയാം
വിഷക്കായും വിഷമില്ലാക്കായും
വേര്‍തിരിച്ചറിയാം
എലിയെയും തുരപ്പനെയും
പിടിക്കാനറിയാം
പക്ഷേ, ഖനിത്തുരപ്പന്മാരെ
പിടിക്കാന്‍ തോക്കുതന്നെ
വേണമെന്ന് പപ്പാ പറയും
ആവോ, ഞങ്ങളുടെ ആളുകള്‍
തോറ്റുപോവുമെന്നുതന്നെ തോന്നുന്നു;
കടുവകള്‍ക്കു മുന്നില്‍
മുയലുകള്‍ക്കെന്തു രക്ഷ?

ബിനായക്‌സെന്‍ പുറത്തുവരട്ടെ
പപ്പായുടെ ചതഞ്ഞ ഉടമ്പും
ഒടിഞ്ഞ വാരിയെല്ലും
അങ്ങേര്‍ ശരിയാക്കുമായിരിക്കും
ഏതായാലും കപ്പലണ്ടി ചെലവായി,
കുറെ മെഴുകുതിരിയും കരുതിയിരുന്നു
അതും ചെലവായി, കാണാനും രസം.

കൂടുതല്‍ മെഴുകുതിരി ചെലവായത്
ജന്തര്‍മന്തറിലാണ്, ആ
വെള്ളയുടുപ്പിട്ട കാരണവരുടെ
സത്യഗ്രഹത്തില്‍
അവിടെയും കണ്ടു ഇവരെ:
നല്ലയുടുപ്പിട്ട നല്ല മണമുള്ളവര്‍
അവര്‍ കോടികളെക്കുറിച്ചു
പറയുന്നതു കേട്ടു, ഞാനോ
നൂറുറുപ്പിക തികച്ചുകാണാത്തവന്‍,
ഇരുപതുറുപ്പിക കിട്ടിയാല്‍
അന്ന് അടിച്ചുപൊളിക്കും
ഹുക്കുംസിങ്ങിന്റെ 'ഢാബ'യില്‍നിന്ന്
റൊട്ടിയും ദാലും ചായയും
ചിലപ്പോള്‍ അയാളെനിക്ക്
ഒരു ഗുലാബ്ജാമുനും വെറുതേതരും,
പറയുന്ന ചിലതൊക്കെ
ചെയ്തുകൊടുക്കണമെന്നേയുള്ളൂ.

കോടികള്‍ ആര്‍ക്കുവേണം?
കപ്പലണ്ടിയില്‍ മണ്ണുവീഴാതെ
ഇങ്ങനെയൊക്കെ
കഴിഞ്ഞാല്‍ മതി
കപ്പലണ്ടിയും മെഴുകുതിരിയും
അവിടെയും കുറെ ചെലവായി
ആ തൊപ്പിക്കാരനു നന്ദി,
ഒരാള്‍ അന്നം വേണ്ടെന്നുവെച്ചാല്‍
പത്താള്‍ക്ക് അന്നം കിട്ടുമെന്നു
തെളിയിച്ചതിന്.

എനിക്കും തന്നു ഒരാള്‍
വടിയിലൊട്ടിച്ച ഒരു കടലാസ്
വായിക്കാനെനിക്കറിയില്ല,
അവര്‍ പറയുന്നതു കേട്ടു,
''ഭ്രഷ്ടാചാര്‍ കേ ഖിലാഫ്''*
നല്ലത്, അഴിമതി കുറഞ്ഞാല്‍
നാടുനന്നാവുമായിരിക്കും
അപ്പോഴും ഞാന്‍
ഇവിടെത്തന്നെ കാണും
അപ്പോള്‍ നിങ്ങളൊക്കെ
കൂടുതല്‍ കപ്പലണ്ടി വാങ്ങണേ,
അഴിമതി പുരളാത്ത
കപ്പലണ്ടി തരാം,
കൊച്ചുകുട്ടികളുണ്ടാക്കിയ
നല്ല മെഴുകുതിരിയും.

