Maya John

Early this year a relatively unknown 74-year old Gandhian, Kisan Baburao Hazare (also known as Anna Hazare), shot to fame for raising a campaign against corruption. For days on end, Anna Hazare haunted our television sets, and details of his campaign greeted us every morning in almost all newspapers. Perhaps some of the readers of this article were avid supporters of the crusade he led, and perhaps some were vocal or even silent critics. However, now that the high point of the campaign has passed and tempers and anxieties have ebbed, a calm and composed assessment of anti-corruption campaigns may be pursued. This paper is one such endeavour to sum up and assess the contours of the 'India Against Corruption' campaign. A special focus of the paper is on the process, whereby anti-corruption campaigns conflate the discontent of exploited and oppressed classes with the interests of the economically dominant class, i.e. the class of capitalists. This subsumption or conflation of differing class discontent is intrinsic to anti-corruption campaigns and it is this process which provides such campaigns their distinctive nature. It is argued here that the 'India Against Corruption' campaign corresponds with the interests of international as well as Indian capitalists. For the capitalist class an "efficient" and "incorrupt" administration has become a necessity to sustain on-the-ground implementation of pro-capitalist policies and laws. This demand by the capitalist class for a strong state has emerged in the context of growing mass discontent among India's poor, as well a large section of India's middle class (1), against brutal capitalist appropriation of public resources. In a well-formulated political manoeuvre, Indian and international capitalist lobbies have hand-picked and promoted NGO leaders in a bid to use them as authoritative pressure groups whom the state is compelled to consult in the process of policy formation and implementation. These selected leaders have been superimposed on the masses, as a result of which the discontent of the masses has been conveniently misdirected towards the capitalist understanding of corruption, and hence, towards a bourgeois resolution of the problem. 

Comments (1) | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Saswat Pattanayak

"He who tells the people revolutionary legends,
he who amuses them with sensational stories,
is as criminal as the geographer
who would draw up false charts for navigators."
HPO Lissagaray, "History of the Paris Commune of 1871" (1877)

The challenges to Occupy Wall Street are many. Some even more critical than the very issues the protestors are fighting against. Whereas it claims to be the 99%, yet the movement practices the age-old privileges of class and race blindness. Similar to most white liberal movements, the OWS is hardly inclusive of the people of colour. Although the spirit is radical and the intent is revolutionary, the movement itself suffers from a lack of critical understanding on how race and class intersect. In reality, 99% of people do not form a class in themselves. This is because the 99% of population comprise a significant amount of aspiring rich, a "middle class" category of people who have steadfastly refused to side with the poor working class whenever the latter has organised itself. In the US, this segment of opportunistic liberal citizens have always believed in the country’s racist foundations, its heritage of exclusionary democracy, and its segregated educational system, and amply benefited from patriotic allegiances. And as a result, they have lent unconditional supports to electoral reforms that sustain an individualistic social order, to corporate policies that help private business thrive, to political outfits such as the Democratic Party in recent times, which upholds the status quo in every level of governance defining American imperialism.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Anjan Chakrabarti

"The emancipation of the working class
must be the act of the workers themselves."
- Rules of the First International

On 16th October 2011, the veteran 71-year-old trade union leader, the chief advisor of the Kanoria Jute Mill Shramik Sangrami Union, and exponent of cooperation ethic, Prafulla Chakraborty, was arrested on the trumped up charges of attempting to murder a worker of the Kanoria Jute Mill and disturbing industrial peace. He was remanded in judicial custody for seven days; since then he has been on indefinite hunger strike. My objective in writing this piece is not merely to protest his arrest which many have rightfully done, but to argue that the arrest involves something more sinister, which needs to be scanned and opposed. Specifically, underlying his arrest is an attack on cooperation ethic and the institution of the economic collective (1) which Prafulla Chakraborty has personified for the last few years, most definitely in the case of the Kanoria Jute Mill.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Paresh Chandra

Capitalism and Legality I: Corruption, Ethics and Reification

The notion of 'corruption' is an essentially ethical one; the terms in which the issue is judged are 'good' and 'evil'. The problem with raising an ethical issue, as one can guess, is that it stays, as does its solution, within the system that defines ethical standards. Corruption is also, simultaneously, a legal issue. In fact, the legal question is in itself ethical, just as the ethical one is legal – the legal and the legitimate intertwine. In the final analysis, the legal structure of a society is defined in terms of what the socio-political order deems legitimate and what it does not. The obvious corollary being that a legal question, by definition, never goes into a questioning of the law itself. Anti-corruption crusaders are asking for more laws, stronger laws, or different laws. There is a difference between the old and the new law/setup, but they are also, to give the matter a Hegelian twist, identical. Fundamentally the system remains the same. In fact, these changes intend to make the system more entrenched and foolproof.

