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On first reckoning this would seem a truly indefensible proposition. Not only does it fly in the face of the most basic common sense, it is an idea so seemingly audacious as not to even merit consideration. Hypocrisy, in contemporary life, has been raised to the status of the seven deadly sins. What could ever be the defence of an action that goes against the very principle which it professes? Read the rest of this entry »
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Assertion of caste identity has increasingly become the favoured mode of agitation for rights by the working people of India. In fact, there has been no significant class based agitation of the working people since the first half of the 1970s. This shift has been paralleled by the retreat of the Left led mass agitations as well as the retreat of the Left organisational growth into its governmental enclaves of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. This is not to deny the existence of various left led movements in various parts of the country, some of them successful too, but none of these have been able to leave a lasting impact either on long term State policy, nor on political correlations. Read the rest of this entry »
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One of the central insights of Marxism is that it demonstrated the incompatibility of interests between those who own property and those who are property-less. The former are called Bourgeois while the latter are the Proletariat. The former is numerically small but controls large amounts of capital and property, while the large mass of property-less workers have no means of survival, other than to sell their labour power to the propertied. The workers, typically, own nothing of productive use but work on the machines owned by the capitalist and are paid a wage at the end of their labour. Without wage employment the workers would not survive. This necessity of selling their labour power to survive enslaves them to the capitalists, which explains the universal resonance of Marx’s famous exhortation, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains”. Read the rest of this entry »
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As this column argued last week, caste has been the historically specific form for expressing class division in the social formation of pre-modern, feudal South Asia. In its form of Jati, it developed parallel to the establishment of the specifically South Asian form of feudalism and received a detailed legal and ideological foundation in the Manusmriti texts compiled about a millennium and half ago.
Each caste was composed of people who were confined to a clearly defined work or occupation and each caste was placed either superior to or in subordination to other castes. Since each caste was linked to a particular work or occupation, it was not possible for social life to continue without the economic cooperation of all castes with each other, even though there were fairly severe restrictions on their social interaction. This reduced the ability of the direct producers – Shudras and the outcastes – to combine in large numbers to oppose oppression or persecution. Therefore, as was mentioned last week, one of the typical forms of lower class revolt in South Asia in pre-modern times has been migration. Read the rest of this entry »
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Review of Socialist Register 2007, titled Coming to Terms with Nature; edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The Merlin Press, London, 2006; published in India by Leftword Books, New Delhi, 2007, pp. xv+363, Rs. 250. This review was published in Down To Earth, 15 June 2007.
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The Socialist Register has come to acquire a special place, globally, as an annual document bringing together state-of-the-art thinking within the left. Therefore it is both a welcome step, and one somewhat surprising, that finally in its 43rd edition the Social Register focuses exclusively on issues relating to the environment and the human – nature relation. Read the rest of this entry »
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Just as geography is a visible yet unobserved presence in the story of our past and present, we cannot live a moment without class – the social expression of economic relations of production – impinging on our reality. Yet, more often than not, it is either ignored or denied its rightful role in historical explanations. Read the rest of this entry »
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There is perhaps none who does not rail against corruption and its baneful impact on the country’s economy as well as on its social fabric. Governments pledge to stop and eradicate it, middle class drawing rooms discuss its baneful influence on national life, the press continues to expose its prevalence, religious leaders and moralists preach against it, while courts of law and the police express their inability to stamp it out. From the helper in a Government office to some of the top functionaries of our Governments, almost everyone seems implicated. Paul Wolfowitz, the soon-to-be-past president of the World Bank, has surely helped to underline the universality of this scourge across country and ethnicity. Read the rest of this entry »
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Democracy, geographic distance and demographic divergence have provided the necessary conditions for the unity of India despite its massive poverty, but these have been merely necessary conditions for its survival. Still, this does not explain the success of its economy. What does? Read the rest of this entry »
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In the past few columns I have tried to argue that democracy, and the universalisation of the democracy idea, demands a rethink from Marxists and communists about their political practice. Today, I will try to conclude this series of articles by attempting to show that it is not merely the question of democracy, but the very development of capitalism which demands such a rethink. Read the rest of this entry »
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If my column last week had spoken about the importance Marx gave to freedom of thought and expression, it is also necessary to answer why he supported the idea of “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (proletariat = working class). Does not this idea of “dictatorship” of the working class negate individual freedom? In fact, most critics of Marxism identify this concept of “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as the root of the authoritarianism and totalitarianism of communist societies. Read the rest of this entry »
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In his famous book, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks of a function to praise Stalin where everyone got up and started clapping after the tribute was read out. The clapping went on, as no one wanted to be the first to stop. No one dared, as the secret police was watching to see who would quit first. This was their way of identifying who the independent-minded people were. Finally, after more than 10 minutes of unceasing applause, the director of the factory where the function was being organised stopped clapping and sat down. As if on cue, the entire congregation stopped clapping and sat down. Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that the director was arrested that same night.
While Solzhenitsyn has been dismissed by supporters of the Soviet Union as a Western agent, this account seems believable because there are so many other, more objective, records of the lack of freedom of thought and expression in the Soviet Union and other communist states. Read the rest of this entry »
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On this day (28 March), in 1871 the citizens of Paris proclaimed the first socialist government of this world. The Paris Commune, as it came to be called, was an epoch making effort by the workers and middle classes of Paris to build a new form of government which would be democratic, just and transcend the narrow walls of nationalism.
This column pointed out last week that ideologies and politics which deny the equality of men and women are growing stronger in today’s world despite women having gained unprecedented political rights and social acceptance for public activity. Read the rest of this entry »
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(The first part of this article can be seen here)
This column ended last week by arguing that women’s struggle for equality cannot be fought independent of the larger struggle for human equality. Does that imply that an independent women’s movement is not desirable? That it could actually be self-defeating in the longer run? Would celebrating the International Women’s Day (which falls tomorrow) split the unity required to struggle for human emancipation by disconnecting women’s issues from larger concerns? Read the rest of this entry »
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Newspapers for the past few days have been carrying reports of riots and firefights between anarchist squatters and police in Copenhagen, Denmark over control of a 19th century building now called the Ungdomshuset or “youth house”. It appears that this municipal building was given to young people in the 1970s and since then has been the site for a vibrant “alternative” youth culture in Copenhagen.
The Guardian makes a brief mention of the fact that this building was constructed by the Danish labour movement in the last years of the 19th century and hosted Vladimir Lenin. We’ll come to that later, but what is most interesting, ironic even, for me is that two days before International Women’s Day the building where this idea was first conceived is being pulled down. Read the rest of this entry »
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