*അഴിമതിക്കെതിരെ

Maoists making Inraods

2011-12-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

Despite serious set backs including the death of Kishanji, the CPI Maoist is making inroads in many parts of India. In a single district of the state of Orissa, around 5000 youth joined their PLGA during the recent observance of the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) Week. Two reports.

PLGA Week: Maoists recruit 5,000 youth in Malkangiri

Daily Pioneer.

During the recent observance of the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) Week, about 5,000 youth and adolescent girls were recruited by the Maoists particularly from Malkangiri district, sources said.

Challenging the joint combing operation of police, CRPF, SOG and paramilitary forces, they were able to hold open meetings for membership drive in the cut - off and remote pockets of the district. They held Prajamelis in around 10 villages, including in several village haats in Alampaka, Similibanki, Kusuguda and Kurmanur areas along the AP- Odisha border.

The Maoists made the tribals aware of the significance of observing PLGA Week, its aims and objectives besides corruption by the Government agencies in the integrated tribal development programmes. About eight Maoist organisations, including Korukonda, Kalimela, Podia and Chitrakonda Dallam of both Andhra Pradesh and Chatishgarh participated in the Prajamelis, sources confided.

They demanded declaration of area encompassing Bihar, Jharkhand and Dandakaranya area as free zone so that the tribal development can be possible and the aboriginal tribes are not deprived of their rights. They appealed to the tribes to join their hands with them for the revolution, sources revealed.

Maoists eyeing commercial hubs in Western India to spread Red terror

The Times of India

NEW DELHI: After facing some reverses in their strongholds, the CPI (Maoist) has formed a 'Golden Corridor Committee' to build its base in hitherto untouched industrial areas of Gujarat and Maharashtra, stretching from Pune to Ahmedabad, including commercial hubs like Mumbai, Nashik, Surat and Vadodara.

Besides, the Red Ultras have planned to expand their movement to Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara and Yavatmal districts of Maharashtra in addition to their existing bases in Gadchiroli, Gondia and Chandrapur in the state.

Maoists' game-plan is to make foray into these unexplored areas was disclosed by the Union home ministry in response to a question in Parliament on Tuesday. The ministry informed the Lok Sabha that Maharashtra alone had witnessed 221 deaths in naxal incidents from 2008 till November, 2011. The state has reported more deaths (51) this year as compared to 2010 when it had witnessed 45 killings in Red violence.

Security agencies had first got to know about the Maoists' plan to set up another theatre of their activities through the 'Golden Corridor Committee' after arresting a number of Ultras in Maharashtra in the past six months, including the first batch of 10 Maoists - all belong to West Bengal - in Pune in May. All the Ultras were working as casual labourers in different industrial units.

"Their questioning and subsequent arrests of many more Maoists gave us lot of details about the Ultras' plan to set up their bases in the industrial areas of Gujarat and Maharashtra," said an official.

Though the CPI (Maoist) had planned to set up the 'Golden Corridor Committee' in February, 2008, it took shape recently when Urban Unit of the Red Ultras started recruiting cadres in different cities of both the states - primarily from among those who are working in various industrial units.

Western India has become one of the eight strategic areas for Maoist activities. Establishing organizational bases in north-eastern India is yet another 'new' strategic area, where they have forged relations with insurgent groups to meet their military requirements.

In response to another question in the Lok Sabha, the ministry said that the CPI (Maoist) had developed "close fraternal ties with north-eastern insurgent groups like the Revolutionary People's Front (RPF) and People's Liberation Army (PLA) of Manipur. Both the outfits have agreed upon mutual cooperation in the areas of training, funding and supply of arms and ammunitions".

Referring to Maoists' north-east agenda, the ministry said: "The Upper Assam Leading Committee (UALC) of the CPI (Maoist) is presently operating in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and has been involved in incidents of looting of weapons and extortion from local villagers".

Stating that the UALC has also engaged in recruitment and training of cadres for the outfit in Assam and these cadres have been utilized in extensive propaganda against mega dam in Assam, the ministry said: "In this backdrop, Assam-Arunachal border has emerged as another theatre of Maoist activity. The outfit is also establishing separate channels in the north-east, particularly in Nagaland, for procurement of ammunition."

Egypt: Women activists attacked by military with particular ferocity

2011-12-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

How to Start a Revolution: Or the Delusions of Gene Sharp

2011-12-04T19:20:00.000-08:00

The West promote this White Gandhi as the saint of non violence and the chief inspiration of Arab Spring. In fact he himself claims that he engineered the Arab spring. But who is this man in fact? Saint or an agent of CIA? The man the West says is the world's leading expert on non violent revolution...And this is a brief review of the new film on Sharp 'How to Start a Revolution' directed by Ruardh Arrow. Below is posted a trailer

By As'ad AbuKhalil - Fri, 2011-12-02 19:43- Angry Corner

The documentary How to Start a Revolution by Ruaridh Arrow was screened at the Zionist Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, among other places presumably. It comes at a time when Foreign Policy magazine has decided that Gene Sharp “has inspired Arab spring protesters.” It all started with a front page story in the New York Times, which decided—without any evidence whatsoever—that Gene Sharp has inspired a non-violent revolution throughout the Arab world.

Of course, the Arab uprisings have not been non-violent at all: the Egyptian people revolted violently in Suez and other places, and government buildings and police stations have been attacked throughout the country, as were offices of Hosni Mubarak’s party. The Libyan uprising degenerated, with NATO intervention, into multiple wars inside Libya. In Tunisia, the rebels also attacked government buildings. In Syria, the situation is now regularly labeled a “civil war.” So one can easily dismiss the theory of Gene Sharp’s so-called inspiration by underlining the non-non-violent nature of the “Arab spring” — it’s more like an Arab autumn these days. But what does the documentary How to Start A Revolution say?

It is not easy to finish the movie: there is no story, really. It is also a bit disturbing. It focuses on Gene Sharp in his old age, in his house in Massachusetts. In the basement of the house works the executive director of his Albert Einstein Institution. The movie focuses on both. But the director struggles to make his case, and the movie has the feel of a promotional movie of a cult.

Sharp disturbingly has no problem in promoting himself and praising, nay exaggerating, his influence. He starts the movie by talking about the oft-used evidence of the spread of his ideas: that his books have been translated into more than 30 languages. They keep talking about the translation of one of his books (prominently featured in the film) into Arabic. But this is dishonest. Sharp knows that his books were not translated through the initiative of Arab fans. They were translated by his own Einstein Institution and through external funding provided to his organization.

Jamila Raqib (who was featured in the film as his devotee) contacted me a few years ago when the Institution funded the translation of the books. They asked me to supervise the translation process and verify the accuracy. But the books were too uninteresting for me, and I turned down the job (although I referred them to a friend). How could Sharp convince himself that the translation of his work into multiple languages is evidence of his influence when he knows that he himself commissioned the translation of his own work?

Politically speaking, Sharp has been working largely in sync with US foreign policy goals. He promoted his non-violent agenda against the communist governments during the Cold War, and his partner (a former US army General) talked about his work under the tutelage of the Republican International Institute. But if Sharp is keen on promoting non-violence, why does he not preach non-violence to the US government which practices more violence than most countries of the world? And why has Sharp preached non-violence to Palestinians but not to Israelis? His project of non-violence seems in the interest of the most violent governments in the world today.

The movie could not provide any evidence of Sharp’s influence so it invites four men to confirm that Sharp has inspired revolution. One man is from Serbia, and another from Georgia, and one is from Egypt, and the fourth, a Syrian from London. Each of the four was tasked with providing a testimonial (clearly under prodding from the interviewer behind the camera) to the effect that, yes, Sharp inspired “his” revolution. But that was it. The film was crude in contrasting images of revolutions and protests with a close up of Gene Sharp’s face in his house. But this method would then prove that a potato inspired a revolution, if you contrast the images of that revolution with the image of a potato.