Comments (3) | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Saswat Pattanayak

The homeless and the Hippies, the socialists and the students, the communists and the commoners - the Wall Street has been occupied for good by the countless human beings demanding dignity of life denied to them under American capitalism. Every disenfranchised minority is now decrying the citadel of private capital, greed and monstrosity. And contrary to White House assertions and corporate media verdicts, the defamed Wall Street has been denied a bail-out - by the people of the United States.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Bhumika Chauhan

Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books, 2010.

Whenever the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system have developed into an overt crisis, the unevenness of capitalist development has acted as a sort of pressure-release mechanism. In our neoliberal times, the unevenness can be seen on many levels – from the formal labour-informal labour binary to the so called North-South divide. To maintain its rate of profit in the face of proletarian struggle (and/or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), the capitalist class found, like always, new avenues to exploit. When the accumulation of absolute and relative surplus value became problematic, like it so often does, capitalism turned yet again to its so-called 'originary moment' – primitive accumulation. As such, primitive accumulation is still very much a part of our present. For instance, today in India, the capitalist system is turning to those pockets that it had kept in reserve (literally) for so long. In backward, agrarian and/or tribal regions, plans are in motion for the acquisition of resources.

Comments (1) | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Pratyush Chandra

Prabhat Patnaik et al, Marx's Capital: An Introductory Reader, LeftWord, 2011, pp 135, Price: Rs 200.

There is a tremendous renewal of interest in Marxism throughout the globe today, especially for the explanation of the economic crisis that has hit capitalism recently. It was quite natural that the only well-organised segment of India's left intellectuals committed to theoretical endeavours in political economy sensed the need to popularise Marx's Capital. Much to the discomfort of the radical/revolutionary left, the fact is that though this segment is broadly organised around the official, parliamentary Left, which is in a deep crisis of confidence today, its research and theorisations have more or less informed the practice and understanding of the whole of the Left that matters in India. This small book of roughly 135 pages, in my view, shows how much the mainstream Indian Left owes to Marx's Capital.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Subhashini Shriya

We recently saw the middle class rise up to the occasion to bring about, what in a flourish was termed, a "Revolution" against corruption. While the emotions and the anger that informed the launch of such an offensive against the regime can hardly be denied or dismissed, the "revolutionary" potential of the movements led by Ramdev and Hazare were grossly suspect and revealed a tendency to preserve rather than change the status quo. Is there another way to address the chagrin the middle classes feel against the dysfunctional state of the system, something they encounter and experience in the rising pressures on their everyday life as examples of corruption? Are instances of corruption aberrations in the functioning of the state or are they, instead, central to its very logic of monopolising the control over common resources in the process of mediating their appropriation by the forces of capital? Can corruption be eliminated without ridding politics of the concept of a nation-state and the capital it serves? And what would the logical orientation of a movement that seeks to address the issue of corruption as a problem integral and intrinsic to a capitalist organisation of the social and the economic be?

Comments (2) | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Pothik Ghosh

Can the decimation of an institutionalised and bureaucratised working-class force like the CPI(M)-led Left Front in West Bengal be a legitimate revolutionary task of the proletariat? The answer to that must, doubtless, be a resounding yes! But does that make the Trinamool Congress juggernaut that demolished the 34-year-old decadent LF regime in the state the bearer of a progressive, working-class impulse? Strange as it may sound, the reply to that has to be an equally emphatic no! This paradox stems from the fact that the politics which helped Mamata Banerjee slay the "Stalinist" demon of Bengal has simultaneously enabled her alliance with the Congress to seek the perpetuation of its ideological project of discrediting the revolutionary working-class horizon that goes under the name of Communism. The open propaganda by the spinmeisters of Mamata Banerjee's extended "family of democracy" on sundry 'public' fora, where they held up her decisive electoral triumph in West Bengal as an example of  the 'indisputable demise' of the Communist political project and its Marxist 'ideology', bears that out.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail

 Paresh Chandra  

Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

It is not hard to find texts that defy the lies of the state by presenting facts that contradict them. This method of 'uncovering' the status quo, which can be called Chomskyan (the political Chomsky, not the linguistic one), works by trying to shock its reader out of their ideological slumber. Unfortunately, the vast array of ugly facts that these texts bring out usually remains ungrounded in a unified, alternative perception of reality. The attempt is to falsify particular claims of the state, by producing facts to the contrary, without trying to understand the 'deep structure' that gives birth to this state of affairs. The reader, not drawn out into a critique of present-day life in its entirety, is able to go back to that life, as if what these books uncover is simply another aspect of reality that s/he need not be concerned with.

Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail