I'm going to just speak for you know a
little bit of time and I'll tell maybe four different I have four different
pieces of this presentation I'll give you the names of the pieces in case you want to keep track They are condition, facts, politics and anachronism Now is interesting that the last one is anachronism for a talk whose name is the
necessity of communism so just get ready for anachronism. Condition... you know before we met I was in Delhi working as a journalist and there were two landmark
events that struck me at that time I mean of course perhaps personally for me
the most important event was the anti-sikh riot of 1984 When 3,006 were killed, massacred, butchered really in Delhi over a weekend. That was a very monumental part of my life and I
really like would like you to see my my cousin sister's film called Ammu
it's a terrific film we were both deeply marked by that pogrom and my first book
actually was about the killers as it were I went to study the so-called
killers of the Sikhs in 1984 in Delhi and then I discovered that the story is
more complicated but in the early 90s there were two incidents that really
marked my understanding of what was happening in India of course there was
the collapse of the Soviet Union but inside India
one was that Manmohan Singh in Bangkok decided to announce that India was going
to the IMF you might remember that he made the announcement in Bangkok and we
all the people who were reading the press releases discovered that all the
Spelling's were American and we thought you know well obviously this document is
written by some yank and you know facts to Manmohan Singh and he read it out
because you know they were c-o-l-o-r I don't know why colour was in there but
I'm just giving that example maybe they were flavor I don't know what but they
were all American spellings so that was interesting
India going to the IMF you may not remember that India actually
airlifted gold to the Bank of London physically lifted gold I mean think of
the vulgarity of this you know there is no England it's a petty useless little
island you know if not from the wealth that it's stole from not only South Asia
but of course the Caribbean and you know from enslavement of African people and
you know this pathetic little island If it hadn't stolen all this from the world
it would never have had the kind of wealth that it had I mean there's no way
they would have had an industrial revolution without the value that it had
extracted from the bodies of enslaved people and mines in which Amerindians in
Potosí and so on you know worked basically for free for Britain for John
Bull for Queen Victoria so that they could give us famines so they could
destroy our way of life and so on and yet when India had a balance of
payments shortfall in July of 1991 gold had to be sent to England so that India
could get a bridge loan that struck me as the continuation of colonialism you
know whatever people say there was something obscene about that Soviet Union might have collapsed but this obscenity of capitalism was still front and center a problem the second thing that occurred was in Sea Lumpur in '93 I was again a young journalist covering the riots of Sea Lumpur after the
destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6th 1992 and in Sea Lumpur
there was a curfew because there there was basically massacre of Muslims taking
place and during the curfew I headed a temple one of the nights and a few maybe
an hour after I was in the temple there was a big banging on the door this group
of killers came in and it struck me as they looked kind of ordinary you know they
had their machetes their knives and they smelled have sort of sweat and I guess
the smell of human blood and we had to all sleep in the same place together
well a few hours later there was another knock on the door now remember it's a
shoot-at-sight curfew and if you know anything about the
Indian you know Constabulary including the
border security force which was out around Delhi at that time that they take
this damn shoot-at-sight order seriously so there was an old woman at
the door and she handed a small packet to one of these men and he handed it to
the leader who was quite a Mustang type guy you know he was like a wrestler you
know bold tough looking guy well it was his mother and she had delivered this
package for him well he takes the package and he opens it and he takes out
the stuff and then he shoots himself in the veins and of course it's his heroin
and I'm sitting there thinking this is wrong I mean these are people who've
just massacred other people and he's a heroin addict there is something deeply
wrong in our civilization there is something deeply wrong in a civilization committed increasingly to social labor and private accumulation it was obvious
that India was going to get much more unequal when all the different you know
however pathetic those social welfare programs were as they were all getting
dismantled you knew that there was going to be a serious crisis in the country
you know that capitalism is intelligent that it tries to conceal from the masses
of people this contradiction between social labor and private accumulation
you know that increasingly intellectuals are going to move from being
intellectuals of the good side of history to being intellectuals on the
bad side of history that they're going to be out there doing at least two
things one they become intellectuals of capitalism finding new ways to get
people to work harder to work less you know whether it's people who work on you
know Taylorism things like that but also finance intellectuals of finance trying
to squeeze more out of people's you know inability to create a livelihood but
then there's a second set of intellectuals who create desire, aspirations, advertising people you know these are also intellectuals who come in
and create a new cultural universe more people entering the private media
landscape this was already clear to us in the news media I started off as a
