The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Why fears of a foreign hand are real

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : Why fears of a foreign hand are real

Why fears of a foreign hand are real

ARUN KUMAR

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India
politics

There are enough reasons to suspect that companies overseas influence Indian politics

Pranab Mukherjee is likely to be India’s next President. It seemed to be touch and go until the tide turned in his favour. It has been suggested that the corporates swung it for him not because he is one of the most seasoned Indian politicians but because they wanted him out of the Ministry of Finance. He has acted tough on retrospective taxation and GAAR – the measures in his recent budget to tackle black income generation. But it would not be surprising if the real pressure was from foreign shores. Indian corporates are sensitive to what their foreign counterparts think. So is our political leadership. Britain and Netherlands exerted strong influence on the Vodafone case. How much of our politics is being determined by such pressures?

Pressure on polity

Several recent events testify that pressure is certainly being exerted on the polity: Hillary Clinton’s visit to India to influence the government’s policies on trade with Iran and on FDI in retail, the S&P downgrade of India, the Aircel Maxis deal. There are also less visible cases of foreign pressure as in defence purchases (the British were upset at our rejection of the Eurofighter), energy sector investments (oil, gas and nuclear), opening of markets and so on.

The Bofors scam has had a continuing impact on politics since 1987. Sten Lindstrom, the former head of the Swedish police who led the investigations into the Bofors-India howitzer deal, recently underlined that there was conclusive evidence that Ottavio Quattarocchi, a close friend of the Nehru-Gandhi family, was one of the recipients of kickbacks. His role in swinging the Bofors deal at the last minute was known. It is not in doubt that payoffs were made or that the Bofors guns are good. The only unsettled issue is who got the money.

That Mr. Quattrochi had powerful friends was confirmed when he was allowed to escape the country during the Congress rule. The case was apparently deliberately spoilt by the investigative agencies, including the CBI and, therefore, lost in the courts — in Malaysia, Britain and Argentina. The red corner notice against him “could not be executed” since our police agencies could not “find” him even though journalists could interview him.

Evidence points to a high level cover up. M.S. Solanki, then the External Affairs Minister, sacrificed his Cabinet berth rather than reveal what he wrote in the paper he passed on to the Swiss counterpart at a meeting. At that point of time, the Swiss bank accounts were being investigated by the Indian agencies to trace the Bofors payoff trail. Could such a sacrifice of a political career be for an ordinary leader?

Who took the money even if not Rajiv Gandhi and why did the investigative agencies spoil the case? Investigations are essential to clear the air about these questions. A former Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office mentioned to this author in an interview on the black economy that when he went with the Bofors file to the then Prime Minister, he was told to close the file as it could cause a threat to his life. No wonder, none of the non-Congress Prime Ministers changed the course of investigations to bring them on track and none of the Congress Prime Ministers has wanted the truth to come out.

Kickbacks are common globally. Sweden is one of the least corrupt countries in the world but its corporations have bribed to get contracts as the Bofors case shows. U.S.-based multinational corporations have resorted to bribes in spite of their being illegal under that country’s law. Recently, Walmart admitted to having bribed its way through in Mexico. When the top management learnt of it, rather than exposing corruption, the internal probe was closed. The same Walmart has been trying to enter India. Ms Clinton’s agenda included “persuading” India to open its doors to foreign retail. The only Chief Minister she visited was Mamata Banerjee, the important UPA partner opposing FDI in retail. It is reminiscent of Henry Kissinger and the Secretaries of Energy and Defence flying to India to lobby for Enron in the mid-1990s. Enron admitted to spending $60 million in India, to “educate” policymakers.

It is not just a few MNCs that indulge in corruption or use their governments to apply pressure on policies. MNC banks are known to help Indians take their capital out of India. UBS bank, the largest Swiss bank, was fined $750 million by the U.S. for helping its citizens to keep secret bank accounts. The same UBS bank was allowed entry into India in spite of its known role; was it a reward for helping some powerful people?

