As global economy shows signs of a recession proving those who declared the end of history wrong, worldwide people are looking for alternatives. In fact isn't there an alternative? On this historic occassion, i post this article by Raymond Lotta first published in the latest edition of revcom.us
System Failure and the Need for Revolution
by Raymond Lotta
The most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of letting up. The financial edifice of U.S. imperialism is in danger of crumbling. The U.S. ruling class is confronting what Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke describes as a crisis of “historic proportions”—and is hurriedly cobbling together desperate measures to prevent wholesale collapse. Three of the largest independent investment banks on Wall Street have ceased to exist since April. The government had to assume a major stake in the American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurer, to prevent it from collapsing. Now the U.S. Treasury is considering taking ownership positions in major U.S. banks.
This crisis is amplifying internationally. Western Europe is facing large bank failures and governments are engineering their own bailouts. The Russian stock market has intermittently suspended operations. Financial markets in Asia have nose-dived. Mexico’s economy is wobbling, as its exports shrink.
Two things stand out about this crisis. First, there is the ferocity of its global shocks and the speed with which it has spread. Second, unlike the debt and financial crises of the last 30 years, which were largely centered in the Third World, this crisis initially exploded in the U.S., the world’s leading capitalist economy, and is focused in the financial centers of world capitalism.
U.S.-led finance, which plays a dominant and shaping role in the global capitalist order, has taken a huge body blow. This will have enormous repercussions, not just for the stability of the world capitalist system but for power shifts and rivalries within it.
Many progressive commentators have put the blame for this crisis on fraud and greed, or on lax regulation. All of which are certainly in play. But these explanations do not get to the essence of what is happening, to the cause of the problem. This crisis is the outcome of the fundamental workings of the capitalist system.
The analysis that follows is framed by these core points:
There is an essential relationship between the vast enlargement of the financial sector in the U.S., and the general phenomenon of financialization, and the deepening globalization of capitalist production of the last 15 years. And central to this dynamic has been the relationship between U.S. imperialism and China.
Through the course of this growth and expansion, severe imbalances have built up between the financial system—and its expectation of future profits—and the accumulation of capital, that is, the structures and actual production and reinvestment of profit based on the exploitation of wage-labor.
A “dirty little secret” of this crisis is the enormous weight of militarization of the U.S. economy.
This crisis is a concentrated expression of the anarchy of capitalist production—the fact that production is not carried out according to any conscious, rational plan at the society-wide level, much less at the international level.
Background to Crisis
In the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the collapse of high-tech stocks, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank sought to stimulate lending and growth. It lowered interest rates and pumped funds into the banking system. Banks had access to cheap and plentiful credit. And through deceit and aggressive marketing, they pushed mortgages on people. The Federal Reserve continued to inject low-cost funds into the banking system—helping to prop up loans and to fuel a long-term speculative housing bubble.
Banks sold these mortgages to investment banks. The investment banks in turn bundled these loans together with other loans, created complex financial products, and sold them to large investors—in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, especially Western Europe. These mortgage-backed securities, as they are called, circulated in financial markets and became the basis for other loans. The ultimate collateral for this chain of borrowing and lending was the original mortgage loans. So when housing prices fell, and as growing numbers of mortgage holders found themselves unable to pay back housing loans, much of this original collateral became nearly worthless.
This whole process is an obscene example of how under this capitalist system something as basic as human shelter becomes a financial instrument and object of speculation. This has led to a situation today where 1 in 6 U.S. homeowners owe more on a mortgage than their home is worth; where 1 in every 65 households in California is in some phase of foreclosure; and where a disproportionate number of Black and Latino families who have been victimized by predatory lending have experienced incredible losses of what little wealth they had.1
AIG had made enormous profits internationally by selling insurance to investors who held many of these mortgage-backed securities. These investors would be repaid by AIG, in the event that the loans that were bundled into these financial packages they had purchased were defaulted on—could not be paid back. But by mid-September, AIG could neither cover massive loan damage nor borrow sufficient funds on the financial markets to keep itself afloat. AIG was so interconnected with other major financial players that if the company went under, it would likely have taken others down.
In the face of mounting financial crisis, the imperialist state intervened. It acted as the representative of capital and as the guardian of the interests of capital. The U.S. ruling class was faced with a two-fold danger: mounting losses and bankruptcies in the financial sector; and the choking up of lending channels, which could send the economy into a rapid downward spiral.
The government basically took over AIG. And on September 19, the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced a $700 billion bailout. The essence of the rescue package was that the government would buy the troubled mortgage-backed securities sloshing about in the financial system and through this get lending going again. But the announced bailout did not unblock credit markets or calm stock markets. Nor has it restored international confidence in the U.S. economy.
Taking a Step Back
This crisis broke out in the banking system. Its more immediate trigger was the popping of a speculative real estate bubble, cascading losses in the financial sector, and the inability of stricken financial institutions to raise capital and the unwillingness of others to lend capital.
At a deeper level, this crisis is the outcome of a particular trajectory of world capitalist growth.
There has been a massive new wave of globalization. One of the most significant features of world growth and expansion of the last 15 years has been the deepening integration of the world capitalist economy. This is happening both on the level of production and trade—like the parts that go into a computer being manufactured in different parts of the world; and in the case of an iPod being totally manufactured in China. And it is happening on the level of finance—where banks operate globally and are more tightly interlinked with one another through chains of borrowing and lending and even, as in the case of AIG, insuring risks of lending.
This new wave of globalization has involved direct productive and financial investments abroad. It has involved the expansion of outsourcing and subcontracting. And central to all of this has been the fuller integration of export producing countries of the Third World into the world capitalist market—and the forging of a globally-integrated, cheap-labor manufacturing economy.2
40 percent of the imports coming into the U.S. are accounted for by U.S. transnational corporations—and this does not even include the subcontracting done by companies like Walmart. 30 percent of U.S. corporate profits are generated overseas. China, which has evolved into the high-profit workshop/sweatshop for international capitalism, has been at the epicenter of this recent surge of globalization.3
From the standpoint of the needs of profitable globalization, various elements of deregulation—for instance, the lifting of barriers to rapid shifts and transfers of capital—were functional. This is why both Republicans and Democrats have promoted deregulation. Indeed, the Clinton administration in the 1990s played a decisive deregulating role. It negotiated so-called free-trade agreements with Third World countries and helped to loosen strictures on U.S. banking and telecommunications.
The trajectory of capitalist growth of the last 15 years has also involved heightened financialization. On this platform of more globalized production and exploitation, the financial services sector in the advanced capitalist countries mushroomed.
On a turbo-charged global playing field of ever-more mobile and massive flows of investment capital—where the stakes of winning and losing are enormous—capital requires all kinds of risk management. Investment banks and other financial institutions provide such financial services to “hedge” against interest rate variations, currency fluctuations, and other sources of volatility and loss. At the same time, financial activities became a greater source of short-term and speculative profits. In an intensely competitive atmosphere for financial market share, investment banks were creating ever-more complex and exotic financial products. Global financial assets increased from $12 trillion in 1980 to nearly $200 trillion in 2007, far outstripping the growth of world output or the expansion of trade.4
Growth in the advanced capitalist countries over the last 15 years became increasingly finance-led and credit-driven. The U.S. has been at the epicenter of this process of heightened financialization. By 2005, the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy had fallen to 12 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (the production of goods and services), while the financial services sector made up of finance, insurance, and real estate had grown to 20 percent. In 1982, the financial sector’s share of total corporate profits was just over 5 percent; in 2007, the financial share of corporate profits had skyrocketed to 40 percent!5
Contradictions of Development
These interrelated processes of globalization and financialization ultimately led to unsustainable imbalances and instabilities. The dynamics that fueled growth have generated new barriers to profitable accumulation of capital. Strengths have turned into vulnerabilities.
These include:
Bloating of the financial sector relative to the productive base.
Huge run-up of debt and U.S. trade and government deficits in the U.S. necessitating massive and uninterrupted inflows of capital from around the world, with the central banks of Japan and increasingly China holding huge amounts of U.S. Treasury debt.
Billions upon billions of dollars of paper assets that cannot be transformed into real, productive and material, assets.
U.S. consumption and borrowing stimulating China’s growth but China’s breakneck manufacturing growth further fueling U.S. trade deficits and intensifying competitive pressures throughout the world economy.
The expansion of credit spurring growth but heightening global financial fragility.
We are seeing things turn into their opposites. Financial institutions attempted to reduce risk and to profit from risk by dispersing more varied financial instruments over a wider field of investors internationally. But this process has drawn investors, these very institutions, and now governments into a vortex of vulnerability and crisis. The heightened globalization of production and markets, the closer intertwining of economies, has created conditions for faster and even more extensive ripple effects of crisis throughout the world.
A Knot of Contradictions
A strategic concern of the U.S. ruling class is the international strength of the dollar. The dollar is the world’s leading currency for settling transactions, clearing debts, and holding foreign exchange reserves (trade and investment earnings that become part of the reserves of foreign central banks). The dollar has been a linchpin of U.S. global supremacy and of the whole current global economic order.
The dollar is also an investible commodity—major currencies are bought and sold and traded on international currency markets. The value of the dollar rises and falls in relation to other currencies, and in response to international political and economic trends and developments. If foreign central banks and investors were to significantly shift away from dollar holdings, this could set off a global monetary crisis and/or strengthen the position of rival currencies (like the euro) and rival powers.
These are uncharted waters for U.S. policymakers: in the scale and complexity of the crisis…in the magnitude of the rescue operations required to prevent financial breakdown…and in the rapidity with which this crisis is unfolding. A Harvard research economist put it this way: “like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we have created things we do not understand and cannot easily control.”6
U.S. imperialism has limited maneuvering room. The U.S. is already the largest debtor country in the world. It is waging costly wars for greater empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And both John McCain and Barack Obama are committed to America’s global “war on terror”—the umbrella under which the U.S. is waging these wars for empire.
U.S. imperialism has attempted to parlay its superior military strength into a new world order and to lock in its global supremacy for decades to come. Defense and defense-related spending totaled more than $1 trillion in fiscal 2008.7 And military-related production and research have long been deeply embedded in the U.S. economy. The whole imperialist system rests on the domination of vast swaths of the globe through savage force, with the U.S. military colossus playing a special role. The costs of forcibly preserving and extending the U.S. empire is one of the dirty little secrets of the dynamics of this crisis that scarcely gets talked about.