news reporter for New Delhi television then it was called the world this week I
had really super colleagues you might know some of them one of them was
mentioned earlier has dibs on this side it was a small office and then of course
the great genius and one of the most intelligent Indians who's ever been born
Arnab Goswami so you know we were a very small office and there was you know
Chief Minister Erna who had already become an expert in terrorism he had
written a book which he used to try to flock to us every day you know you
already knew that something terrible was going to happen in the media landscape
that a construction of an immense falsity of desire was going to take
place and there was going to be an exercise of concealing from the masses
the reality of social labor and private accumulation this is a degeneracy that
was creeping into society and it was quite clear that this new intellectual
class including this new political class people like Lord Krishna Advani who you
know now sorry like George W Bush is getting rehabilitated but Lara Krishna
Advani was a venomous character, hateful man you know these are the intellectuals
who orchestrated the idea of scapegoating in society this is not a
new idea for places like India but the velocity
of scapegoating was going to intensify this was very clear to us part one conditions, part two facts there are 1.3 billion people roughly in India
according to a McKinsey study 700 million of them go hungry every day or
at least don't know when the next meal is coming from that's about one in two
Indians roughly 300 million Indians very conservative number wouldn't be able to
read that McKinsey report 240 million Indians wouldn't be able to read that
report at night because they don't have electricity and stunningly 1 million
Indians enter the sewers of the country every year
to clear them manually despite the fact that there is equipment to do this work
1 million Indians there are more poor people in India than
in the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa India is one of the poorest places on
the planet Earth there are also millionaires there are also nuclear bombs there's also Narendra Modi now a hundred years ago I think last week
Gandhi okay Gandhi here I am you know I don't know what's the name for me now
let's orthodox Marxist or vulgar whatever these are all nice names vulgar
is fine actually I think I actually like vulgar vulgarity has a certain nice ring to it you see because you can be honest then Ghandi about a hundred years
ago said something quite beautiful in .... College in Pune he said the test of
civilization of a country is not the number of millionaires it has but the
absence of starvation among its people now a 100 years later it's clear India's
failed this moral test so very elegant simple test
Indian has totally failed part two facts, part three politics see I'm going quickly but the thing is part three is long so and I'm making some of it up as
I go along I'm looking down but it's a move that I'm making up so let's see politics
by the nineteen seventies yes it is made up so it's okay yes the facts X is all
made up there's a sort of boresial? thing you can decide what's true or not
it's fake news yeah that's right 240 million Indians can't read
that's fake news by the 1970s or maybe the 1980s Indian freedom struggle
it's reservoirs had depleted themselves I mean there was an exhaustion to Indian
freedom struggles I mean for me a good indicator of that is the Planning
Commission meeting and I think 1985 when Rajiv Gandhi goes in as you know
the head of the Planning Commission even though Prime Ministers rarely came
in and and in Randol Commission meetings Manmohan Singh was then
the actual chair of the Commission Rajiv Gandhi comes in to a 1985 Planning
Commission meeting and says why are you bothering about farmers and support
prices and all this crap Rajiv Gandhi used to talk like that why
bother with all this crap he says you know you need to think about building
american-style freeways we need to have better airports we need to have malls
why aren't you guys thinking about malls you know which is interesting because
they were thinking about the opposite of malls how to protect agricultural farmlands what's happening to farmers livelihood things like that
now whether again they did anything useful with those discussions or not the
point is that was their discussion this guy comes says that's all boring
let's think about becoming America National Liberation was really exhausted
by then there was a constituency among the so-called middle class the word
middle class inserted itself in place of the dominant classes
so what middle class can mean anything what they really meant was the dominant
classes in society were interested in transforming the kind of class compact
that had been won through the National Movement and so what you see after 1985
is the surrender of the Indian National Congress already by the emergency period
Inder Gujral had come before the emergency Parliament and said that we
need to attract foreign exchange we need to cut licence Raj I mean this was Inder Gujral a very fine man very distinguished person but he was saying this stuff in the emergency Parliament in 1976 didn't happen until 1990/91
slowly in the 80s they were doing some things but in 1991 it's a decisive break
you see the surrender of the Congress party and slowly from 91 to the present
those who hold socialistic Gandhian sections of the party got marginalized
or left you know they went to other places including some sections went to
initially the BJP the Samajwadi dynamic the old social is dominant also begins
to lose steam and you begin to see you know whether it's the Samajwadi Party or
this Janta party or that Janta party or this (NAME) that (NAME)
Lalu Prasad here Malai Am Singh there one way or the other they began to
collaborate fundamentally with the regional bourgeoisie I mean the fact that