Executives of Siemens, a supposedly honest MNC and an important player in India, were indicted in the U.S. in December 2011 for bribery in Argentina. Investigations revealed that the company also made illegal payments to the tune of $1.4 billion from 2001 to 2007 in Bangladesh, China, Russia, Venezuela and other countries. These were often routed via consultants. The company paid fines and fees of $1.6 billion to the U.S. and German governments for the bribes it paid across the globe.

Siemens started bribing soon after the end of World War II to get contracts under the Marshall Plan which were mostly going to the Americans. Since its prosecution, Siemens claims to have appointed Compliance Officers to check bribery. But, with the prevalence of a high degree of illegality internationally, can one company be honest while others are not? How would it win contracts when those in charge expect to be bribed? Since non-transparent processes are set up, at every step, decisions need to be influenced, as seen in the Bofors case or the 2G spectrum allocation.

The Vodafone case is significant. MNCs (Indian and foreign) have used tax havens and tax planning to avoid paying taxes in India. They create a web of holdings to hide the identity of the real owners of a company or who it is being transferred to. In 1985, in the Mcdowell case, the Supreme Court bench observed, “Colourable devices cannot be part of tax planning and it is wrong to encourage or entertain the belief that it is honourable to avoid the payment of tax by resorting to dubious methods”. This judgment was overturned in 2003 inUnion of India vs Azadi Bachao Andolan on the use of the Mauritius route to avoid paying tax in India. Vodafone took advantage of this judgment to successfully argue against having to pay capital gains tax in India on transfer of a company in a tax haven which owned the Indian assets. Mr. Mukherjee was trying to recover lost ground.

Dominant interests

Indian policies have been subject to foreign pressures since the days of the Cold War in the 1950s. But until the mid-1980s, the decisions were accepted as being in the “long-term national interest.” There were accusations in the procurement of the Jaguar aircraft also but these did not create the furore that the Bofors scam did. Since the late 1980s, as in the case of Bofors or the new economic policies in 1991 or the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, sectional or individual interests have become dominant. These have played havoc with national politics. Pressures and counter pressures are mounted through political parties and their leaders and big business.

The lesson is that foreign pressures tend to damage processes that national politics cannot undo. The public is left bewildered by the goings on, as in the present case of selection of the presidential candidate.

(The writer is Chairperson, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Email: arunkumar1000@hotmail.com)

अरविंद लैक्सिकन अब ऑनलाइन

अरविंद लैक्सिकन अब ऑनलाइन

http://arvindlexicon.com/lexicon

पिछले दिनों श्‍लाका पुरस्‍कार से सम्‍मानित वरिष्‍ठ पत्रकार कोशाकार अरविंद कुमार की बहुप्रतीक्षित वेबसाइट अरविंद लैक्सिकन लांच हो गई है. पूर्व में इस वेबसाइट को स्‍वतंत्रता दिवस के दिन 15 अगस्‍त को अथवा हिंदी दिवस 14 सितम्‍बर को लांच किए जाने की योजना थी, परन्‍तु इसे 24 जून को उस समय लांच किया गया जब अरविंद कुमार को श्‍लाका सम्‍मान दिया गया.

अरविंद लैक्सिकन वेबसाइट के दो मुख्य भाग है. अरविंद लैक्सिकन - यह ऑनलाइन हिंदी-इंग्लिश-हिंदी थिसारस-शब्दकोश और भाषाखोजी है. आजकल हर कोई कंप्यूटर पर काम कर रहा है. किसी के पास न तो इतना समय है ना धैर्य कि कोश या थिसारस के भारी भरकम किताबों के पन्ने पलटे. आज चाहिए कुछ ऐसा जो कंप्यूटर पर हो या इंटरनेट पर तथा जल्‍द उपलब्‍ध हो. अभी तक उन की सहायता के लिए कंप्यूटर पर कोई हैंडी और तात्कालिक भाषाई उपकरण या टूल नही था. इसी कमी को देखते हुए अरविंद कुमार ने अरविंद लैक्सिकन को तैयार किया.

Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis_Foreword for the Indian Edition

http://www.daanishbooks.com/products/Following-Marx%3A-Method%2C-Critique%2C-and-Crisis.html

Foreword
For the Indian Edition 

In his notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic, Lenin came to an essential conclusion that I embrace and which is reflected in the essays in this book:

Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later, none of the Marxists understood Marx!! [1]

Lenin’s comment did not drop from the sky. Rather, its germination can be traced in his Philosophical Notebooks; it can be seen in his growing appreciation of Hegel’s conception of the interconnection of all elements (‘the necessary connection of the whole world’, ‘the mutually determinant connection of the whole’) and of Hegel’s dialectical process of reasoning (‘the immanent emergence of distinctions’).[2] ‘The basic idea,’ Lenin observed, ‘is one of genius: that of the universal, all-sided, vital connection of everything with everything and the reflection of this connection — Hegel materialistically turned upside-down — in human concepts, which likewise must be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world.’[3]

But it was not only Hegel’s understanding of the inner connection that Lenin embraced. It was also the recognition of the problems inherent in appearances and therefore the necessity to go beyond appearance. ‘Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract,’ he indicated, ‘does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it.’ This process of abstraction is essential: ‘From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice — such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.’[4] In short, as Hegel stressed, we must go beyond even the regularities in appearances if we are to understand what underlies those regularities. Developing ‘laws’ and theories simply on the basis of empiricism, Lenin learned here, is inherently ‘narrow, incomplete, approximate’.[5]

Reading Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, I was guided through Hegel’s Logic and from there to an understanding of the Grundrisse and Capital. In these collected essays on method, appearance and essence, crisis theory and one-sidedness — as well as in my Beyond Capital and The Socialist Alternative (Lebowitz 2003, 2010), I try to pass on what I have learned. It is my hope that Indian scholars and activists can follow the same path — the one that Lenin pointed to:

Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique.... And purely logical elaboration? It coincides. It must coincide, as induction and deduction in Capita1.[6]
 

For, if there is one thing clear to me, it is that what Lenin called ‘the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object’ has not come to an end, and it has been a great error to believe that we have inherited ‘truth in the form of a dead repose’.[7]


Michael A. Lebowitz
26 April 2010.


References


Lebowitz, Michael A. 2003. Beyond CAPITAL: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.


——. Lebowitz, Michael A. 2010. The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, New York: Monthly Review Press.


Lenin, V.I. 1961. Collected Works, Vol. 38: ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

---

^[1]  Lenin, 1961: 180.

^[2]  Ibid, 97,106.

^[3]  Ibid, 146–7.

^[4]  Ibid, 171.

^[5]  Ibid, 150–1.

^[6]  Ibid, 146–7.

^[7]  Ibid, 195.

Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis

Author: Michael A. LebowitzYear: 2012
Pages: xviii+370pp.
Price: `425
ISBN: 978-81-89654-99-3 (Pb)


About the Book
What does it mean to follow Marx? In this examination of Marx’s methodology combined with specific applications on topics in political economy such as neo-Ricardian theory, analytical Marxism, the falling rate of profit, crisis theory, monopoly capital, advertising and the capitalist state, this volume argues that the failure to understand (or explicit rejection of) Marx’s method has led astray many who consider themselves Marxists. By focusing particularly upon the concept of a totality and the necessary form of appearance of capital as many capitals in competition, Following Marx both demonstrates why Marx insisted that ‘in competition everything is reversed’ and provides a guide for following Marx.


About the Author
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University. His book, Beyond 'Capital': Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004. His Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-first Century has been republished in several languages.