Here an important dialectic comes into play. “U.S. military dominance,” writes Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, “has been one of the linchpins of the dollar.”8 But this military dominance and the wars the U.S. is waging have increasingly come to depend on the steady inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. (to the tune of $3 billion a day). For this to continue requires that the U.S. economy and dollar remain stable. This is a major contradiction for U.S. imperialism.
U.S. imperialism is facing new competitive challenges and the emergence of potential rival constellations of imperial and big powers—vying for market shares, control over energy resources, and geopolitical position.
Emergency Capitalism
People are losing their homes. Retirement savings plans since the middle of 2007 have lost 20 percent of their value with the stock market sinking. Funding for vitally needed social programs and services at state and local levels is being pinched by the financial crisis and economic slowdown. In much of the Third World, food prices soared over the last year, this is partly related to financial speculation, and hunger has spread.9
While the futures of millions are in jeopardy, what is the paramount concern of those at the top of the pyramid of economic and political power? It is the protection of a financial system that sits atop a global system of exploitation; it is the rescue of the owners and investor beneficiaries of that system.
This is not “socialism for the rich” or a bailout for the people. It’s emergency capitalism for the capitalist class: injections of funds and guarantees, government takeovers, cost-cutting, selective liquidations, restructuring of regulations; and it’s more brutal capitalism for everyone else: austerity, more intense international exploitation, and more misery for people throughout the world.
The official story line is that this crisis issues from particular flaws and malpractices that can be corrected: “excessive greed,” “Wall Street irresponsibility,” “outdated” or “ unenforced regulations.”
The truth is that this crisis has deep structural causes in the very nature of the system—in the quest for profit, not the satisfaction of human need, and in the anarchic workings of world capitalism.
We are seeing how the means through which capitalism expands and “innovates” have led to new barriers and to gales of “creative destruction”—with trillions of dollars of asset values destroyed in the market turmoil. Through these convulsions, the imperialists seek to wrench new freedom, promoting further consolidation and monopolization. Bank of America absorbs the giant investment bank Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers is forced into liquidation.
Whoever wins the presidential election will be inheriting a battered financial system and huge government deficits. This will not be an era of expanded social spending, but one of more direct government intervention in financial markets and cutbacks in social spending.
A Status Report
This rolling and intensifying financial crisis serves as a profile and status report on capitalism in the 21st century:
A once-thriving subprime mortgage market…had been linked to the ability of U.S. financial institutions to market securities to European banks and of the U.S. Treasury to draw in export earnings from China…earnings generated in sweatshops…tied into subcontracting networks of Western corporations….
Real estate markets tank…. The “smart money” looks for “safe places” to shift its capital…. Some of it heads for commodity futures like rice…. So food prices spiral upward in response to the investment stratagems of people who know and care nothing about food needs and food production…. In countries like Haiti, women who can no longer afford basic staples are feeding their children mud-cakes….
A French bank, with its assets plunging in value, and the chain of global capitalist finance snapping all over, now finds itself with “non-performing loans”…. It must “improve its balance sheet” and faces pressures to reduce or eliminate trade credits to a country in Africa that depends on imports for food, and where people already spend 50 percent of their incomes for food.
Despite staggering advances in technology and human knowledge, despite the fact that the development of human society has brought humanity to a historic threshold where it is now possible not only to overcome scarcity and exploitation but also to forge social arrangements where human beings can truly flourish—despite all of this potential, social and economic life are under painful duress and the ecosystems of the planet gravely threatened. It is not for lack of resources or knowledge.
All of what has been described in this article is the result of the relations and domination of capital, the result of the workings of a system driven by vicious competition and the blind accumulation of profit based on exploitation—and backed by massive military force.
In the heartland of capitalism, there is financial meltdown. In the Third World, millions are already suffering the ravages of a global food crisis. This system is a horror and a failure. Is it necessary for humanity to live this way?
The October 10 edition of The Washington Post carried an article with the title and question “The End to American Capitalism?” In forums and in the media, leading bourgeois policymakers and analysts have discussed whether this crisis, careening beyond control and threatening greater economic calamity, suggests that there is something fundamentally amiss about capitalism. And the emphatic answer given is the same: “the system may not be working optimally, but there is no alternative, only gradations and variations of capitalism.”
But there is another way. It is possible to take hold of the productive resources of society and to develop and deploy them in a rational, planned, and society-wide way to meet human need and to safeguard the planet. It is possible to establish a radically different kind of state power and to create a society and institutions that unleash people’s creativity and that promote initiative and diversity in an atmosphere that brings out human community.
The question of socialism, of communism, of revolution could not be more relevant…and more urgent.
To be clear, revolution is not a catchword for lots of new things or lots of change. Revolution has very specific meaning: the people getting rid of the system; depriving the old ruling class of their political-economic-military power; and creating a new power with new aims and objectives and the means to enforce those aims and objectives.
As serious as this crisis is, with all the havoc it is wreaking, the system will not automatically collapse of its own weight and disorder. Absent revolution, capitalism will put itself back together—in its own image and at unimaginable social cost.
And for all the agony that crisis inflicts, this will not automatically and spontaneously translate into progressive, radical, and revolutionary sentiment and consciousness. Other forces are in the field doing ideological and political work: reactionary populists like Lou Dobbs (“blame the foreigners and illegal immigrants”) and Sarah Palin whipping up a social base for religio-fascism. The Obama candidacy is channeling disenchantment and the thirst for change right back into the political system’s suffocating embrace (“change we can believe in” is nothing other than change acceptable to the powers that be).
This is a highly fraught situation. Things can change very quickly. The system is revealing much about its basic nature. Bigger jolts may come and outrage may suddenly grow and give rise to resistance from all kinds of quarters. We have to grasp the potential of the situation. We have to be out there bringing forward understanding and bringing forward a vision of a liberatory world. We have to rise to new political and ideological challenges in the belly of the beast.
ENDNOTES
1. Data from James R. Hagerty and Ruth Simon, “Housing Pain Gauge: Nearly 1 in 6 Owners ‘Under Water,’” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2008; RealtyTrac, “Foreclosure Activity Up 14 Percent in Second Quarter,” Realtytrac.com, July 25, 2008. A study published earlier this year estimates the total loss of wealth suffered by Black, Latino, and other minority households on account of bank subprime-lending of the last eight years to be the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history (United for a Fair Economy, Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008).
2. Among informative studies of the origins and development of a globally integrated cheap labor manufacturing economy, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Quebec: Center for Research on Globalization, 2003); and on globalized manufacturing in relation to financialization, see William Millberg, “Shifting Sources and Uses of Profits: Sustaining US Financialization with Global Value Chains,” Economy and Society, Vol. 37, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 420-451.
3. Data from Milberg, “Shifting Value Chains…”
4. Jeffrey Garten, “We Need a New Global Monetary Authority,” Financial Times, September 25, 2008. On financialization as a means also to contain financial disorder and to impose profit maximizing discipline on capital, see Christopher Rude, “The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded, London: Merlin Press, 2004.
5. Kevin Phillips, Bad Money (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 5; Robert Wade, “The First-World Debt Crisis of 2007-2010 in Global Perspective,” Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, July-August 2008, p. 33.
6. David Dapice, “Bad Spell on Wall Street,” Policyinnovations.org, January 24, 2008.
7. Leaving out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. See Chalmers Johnson, “Why the US has really gone broke,” mondediplo.com (English edition), February 5, 2008.
8. Kenneth Rogoff, “America Will Need a $1,000bn Bail-Out,” Financial Times, September 17, 2008.
9. On the global food crisis, see “The Global Food Crisis and the Ravenous System of Capitalism,” Revolution #128, May 1, 2008.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Return of Marx
With the signs of a sunset becoming more visible in the Empire, the talks about an alternative to capitalism is once again hotting up across the world. And quite naturally the intellectuals are looking back to Karl Marx. The conversation between Eric Hobsbawm and Marcello Musto held on the occassion of 15o years of Grundrisse also points to the contemporary relevance of Marx.
The importance of Marx, 150 years after the Grundrisse
M. M. Professor Hobsbawm, two decades after 1989, when he was too hastily consigned to oblivion, Karl Marx has returned to the limelight. Freed from the role of instrumentum regni to which he was assigned in the Soviet Union, and from the shackles of ``Marxism-Leninism'', he has in the last few years not only received intellectual attention through new publication of his work, but also been the focus of more widespread interest. Indeed in 2003, the French magazine Nouvel Observateur dedicated a special issue to Karl Marx -- le penseur du troisième millénaire? (Karl Marx -- the thinker of the third millennium?). A year later, in Germany, in an opinion poll sponsored by the television company ZDF to establish who were the most important Germans of all time, more than 500,000 viewers voted for Marx; he came third in the general classification and first in the ``current relevance'' category. Then, in 2005, the weekly Der Spiegel portrayed him on the cover under the title ``Ein Gespenst kehrt zurück'' (A spectre is back), while listeners to the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time voted for Marx as their ``greatest philosopher''
In a recent public conversation with Jacques Attalì, you said that paradoxically "it is the capitalists more than others who have been rediscovering Marx", and you talked of your astonishment when the businessman and liberal politician George Soros said to you "I've just been reading Marx and there is an awful lot in what he says." Although weak and rather vague, what are the reasons for this revival? Is his work likely to be of interest only to specialists and intellectuals, being presented in university courses as a great classic of modern thought that should never be forgotten? Or could a new "demand for Marx" come in the future from the political side as well?
E. H. There is an undoubted revival of public interest in Marx in the capitalist world, though probably not as yet in the new East European members of the European Union. It was probably accelerated by the fact that the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided with a particularly dramatic international economic crisis in the midst of a period of ultra-rapid free market globalisation.
Marx had predicted the nature of the early 21st century world economy a hundred and fifty years earlier, on the basis of his analysis of "bourgeois society". It is not surprising that intelligent capitalists, especially in the globalised financial sector, were impressed by Marx, since they were necessarily more aware than others of the nature and instabilities of the capitalist economy in which they operated. Most of the intellectual left no longer knew what to do with Marx. It had been demoralised by the collapse of the social-democratic project in most North Atlantic states in the 1980s and the mass conversion of national governments to free market ideology, as well as by the collapse of the political and economic systems that claimed to be inspired by Marx and Lenin. The so-called "new social movements" like feminism either had no logical connection with anti-capitalism (though as individuals their members might be aligned with it) or they challenged the belief in endless progress in human control over nature, which both capitalism and traditional socialism had shared. At the same time the "proletariat", divided and diminished, ceased to be credible as Marx's historical agent of social transformation. It is also the case that since 1968 the most prominent radical movements have preferred direct action not necessarily based on much reading and theoretical analysis.
