Can Socialism Survive Human Nature?

5 02 2008

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The single greatest image which captured the end of the Socialist State system of the 20th century was the sight of hundreds of thousands of Germans breaking down the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall had been built in 1961 to stop residents of Communist East Berlin crossing over to capitalist West Berlin. Despite the barbed wire, watch-towers, attack-dogs and gun-totting sentries a few thousand people “escaped” from East Berlin to the West over the three decades of this Wall’s existance, each successful escape producing a hero and each killing on the Wall producing a “martyr”. The Berlin Wall became a metaphor for imprisoning an entire population and it was a distressing fact that this was being done by a State which claimed to champion the ideals of Karl Marx.

This column has earlier spoken about the endemic lack of freedom in the socialist States of the 20th Century (4, April, 2007). In a sense, they had made a Faustian bargain with what Marx had called “the characterless monster of unfreedom” in their attempt to protect their revolution. It has not only been the socialist revolutions which ended up denying freedom to their people, but this has been the unhappy chronicle of almost all modern liberatory revolutions. As this column has recounted over the past three weeks, similar was the case with the revolution of Haiti too, which in 1804 achieved freedom from slavery and colonialism, but is today wracked by poverty, imperialist plunder and oppressive rulers. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column

The Destruction of Haiti

31 01 2008

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Haiti is today a country broken by poverty, destitution and hopelessness. A country which was once the biggest source of colonial plunder – providing France with £ 11 million out of its total trade of £ 17 million in 1789 – is today the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, eighty percent of whose population lives below the poverty line. The country, whose slave army repeatedly defeated the mightiest European armies of the 18th and 19th centuries, is today without an army of its own. A land famous for its forests and agricultural produce is today denuded of all its forests and can’t grow enough to feed itself. The Haitian State itself verges on the brink of collapse and cannot survive without the crutches of Aid dollars and the UN military force.

How did the first colony of the modern world to free itself come to this sorry pass? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, Politics, The Post Column, War and Imperialism

The Successful Failure of Haiti’s Revolution

23 01 2008

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As this column recounted last week, Haiti was the first colony of the modern world to win freedom. What is even more astounding is that when Haiti declared independence from France on January 1, 1804, its army – composed of slaves who had been brought from Africa – had defeated the armies of France, Great Britain and Spain in the span of 13 years.

I would argue that Haiti was the completion of the process that began with the American War of Independence about three decades earlier. The American War of Independence was fought on the principle of self-rule and against colonial subjugation. It raised the slogan of “No taxation without Representation” and stated that all countries were equal and one could not subjugate the other. The French Revolution extended this principle of self-rule, which the American War of Independence had established between countries, to the domestic sphere. The French Revolution stated that not only were all countries equal to one another, but all people residing inside the country were also legally equal and free. There could be no political authority on earth that was higher than the citizen. While these revolutions have justly been hailed as the pioneers of our modern regime of rights and freedoms, what is forgotten is that these revolutions remained confined to the white man and did not extend these rights to either the non-whites or to women. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, Mobilisation and Movements, Politics, The Post Column, War and Imperialism

The First Revolution of the Third World: Haiti

15 01 2008

“Won’t you help to sing

These songs of freedom…”

Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbeans, is today one of the poorest countries in the world. The State itself is weak, without any army and crumbling infrastructure, Haiti practically lives of the sharp philanthropy of Western Aid agencies. But hidden behind the poverty, destitution and fragile State which presents itself to the contemporary visitor, lies one of the greatest anti-colonial struggles of the third world. When Haiti won independence from France in 1804, it was the first colony of the modern world to win freedom. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, Mobilisation and Movements, The Post Column, War and Imperialism

The Coming Revolution in Pakistan – II

9 01 2008

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Last week this column had posited that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was the culmination of a long series of failures by the Pakistani ruling class to manage the contradictions inherent in a State based on strong landed property with a weak industrial base. The column argued that such conditions created a predilection for the use of brute repression (the strategy of the stick) to deal with popular demands and undermined the possibility of democratic institutions gaining ground. The column further argued that this predilection was conditioned by the structural limitations that landholding imposes on the political strategy that a ruling class can adopt vis-à-vis the demands of the masses.

These structural limitations are the falling rate of return on primary products in global trade and the physical difficulty of dividing landed wealth among new aspirants to the ruling class. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, India - Pakistan, Muslims and Islam, Politics, Religion, Secularism, Secularisation, The Post Column

The Coming Revolution in Pakistan – I

1 01 2008

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Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is perhaps as significant a turning point in the history of Pakistan as was the assassination of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and of Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali. In a sense these three killings form three significant watersheds in the political history of Pakistan and each represent the culmination of the failure of the country’s ruling class to successfully manage the contradictions of their time. What is particularly significant is that each assassination, built as it was on the failure of the previous attempt to overcome contradictions, has been more calamitous for the country than the previous one. Today, in the opinion of this columnist, it’s a situation of do or die for Pakistan as a nation and its citizens as a people. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, India - Pakistan, Muslims and Islam, Politics, The Post Column

The Courage of the Traitor

7 11 2007

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By the beginning of the 20th century the world had been divided into colonies. The Western Hemisphere was a colony of the USA while Africa and Asia were divided between Britain, France and Russia. As the new industrial power – Germany – emerged on the foundations of Bismarckian rule, it found itself bereft of colonies to plunder for its growing industrial appetite. This laid the foundation for the first global war or World War I in 1914. Germany had formed a military alliance with Austria-Hungary and the Turkish empire while the older colonialists – Britain, France and Russia – formed the rival bloc.