Reviews
“Michael Lebowitz has proven himself time and again to be one of the most inventive of contemporary Marxist writers. This collection, Following Marx, shows him at his full power as theorist, analyst, and polemicist. Marxian political economy is all the better for it today. Orthodox in his approach, but always interesting and unexpected in his conclusions.” —Gregory Albo, York University Department of Political Science

“An outstanding contribution to Marxist theory. It is innovative, clear-sighted and thought-provoking. Lebowitz is one of the most original thinkers of our age.” —Alfredo Saad Filho

“A distinctive voice in socialist theory.” —Colin Barker

“An exciting and major contribution to the renewal of Marxism, and the revival of socialist politics.” —Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

“A major contribution to Marxian thought.” —Tony Smith

“….But Anuradha was different”

Foreword

“….But Anuradha was different”

Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her obvious enthusiasm for the women’s movement in Dandakaranya did not blind her to the problems that women comrades faced within the revolutionary movement. At the time of her death, that is what she was working on — how to purge the Maoist Party of the vestiges of continuing discrimination against women and the various shades of patriarchy that stubbornly persisted among those male comrades who called themselves revolutionary. In the time I spent with the PLGA in Bastar, many comrades remembered her with such touching affection. Comrade Janaki was the name they knew her by. They had a worn photograph of her, in fatigues and her huge trademark glasses, standing in the forest, beaming, with a rifle slung over her shoulder.
She’s gone now — Anu, Avanti, Janaki. And she’s left her comrades with a sense of loss they may never get over. She has left behind this sheaf of paper, these writings, notes and essays. And I have been given the task of introducing them to a wider audience.
It has been hard to work out how to read these writings. Clearly, they were not written with a view to be published as a collection. At first reading they could seem somewhat basic, often repetitive, a little didactic. But a second and third reading made me see them differently. I see them now as Anuradha’s notes to herself. Their sketchy, uneven quality, the fact that some of her assertions explode off the page like hand-grenades, makes them that much more personal. Reading through them you catch glimpses of the mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic but was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustices she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought. Having decided to do something real and urgent for the country she lived in, and the people she lived amongst, in these writings, Anuradha tries to tell us (and herself) why she became a Marxist-Leninist and not a liberal activist, or a radical feminist, or an eco-feminist or an Ambedkarite. To do this, she takes us on a basic guided tour of a history of these movements, with quick thumb-nail analyses of various ideologies, ticking off their advantages and drawbacks like a teacher correcting an examination paper with a thick fluorescent marker. The insights and observations sometimes lapse into easy sloganeering, but often they are profound and occasionally they’re epiphanic — and could only have come from someone who has a razor sharp political mind and knows her subject intimately, from observation and experience, not merely from history and sociology textbooks.
Perhaps Anuradha Ghandy’s greatest contribution, in her writing, as well as the politics she practiced, is her work on gender and on Dalit issues. She is sharply critical of the orthodox Marxist interpretation of caste (‘caste is class’) as being somewhat intellectually lazy. She points out that her own party has made mistakes in the past in not being able to understand the caste issue properly. She critiques the Dalit movement for turning into an identity struggle, reformist not revolutionary, futile in its search for justice within an intrinsically unjust social system. She believes that without dismantling patriarchy and the caste-system, brick, by painful brick, there can be no New Democratic Revolution.
In her writings on caste and gender, Anuradha Ghandy shows us a mind and an attitude that is unafraid of nuance, unafraid of engaging with dogma, unafraid of telling it like it is — to her comrades as well as to the system that she fought against all her life. What a woman she was.

Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Ghandy, and ‘Romantic Marxism’

by Bernard D’Mello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes
1 Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy, edited by Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen, Daanish Books, Delhi, 2011.
2 One should also mention Marx and Engels’ On the Jewish Question (1844) and The German Ideology (1932, writing completed in 1846).
3 See Michael Lowy’s “The Romantic and the Marxist Critique of Modern Civilisation”, Theory and Society, Vol. 16, No. 6 (November 1987), p 892.
4 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954; a reproduction of the first English edition of 1887, edited by Frederick Engels), chapter 10, “The Working Day”, p 233.
5 Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi, “Magdoff-Sweezy and Minsky on the Real Subsumption of Labour to Finance”, 2010, at cemf.u-bourgogne.fr/z-outils/documents/communications%202009/AHE.pdf.
6 Jan Toporowski, “The Wisdom of Property and the Politics of the Middle Classes”, Monthly Review, Vol. 62, Issue 4, September 2010.
7 Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, The Irreversible Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press), 1988, p. 55.
8 Ibid.
9 This is how Marx puts it in chapter 31 on “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”, in Capital, Volume I.

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


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bernard D’Mello is deputy editor, Economic & Political Weekly, and a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

‘Adivasis are always exploited’

Thursday, February 16, 2012

HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times

Mumbai , November 19, 2011

First Published: 01:55 IST(19/11/2011)

Last Updated: 01:57 IST(19/11/2011)

‘Adivasis are always exploited’

Calling for sensitisation of the judiciary towards displacement of tribals in India owing to development projects, former chief justice of Delhi high court, AP Shah, on Friday said, “Adivasis are continuously exploited and dispossessed all over the country for wider economic development”.

Shah was speaking at a function in the city to launch a book on the writings of Anuradha Ghandy, ‘Scripting the change’. Ghandy was a communist activist who died of cerebral malaria in 2008 in Bastar, Jharkhand, while educating the tribals against societal oppression. The book, published on behalf of the Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee, is a compilation of her articles on women, caste and other social issues.

Shah delivered the landmark judgment decriminalising consensual gay sex in 2009. Admitting that he was moved by Ghandy’s writings, Justice Shah read out passages from the book that spoke of abolition of caste oppression and upliftment of the downtrodden. “Tribals today are the most backward people in the country with literacy rate among them being the lowest. They are continuously exploited and dispossessed by the traders, contractors and forest guards who function like rulers of the forests.”

He also termed as unfortunate the 2000 Supreme Court judgment that favoured the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada belt.

Are Other Worlds Possible?

http://www.daanishbooks.com/products/Interrogating-Empires.html

Interrogating Empires

Price: INR650.00 / INR295.00
ISBN: 978-93-81144-02-2 (Hb) / 978-93-81144-03-9 (Pb)
Author(s): Jai Sen (ed.)
Year: 2011
Pages: 342pp.
Publisher: Daanish Books and OpenWord

About the Book

As much as empires exist out there, regulating our lives, they also exist within our minds. Unless we comprehend these empires as being not only ‘out there’ but also as within us, and locate ourselves in relation to them, there is no way in which we can even begin to understand the world, let alone imagine the changes that are required towards making it a more open, just, peaceful, and joyful world.

This book is a close look at some of the empires that govern our lives and that we are constantly socialised to believe in and accept, by society, by family, by education, by the market and the media, and by the institutions we are all part of at one point or another in our lives : The empires of patriarchy, casteism, racism, nationalism, and religious communalism – and where each of these is quite aside from what is popularly referred to as ‘globalisation’, even as they interlock with it.

Organised as five ‘open spaces’ of conversation and debate, each one distilled from the content of seminars organised at the University of Delhi, the Open Space Seminar Series, the book attempts to itself be an open space that challenges readers to engage with themselves and with the worlds around us. The debates also explicitly and implicitly raise the question, and concept, of power – of realms of power, of how power is exercised, and of the nature of power – and therefore also questions of emancipation and of liberation.

At the same time, since these are the major themes or areas of concern of the World Social Forum, the debates also equip us to understand and take part in this important emerging world institution in a far more informed way.