we used to call the Samajwadi Party in UP the party of Raster Sahara is not
you know an idle comment I mean the Sahara group basically were the
underwriters of Malaya Singh Yadvis party (NAME)Pradesh so there was a
general surrender in a sense of the bulk of the political class including some of
the regional political parties to this new policy dispensation this policy
dispensation which favoured the trajectory of malls and airports rather
than support prices and let's say you know some forms of protection for the
poor but this was itself very difficult for any political movement that wanted
to chart an alternative you know those terms from the 1990s from in 96 for
instance of the Third Front United Front, Popular Front if you draw
the earlier terms these were all terms with very limited content who is going
to join your third front who is going to join your united front who's going to
come to you these are questions that I'm going to return to in a second if
everybody else is gone in the other direction how are you going to be able
to create a national popular will to move the agenda in a different way
the left was put on the back foot by the mid-1990s and this comes to that in a
very important vote in 1996 made by my party the CPIM in our Central Committee
when the opposition groups came to Jyoti Basu very venerable leader of our
movement and said will you become the prime minister of the country and our
Central Committee had a very long meeting and decided at the end of it
that no Jyoti Basu cannot become the prime minister because he'll merely
become the prime minister of a government with a completely different
political direction it's going to go in a completely different political
direction in fact that government didn't last very long because there was just
not enough political power and there was no alternative national popular will
that Jyoti Basu could have driven forward into a different direction broken India into a different policy direction there was simply not
the will in this period as we see the surrender of every political party
including the Congress especially the Congress to this policy direction which
increased inequality which brought a great deal of agrarian suffering at the
same time you see the emergence rapid emergence of the fascistic RSS and its
political party the BJP rapid ascension you know and the ascension came on that
one empty category that's the innocence the genius of the BJP's national
political emergence on that empty category corruption you see corruption
is an interesting category because it will produce the Tweedledee Tweedledum
politics every bourgeois party when it's out of power will accuse the one in
power of corruption and then you can just go back and forth and say they are
corrupt you know you create a consensus where people forget that both are
corrupt and you say they are more corrupt because the scandals are more
recent you see because that scandal with (NAME) happened yesterday and then
when you come to power you will have your own scandal and then you'll delegitimize yourself and then you can come back this corruption word produces
a consensus of one-party rule essentially with the difference in India
that one party has this fascistic brain the RSS pushing it in a horrible
direction so what is the left to do now I mean I'm very glad we're meeting here
not immediately after our defeated (NAME) because if we did you just pile on
to me and say you guys are useless you should close down I'm going to come down
today you should close down shop between the defeated (NAME) and now
other things have appeared which have by the way always been there you might not
know that in September 2016 180 million Indian workers went on strike in September 2016
180 million workers my friends what is the population of
Canada huh how much, how many, how many again what we said how many times do we
have to say that to come to 160 million six times well done 160 million how did
they go on strike I'm going to come back to that in a minute that was in
September of 2016 you know the left hasn't done anything the left has in the
left doesn't do this we'll come back to that between the defeated (NAME) and now
we've had two major struggles which I just like to point out and I'd like you
to go and do what every self-respecting person seems to do these days go and
google it number one is the struggle in Sikar Rajasthan I'd like you to go and
look and watch the news clip reports on the struggle in Sikar Rajasthan I mean
these are very impressive agrarian workers struggles the other thing is go
and Google Kisan Long March the march in Maharashtra which was led by the All India Kisan Sabha you know this was an amazing March guys
you know they marched 160 kilometers and they arrived in Bombay and they heard
the leadership heard that they were class 10 exams and next day so they kept
marching through the night so they wouldn't disturb the students when they
had their examinations I mean these are moral upright people and they forced the
BJP government horrible government to accept their demands you know this is
also Indian communism and I'd like to talk a little bit with that in mind so I
have some questions that I'm raising I think there are three four of them that
I hope you find useful and the broad section now is called anachronisms what should the left do? the left exists by the way I've been a member of the CPIM for now almost 30 years we have a million cadre members that's 1 million people in our party we have about 80 million people in our mass movements including 14 million in the All India Women's Democratic Association about 12 to 15 million in the whole India (NAME) I mean these are very large
organizations it's impossible just to say oh you know I don't know what would
be the opposite thing close them down I'm going to come to that in a second anachronisms, what is the left to do? number one become Social Democrats now Rahm Guha and I have had this
conversation for years look he says the party is already Social Democratic you
basically were Social Democrats implying West Bengal why don't you just become
Social Democrats give up the hammer and sickle give up the whole Lenin Stalin thing recently he wrote a piece in The Telegraph saying you know you should
just adopt Bhagat Singh and forget all the foreign leaders you know because the
BJP had just knocked down the Lenin statue and so he said you know
maybe he is a foreign person guys the BJP especially the RSS is inspired by like
Hitler and Mussolini you know (NAME) went to Italy and studied fascist
tactics for (NAME) I mean to my mind (NAME) is a foreigner not to India
but to the planet Earth so I mean why do you need (NAME) like paintings in the
parliament the other day I was talking to somebody and she was saying have you read this book by (NAME) I said are you joking
read a book by (NAME) I mean for what like for some intellectual thing or to
learn something she was like why it's very interesting book really this guy
killed Gandhi man why would I read a book become Social Democrats (NAME) says
and then you know you can build the you can be the backbone of a new revival
something to consider is that communism has a very slow like a turtle slow
journey moves steadily and it works confounded by the dialectic between the
present and the future see this dialectic between the present
and the future is something that I think one should consider if you as a
political party a communist party or a socialist party or whatever some kind of
transformative party that believes in a post-capitalist future if you as this
kind of party exceed too much to the present there's a tendency to reformism
see one of the interesting features is in our theory in our understanding of how
capitalism works we don't find it credible that the dominant classes want
share wealth and power with everybody else we don't find that a credible
approach to human reality we don't think that the dominant classes infected
somehow by liberalism are going to deliver to the poor and the you know
peasants and workers and so on a greater share of the surplus and say why don't
you also come in and govern with us I mean today I visited the picket lines at
York why doesn't this administration among whom I used to know some of these
people personally actually just come and negotiate with the students why do they
demand that the students have to surrender before they negotiate you see
what I'm saying is that you'd have to have a completely upside-down vision of
reality if you believe that the ruling class just nudged a little bit by
liberalism or good feeling is going to give up capital give up power you know
give up these things just to look nice and be considered as you know decent
people. They're not decent people they are advantaged by an indecent immoral
structure so if you believe in a social democratic politics alone then what
happens is you are going to basically betray the workers and peasants who are
part of your movement because they are not going to be able to get a better
deal unless they struggle and fight and build power so in the sense exceeding
too much to the present is what we consider class collaboration with the
elite and therefore the surrender of the demands, grievances, hopes, aspirations of
the working class people peasants and so on of our societies. At the same time if
you go too far into demanding questions of the future that cuts the party off or
any political organization from the struggles of the present this is a
demand for purism. Don't get stuck in the current dilemmas you know the desire to
fight somehow to produce say an end to hunger don't get caught up in all this
you will get stuck in the present just go for the future this will this is what
actually produces a tendency to secterianism one of the challenges of the left which is why the left should not become social-democratic
but why the left requires social democracy to grow I can come back to
that why I think for the left it's very important to have a social democratic
party in your society if the left exceeds to social democracy if it gives
up its belief in transformation then you've gone beyond the dialectic between
the present and the future and the dialectic between the present and the
future is really the essence of a political project of the left second, that was you know (????) become social democrat second dissolve the vanguard and let the so-called people be free why do you need a vanguard you know
I remember when subaltern studies came out in 1982 and then thereafter being
very excited by the project rethinking history you know everything was exciting
I mean you're that's the one thing about academics that I don't miss by the way
this idea that everything has to be new gotta have the newest critique you know
can't repeat something from the past you gotta be original good luck good luck
with being original half the time when you hear somebody saying I have an
original argument it's from 1935 also in this industry
lose the capacity to be humble and understand how ideas grow and develop
and you know sometimes we take u-turns in our thinking and so on subaltern
studies showed up and he was really exciting and then reading it reading and
reading it by the way of course it published that scoundrel Swapan Dasgupta
and so on you know it's not all pure by the way Swapan Dasgupta now chief
ideologue of the BJP has an essay in one of the subaltern studies volumes four
or five on the peasant movement in (mid napal??) you go look it up Xerox it and thousand people should mail it to him although it's not a very good
essay but that's a separate issue one of the things about subaltern studies that
I felt quite extraordinary was that there was no organization the category
organization was not available in other words
it sort of promoted spontaneity that movements just happen if you go back and
read the studies you'll find that there are no organizers in fact the page in
his stuff attacked the idea of the organizer you know the (?????)