Of course this does not mean that Marx will cease to be regarded as a great and classical thinker, although for political reasons, especially in countries like France and Italy with once powerful Communist parties, there has been a passionate intellectual offensive against Marx and Marxist analyses, which was probably at its height in the 1980s and 1990s. There are signs that it has now run its course.
M. M. Throughout his life Marx was a shrewd and tireless researcher, who sensed and analysed better than anyone else in his time the development of capitalism on a world scale. He understood that the birth of a globalised international economy was inherent in the capitalist mode of production and predicted that this process would generate not only the growth and prosperity flaunted by liberal theorists and politicians but also violent conflicts, economic crises and widespread social injustice. In the last decade we have seen the East Asian financial crisis, which started in the summer of 1997, the Argentinian economic crisis of 1999-2002 and, above all, the subprime mortgage crisis, which started in the United States in 2006 and has now become the biggest post-war financial crisis. Is it right to say, therefore, that the return of interest in Marx is also based on the crisis of capitalist society and on his enduring capacity to explain the profound contradictions of today's world?
E. H. Whether the future politics of the left will once again be inspired by Marx's analysis, as the old socialist and communist movements were, will depend on what happens to world capitalism. But this applies not only to Marx but to the left as a coherent political ideology and project. Since, as you say correctly, the return of interest in Marx is largely -- I would say mainly -- based on the current crisis of capitalist society, the outlook is more promising than it was in the 1990s.
The present world financial crisis, which may well become a major economic depression in the USA, dramatises the failure of the theology of the uncontrolled global free market, and forces even the US government to consider taking public actions forgotten since the 1930s. Political pressures are already weakening the commitment of economic neoliberal governments to uncontrolled, unlimited and unregulated globalisation. In some cases (China) the vast inequalities and injustices caused by a wholesale transition to a free market economy already raise major problems for social stability and raise doubts even at the higher levels of government.
It is clear that any "return to Marx" will be essentially a return to Marx's analysis of capitalism and its place in the historical evolution of humanity -- including, above all, his analysis of the central instability of capitalist development, which proceeds through self-generated periodic economic crises, with political and social dimensions. No Marxist could believe for a moment that, as neoliberal ideologists argued in 1989, liberal capitalism had established itself forever, that history had come to an end, or indeed that any system of human relations could ever be final and definitive.
M. M. Do you not think that if the political and intellectual forces of the international left, who are questioning themselves with regard to socialism in the new century, were to foreswear the ideas of Marx, they would lose a fundamental guide for the examination and transformation of today's reality?
E. H. No socialist can foreswear the ideas of Marx, since his belief that capitalism must be succeeded by another form of society is based not on hope or will but on a serious analysis of historical development, particularly in the capitalist era. His actual prediction that capitalism would be replaced by a socially managed or planned system still seems reasonable, though he certainly underestimated the market elements which would survive in any post-capitalist system(s).
Since he deliberately abstained from speculation about the future, he cannot be made responsible for the specific ways in which "socialist" economies were organised under "really existing socialism". As to the objectives of socialism, Marx was not the only thinker who wanted a society without exploitation and alienation, in which all human beings could fully realise their potentialities, but he expressed this aspiration more powerfully than anyone else, and his words retain the power to inspire.
However, Marx will not return as a political inspiration to the left until it is understood that his writings should not be treated as political programs, authoritative or otherwise, nor as descriptions of the actual situation of world capitalism today, but rather as guides to his way of understanding the nature of capitalist development. Nor can or should we forget that he did not achieve a coherent and fully thought out presentation of his ideas, in spite of attempts by Engels and others to construct a volume II and III of Capital out of Marx's manuscripts. As the Grundrisse show, even a completed Capital would have formed only part of Marx's own, perhaps excessively ambitious, original plan.
On the other hand, Marx will not return to the left until the current tendency among radical activists to turn anti-capitalism into anti-globalism is abandoned. Globalisation exists, and, short of a collapse of human society, is irreversible. Indeed, Marx recognised it as a fact and, as an internationalist, welcomed it, in principle. What he criticised, and what we must criticise, was the kind of globalisation produced by capitalism.
M. M. One of Marx's writings which has provoked the greatest interest amongst new readers and commentators is the Grundrisse. Written between 1857 and 1858, the Grundrisse is the first draft of Marx's critique of political economy and, thus, also the initial preparatory work on Capital; it contains numerous reflections on matters that Marx did not develop elsewhere in his incomplete oeuvre. Why, in your opinion, are these manuscripts one of Marx's writings which continue to provoke more debate than any other, in spite of the fact that he wrote them only to summarise the foundations of his critique of political economy? What is the reason for their persistent appeal?
E. H. In my view the Grundrisse have made so large an international impact on the Marxian intellectual scene for two connected reasons. They were virtually unpublished before the 1950s, and, as you say, contained a mass of reflections on matters that Marx did not develop elsewhere. They were not part of the largely dogmatised corpus of orthodox Marxism in the world of Soviet socialism, yet Soviet socialism could not simply dismiss them. They could therefore be used by Marxists who wanted to criticise orthodoxy or widen the scope of Marxist analysis by an appeal to a text which could not be accused of being heretical or anti-Marxist.
Hence the editions of the 1970s and 1980s (well before the fall of the Berlin Wall) continued to provoke debate largely because in these manuscripts Marx raised important problems which were not considered in Capital, for instance, the questions raised in my preface to the volume of essays you collected [Karl Marx's Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, edited by M. Musto, London—New York: Routledge 2008; http://www.routledgeeconomics.com/books/Karl-Marxs-Grundrisse-isbn9780415437493].
M. M. In the preface to this book, written by various international experts to mark the 150th anniversary of its composition, you have written: "Perhaps this is the right moment to return to a study of the Grundrisse less constricted by the temporary considerations of leftwing politics between Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev". Moreover, to underline the enormous value of this text, you stated that the Grundrisse "contains analyses and insights, for instance about technology, that take Marx's treatment of capitalism far beyond the nineteenth century, into the era of a society where production no longer requires mass labour, of automation, the potential of leisure, and the transformations of alienation in such circumstances. It is the only text that goes some way beyond Marx's own hints of the communist future in the German Ideology. In a few words, it has been rightly described as Marx's thought at its richest." Therefore, what might be the result of re-reading the Grundrisse today?
E. H. There are probably not more than a handful of editors and translators who have full knowledge of this large and notoriously difficult mass of texts. But a re-rereading, or rather reading, of them today could help us to rethink Marx: to distinguish what is general in Marx's analysis of capitalism from what was specific to the situation of mid-nineteenth-century "bourgeois society". We cannot predict what conclusions from this analysis are possible and likely, only that they will certainly not command unanimous agreement.
M. M. To finish, one final question. Why is it important today to read Marx?
E. H. To anyone interested in ideas, whether a university student or not, it is patently clear that Marx is and will remain one of the great philosophical minds and economic analysts of the nineteenth century and, at his best, a master of passionate prose. It is also important to read Marx because the world in which we live today cannot be understood without the influence that the writings of this man had on the twentieth century. And finally, he should be read because, as he himself wrote, the world cannot be effectively changed unless it is understood -- and Marx remains a superb guide to understanding the world and the problems we must confront.
Eric Hobsbawm is considered one of the greatest living historians. He is president of Birkbeck College, London, and professor emeritus at the New School for Social Research. Among his many writings are the trilogy about the "the long 19th century": The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (1962); The Age of Capital: 1848-1874 (1975); The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987), and the book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). Marcello Musto is editor of Karl Marx's Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London-New York: Routledge 2008.
This article first appeared at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18828
Saturday, October 4, 2008
campaign against state terror
In the backdrop of Porattom general convenor M.N.Ravunni's arrest the other day here in Kerala, Janakeeya Manushyavakasa Prasthanam (People's Human Rights Organisation)has decided to launch a statewide campaign against the increasing police excesses and state terror in general. Adv.Tushar Nirmal Sarathy, convenor of the organisation said that as part of the campaign, a meeting will be held on Tuesday at 2.p.m (07-10-08) at PWD Rest House in Palakkad. He asked individauls and representatives of various organisations to attend the meeting , which is aimed at developing a unity among democratic forces in the fight for human rights.He also asked those who coudln't make it to the meeting to send him mail showing their opinion on being a memebr of the joint campaign committe. Adv.Tushar's e mail ID is thusharnirmal@gmail.com . He may also be contacted over the fone number 9495218579
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
People's Human Rights Oranisation Condemns the arrest M.N. Ravunni
Janakeeya Manushyavakasa Prasthanam (People's Human Rights Organisation), has condemned the arrest of Porattam general convenor M.N.Ravunni. In a statement the organisation pointed out that the arrest of Ravunni, an ardent critic of state terror, is aimed at keeping him silent behind the bars.
The statement issued by the Organisation is posted here.
CONDEMN THE ARREST OF M.N.RAVUNNI
M.N.Ravunni General Convenor of Porattam - a mass organisation - was arrested by the police today.
On 31/8/2008 Agaly police arrested two Porattam activists Sunil Babu and Vinod from Goolikadavu following a quarrel with some local people. The Agaly police kept them under illegal detention for two days and also subjected them to custodial torture. They were produced before the Judicial First Class Magistrate, Mannarkkad on 2/9/2008 in crime no.183/2008 on the charges of sedition and conspiracy to wage war against state.
On 1/9/2008 M.N.Ravunni attended a press conference at Palakkad press club accusing the police officers for the violation of human rights and on 2/9/2008 M.N.Ravunni filed a complaint before the State Human Rights Commission praying for the intervention of the commission in this matter.
Two days before Agaly Dy. S.P contacted Mr. Ravunni and informed him to be present at Palakkad S.P Office for recording his statement as instructed by the State Human Rights Commission. Accordingly he went to Palakkad S.P Office on 29/09/2008 and the police took him under custody. He is now under custody of Agaly Dy. S.P and the police arrayed him as an accomplice in crime no.183/2008 under the charge of sedition and conspiracy to wage war against state. The arrest is a counterblast to the complaint raised by him before the Human Rights Commission.