Contents

Introduction: Understanding the world: Interrogating empire and power Jai Sen
Acknowledgements

1 Patriarchy: Sense and Sexuality: Breaking Out
The Power of Patriarchy Uma Chakravarti
Breaking the Silence Pramada Menon
The Politics of Masculinity Shaleen Rakesh
The Open Forum: Breaking Out
A frank and open discussion between Uma Chakravarti, Pramada Menon, Shaleen Rakesh, Delhi University students and faculty, and others

2 Nationalism: Community, Nation, State, War
Understanding Nationalism and Internationalism Today Achin Vanaik
Imagine there's no countries, nothing to kill or die for Rohini Hensman
Cultures of Nationalism Ashis Nandy
Open Forum: Community, Nation, State
An open discussion between Achin Vanaik, Rohini Hensman, Ashis Nandy, Delhi University students and faculty, and others

3 Caste: Meanings and Modes of Struggle
Fighting Back Gail Omvedt
Local and Global : Searching for Resonance V Geetha
Making Caste a Global Issue N Paul Divakar
Transformational Potential? Reading Caste and Law Kalpana Kannabiran
Open Forum : Meanings and Modes of Struggle
A discussion between Gail Omvedt, V Geetha, Paul Divakar, Kalpana Kannabiran, Delhi School of Economics and Delhi University students and faculty, and others

4 Religion: Fundamentalism, Faith, and Reason
The World as One Family Swami Agnivesh
Giving Birth to the World Ashok Vajpeyi
The Power of Reason Purushottam Agarwal
Open Forum: Faith and Reason
An intense exchange between Swami Agnivesh, Ashok Vajpeyi, Purushottam Agrawal, Delhi University students and faculty, and others

5 Globalisation: Imperialism and Empire
The New Imperialism Jayati Ghosh
Imperialist Globalisation versus Global Solidarity Jean Drèze
Changing the Landscape: The Importance of South Asia in Globalisation Mahesh Rangarajan
Open Forum: Imperialism and Empire
An open exchange between Jayati Ghosh, Jean Drèze, Mahesh Rangarajan, Praful Bidwai, Delhi University students and faculty, and others

Glossary
Visual Credits
Index

_____________________________________________________________________
 
http://www.daanishbooks.com/products/Imagining-Alternatives.html

Imagining Alternatives

ISBN: 978-93-81144-14-5 (Hb) Price: INR550.00
ISBN: 978-93-81144-15-2 (Pb) Price: INR250.00
Author(s): Jai Sen (ed.)
Year: 2012
Pages: 243pp.
Publisher(s): Daanish Books and OpenWord
About the Book

The history of the twentieth century … makes it clear that a wide range of ideas have proved to be ‘possible’. Aside from socialism, fascism and Nazism have also been proved to be possible… Instead of just talking about possibilities, we need to talk about desirability, and necessity. … Politics is not merely the art of the possible; it is the science of the desirable, and of necessity.

– Dipankar Bhattacharya, General Secretary,

CPI(ML) Liberation, India

People in social and political movements – especially those involved with the World Social Forum – quite commonly say that “Another world is possible”; a world very different from the one we today know. But what do they mean by this ? What ‘other world/s’ ? Do such worlds only exist in some people’s imaginations ? And even if they are real, how do we get into these other worlds ? And anyway, are such other worlds necessarily more open, more just, and more desirable than the one we know ?

This book, the third in the Are Other World Possible ? book series – and preferably read along with the other two (Talking New Politics and Interrogating Empires) – critically explores three of the more important ‘other worlds’ that human societies have so far tried building: Socialism, Cyberspace, and the University.

The Are Other Worlds Possible ? books have come out of a series of seminars organised in late 2003 at the University of Delhi called the ‘Open Space Seminar Series’ that was conceptualised as preparation for the World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India, in January 2004.

Contents

Proem: Pathways to Alternatives Mukul Mangalik
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Imagining Alternatives: Exploring ways to other worlds Jai Sen

Open Space 1: Socialism: Is Socialism the Only Possible Other World?
Rethinking Socialism Dunu Roy
Socialism is both Necessary and Desirable Dipankar Bhattacharya
Women, Freedom, and Emerging Worlds Kumkum Sangari
Open Forum: Is Socialism the Only Possible Other World? A frank and open discussion between Dunu Roy, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Kumkum Sangari, Delhi University students and faculty, and others

Open Space 2: Cyberspace: Dreams of Other Worlds
The Politics of Knowledge Sharing Suddhabrata Sengupta
New Technology in an Old Social Order C K Raju
Open Forum: The Promise of Cyberspace An open exchange between Suddhabrata Sengupta, other members of Sarai, and others

Open Space 3: The University: How Open? Open for Whom?
A Culture of Closedness, A Struggle for Openness Anita Ghai
Under Threat : Open Space as Freedom Nandita Narain
Open Forum: The University as Open Space An open space for the presentation of diverse perceptions of the university as open space by people at different margins of a university, responding to and taking off from the presentations by Janaki Abraham, Anita Ghai, and Nandita Narain

Apunba : Steps towards Critical Engagement Madhuresh Kumar
Creating Open Spaces Vanessa Andreotti
Open Space and Liminality : Notes on Sexualising the University Oishik Sarkar

Glossary
Visual Credits
Index

New Books from Daanish — February 2012

http://www.daanishbooks.com/products/Scripting-the-Change%3A-Selected-Writings-of-Anuradha-Ghandy.html

Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy

ISBN: 978-93-81144-10-7 (Hb) Price: INR700.00
ISBN: 978-93-81144-11-4 (Pb) Price: INR350.00
Author(s): Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen (eds.)
Year: 2012[2011]
Pages: xxiv+480

About the Book

In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Gandhy was what is known as a ‘Maoist terrorist,’ liable to be arrested, or, more likely, shot in a fake ‘encounter’ like hundreds of her colleagues have been … Reading through [her writings]… you catch glimpses of a mind of someone who could have been a serious scholar or academic who was overtaken by her conscience and found it impossible to sit back and merely theorize about the terrible injustice she saw around her. These writings reveal a person who is doing all she can to link theory and practice, action and thought.

— Arundhati Roy, New Delhi

Anuradha Ghandy’s life and work stands as an example for a generation of Indian revolutionaries. But more than that she has directly contributed to the development of the Indian revolutionary movement in significant ways. Take the caste issue. Anuradha was one of the new generations of revolutionaries that in practical political activity gained and formulated an insight that helped the movement to move forward from the former narrow economism in the perception of caste of the old CPI to a new and broader understanding of the class role of the superstructure. ...her writing contains much more. It is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the present situation in India.

— Jan Myrdal, Sweden

Contents

Preface
Foreword: “….But Anuradha was different” Arundhati Roy
Remembering Anuradha Ghandy: Friend, Comrade, Moving Spirit

Section 1: Caste

Introduction
Caste Question in India
The Caste Question Returns
Movements against Caste in Maharashtra
When Maharashtra Burned for Four Days
Dalit Fury Scorches Maharashtra: Gruesome Massacre of Dalits
Mahars as Landholders

Section 2: Women

Introduction
Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement
The Revolutionary Women’s Movement in India
8 March and the Women’s Movement in India
International Women’s Day: Past and Present
Fascism, Fundamentalism and Patriarchy
Changes in Rape Law: How far will they Help?
Cultural Expression of the Adivasi Women in the Revolutionary Movement
In Conversation with Comrade Janaki
Working Class Women: Making the Invisible Visible
Women Bidi Workers and the Co-operative Movement: A Study of the Struggle in the Bhandara District Bidi Workers’ Co-operative

Section 3: Miscellaneous

Introduction
A Pyrrhic Victory: Government Take-Over of Empress Mills
Empress Mills: What Misstatements?
Inchampalli-Bhopalapatnam Revisited
Season: Tendupatta; Pimp: The State
Can Revolution be prevented by Blocking the Roads to Kamalapur?
Gagging People’s Culture
People’s Struggles in Bastar
The Bitter Lessons of Khaparkheda
Working Class Anger Erupts
Workers’ Upsurge against Changes in Labour Laws
Prices Make the Poor Poorer
Rape and Murder — ‘Law And Order’ of the Day
A Time to Remember
Brahmin Sub-Inspector Tramples Dalit Flag
Small Magazines: A Significant Expression of the People’s Culture
Deaths in Police Custody in Nagpur
Cotton Flower … the Best Flower! … ?
Practical Socialism: Not Socialism but Pure Fascism