coming from outside etc some of the idea was that the poor the worker makes
history by the work by themselves this is an interesting idea because firstly
it asumes that organization always comes from outside that workers don't self
organize into unions and so on that these unions of the past were not
organized by workers they had to come from outside it's not historically true
but it's somehow assumed that organization is irrelevant if you in the
past suggest that struggles took place without the work of organization then
why should you organize in the present what's the need of organizing the way
you construct the historical imagination has an immense impact on how people act
in the world now so the erasure of organization in the past strikingly
mirrored the kind of postmodern thinking you know which was itself the mirror of
Hayekian liberalism you try to change the world you'd go to the gulag you know
stunning vision of history that you should therefore not bother to try to
change the world let the market change the world is a stunning indictment of thinking in that period when these volumes were coming out somehow there was a belief that spontaneity was good and rigidness was bad this was the kind of duality you know there's a literature that's worked through the divide
between spontaneity and organization if nothing else
go and read Rosa Luxemburg very telling terrific book Reform and Revolution it's
a superb attack on Bernstein but really it's not an attack on Bernstein alone
this book underscores goes into the problem of organization she also wrote
an essay called The Problem of Organization very fine essay
you know those old Bolsheviks and socialists they were struggling
with the idea of organization and spontaneity it's well worth going and
revising going and reading that stuff again and thinking also honestly about how
movements actually get built can they be changed without organization I remember I was reporting during the Arab Spring from Egypt and you know all the Western press were celebrating that in Tahrir Square there was no organization that it was all just sort of happening but it was obvious to us that it was not without organisation there were the Muslim Brotherhood if they hadn't been there there would have been no defence against the you know the essentially the "gundas" that came in to beat people in the square then there was the liberal bloggers sitting in a corner with the computers on with a kind
of blue light shining in their faces and then they were the young kids from the
graveyards now Cairo's a wild city you have people just living their lives in
graveyards or slums there are some slums and graveyards and these young kids from
the graveyards very organized were the ones fighting the cops you know they
were the ones pelting the cops with stones and so on highly organized space
not disorganized at all but organized by realities that were alien to these
press people because they couldn't see these young kids as part of organized
networks operating you know like swallows you know running in patterns
you know understanding each other very well because they've done this stuff all
the time they've confronted the cops all the time a book was written by an American journalist called Once Upon a Revolution in which he starts the book
by attacking Leninist ideas of the vanguard and says that you know it's a
great thing that in Egypt there was no vanguard then in the middle of the book
he says, at one point when there's discussing the question of media
definition of the revolution there's a building in Cairo called Maspero which is the headquarters of the media and this very well-meaning liberal
journalist writes they should have seized Maspero I asked him, who is "they",
like when you say they should have seized Maspero, who is "they" who gets to
say "comrades! let's go seize Maspero" how can you who believe that it's good
to have a revolution of the people without organization suddenly come up
upon reality where you say if they had seized Maspero they could have defined
the revolution but that takes a vanguard party that takes somebody coming in there with a theory of revolution with revolutionaries
who've been steered in various forms of struggle who understand who can feel the
temperature of a movement and say at that point it's time to go to stand up in the square and say "Comrades of the you know of the graveyards you
lead the way because you are braver than we are go and fight us a corridor so we
can seize Maspero" or "Muslim brotherhood you stand there in that statuesque way that you do that terrifies the cops and lead the way to seize Maspero because there
was nobody else really willing to do anything like that same thing in this long march of the Kisan Sabha I mean this was organized by
the All-India Kisan Sabha this was not just farmers waking up one day you know
it's like the myth of Rosa Parks in the United States this old woman woke up one day and said I'm not going to...she was trained at Highlander school...she was
trained by organizers...they had practiced sitting on that damn bus and not moving.