Two weeks ago a Human Right Activist’s Fact Finding Team including Adv. P.A. Pouran, PUCL State Secretary Kerala, Dr. Abdul Salam State Secretary CHRO, Adv Thushar Nirmal Sarathy Convenor Janakeeya Manushyavakasa Prasthanam visited Goolikadavu and nearby places and collected facts behind the arrest of Sunil babu and Vinod. The fact finding team concluded unanimously that the arrest of Sunil and Vinod was illegal and demanded immediate withdrawal of false case registered against them. The Hon’ble High Court of Kerala later granted bail to Sunil and Vinod.
Now the arrest of Ravunni is clearly an act of retaliation, particularly for the role played by him in exposing the human rights violation of Agaly police and also with a larger intention to keep him silent behind bars as he is an ardent critic of the state.
‘JANAKEEYA MANUSHYAVAKASHA PRASTHANAM’ strongly condemns the arrest of M.N.Ravunni and appeal all the democratic forces all over the country to join hands against the STATE TERROR.
The statement issued by the Organisation is posted here.
CONDEMN THE ARREST OF M.N.RAVUNNI
M.N.Ravunni General Convenor of Porattam - a mass organisation - was arrested by the police today.
On 31/8/2008 Agaly police arrested two Porattam activists Sunil Babu and Vinod from Goolikadavu following a quarrel with some local people. The Agaly police kept them under illegal detention for two days and also subjected them to custodial torture. They were produced before the Judicial First Class Magistrate, Mannarkkad on 2/9/2008 in crime no.183/2008 on the charges of sedition and conspiracy to wage war against state.
On 1/9/2008 M.N.Ravunni attended a press conference at Palakkad press club accusing the police officers for the violation of human rights and on 2/9/2008 M.N.Ravunni filed a complaint before the State Human Rights Commission praying for the intervention of the commission in this matter.
Two days before Agaly Dy. S.P contacted Mr. Ravunni and informed him to be present at Palakkad S.P Office for recording his statement as instructed by the State Human Rights Commission. Accordingly he went to Palakkad S.P Office on 29/09/2008 and the police took him under custody. He is now under custody of Agaly Dy. S.P and the police arrayed him as an accomplice in crime no.183/2008 under the charge of sedition and conspiracy to wage war against state. The arrest is a counterblast to the complaint raised by him before the Human Rights Commission.
Two weeks ago a Human Right Activist’s Fact Finding Team including Adv. P.A. Pouran, PUCL State Secretary Kerala, Dr. Abdul Salam State Secretary CHRO, Adv Thushar Nirmal Sarathy Convenor Janakeeya Manushyavakasa Prasthanam visited Goolikadavu and nearby places and collected facts behind the arrest of Sunil babu and Vinod. The fact finding team concluded unanimously that the arrest of Sunil and Vinod was illegal and demanded immediate withdrawal of false case registered against them. The Hon’ble High Court of Kerala later granted bail to Sunil and Vinod.
Now the arrest of Ravunni is clearly an act of retaliation, particularly for the role played by him in exposing the human rights violation of Agaly police and also with a larger intention to keep him silent behind bars as he is an ardent critic of the state.
‘JANAKEEYA MANUSHYAVAKASHA PRASTHANAM’ strongly condemns the arrest of M.N.Ravunni and appeal all the democratic forces all over the country to join hands against the STATE TERROR.
Revolutionary Feminist Movement to stage Dharna
Even as the CPI(M) led LDF government of Kerala playing all dirty tricks to foil the land struggle in Chengara, Viplava Streevadi Prasthanam(Revolutionary Feminist Movement), the women's wing of CPI(ML) Naxalbari has decided to stage a dharna in front of Pathanamthitta collectorate on 6th October. Sadhujana Vimochana Samyuktha Vedi Secretaty Celina Prakkanam will inagurate the dharna, which is held demanding an immediate settlement of the agitation. Dr.P.Geetha, Adv.Nandini, Rekha Raj, Anila George, Maya S., Radhamoni and syamala will speak on the occassion.
As part of the agitations being held by the Prasthanam, a solidarity march too will be held from October 1 to 5.
As part of the agitations being held by the Prasthanam, a solidarity march too will be held from October 1 to 5.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Social activists question the veracity of Delhi encounter killings
Few days back Indian capital Delhi witnessed a highly dramatic incident. Though nobody saw with their eyes any encounter, the Delhi police claimed that they shot dead two alleged terrorists Atif and Sajid at an apartment in Jamia Nagar in the afternoon of 20.09.2008 (Saturday).The police also claimed that Mohan Chand Sharma, an inspector of the Delhi Police's Special Cell also died in the operation while a third alleged terrorist was arrested.
Following the incident a team comprising activists, academicians and journalists visited the site of the police operation. And demanding a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident they have raised a few questions and contradictions regarding the case. Given below are the questions posed by them.
On the basis of our interactions with the local residents, eye witnesses and the reports which have appeared in the media, we would like to pose the following questions:
1. It has been widely reported that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar. All the five youth living in the apartment submitted to the Delhi police their personal details, including permanent address, driving license details, address of the house they previously stayed in, all of which were found to be accurate. Though the police is now denying the veracity of the verification form, Mr. Rehman, the caretaker of the flat, has vouched, on camera, that he accompanied Atif to the Police Station for the verification.
Is it conceivable that the alleged kingpin behind the terrorist Indian Mujahideen outfit would have wanted to undergo a police verification--for whatever purpose-- just a week after the Ahmedabad blasts and a month before the bombings in Delhi?
2. The four-storeyed house L-18 in Jamia Nagar, where the alleged terrorists were staying, has only one access point, through the stair case, which is covered by an iron grill. It is impossible to leave the house except from the staircase. By all reports, the staircase was taken over by the Special Cell and/ or other agencies during the counter-terror operation. The house, indeed the entire block, was cordoned off at the time of the operation. How then was it then possible, as claimed by the police, for two alleged terrorists to escape the premises during the police operation?
3. The media has quoted 'police sources' as having informed them that the Special Cell was fully aware about the presence of dreaded terrorists, involved in the bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, staying in the apartment that was raided.
Why was the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, a veteran of dozens of encounter operations, the only officer in the operation not wearing a bullet proof vest? Was this due to over-confidence or is there something else to his mysterious death during the operation? Will the forensic report of the bullets that killed Inspector Sharma be made public?
4. There are reports that towards the end of the counter-terror operation, some policemen climbed on the roof of L-18 and fired several rounds in the air. Other policemen were seen breaking windows and even throwing flower pots to the ground from flats adjacent or opposite to L-18. Why was the police firing in the air and why did it indulge in destruction of property around L-18 after the encounter?
5. The police officials claim that an AK-47 and pistols were recovered from L-18. What was the weapon that killed Inspector Sharma? Was the AK-47 used at all and by whom? Going by some reports that have appeared (see 'Times of India', 20.09.08), the AK-47s have been used by the police only. Is it not strange that alleged terrorists did not use a more deadly and sophisticated weapon like the AK-47, which they purportedly possessed, preferring to use pistols?
We feel that there are far too many loose ends in the current story of the police encounter at L-18 in Jamia Nagar.We demand that a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident be initiated at the earliest to answer the above questions as also any other ones that arise from the contradictions of the case.
Signed/-
Shabnam Hashmi (Anhad)
Satya Sivaraman (Independent Journalist)
Manisha Sethi (Forum for Democratic Initiatives)
Tanweer Fazal (Forum for Democratic Initiatives)
Arshad Alam (Jamia Millia Islamia)
Neshat Quaiser (Jamia Millia Islamia)
Pallavi Deka (General Secretary, JNU Students' Union)
Following the incident a team comprising activists, academicians and journalists visited the site of the police operation. And demanding a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident they have raised a few questions and contradictions regarding the case. Given below are the questions posed by them.
On the basis of our interactions with the local residents, eye witnesses and the reports which have appeared in the media, we would like to pose the following questions:
1. It has been widely reported that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar. All the five youth living in the apartment submitted to the Delhi police their personal details, including permanent address, driving license details, address of the house they previously stayed in, all of which were found to be accurate. Though the police is now denying the veracity of the verification form, Mr. Rehman, the caretaker of the flat, has vouched, on camera, that he accompanied Atif to the Police Station for the verification.
Is it conceivable that the alleged kingpin behind the terrorist Indian Mujahideen outfit would have wanted to undergo a police verification--for whatever purpose-- just a week after the Ahmedabad blasts and a month before the bombings in Delhi?
2. The four-storeyed house L-18 in Jamia Nagar, where the alleged terrorists were staying, has only one access point, through the stair case, which is covered by an iron grill. It is impossible to leave the house except from the staircase. By all reports, the staircase was taken over by the Special Cell and/ or other agencies during the counter-terror operation. The house, indeed the entire block, was cordoned off at the time of the operation. How then was it then possible, as claimed by the police, for two alleged terrorists to escape the premises during the police operation?
3. The media has quoted 'police sources' as having informed them that the Special Cell was fully aware about the presence of dreaded terrorists, involved in the bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, staying in the apartment that was raided.
Why was the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, a veteran of dozens of encounter operations, the only officer in the operation not wearing a bullet proof vest? Was this due to over-confidence or is there something else to his mysterious death during the operation? Will the forensic report of the bullets that killed Inspector Sharma be made public?
4. There are reports that towards the end of the counter-terror operation, some policemen climbed on the roof of L-18 and fired several rounds in the air. Other policemen were seen breaking windows and even throwing flower pots to the ground from flats adjacent or opposite to L-18. Why was the police firing in the air and why did it indulge in destruction of property around L-18 after the encounter?
5. The police officials claim that an AK-47 and pistols were recovered from L-18. What was the weapon that killed Inspector Sharma? Was the AK-47 used at all and by whom? Going by some reports that have appeared (see 'Times of India', 20.09.08), the AK-47s have been used by the police only. Is it not strange that alleged terrorists did not use a more deadly and sophisticated weapon like the AK-47, which they purportedly possessed, preferring to use pistols?
We feel that there are far too many loose ends in the current story of the police encounter at L-18 in Jamia Nagar.We demand that a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident be initiated at the earliest to answer the above questions as also any other ones that arise from the contradictions of the case.
Signed/-
Shabnam Hashmi (Anhad)
Satya Sivaraman (Independent Journalist)
Manisha Sethi (Forum for Democratic Initiatives)
Tanweer Fazal (Forum for Democratic Initiatives)
Arshad Alam (Jamia Millia Islamia)
Neshat Quaiser (Jamia Millia Islamia)
Pallavi Deka (General Secretary, JNU Students' Union)
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Dancing under the gun
I received this article from A World to Win News Service. It is posted here for those readers who are not subscribers to World to Win
"Anyone who is familiar with Holocaust archival photos remembers images of Nazis forcing Jews to dance in the ghetto as they laugh derisively."
This comment was made by Israeli blogger Richard Silverstein about an incident at the Tel Aviv international airport 7 September. The Alvin Ailey dance ensemble from New York arrived for a performance they were to give at one of Israel's main venues, the first stop in a six-country tour celebrating the famed New York African-American dance ensemble's fiftieth anniversary.
Abdur-Rahim Jackson, a senior dancer, passed through security with the rest of the troupe. Then he was pulled aside and taken to a holding room.
The problem, security police told him, was his name. "I explained to them," Jackson later recounted, "that my father converted to Islam and gave me that name. They repeatedly asked me what my father's name is, what my mother's name is and why they gave me that name." One security officer told him he should change his name.
But they weren't through with him. They said that his airline pre-flight passenger data, passport, prestige in the field of dance, his travelling with the troupe, his pictures in the dance company's brochures, etc., weren't enough. If he wanted to enter Israel, they said, he would have to dance for them, right there in the interrogation room, surrounded by mocking police. Unwillingly, and highly upset and embarrassed, he said later, he did. (Associated Press, 9 September)
Then he was interrogated by a second set of officers – and again, forced to dance. After about an hour of humiliation, they released him.
The incident made news in Israel for the wrong reasons. Jackson, it turns out, is not now and never has been a Moslem, and his fiancé, although classifiable as Black by zealous profilers, is Jewish. Her Israeli family were waiting at the airport. Nevertheless, Israeli officials adamantly refused to comment, let alone apologize.
Blogger Silverstein points out, "Perhaps it doesn't rise to the same level of humiliation [as the famous Polish ghetto photo]. But that's only because Israeli personnel knew this was an American citizen. You can be certain that if this had been an Israeli Arab dancer the treatment would've been much worse." (richardsilverstein .com)
Much worse: Mohammed Omer, a 24-year-old from Gaza, was one of two winners of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (along with Dahr Jamail). International governmental support, including Dutch diplomats who travelled to get him, forced Israel to let him out of Gaza so he could attend the award ceremony in London. Omer became a journalist as a teenager after an Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while his family was still inside, seriously injuring his mother. Yet, according to a former Dutch ambassador, "He is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel." (johnpilger. com, 2 July)
But as with the dancer Jackson, Israel doesn't care if someone really poses a threat or not. They have a system to enforce. Part of that is that no one among those they consider subhuman is allowed to consider themselves as good as the master race. Nor can any of the master race's enforcers entertain the idea that those whose oppression their identity is based on are human beings. Their system stands or falls, ultimately, on guns, but this ideology is essential to its survival.
When Omer tried to re-enter Israel, at the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, again travelling with a Dutch diplomat for protection, eight Shin Bet (Israeli Gestapo) officers surrounded him and demanded his prize money. One put a gun to Omer's head. They forcibly stripped him and made him stand naked. They laughed when he complained that he was a human being. After twelve hours without water, food or a toilet, he vomited and passed out. Then the Shin Bet men used their thumbs to gouge under his eyes and the nerves under his ears and stepped on his throat to cut off his breathing – torture procedures designed not to leave marks. All the while, his Dutch diplomatic escort was waiting. Maybe that's why he ended up in a hospital instead of dead.
Before they tortured him, they made him dance.
"Anyone who is familiar with Holocaust archival photos remembers images of Nazis forcing Jews to dance in the ghetto as they laugh derisively."
This comment was made by Israeli blogger Richard Silverstein about an incident at the Tel Aviv international airport 7 September. The Alvin Ailey dance ensemble from New York arrived for a performance they were to give at one of Israel's main venues, the first stop in a six-country tour celebrating the famed New York African-American dance ensemble's fiftieth anniversary.
Abdur-Rahim Jackson, a senior dancer, passed through security with the rest of the troupe. Then he was pulled aside and taken to a holding room.
The problem, security police told him, was his name. "I explained to them," Jackson later recounted, "that my father converted to Islam and gave me that name. They repeatedly asked me what my father's name is, what my mother's name is and why they gave me that name." One security officer told him he should change his name.
But they weren't through with him. They said that his airline pre-flight passenger data, passport, prestige in the field of dance, his travelling with the troupe, his pictures in the dance company's brochures, etc., weren't enough. If he wanted to enter Israel, they said, he would have to dance for them, right there in the interrogation room, surrounded by mocking police. Unwillingly, and highly upset and embarrassed, he said later, he did. (Associated Press, 9 September)
Then he was interrogated by a second set of officers – and again, forced to dance. After about an hour of humiliation, they released him.
The incident made news in Israel for the wrong reasons. Jackson, it turns out, is not now and never has been a Moslem, and his fiancé, although classifiable as Black by zealous profilers, is Jewish. Her Israeli family were waiting at the airport. Nevertheless, Israeli officials adamantly refused to comment, let alone apologize.
Blogger Silverstein points out, "Perhaps it doesn't rise to the same level of humiliation [as the famous Polish ghetto photo]. But that's only because Israeli personnel knew this was an American citizen. You can be certain that if this had been an Israeli Arab dancer the treatment would've been much worse." (richardsilverstein .com)
Much worse: Mohammed Omer, a 24-year-old from Gaza, was one of two winners of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (along with Dahr Jamail). International governmental support, including Dutch diplomats who travelled to get him, forced Israel to let him out of Gaza so he could attend the award ceremony in London. Omer became a journalist as a teenager after an Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while his family was still inside, seriously injuring his mother. Yet, according to a former Dutch ambassador, "He is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel." (johnpilger. com, 2 July)
But as with the dancer Jackson, Israel doesn't care if someone really poses a threat or not. They have a system to enforce. Part of that is that no one among those they consider subhuman is allowed to consider themselves as good as the master race. Nor can any of the master race's enforcers entertain the idea that those whose oppression their identity is based on are human beings. Their system stands or falls, ultimately, on guns, but this ideology is essential to its survival.
When Omer tried to re-enter Israel, at the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, again travelling with a Dutch diplomat for protection, eight Shin Bet (Israeli Gestapo) officers surrounded him and demanded his prize money. One put a gun to Omer's head. They forcibly stripped him and made him stand naked. They laughed when he complained that he was a human being. After twelve hours without water, food or a toilet, he vomited and passed out. Then the Shin Bet men used their thumbs to gouge under his eyes and the nerves under his ears and stepped on his throat to cut off his breathing – torture procedures designed not to leave marks. All the while, his Dutch diplomatic escort was waiting. Maybe that's why he ended up in a hospital instead of dead.
Before they tortured him, they made him dance.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
In Memory of September 11
Its yet another September 11; one of the darkest days in history. It was on on this day in 1973, the Chilean military, with the backing and under the direction of the U.S. government, murdered democracy in Chile. Just before his death the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, made this speech over Chilean radio. As he spoke, nonfascist radio stations were being knocked off the air:
Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973
My friends,
Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes.
My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police].
Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.
They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society. I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours -- in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act. They were committed. History will judge them.
Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.
The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
To watch Allende speaking please click http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=WEmvWWQkzRM
Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973
My friends,
Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes.
My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police].
Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.
They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.
Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.
I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society. I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours -- in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act. They were committed. History will judge them.
Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.
The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.
To watch Allende speaking please click http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=WEmvWWQkzRM
Nepal: Prachanda -- `No illusions on the ultimate goal of socialist communism'
In his first interview since he became Nepal's prime minister, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) chairperson Pushpa Kamal Dahal ``Prachanda'' spoke to Rabindra Mishra of BBC's Nepali Service about the strategies of his new government.
BBC: In the past Maoist leaders had vowed not to keep any private property. They handed over their private properties to the party. Now, what will you do to your salary that you will be drawing as prime minister?
That (money) will go to the country and the people. It will be deposited in the party treasury. Except some amount for the general upkeep, the salary will be deposited in the party treasury.
Then, how can one be assured of the right to private property under your government when you are yourself are not keeping private property?
We do not believe that private property should be abolished. But we believe that the leadership must keep away from making money to ensure that the properties of the people are protected and promoted.
What three things you will do in the next three months that will make a difference to the people?
First, a special committee will be announced to facilitate the integration (of the army) and rehabilitation within six months as part of moves to take the peace process to a logical conclusion. Second, the process of constitution making will be expedited in three months. Third, programs to provide immediate and long-term relief will be announced.
Given that the army integration is being seen as a very sensitive issue will you let the current army chief General Rookmangud Katawal complete his tenure?
The demand of the time is to exercise maximum restraint. The country will suffer by any move that breeds bitterness at this juncture.
So the suspicions about the army chief being sacked are misplaced? He will not be sacked, will he?
That will not happen. As long as everyone including the army, the police and the other officials remain committed to the people's mandate on democracy, peace and change, no one needs to feel insecure. There will be no prejudice against any.
How will you handle the army integration? The Nepali Army seems to have its own ideas about this. How will you merge your combatants into the national army?
Now that I have become prime minister I have been travelling with the army security. I have found a serious commitment and sense of responsibility in the Nepali soldiers. I don't think that we will face any problem in taking this (integration) process to a conclusion.
If you had so much faith in Nepali Army, why did you distrust the NA and, instead, induct your combatants of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) for your personal security?
I never showed such distrust. I never wanted to show any bit of distrust towards NA or police or PLA or armed police. Since last two years armed police and PLA personnel had been providing security to my residence in Naya Bazaar. This was an issue that needed a technical solution. I do not want to suspect anyone or make anyone feel humiliated. The PLA also should not feel that they have been orphaned now that I have become Prime Minister. I am quite sensitive on this matter. Both PLA and NA understand the issue very well.
Among the 20,000 Maoist combatants in the cantonments, how many will be accommodated into the Nepali Army. What happens to the rest?
The PLA combatants who are staying in the cantonments and who have been verified by the United Nations are all eligible for rehabilitation and integration. According to our latest understanding each and every PLA combatant will be given the freedom to choose whether he/she wants to return home or engage in other professions. Therefore, I am not in a position to say how many PLA combatants will be integrated and how many of them will return home.
How long will the ex-King Gyanendra be allowed to stay in the Nagarjuna palace?
We are discussing this matter. The cabinet has just been expanded. It will take up the issue soon.
Will you re-open the probe into the palace killings (of 2001)?
This issue will be raised at the Constituent Assembly. There have been no satisfactory answers yet to the people's serious questions about the incident.
Perhaps the people could raise similar questions about you also?
Maybe. But the people of Nepal have already justified our action -- you call it civil war or people's war -- through the Constituent Assembly verdict. Have the people ever justified the palace killings?
Do you ever feel that you hands are stained with blood?
Sometimes in the event of grave mistakes on our part, I was emotional. But what is more important is the great process of transformation and the class, ethnic, regional and gender consciousness which have come about through our movement. So I do not feel the need to repent.
Would you have visited China first if it had not hosted the Olympic Games?
Let's not get into hypothetical questions. Since China is our neighbour and since we could not attend the inaugural ceremony of the Olympics I went there for the closing ceremony. Anyway, it would not have been easier for me to go there first if there had been no Olympic.
Since China is the land of your inspiration Mao Zedong, you must have harboured wishes to travel there?
I would be lying if I said no.
What do you want to do with the 1950 Indo-Nepal treaty?
Nepal has become a republic passing through big changes since the Rana regime. So, the 1950 treaty should be clearly reviewed. It cannot be kept in the present form.
What are the provisions that you do not like in the present treaty?
I am engaged in consultations on my visit to India soon. So, I do not want to reply to your question at this point.
When are you visiting to India?
I am going to attend the UN General Assembly. I will travel to India before that.
You used to claim that different power centres were blocking your ascent to power. Have you defeated those centres now?
I cannot use the same language as I am prime minister now. I have said on many occasions that had any other party won the election, nothing would have stopped the formation of a new government within a week. It took four months for us.
You have defeated the king and elbowed out Girija Prasad Koirala. Do you feel that you have mastered the policy of 'use and throw'?
I am pained by the allegations that we engage in ``use and throw''. I never think that I have cheated anyone. But in course of advancing my cause, I might have made compromises and come closer to one or another at different times. But there was never any conspiracy there. It was our philosophy of cooperating with others to defeat the primary enemy.
There are two schools of thoughts within your party -- one favouring the people's republic and the other favouring the democratic republic. Which one will prevail?
That is not the case. There is no illusion within our party regarding our ultimate goal of establishing a socialist communism. However, in the current national and international circumstances, we have decided to move ahead by institutionalising the federal democratic republic.
So, you want to establish a people's republic by means of the state of the democratic republic?
We will definitely attempt to establish a people's republic by institutionalising democratic republic and through the legitimate means like elections. Once we attain that, we will then work to achieve socialism and communism.
Will there be a people's republic if your party wins a majority in the next election?
Let's not understand this in a provocative manner. We will definitely try our best to ensure that the new constitution will be as close to the ideal of people's republic as possible. I believe that the constitution would pave the way for a people's republic, socialism and communism.
How can it pave the way for communism when you have said there will be guarantees of all kinds of political freedom?
We have concluded that socialism without multiparty competition and political freedoms cannot survive. We have learned this from the experiences of Russia and other countries.
What are you talking about, socialism or communism?
I am talking about socialism. A lively society can be built only if there are political freedoms and competitions within socialism. Communism is something like a heaven where there is neither a class nor a state nor an army. It will take hundreds of years to reach there.
You are not in a mood to step down as party chairman even after becoming PM. Why?
Certainly since I will not be able to devote adequate time and energy for the party after becoming the PM, other comrades will have to take more responsibility. But there is no rule anywhere in the world that the party chief has to step down when he becomes PM. Besides, ours is a party that believes in central and unified leadership. So there is no question of abandoning one responsibility when taking up another.
You once publicly said that top leaders will not join the government and act like Mahatma Gandhi?
What I said that that will happen only after a people's constitution and a stable government are put in place. We believe that a leader does not need to stick to the position of a prime minister or a president once the revolution is completed, constitution is written and the country cruises on a stable course.
Politicians are smart in playing with words, aren't they?
Not at all, I have only tried to reply in a very direct manner.
How long will your government survive?
It will continue till the constitution is written and the peace process is completed. I believe our party will win majority, even two-thirds majority in the next election. Then, our government will continue for another five years. We will improve our performance during that period. There will come a situation where people will start thinking that Maoists alone can run this country. In the subsequent election, we expect to win 90 percent votes and we will continue in power for many decades.
You have high expectations. Do you believe they will be fulfilled?
Definitely. We have strong faith in people. We are devoted to the nation and the people. No one can severe our relation with the people.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
In memory of Mahmoud Darwish
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died recenlty leaving behind a great legacy of poetic resistance. Following is an article received from A World to Win News Service
In memory of Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008 )
A World to Win News Service
The celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died 9 August after complications from heart surgery. In life, he was one of the world’s very few people who could fill a football stadium with as many as 25,000 listeners for a poetry reading. He had a special place in the hearts of the masses of Palestinians and other Arab people, and this was matched by the high regard in which many intellectuals of all countries held him. His poetry captured the pulse of Palestinian pain in magical ways, making readers laugh and weep. In death, throngs of Palestinians gave homage to him as the symbol and expression of Palestinian aspirations for the return of their land, their country. Darwish put in words the collective passion felt by the women and men, rich or poor, educated or not who were and still are victims of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and occupation of their lands by the Zionist state of Israel 60 years ago. His poems were put to music and became anthems for two generations of Palestinians and others.
He founded one of the Arab world’s top literary magazines, al-Karmel, in 1981. He wrote 20 volumes of poetry and was translated into more than 20 languages. His first collection of poems in the 1960s included “Identity Card”, which became something of a signature poem for him. It is written in the first person. A common practice among many Palestinians in those days was to respond to hostile Israeli authorities and Arab governments by simply giving an identity number. A few of the lines are:
Write it down!
I am an Arab
My number is 50,000
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged. …………….
At the time of the Nakba in 1948, he was seven. He fled with his family from Birweh, a village in Galilee. The family came back in 1949, risking death at the hands of Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who tried to return to their homes. He spent the rest of his youth living as a second-class Israeli citizen. His grandfather chose to live on a hill overlooking his land. Until he died, the grandfather watched Jewish immigrants from Yemen living in his home that he could not even visit. Darwish acquired a reputation as a precocious child poet, at age 12. He was asked to compose a poem for a public reading on Israel’s “Independence Day”. His poem described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed and tilling his father’s lands. Summoned by the military governor, Darwish was told that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. This incident marked Darwish for life.
His militant poems defined Palestinian existence in the face of Golda Meir’s assertion “There are no Palestinians”. He was jailed five times between 1961 and 1976. Eventually Israel stripped Darwish of his “citizenship” and he became part of the Palestinian diaspora. Once a member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Israeli Communist Party, he spent a year studying in the Soviet Union where he became disillusioned. He became one of many stateless persons wandering around first in Egypt, then Jordan, and finally Lebanon. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked another defining moment in Darwish’s life. In Beirut, he lived under the shelling and siege of the city amidst the world’s deafening silence. In the camps outside the city, the Israeli army stood guard while the Lebanese Christian Falangists conducted the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
In 1973 he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation headed by Yassar Arafat. In 1987 he was appointed to the PLO’s Executive Committee, although he saw his role there as symbolic. In 1993 he broke with Arafat and resigned his position the day after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the PLO that was to lead to today’s “road map” to nowhere and the PLO’s current role as flunkies under the Israeli occupation. But with the Accords, he was able to return to Palestine in 1996. He lived in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and travelled throughout Palestine when he could, including Gaza.
In the early days of the second Intifada, the world reeled at the infamous photo of Muhammad al-Durrah, a 12 year-old boy crouching in the shelter of his father’s body during an Israeli Defence Force incursion in September 2000. Israeli bullets killed the boy, despite his father’s efforts. Darwish wrote: “We love life – if we can have it.”
In 2002 Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield, a barbarous reinvasion of West Bank cities, in particular Ramallah. At that time Darwish invited a number of Nobel Prize-winning authors (José Saramago, Wole Soyinka, Juan Goytisolo, Breyten Breytenbach and Russell Banks) to see the military occupation for themselves. Breytenbach recalled the former apartheid rule of South Africa. Banks compared it with American Indian reservations of the nineteenth century. The invasion inspired Darwish to write “A State of Siege”. Some of the lines address the Israeli soldiers shooting up his neighbourhood:
You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us.
Other lines address the soldier/killer of a foetus:
If you had left the foetus thirty days,
Things would’ve been different
The occupation may end, and the toddler may not remember the time of the siege,
And he would grow up a healthy boy,
And study the Ancient history of Asia,
In the same college as one of your daughters.
And they may fall in love.
And they may have a daughter (who would be Jewish by birth).
What have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow,
And your granddaughter is now orphaned.
What have you done to your scattered family,
And how could you have slain three pigeons with the one bullet?
Also in 2002, an Israeli reformist Education Minister tried to have five of Darwish’s poems introduced into a “multi-cultural” school curriculum. This aroused a maelstrom of controversy in the Israeli parliament where the proposal was roundly defeated. Darwish commented, “They teach pupils the country was empty. When they teach Palestinian poets, this knowledge is broken. Most of my poetry is about love for my country.” He added,” It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem.” The Israeli government considered Mahmoud Darwish a dangerous foe to the end.
His poems expose a wide range of targets: the Israeli government (for instance, its pretending to be the victim (”You stole our tears, wolf”), the U.S. government (for giving every Palestinian child the “gift” of a cluster bomb to play with) and the Arab governments (who refrain from helping the Palestinians and hide their ineptitude behind anti-Semitic rhetoric).
A secular nationalist, Darwish was depressed and angered by Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian political organisations. He was unsparing in his criticism of their narrow power struggle, calling it “suicide in the streets”.
That makes it all the more significant that his funeral in Ramallah was attended by many thousands of people, making it the biggest mass political event in the West Bank since the burial of Arafat.
In memory of Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008 )
A World to Win News Service
The celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died 9 August after complications from heart surgery. In life, he was one of the world’s very few people who could fill a football stadium with as many as 25,000 listeners for a poetry reading. He had a special place in the hearts of the masses of Palestinians and other Arab people, and this was matched by the high regard in which many intellectuals of all countries held him. His poetry captured the pulse of Palestinian pain in magical ways, making readers laugh and weep. In death, throngs of Palestinians gave homage to him as the symbol and expression of Palestinian aspirations for the return of their land, their country. Darwish put in words the collective passion felt by the women and men, rich or poor, educated or not who were and still are victims of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and occupation of their lands by the Zionist state of Israel 60 years ago. His poems were put to music and became anthems for two generations of Palestinians and others.