And the movie claimed falsely that governments around the world have been attacking Gene Sharp’s works due to his influence. Sharp himself, without any evidence, claimed that the Russian government set on fire two printing presses because they carried his books. The film claimed that protesters in Iran were convicted on following the instructions of Sharp — and again no evidence was presented.

The second part of the movie focuses on the Egyptian and Syrian cases. In the Egyptian case, the movie brings in a guy and introduces him to us as “a leader of the Egyptian revolution.” I personally have never heard of the guy, but you had to believe that he is the leader of the revolution. He, of course, said that, yes, Sharp inspired “his” revolution. The Syrian guy, an Ussama Munajjid, was even funnier. He lives in London but the film introduced him as a — you guessed it — “leader” of the Syrian revolution. We saw him in his office uploading footage from cameras that he “had placed” all over the country, as the film alleges. But if this guy’s testimonial was not enough, he was flown to Boston to be filmed while listening to Sharp’s advice.

It is not difficult, of course, to mock the writings of Sharp. His instructions for revolution are too basic and common-sensical to be credited to Sharp. The film even suggests that he was behind the idea of beating pots and pans in Serbia, when Latin Americans have engaged in this form of protests for decades, long before Sharp’s books were translated (at his own initiative) to Spanish. He, for example, suggests that protesters should wave flags, as if they did not think of that prior to the publication of Sharp’s books.

The film is disturbing at more than one level: the message of Sharp is condescending and patronizing, although his firm belief in his own international influence has a tinge of self-delusion. He believes that he — the White Man — alone knows what is the best course of action for people around the world. He preaches to Arabs that they were wrong in insisting on the resignation of the leader: he urges that the downfall of the government be stressed instead, as if Arab popular chants did not aim at that. Sharp (or his one Egyptian fan in the film) may have not heard of the nine bombings of the Egyptian pipeline to Israel. That was not in any of Sharp’s books.

Freedom soon will come / Then we'll come from the shadows.

2011-12-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

THE PARTISAN

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends
And some of them are with me

An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in the garret
Then the soldiers came
She died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on
The frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows.

socialistplatform

The Social Basis of the Woman Question

The Struggle for Economic Independence

Marriage and the Problem of the Family

The Struggle for Political Rights

The Question of Women’s Leadership in People’s War in Nepal

Com. Janaki: “People’s War Has Shattered the Hesitations of the Women of Dandakaranya!”

This interview with Com. Janaki (Anuradha Gandhy) is from the March 2001 issue of Poru Mahila, the organ of Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan, DK.

The Cuban Revolution & Women’s Liberation

The Cultural Revolution & The Struggle to Liberate Women

Footnotes

Pentagon commander says US special forces in India

Pentagon says US special forces in India; Delhi denies

Pentagon commander says US special forces in India

Capitalism’s Real Gravediggers

Beware the ‘Gush-Up Gospel’ Behind India’s Billionaires

Arundhati Roy: Foreword to “Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy”

About the Book

Contents

Section 1: Caste

Section 2: Women

Section 3: Miscellaneous

Israeli Apartheid Week 2012: Call It What It Is

NYPD Admits Using Anti-Muslim Film for Training Nearly 1,500 Officers

Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Ghandy, and 'Romantic Marxism'

Nation sitting on Volcano and the Media Offering opium to Masses

4th Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture (Jan 20, Mumbai)

International campaign in support of People's war in India commences tomorrow

Where Ants Drove Out Elephants - The Story of People’s Resistance to Displacement in Jharkhand

കപ്പലണ്ടിക്കാരന്റെ ആത്മഗതം

കപ്പലണ്ടിക്കാരന്റെ ആത്മഗതം

Maoists making Inraods

Maoists eyeing commercial hubs in Western India to spread Red terror

Egypt: Women activists attacked by military with particular ferocity

How to Start a Revolution: Or the Delusions of Gene Sharp

Freedom soon will come / Then we'll come from the shadows.