This was part of an organized campaign friends it's not like some one day this
old woman was too tired... she's not even that old actually when she did it, she
was quite young, she was a young militant, highly trained, practice this because you
need to practice it when you're sitting at a lunch counter in North Carolina and
people come and throw that you know, whatever it is, spaghetti on your head throw a hamburger at your face, you have to be trained to be able to deal with that.
Building a political movement is about training people, stealing them to know
how to operate and not break down, not get violent in return and so on. So this
aspect of over there was a long march... I mean on social media people
said oh why is the left claiming credit for it....it's okay guys.
Communism is not an abstract force it is composed of individuals. People who have
sacrificed their lives given a great deal to build these movements, these
platforms of the politics of the people. Between theory and practice there is
organization. When Lenin said you cannot have a revolutionary theory without
revolutionary practice, he might have added in; you cannot have either without
the mediating concept of organization. Organization is what bridges theory and
practice. These three concepts are essential to each other. You can't just have theory and practice, you gotta have an organization. It anchors this. Third thing that I hear on occasions, why
don't you dissolve the party and let identity movements develop. You know caste movements, religious movements & so on... I mean it's really interesting. Ahilan
made a very important comment. Ahilan when you said that the Jaffna Youth Congress begins with anti-caste struggles, I mean in a sense it's
impossible to imagine any class struggle in South Asian history that has not
engaged caste, gender you know indigeneity; I mean these are the ways in
which class manifests itself in the world. Madiha said the same thing in
her presentation that class is expressed through society; it's
not like... there's no such thing as class. Class is an analytic understanding of
power. People don't have a class like they have an identity of say religion or
so on. Class is something that you have experienced analytically, you
experience it really of course poverty and so on, but class is at a different
level, you know it's the embodiment of various forms of suffering and
consciousness together. Althusser has a very nice distinction between
class for itself and class in itself. it's not only your position in a
class society but it's your understanding of that as well, and your
understanding of it always is refracted through religion, through various other
identities, caste, through you know gender, etc. I remember doing a
project in Thanjavur district which had an amazing peasant struggle in the early
part of the previous century. I was just collecting material like I do when I travel
around India, collect stories, meet old comrades ask them tell me about the past
you know that sort of thing not for any project
but they told a really nice story about Srinivas Rao game Goku and later pyramid
Moorthy. These are important names in Tamil Nadu's history; means nothing to
most of you. They arrived in Thanjavur and you know they had an understanding
how to build an organization so what they said you know they gave up their
lives in Madras and Madurai and came to this rural area where they had
been some problems... drought problems they said this and the other, and Srinavas Rao said
well we have to build a unit you know like every communist you get the
handbook foundations of Leninism or something they say well we have to build
a unit...and so he gathered some people who were interested in left ideas, people
who had understood some things through their own struggles, peasant struggles,
struggles for water and so on, and they formed a small unit there. And then he
said well you know the unit is spread out around the district so we need a
courier who is going to pass messages back and forth you know. So there was a
young man he said I will be the courier you know I'm very interested and he had
a bicycle which was useful so one day Srinivas Rao gives him a message and says
deliver it to the other side of the thing and come back, but 8-10 hours later
this guy came back. Srinivas Rao furious says to him how could you take
so long to go there and come back you know it's just a straight run you should
have delivered it come back what if it was an urgent thing you know we had to
meet somewhere and fight the police whatever. Guy says listen you don't
understand this but I'm a Dalit and we're not allowed to ride our bicycles
through the middle of town, we have to go all the way around and so on so it took
hours to get there. Srinivas Rao you know who had not really fully
understood and digested the question of Dalit humiliation was furious.