He founded one of the Arab world’s top literary magazines, al-Karmel, in 1981. He wrote 20 volumes of poetry and was translated into more than 20 languages. His first collection of poems in the 1960s included “Identity Card”, which became something of a signature poem for him. It is written in the first person. A common practice among many Palestinians in those days was to respond to hostile Israeli authorities and Arab governments by simply giving an identity number. A few of the lines are:
Write it down!
I am an Arab
My number is 50,000
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged. …………….
At the time of the Nakba in 1948, he was seven. He fled with his family from Birweh, a village in Galilee. The family came back in 1949, risking death at the hands of Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who tried to return to their homes. He spent the rest of his youth living as a second-class Israeli citizen. His grandfather chose to live on a hill overlooking his land. Until he died, the grandfather watched Jewish immigrants from Yemen living in his home that he could not even visit. Darwish acquired a reputation as a precocious child poet, at age 12. He was asked to compose a poem for a public reading on Israel’s “Independence Day”. His poem described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed and tilling his father’s lands. Summoned by the military governor, Darwish was told that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. This incident marked Darwish for life.
His militant poems defined Palestinian existence in the face of Golda Meir’s assertion “There are no Palestinians”. He was jailed five times between 1961 and 1976. Eventually Israel stripped Darwish of his “citizenship” and he became part of the Palestinian diaspora. Once a member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Israeli Communist Party, he spent a year studying in the Soviet Union where he became disillusioned. He became one of many stateless persons wandering around first in Egypt, then Jordan, and finally Lebanon. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 marked another defining moment in Darwish’s life. In Beirut, he lived under the shelling and siege of the city amidst the world’s deafening silence. In the camps outside the city, the Israeli army stood guard while the Lebanese Christian Falangists conducted the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
In 1973 he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation headed by Yassar Arafat. In 1987 he was appointed to the PLO’s Executive Committee, although he saw his role there as symbolic. In 1993 he broke with Arafat and resigned his position the day after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the PLO that was to lead to today’s “road map” to nowhere and the PLO’s current role as flunkies under the Israeli occupation. But with the Accords, he was able to return to Palestine in 1996. He lived in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and travelled throughout Palestine when he could, including Gaza.
In the early days of the second Intifada, the world reeled at the infamous photo of Muhammad al-Durrah, a 12 year-old boy crouching in the shelter of his father’s body during an Israeli Defence Force incursion in September 2000. Israeli bullets killed the boy, despite his father’s efforts. Darwish wrote: “We love life – if we can have it.”
In 2002 Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield, a barbarous reinvasion of West Bank cities, in particular Ramallah. At that time Darwish invited a number of Nobel Prize-winning authors (José Saramago, Wole Soyinka, Juan Goytisolo, Breyten Breytenbach and Russell Banks) to see the military occupation for themselves. Breytenbach recalled the former apartheid rule of South Africa. Banks compared it with American Indian reservations of the nineteenth century. The invasion inspired Darwish to write “A State of Siege”. Some of the lines address the Israeli soldiers shooting up his neighbourhood:
You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us.
Other lines address the soldier/killer of a foetus:
If you had left the foetus thirty days,
Things would’ve been different
The occupation may end, and the toddler may not remember the time of the siege,
And he would grow up a healthy boy,
And study the Ancient history of Asia,
In the same college as one of your daughters.
And they may fall in love.
And they may have a daughter (who would be Jewish by birth).
What have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow,
And your granddaughter is now orphaned.
What have you done to your scattered family,
And how could you have slain three pigeons with the one bullet?
Also in 2002, an Israeli reformist Education Minister tried to have five of Darwish’s poems introduced into a “multi-cultural” school curriculum. This aroused a maelstrom of controversy in the Israeli parliament where the proposal was roundly defeated. Darwish commented, “They teach pupils the country was empty. When they teach Palestinian poets, this knowledge is broken. Most of my poetry is about love for my country.” He added,” It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem.” The Israeli government considered Mahmoud Darwish a dangerous foe to the end.
His poems expose a wide range of targets: the Israeli government (for instance, its pretending to be the victim (”You stole our tears, wolf”), the U.S. government (for giving every Palestinian child the “gift” of a cluster bomb to play with) and the Arab governments (who refrain from helping the Palestinians and hide their ineptitude behind anti-Semitic rhetoric).
A secular nationalist, Darwish was depressed and angered by Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian political organisations. He was unsparing in his criticism of their narrow power struggle, calling it “suicide in the streets”.
That makes it all the more significant that his funeral in Ramallah was attended by many thousands of people, making it the biggest mass political event in the West Bank since the burial of Arafat.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Marx on Money
Money is one of the greatest influences in human life. It can do anything. American empire can purchase parliament members of India with moeny. Money corrupts everything. Here in this post let's read what Karl Marx thought about money.
The Power of Money
If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the (narrower) sense, but truly ontological affirmation of being (of nature), and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as a sensual object, then it is clear that:
1. They have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but rather that the distinct character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinct mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification.
2. Wherever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.
3. Insofar as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., is human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own gratification
4. Only through developed industry — i.e., through the medium of private property — does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s own practical activity.
5. The meaning of private property — apart from its estrangement — is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity.
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as omnipotent. . . . Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.
“What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours!
And what we take while life is sweet,
Is that to be declared not ours?
Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.”
Goethe: Faust (Mephistopheles)
Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:
“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.”
And also later:
“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!”
Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.
That which is for me through the medium of money — that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) — that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s — properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness — its deterrent power — is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent — the [. . .] chemical power of society.
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not — turns it, that is, into its contrary.
If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence — from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.
No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the [others], and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the idea which merely exists within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need — that is, no real and realisable need — to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study — that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras — essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual — into real essential powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes.
Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.
Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things — the world upside-down — the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return — that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.
The Power of Money
If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the (narrower) sense, but truly ontological affirmation of being (of nature), and if they are only really affirmed because their object exists for them as a sensual object, then it is clear that:
1. They have by no means merely one mode of affirmation, but rather that the distinct character of their existence, of their life, is constituted by the distinct mode of their affirmation. In what manner the object exists for them, is the characteristic mode of their gratification.
2. Wherever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working up of the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.
3. Insofar as man, and hence also his feeling, etc., is human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own gratification
4. Only through developed industry — i.e., through the medium of private property — does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s own practical activity.
5. The meaning of private property — apart from its estrangement — is the existence of essential objects for man, both as objects of enjoyment and as objects of activity.
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as omnipotent. . . . Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.
“What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours!
And what we take while life is sweet,
Is that to be declared not ours?
Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.”
Goethe: Faust (Mephistopheles)
Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:
“Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: This is it
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds
Among the rout of nations.”
And also later:
“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! Thou visible God!
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! That speak’st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!”
Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.
That which is for me through the medium of money — that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) — that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s — properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness — its deterrent power — is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent — the [. . .] chemical power of society.
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity — the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities — the divine power of money — lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not — turns it, that is, into its contrary.
If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence — from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.
No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the [others], and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the idea which merely exists within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need — that is, no real and realisable need — to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study — that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras — essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual — into real essential powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes.
Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.
Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things — the world upside-down — the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return — that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Book review: Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country
Following is a slightly abridged review of the book Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti (Penguin/Viking) from the Communist Party of India (Maoist) Information Bulletin (no. 2, 10 May 2008). Editor’s added clarifications are in brackets.
The Maoist movement in India is one of the oldest and longest-sustained revolutionary movements in the contemporary world. Spanning four decades beginning with the first earth-shaking volcanic eruption in a tiny village in Naxalbari, it has become part of folklore in some regions in the country. It had risen, phoenix-like, every time the political pundits had confidently pronounced its certain demise. Top political and police brass had time and again boasted that they had "finished off" the revolution, which, they claimed, had been "imported from abroad". They asserted that Maoist revolution is something alien to the conditions in Gandhi's India where, they claim, people are not prone to violent ways. The latest in this long list of liars, wishful thinkers and vicious propagandists is Mahendra Karma [Congress Party leader in the state of Orissa], who declared amidst much fanfare in June 2005 that he would decimate the Maoists within a year through his state-sponsored terrorist campaign christened salwa judum (peace campaign). When his armed gangsters and the state's khaki-clad goons took a beating in the hands of the Maoists, this scab of the imperialist- big business-feudal combine kept on barking over the past two years that he would finish off the Maoists within a short time. However, nailing all these lies and disgusting boasts by the mediocre politicians and police officials ruling the country, the resilience and growth of the Maoist movement had surprised many sceptics who see the Indian state as an almighty behemoth that can snuff out any armed resistance.
Surprisingly, given the great international significance of revolution in a vast country like India – the second most populous in the world – very few scholars have attempted any serious research into this social phenomenon and books dealing with this protracted insurgency are very few. But of late, several research scholars belonging to various persuasions and particularly so-called independent agencies have suddenly jumped into the fray. There is very less objectivity and realistic analysis in most of these writings. Many of these have begun to paint a scary picture of a rapidly growing “Red Terror” which is supposed to undermine development measures undertaken by the government. They talk of the Maoist movement spreading at an alarming speed to the majority of the states in India.
In Red Sun, published by Penguin (Viking) Books India in early 2008, the author, Sudeep Chakravarti, makes an attempt to understand and present the phenomenon of the Maoist movement in India. It is not, as the writer himself claims, a history of the Maoist movement, but a travelogue that tries to understand the Other India, as he christens it. The positive side of the book is the writer's attempt to present the conditions of the vast majority of the common people – their grinding poverty, excruciating indebtedness, horrific tales of their destitution and displacement by so-called development – leading to extreme helplessness and heart-rending suicides. The writer tries to focus on the aspirations of the majority in India that have been left out of every development scheme and model touted as great boons for the poor by the Indian ruling classes. Overall, the writer has been able to present in a lucid manner the explosive socio-economic milieu that gave rise to, and continues to nurture, the Maoist movement in India. And as a travelogue, this aspect often comes forcefully through conversations with people from various walks of life. He logically anticipates the inevitable spread of the Maoist movement to the urban areas, since similar conditions had pushed the vast majority of the urban poor into utter wretchedness.
Good exposure of state-sponsored terror campaign in Dandakaranya
The exposure of the state-sponsored terrorist campaign in Dandakaranya through the so-called salwa judum comes out forcefully in the book. It is here that the writer is seen at his best and he boldly exposes the havoc created by the state-sponsored vigilante gangs combined with the state and central [Delhi] forces. There is some amount of depth in the writer’s presentation of the movement in one of the crucial regions of the Maoists. He vividly describes the war theatre, the explosive situation and the strategies and plans of the state. As far as the writer’s description of the Maoist movement goes this is the best part in the entire book. After this, the presentation of the movement elsewhere is shallow and based more on hearsay.
None of the movements in other regions such as Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, or Andhra Pradesh are given any in-depth analysis. This reflects a lack of real interaction with the actual players. Even the conversations with such an eminent personality in the revolutionary camp like VV [prominent Andhra Pradesh intellectual Varavara Rao, accused of connections with CPI(M)] lack punch and analysis. The principal weakness of the travelogue is that the writer travelled more along the periphery of the war zone and had hardly any interaction with the Maoist fighters and leaders in any of these regions. Whether this is deliberately done, or the writer found no opportunity to meet the Maoist revolutionaries in the battlefield, is not clear. With the right contacts – and the writer claims to have many such contacts – it is, of course, not difficult to meet CPI (Maoist) underground cadre.
The excerpts from the Fact Finding Report by a team of democratic intellectuals released to
the media in December 2005 and from the Report of April 2006 entitled "When the State Makes War on Its Own People" [see AWTWNS 18 December 2006], Mahendra Karma's statement on the aim of salwa judum ("Unless you cut off the source of the disease, the disease will remain. The source is the people, the villagers.") , the presentation of the full text of Bijapur SP D.L. Manhar's instructions on the wireless to his men which was taped by the Maoists, the story of local journalist Kamlesh Paika, conversations with K.R. Pisda, Collector of Dantewara, the abuse of journalists in the most filthy and uncivilized manner by Alok Awasthi, additional director in Chattisgarh' s Directorate of Public Relations, etc., are well brought out. The aim of the salwa judum as admitted by the government in the official document is also quoted exhaustively.
The most chilling story of the evacuation and setting afire of the village of Darzo in Mizoram by the Indian Army during the early 1970s as part of the sordid plan of resettlement of the villages is very much relevant in the context of the salwa judum campaign and the planned resettlement of the tribals in Dantewara. The comparison with the Mizoram of the 1970s is a commendable job.
At several places in the book, during conversations with the revolutionaries, bureaucrats and police officials, the activities and viewpoints of the two opposing forces in this class conflict are brought into sharp contrast. Some of the remarks by top political and police brass make interesting, and at times, disgusting, reading. For instance, the health minister of Jharkhand, Bhanu Pratap Shahi, says in an interview: "One vasectomy in a Naxalite dominated village means that many potential comrades less… when you have too many mouths to feed and too little food to eat, you may turn into a Naxalite. All I want is to minimize the number of mouths."
The cynical revelation by an officer of the military intelligence of how he and his team had hacked off the heads of six militants just to petrify their Islamic colleagues and to serve as a spiritual insult makes chilling reading. "Then we heard these human rights chaps were coming. So we put the heads back on somehow, crudely stitched them up. We didn't bother with matching head and body." That cynical laughter of the officer while narrating this ghastly incident shows the general sadistic mindset of the police and security establishment, whether it is in Kashmir, the North East, Dandakaranya, Jharkhand, Andra Pradesh or elsewhere. Their proposed solution to the Naxalite issue is outright murder and fascist suppression, despite their occasional declarations to the contrary, meant only to please and appease civil rights activists and liberal-minded intellectuals.
Chattisgarh' s DGP OP Rathor (who died of heart attack on Anti-Terrorist Day) bursts out venom against the Naxals: "Bloody nuisance. There's not a socio-economic one, rather than a law and order problem. Khadi and Khaki bandits are all one and the same with regard to this. Marxism, Leninism or Maoism about them. When I was young I at least sensed some ideology about the Naxalites. But these chaps (now) are nothing but thugs and extortionists. " The Additional Chief Secretary (Home), Government of Chattisgarh, BKS Ray, shows the same abysmally crude attitude and approach towards the Naxalite movement. "These people are just thugs and extortionists. That's why in Chattisgarh you have a spontaneous popular movement against them – these tribals are fed up of the Naxals", he says. Why the tribals were not fed up with the Naxals for 25 years and why all of a sudden they became restive is something this arrogant bureaucrat will never be able to grasp or explain. And why will the tribals be angry with Naxals, even if one accepts the allegations of the rulers that they are extortionists, since the tribals have nothing to lose and everything to gain? Is it not only the big contractors, bureaucrats, traders and industrialists who have big property amassed through primitive methods of exploitation of tribals and loot and plunder of the entire region that actually fear the Maoists and try to snuff them out with all means at their disposal? No wonder, this bureaucrat with a police mind set can only think of exterminating the Maoists as the solution.
It has become a fashion for every police officer and political bigwig to express nostalgic feelings about the Naxals of yesteryears as if they really believed Naxals were sincere in the bygone times and had become a nuisance now. They say they were an educated lot in earlier times but now have lumpen elements in dominance. The fact is today Naxals have the real oppressed classes behind them, which is why it is becoming increasingly difficult for the reactionary ruling classes to suppress them. The change in the composition of the Naxalite movement shows the maturity and grass-roots strength of the movement.
Ideological biases
As is natural in a class-divided society, the presentation in the book, and the conclusions drawn, are subject to the limitations set by the class [outlook] of the writer, in addition to the inescapable influence of oft-repeated verdicts on the movement by earlier writers of various hues. It is not easy to wriggle oneself out of the shackles of ruling ideology, culture and long-inculcated values that continue to reinforce upon one's mind ever since one's childhood. Some of the remarks of the writer bring home this point. For instance, referring to VV's speech at the Tehelka summit in November 2006 in Delhi, the writer says: "Democracy, with all its ills, allows him this public space. I hope he realizes the irony that dogma and undemocratic institutions have no space for others, tolerate no dissent. Mao didn't. The bloom of a Hundred Flowers turned into deepest tragedy. Maybe when the Maoists talk about New India, they really need to talk about gentler Maoism – possibly an oxymoron – as their counterparts have done for Nepal's fragile peace." (p. 292)
The author also cites some instances of punishment given to informers in Dandakaranya, Jharkhand, Orissa by the "dreaded Jan Adalat, or People's Court, which is little more than kangaroo court" and concludes that "These acts are as gruesome, and gratuitous, as what the Maoists accuse state security of."
Another comment or rather conclusion of the author without any analysis runs thus: "In Dantewada, democracy is quite dead, on both sides of the battle line." Surprisingly, he cites the game of chor-police (cops and robbers) played by tribal children to arrive at such an obviously biased conclusion! The author's ideological biases can be seen also from his bland statements regarding the future postrevolutionary society and about Maoist China. He says: "What would it be like if ever revolution were to succeed in India, enough to impose its imprint beyond tribal and caste-roiled areas? Most probably, instant justice, dogmatic and Puritanical life, Soviet-style post-revolutionary rot, vast May Day parades." And he goes on: "Perhaps even brutal China-style state control and a repeat of the Cultural revolution of Mao himself, that ended up killing and damning millions of unbelievers. " He concludes: "From available historical evidence, a Maoist state might do little else but backslide all of India's hard-won victories despite the mire of grand corruption and the utter small-mindedness of administration. "
Needless to say, this writer, as any other writer without living links with the lives of the oppressed masses and the movement, has also become a victim to the almost inescapable influence of the imperialist and ruling class ideological biases as regards comrade Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, post-revolutionary societies, and so on. From the opinions expressed by the writer such as the above one cannot but come to the conclusion that he prefers the status quo in place of a new revolutionary order where, he imagines, freedom will be the first casualty. He forgets that Maoists are also learning from the socialist experiments of the past and will certainly imbibe the positive aspects while rejecting the negative ones.
Some factual errors
There are a few minor factual errors in the book, which could have been avoided with a little more diligence and care by the writer [here the review cites a number of mistakes regarding the identification of individuals, organisational matters and historical questions].
Another problem with the presentation is that several allegations are made regarding the activities of the Maoists by some police officials and political leaders, while no opportunity is available to the former to refute these allegations. When an author quotes these officials it will also be the bounden duty to get the response from the Maoists. Or else, it would mislead the people and amounts to gross injustice to the other side in the ongoing war. For instance, the superintendent of police of Dantewada district, Prabir Kumar Das, alleges that Maoists are against development and do not allow bore-wells to be sunk in their stronghold villages. He is quoted as saying: "When we entered an area 50 kilometres from here, deep inside, we found they had broken hand pumps. Initially, we thought it was to deny police water. Later, when we went to areas we hadn't been to before, there too the pumps were broken. Villagers told us that they were asked by the Maoists to drink only from wells and other natural water sources." The rationale of the Maoists, behind this move, is attributed to their perception of bore-wells as a sign of oppression (!!) "Hand pumps were provided by the state or NGOs with state funding; they were a sign of oppression, and therefore taboo" says this gentleman.
Nothing could be farther from truth. This even goes against common sense, which the top police brains in India pitifully lack. How can the Maoists (the police can at least get their own mineral bottles), survive if they break the hand-pumps? If the author had verified the facts by touring the areas deep inside it would have been really useful in exposing the deliberate concoctions of the police chief. And all this is only to justify the brutal state-sponsored terror campaign in the name of salwa judum with the pretext that the villagers are fed up with Maoist attempts to block development schemes and such trash.
The writer comes to the conclusion that the Maoist movement will soon encompass the urban areas and mobilize the vast masses of the have-nots living in the most distressing conditions in the slums and factories. He rightly says that all the material conditions for the spread of Maoists to the urban areas exist there. He includes entire sections from the document of the CPI(Maoist), "Perspective of Urban Areas", as an appendix and quotes extensively from this document to prove how the Maoists will emerge as a strong urban force too.
The author also tries to place his own theories of In-Land, Out-Land, City States, etc., which he says will characterize the country’s social scenario in the future. Or in other words, that India will increasingly be divided into two: one inhabited by the haves and the other by have-nots, with continuous friction between the two. Although the essence of his thesis will be the unfolding reality – the pointers to this division are already emerging with the fast multiplying expressways, multiplexes, shopping malls, super fast trains, amusement parks, high cost of education, housing and health, drastic cuts in social welfare schemes, and so on – the emerging scenario will be one of acute class struggle with the vast majority of the Indian population locked up in bitter struggles, armed and unarmed, against the exploitative set-up, and fascist state dictatorship becoming the norm. In this cruel, bitter class war the Maoist movement is certain to gain ground and advance towards the goal of liberation of our country from the clutches of the imperialist marauders, decadent feudal forces and comprador big business sharks.
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