JK Alternative Viewpoint

  

During the last two to three years tension and conflict have been increasing in East Asia.1 In 2012 this tendency was evident in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the area round the Korean peninsula. Let’s look at a few examples:

South China Sea: In early April 2012 there was a confrontation between China and the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal (Chinese: Huangyan Island), one of the Spratly Islands (Chinese: Nansha Islands, Vietnamese: Truong Sa Islands) in the South China Sea. The confrontation between the naval vessels of the two countries continued for almost two months and in the middle of this the United States and the Philippines carried out a Balikatan joint military drill in the vicinity. Japan, Australia and South Korea all sent personnel to participate in this drill. At the time Duane Thiessen, commander of the US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, commented: “If a military conflict were to arise in the Spratly Islands the US military would be able to intervene.”

Yellow Sea: In June 2012 South Korea, Japan and the United States held a joint navy drill in the seas to the south of Cheju Island, followed by a joint South Korea and US drill in the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula. Two things about this were noteworthy: this was the first ever formal joint exercise involving the three countries; this was the first time since the Yonpyong Island incident of 20102 that a US aircraft carrier had entered the Yellow Sea. Both of these factors were major provocations for China. In addition to this, in the latter part of April China and Russia held a large-scale joint military exercise in the Yellow Sea. The Chinese defence ministry openly revealed the purpose of this exercise, saying: “This is in response to the recent military exercise carried out by South Korea, the US Pacific fleet and Japan.”

East China Sea: The most striking conflict began in the summer of 2012 over the Diaoyu Islands (Japanese: Senkaku Islands). In June there was a confrontation between a Chinese fishery inspection boat and a Japanese coastguard boat and in July Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda aggravated the conflict by playing the nationalisation card.3 This was followed by a group of Chinese protesters landing on the islands on 15 August. On 10 September the Noda cabinet officially approved the nationalisation of the Diaoyu Islands, immediately ratcheting up the dispute between Japan and China. China responded by declaring that the islands were within its territorial waters and despatched a patrol boat. Over the following few months military tensions increased as patrol boats and warships of the two countries confronted each other in the waters round the islands. They also continued to hold various military exercises. While Japan and the US held joint landing exercises among islands of the East China Sea, China held counter-exercises. The US openly expressed its support for Japan. In July the State Department clarified that the Senkakus “fall within the scope of the US-Japan Security Treaty” and then in December the Defense Authorisation Act approved by the US Congress specifically included a stipulation to the same effect.

The changing structure of world capitalism
In order to understand why tensions and conflicts are on the rise in East Asia at the moment we need to examine the core characteristics of today’s global capitalist system. To put it simply, world capitalism is experiencing a long-term crisis of profitability (beginning in the early 1970s), and in the midst of this important changes are occurring in the relative economic power of different states. This has significant geopolitical implications. Not only has the current economic crisis made it difficult to cooperate on implementing economic policy, but the changes in relative economic power have been accompanied by changes in political power and this also reduces the possibility of continued cooperation between states. This is giving rise to a situation where those states that want to move up the hierarchy of the international order and those that want to maintain their positions at the top are making a show of strength against one another.

In the early 20th century Lenin stressed the unevenness and contradictions of the world economy, emphasising that the dynamic process of capitalist development itself altered the distribution of this unevenness, thereby constantly changing the balance of power between states. Thus Lenin, in contrast to Kautsky, believed that it was impossible to establish a stable alliance among the ruling powers. In order to understand today’s world it is crucially important to understand the political implications of the unevenness and contradictions of the world economy, as well as the changing pattern of this unevenness.

In Lenin’s time Britain—then the pre-eminent capitalist state—was faced with the rise of Germany and the US. In the current shifts in the balance of power between states the most striking thing is the relative decline of the US and the “rise of the rest”, and in particular, the rise of China. Immediately after the Second World War the US accounted for 50 percent of the world’s industrial output, but by the 1980s this had fallen to only 25 percent. Although the US has reigned as the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War in 1991, its economic position has continued to decline. The US has made various attempts to recover its former position, including the Iraq War, but has not been successful. The US National Intelligence Council’s report on the outlook for the world system, “Global Trends 2025”, argues that looking forward to 2025 the international order is going to become more complicated and while the US will continue to be a superpower, it will be transformed into a less dominant state than it is now.4

Meanwhile, China has averaged remarkable economic growth of 8 to 10 percent over the last 30 years and, particularly since the late 1990s, as its economy has grown explosively it has emerged as a potential challenger for US hegemony. Between 1978 and 2009 China’s GDP grew by almost
2,000 percent. Table 1 shows how China’s share of world GDP (when measured by market exchange rates) was only 1.72 percent in 1980, but by 2010 it had grown to 9.32 percent. When you measure this in purchasing power parity terms that take into account differences in costs the figure rises to 13.37 percent.
On the other hand, during the same period the US’s share of world GDP fell from 25.2 percent to 23.13 percent, Japan’s from 9.75 to 8.72 and Germany’s from 8.37 to 5.25. Figure 1 illustrates how the gap between China’s and the US’s shares of world GDP has narrowed rapidly.

 

China became the fifth largest economy in the world in real terms in 2005 and then overtook Germany in 2007 to become the third largest. Only three years later in 2010 China pushed Japan out of the position it had held for 42 years to become the second largest economy in the world.