So the first thing that their Kisan Sabha unit did was they
fought against this bicycle prohibition and they won on that. I mean our histories
are very complicated. There is a very silly way in which we say well the
left doesn't engage caste or the left doesn't do this left doesn't do that, but
one has to actually go back and look at the experiences of these struggles. If
you read Kathleen Govs essays, very good essays, very fine essays. She was a toronto-based right..Canada? she did that book with what's-his-name
who died a few years ago she was on the west coast of Canada yeah Vancouver
isn't that the West cool yeah; UBC? very fine anthropologist I don't mean to
criticize her or anything but in her work on Thanjavur she wrote some amazing
stuff but this political thing was not in her work so if you read Kathleen Gough
to understand about Thanjavur, what you see is here were there distress signals,
here was the peasant struggle, and there's no mention of this crucial
component which is the class had to be constructed through an anti-caste
struggle. In the 1950s, B.R. Ambedkar sits in his study and starts to draft a book
on India and communism, and he never finished this book we published this in
Left Word last year... very fine the remainder of the book. In this book
Ambedkar basically makes the point that in India you cannot create a communist
movement unless you strike deeply at the root of caste. Caste struggle has to be
essential in a class to create a communist movement but at the same time
you can't organize people on the ground of caste because you're not creating
caste polarization politically you don't want to create caste polar I don't want
to create a caste war in a society. So interesting that in two adjoining
districts in Tamil Nadu, one is East Thanjavur Distruct, and the other is just
just to its west, both had agrarian struggles. One was led by the communists
in each Thanjavur, they won a major struggle against the landlords the
other one which was led by the Forward Bloc degenerated into a caste war where
there were basically riots inter-caste riots that lasted for a generation.
We published another book at Left Word about that district called
Murder in Mudukulathur. Very fine book, very detailed
study about that... these are adjoining districts, two different strategies. If
you want to risk organizing on the platform of... strengthen caste as
a platform, that risk is substantial because it can move
to a caste war. This is what they worried about. Now it took them in Tamil Nadu, I'm
emphasizing Tamil Nadu because about 20 years ago in Tamil Nadu there was a
serious move to organize against untouchability. It was found by the Kisan
Sabha, also by the Democratic Youth Federation and the All India women's
Democratic Associate... it was found that they could not advance any
struggles unless they directly hit untouchability. This is Ambedkar's lesson.
It was many years coming but it has come deeply come, so the CPIM organised in
Tamil Nadu the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front and what this front
does is it goes into villages organizes people in the village and then gives
people the confidence, see this is the key thing for organizing... organizing
provides a platform of confidence. People might have consciousness, they might have
the willingness but sometimes the confidence to act is just not there. That
has been my experience as well in understanding of peasant struggles
developed. Confidence plays an immense role. It can be of course the self
generated and often is but it doesn't help.. I'm sorry it doesn't hurt to have
outside forces parties etc come in and provide the scaffolding for once
confidence, and then people in those villages have been going and knocking
down the so-called caste wall or the untouchable wall I mean these are
horrible walls built in the middle second apartheid wall in these villages
in Tamil Nadu so the Tamil Nadu untouchability
eradication front has been going from village to village organizing people
against these caste walls. What this has done in a sense is provided now a much
buoyancy for the Kisan Sabha there is the farmers and agricultural
workers unit. Finally, last point; you see there are some things that I want us to
think about. These are serious... these four things are serious challenges for the
production of a new left horizon. It's not that the left isn't in a serious
problem globally; so I want you to think about these four different challenges
posed before us. One is that the working class in the peasantry has been
seriously decomposed. I mean if you've traveled to rural India now you will
find women and men but mostly women spending five six hours a day commuting
to places where they are not guaranteed to get daily labor. They are day laborers
commuting 5-6 hours to get to the point where they might get rejected...two and a
half hours to get that to an hours... there's no time for them to be in
organizations. They're basically at the edge of survival. This decomposition of
the working class, the construction of basically maquiladoras within India, you
know on the corridor not only in the Gurgaon belt, you know Manesar that
area but between Madras and Coimbatore, in the north of Bangalore, that
road that goes north, I mean these are new belts of essentially maquiladoras
where workers brought form say Bihar to Karnataka are kept in compounds
and they work then and they are sent by bus back to Bihar. It's very hard to
organize in these spaces where essentially factories have become
prisons. So this recomposition of the working class is a serious challenge. The
Indian Left that is both the you know so-called mainstream or whatever you
want to call it communist parties have taken seriously the idea that we if we
cannot organize at the point of production we have to organize at the
point of life. In other words where people live...in slums, huge project,
organizing in slums, organizing people in their home places when they come back
home and then they go to their factories and so on. It's a very long-term project.