When open hostilities finally broke out in 1914, each side hoped to win a decisive victory over its opponents which would provide the victors with the colonies and territories of the defeated powers as trophy. Fired by the most brazen national chauvinisms, people in each country rose up to fight for what was drummed up as their national rights and hundreds of thousands of young men marched happily to their death in the name of national glory. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column

The Anti-Growth Manifesto V (The relevance of Socialism)

31 10 2007

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For the past few weeks, this column has been arguing that constant economic growth is not only un-achievable but also deeply undesirable.

Unachievable because it is impossible to have unlimited growth in a planet of limited resources. With human population creeping close to seven billion, we collectively consume about a quarter of the world’s biomass but this only satisfies about a fifth of our energy and natural resource hunger. So we are happily mining away the non-renewable resources of petroleum, coal, gas, iron and other metals. This is a situation when an overwhelming majority of the world’s human population lives on less than US $ 2 a day or in utter poverty. Imagine the extraction of natural and non-renewable resources if every one of this blessed planet’s seven billion people lived the life of a West European or North American? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Back-of-the-envelope Economics, Energy and Environment, Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column

The Anti-Growth Manifesto IV (The Energy Trap)

17 10 2007

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As this column has pointed out a few times in the past, hydrocarbons have been the material foundation on which continuous and limitless economic growth – so characteristic of our industrial societies – is based. It may be useful to recap the main points before we move further.

Hydrocarbons provide concentrated energy in small packets. One litre of petroleum concentrates the energy from 23 tonnes of prehistoric plant matter. Coal, though less energy efficient, is still far superior to charcoal or fresh wood as an energy source. Not only do these hydrocarbons provide high levels of energy, being carbon-based, they are useful for a range of other products for our use like fertilisers, plastics, textiles, medicines and cosmetics, among others. Further, hydrocarbons are easily transportable and storable over time, while at the same time being available in sufficient quantities for globally pervasive, if unequal, use for a few centuries before they run out. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Back-of-the-envelope Economics, Energy and Environment, The Post Column

The Anti-Growth Manifesto III (Technology: The Universal Solvent)

10 10 2007

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Irrespective of the particular religious affiliation we profess, all of us are in reality worshippers at the temple of technology. From the Osama bin Ladens in the Tora Bora caves to the Christian fundamentalist Bushies ensconced in arrogant Washington, from the smug liberal to the all-sacrificing communist, there is hardly a person in our world who does not bow down in reverence to the all powerful deity of technology and its omniscient promise of providing a solution to all our troubles in this problem-ridden world. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Politics, Pop goes the Culture, The Post Column

The Anti-Growth Manifesto – II (The Need for Speed)

3 10 2007

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The two week absence of the Left~write column was caused by the sudden death of my brother-in-law in a road accident in the city of Baroda (India). A young man of 42, he leaves behind an uncomprehending daughter who is not yet seven, a distressed wife and distraught parents. It is difficult to come to terms with the hurt and loss this has caused, especially since it seems so avoidable and inexplicable. ‘Why?’ is the question in everyone’s mind. But even in our moment of sadness it is sobering to realise that close to a 100,000 people die in similar road accidents in India each year. Each death a catastrophe for the family. Globally close to 800,000 people die annually in road accidents, a figure that is expected to touch a million by 2010. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Demography, Energy and Environment, Marxism and Marxists, Pop goes the Culture, The Post Column

The Anti-Growth Manifesto – I

12 09 2007

Sherlock Holmes, that immortal detective of Victorian England is perhaps among the best teachers of the methodology of research. As he proceeded to unravel one crime after the other, Mr Holmes left behind a treasure-trove of tools of investigation that stand any social scientist in good stead when he investigates human society. In the famous novel, Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes says, “The world is full of obvious things, which nobody by any chance ever observes,” and in Boscombe Valley Mystery, he observes, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Energy and Environment, Marxism and Marxists, The Post Column

The Tragedy and Heroism of 9/11

5 09 2007

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On the morning of September 11, 1973, a little before 9:00 am, US-manufactured air force planes attacked the presidential palace of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. This was part of the CIA-sponsored coup d’état led by the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. In the face of a massive attack using tanks, infantry and air force planes, Salvador Allende refused to surrender or run away, defending the presidential palace and Chilean democracy with a gun in his hand. Surrounded and with no chance of defeating the enemy, Allende preferred death rather than be taken prisoner by the usurper generals in the pay of US imperialism. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : History, Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column, War and Imperialism

Nation: Another Solidarity is Possible

29 08 2007

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Over the past two weeks this column has tried to demonstrate the futility, rather danger, of continuing with the Nation and its “ism” as a political community in today’s world. While some readers may even be willing to accept the logic of this secular heresy, the common response would be, what is the alternative? What political community is possible other than the Nation in today’s world? Would it not be a costly political mistake to attempt a destruction of the Nation when there is no alternative? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Energy and Environment, Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column, War and Imperialism

The Narrow Domestic Walls of Nationalism

22 08 2007

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India, by most accounts, is seen as among the more successful examples of post-colonial nationhood. Former leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, a working democracy which has managed to retain the secular nature of its state, a successful economy which is now an “emergent superpower”, India is being feted globally on completing 60 years of its independent nationhood. Even a look at the colonial period indicates that the moulding of the peoples living under the British rule into a nation called India was a creative exercise in achieving freedom. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : India - Pakistan, Marxism and Marxists, Politics, The Post Column

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