Index

____________________________________________________________________
 
http://www.daanishbooks.com/products/From-Varna-to-Jati%3A-Political-Economy-of-Caste-in-Indian-Social-Formation-%E2%80%94-Commemorating-Scholar-and-Revolutionary-Martyr-Yalavarthi-Naveen-Babu.html

From Varna to Jati: Political Economy of Caste in Indian Social Formation — Commemorating Scholar and Revolutionary Martyr Yalavarthi Naveen Babu

Price: INR175.00
ISBN: 978-81-89654-59-4 (Pb)
Author(s): Yalavarthi Naveen Babu (edited by B. Ramesh Babu)
Year: 2012[2008]
Pages: xvi+144pp.________________________________________

About the Book

This commemorative volume is based on Yalavarthi Naveen Babu’s M.Phil dissertation in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Using the more dynamic conception of jati as opposed to a static Western understanding of ‘caste,’ Naveen Babu traces its history in the social, cultural and economic aspects of the formation of ‘Varna into jati’ from the Rg-Vedic period to the end of 20th century. He demonstrates how these changes were grounded into the changing modes of production and its accompanying social formation. Naveen Babu’s work is a modest but significant interdisciplinary contribution to Indian Marxist historiography, sociology and political economy. It is relevant, not only for a scientific understanding of caste, but also for contemporary social movements against the caste and class divided Indian society. It is hoped that readers of this book will be further motivated to dig deeper into the complexity of the present social formation that embodies the subcontinent.

Other contributors include sociologist Prof. Yogendra Singh, political scientist Prof. Manorajan Mohanty, revolutionary poet Dr. Vara Vara Rao and Naveen’s friends and contemporaries, including the Editor, B. Ramesh Babu, a biotechnologist, entrepreneur and a faculty at Wayne State University, USA.

Yalavarthi Naveen Babu, fondly known to his friends as Naveen, was born in a middle caste, middle peasant family on 29 May 1964 in Guddikayalanka village, Repalle Mandal, Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. After schooling, Naveen moved to the state capital, Hyderabad, where he completed his intermediate and B.Sc. from Babu Jagjivan Ram College, and later moved to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, where he completed his MA in Sociology. His M.Phil dissertation, for which he was awarded his degree in 1989, is published as such in the initial part of this book. He enrolled for Ph.D. under Prof. Yogendra Singh, but discontinued later as he could not devote enough time for his thesis work due to his increasing commitment for political activism. Since early 1990s, he became a full-time activist of CPI-ML (Peoples’ War), now known as CPI (Maoist), and grew up fast in its ranks to the Central Committee level through his scholarly understanding of issues, pleasant personality and revolutionary fervour. He was martyred on 18th February 2000 in Darakonda, a village near Visakhapatnam, AP.



Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface M. Nadarajah

I. Academic Contribution of Naveen Babu

Reinterpreting Caste and Social Change: A Review Ramesh Babu and M. Nadarajah
Conceptual and Methodological Issues Yogendra Singh
From Varna to Jati: Transformation from Pastoral to Agrarian Social Formation Yalavarthi Naveen Babu

II. Commemoration of Naveen Babu

A Biography of Y. Naveen Babu B. Ramesh Babu
Remembering Naveen Babu Manoranjan Mohanty
A Life Dedicated to the People’s Cause Vara Vara Rao
Naveen, Friendship’s Gift to Me M. Nadarajah
My Friend, Naveen Babu S. Samuel Asir Raj
Pleasant Radical: Yalavarthi Naveen Babu Bhupendra Yadav