It's not going to bear dividends as they say in capitalist concerned for a long
time. I mean this idea that we're shifting some of our resources from
building factory based organizing to building working class organization in
urban areas, in rural areas where people live is a very serious
project to try to recompose the decomposed working class that was the
first challenge second challenge you know this is what with you was saying
today about the new aspirations what I began with is well you know we have to
consider how to both reveal what is being conceived by this phase of
capitalism the concealing of the fact that we labor socially accumulation is
private and then this immense production of desire through advertisements media
etc basically conceals reality from people I don't mean this is false
consciousness by the way it's not that debate this is the entirely different
situation this is a situation of how new aspirations are created people believe
in the new aspirations how do we create socialist aspirations you know what is
this going to look like what is a new national or international popular will
going to look like this is the serious challenge not for this party that party
that group this non party all those divides are irrelevant here this is a
serious challenge for the totality of the left side thirdly we have a
challenge for a new social welfare project you know if we have the
dialectic between the present and the future what kind of social welfare
project can be envisioned you know do we come back to make greater demands for
social wages in other words rather than demand individual wage rises which is
basically a neoliberal way to demand higher payment do we demand more social
wages improvement of healthcare systems improvement of you know of of
educational systems we have to think very carefully about what people have
you know what the best practice has shown in struggle you know whether it's
in chat this girl where they've built these community hospitals whether it's
in you know the Cuban experience whether it's people like Camilo Harry from
Honduras and the ideas that they have of interesting new ways of delivering
health care basic health care to people we have to be very imaginative about new
forms of social welfare including education you know what kind of
education systems do we want to fight for is it enough to always fight
rearguard actions you know Cara in student struggles going on now
including at York but javelin Larry University this week there was a long
march from the from GNU to Parliament Street they were beaten mercilessly by
Delhi police these are rearguard actions what's the
new thinking what should education look like how do we appeal to people going
back to 0.2 with new aspirations you know we can't just say that they can't
deliver what have we decided you know could become a way in which society
works I've never found comfortable that idea that you know all the solutions are
once you take power you got to think about these things in the present it's a
dialectic between the present and the future finally we have to think about
leisure you know we have to make demands on leisure it sounds insane to say it
you know 100 years ago they had the eight-hour 10-hour day then the
eight-hour day I think it's about time we actually captured four people as a
slogan the idea of a four hour day or a three hour day you know we don't work
socialists don't demand that life is about work that's a fascist slogan hard
white macht frei that's what the Nazis put in Treblinka you know that's not how
it's that's not a slogan our slogan is we live as human beings to create
community with other human beings I don't give two shits if you work 20
hours or eight hours or you should work less you need to spend more time
building society we need to spend more time with each other's people those
simple demands need to be at the heart of our movement of our project you know
we need to fight against capitalism which is basically anti life and project
ourselves as a life-giving force not just as a negative force against
capitalism so that's a fine final point for that all of this in my opinion would
help us build a new horizon I mean that's the real point is that in a sense
in July of 1991 when Manmohan Singh wrote this text with American spellings
for insulin bull when this gangster shot himself with heroin
these were anti life openings life seemed to end in these openings
something toxic entered the world as far as I was concerned our movement has
suffered a huge blow huge defeat not just politically but also intellectually
you know universities are places where people make it an industry to think
critically about the left which is already a weak force... instead of putting
the intelligence to work to help reimagine what a left project would be
like it's tiresome to hear you know talk after talk about the left hasn't done
this the left hasn't done that. I would like intelligent people to put their
intelligence forward to think about some of the complex problems we face today
and to posit at least some sorts of, for discussion even, answers to these problems. So c'mon guys, lets get it together. You wan't the left, the point isn't to have the left be perfection. The point is to produce movements where we are thinking together to build that new horizon. Thanks a lot!
Some important points from 30 minutes onward, which have an application to the North American society, particularly race issues.