China’s economic status has increased particularly rapidly in East Asia. This region is now the most dynamic in the world capitalist system. China provides a vast export market and plays a pivotal role in regional trade and production that has resulted in a great increase in the mutual interdependence of East Asian economies. Regional trade in East Asia has grown rapidly since the 1990s. Between 1992 and 2007 regional trade increased from 45 percent of East Asia’s total trade to 52.23 percent. The principal goods traded within the region are intermediary goods, reflecting the division of labour within the East Asian economy. Core components made in Japan then flow into China, South Korea and the five ASEAN countries (Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines). The components are then reprocessed in South Korea and the ASEAN countries before flowing into China. Thus, Japan, South Korea and the ASEAN countries all have trade surpluses with China. China then assembles these components and exports the finished goods, mainly to the US. China’s trade surplus with the US increased by 12.29 times during the period 1995-2008. (The US’s ability to import goods relies on money borrowed from China and the rest of Asia.)

 
Since 2008 China has been the largest trading partner of both South Korea and Japan. South Korea’s degree of reliance on trade with China has increased particularly rapidly, from 9.39 percent in 2000 to 18.43 percent in 2005 and 21.13 percent in 2010. In complete contrast, South Korea’s reliance on trade with the US has decreased during the same period from 20.9 percent in 2000 to 10.12 percent in 2010. Figure 2 shows clearly how South Korea’s exports to China have soared while exports to the US have rapidly declined. Japan’s trade figures have told a similar story. Japan’s reliance on trade with China has grown rapidly from 9.95 percent in 2000 to 16.97 percent in 2005 and 21.02 percent in 2010, while during the same period the country’s reliance on trade with the US plummeted from 24.99 percent to 12.92 percent. This is a significant shift for South Korea and Japan which have both traditionally achieved economic growth within the context of their close relationships with the US.

 

 

The countries of South East Asia, which have traditionally been the main trading partners for Japan, have also seen a very rapid growth in their trade with China. In fact, China’s trade with the South East Asian countries has grown at an average rate of 20 percent a year since the 1990s. As a result, by 2006 their trade with China was about the same as their trade with the US. From 2007 China became the largest trading partner for the ASEAN countries. ASEAN’s trade reliance on China grew from 1.4 percent in 1993 to 5.6 percent in 2000, and then to 13 percent in 2006. During the same period the region’s trade reliance on Japan fell from 20.6 percent to 15.1 percent.

Geopolitical consequences of the changing world economy
China’s economic growth is obviously having a major geopolitical impact. First, as China’s political influence grows it is gradually giving rise to changes in the existing world order, dominated by the US. For example, as the “workshop of the world”, China’s demand for raw materials from Latin American and Africa is huge and as China begins to form close relationships with these countries this is having the effect of peeling them away from the US sphere of influence. At the April 2012 Organisation of American States summit meeting a war of nerves between the Latin American countries and the US broke out over the exclusion of Cuba. The Latin American countries displayed a “completely different attitude to that of the past, when they were America’s yes men”,7 and their relations with China have played a role in this change.

China has also been using its huge foreign currency reserves to expand its foreign direct investment and official development aid in Asia, Africa and Latin America and, as this money flows into the whole of the Global South, it is increasing China’s influence in these countries. In the past the countries of the Global South had to accept the constraints of neoliberal conditions in order to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank, but as China expands its support this is changing. In 2007 when China offered to lend money with better conditions Angola broke off its negotiations with the IMF. Since the beginning of the world economic crisis in 2008 China has been pursuing an even more active programme of overseas aid. It has agreed $95 billion worth of currency swaps with six Asian countries, given support to Pakistan, Kazakhstan and others to help them overcome the economic crisis and provided loans to Jamaica, Angola, Mongolia and Ecuador, among others.

The rise of China has also expanded Russia’s room for manoeuvre. Russia and China are now cooperating through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and this institution has had some success in checking the US advance into Central Asia by demanding the withdrawal of US troops from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The June 2012 SCO summit meeting laid out the first comprehensive plan, flaunting the strengthened alliance, and was significantly followed by joint military exercises.

China’s increasing political influence is particularly clear among Asian countries. As many Asian countries have seen their trade with China grow rapidly and recorded trade surpluses they have begun to place great importance on their relations with China. For example, at the 2003 Asia-Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) conference the US tried to persuade Asian countries to criticise China’s exchange rate policy, but it was not successful and neither was it able to strengthen defence cooperation. In 2006 Alexander Downer, the foreign minister of the US’s close ally Australia, cautioned against any US attempt to blockade China, drawing a clear line between the two countries’ approaches.8 This reflected Australia’s particular position as it enjoyed an economic boom thanks to its exports of natural resources to China.

The “turning to Asia” policy of Japanese Democratic Party prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who was elected in 2009, is another typical example of this tendency. He claimed that he would “leave America and enter Asia”, in other words that he would look towards China and escape from Japan’s reliance on the alliance with the US. However, Hatoyama, who had caused conflict with the US over his plan to move the Futenma US airbase out of Okinawa, then compromised with the US, using North Korea’s alleged sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan as an excuse. This led to his resignation as prime minister after only eight months. At the time the US pressured Japan, claiming that “Japanese citizens were also exposed to the threat of attack by North Korea”, thus enabling the US to save its key strategic base at Futenma and reinstate the US-Japan alliance.

The move towards stressing the importance of China can also be seen in South Korea. Of the 138 newly elected representatives in the 17th National Assembly elections of 2004, some 55 percent said they regarded China as a more important diplomatic partner than the US. In a survey of representatives elected in the 18th National Assembly elections in 2008, the Democratic Party9 assembly members took the view that Korea “needs to diversify its diplomatic line”. In 2012 the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Moon Jae-in, criticised right wing President Lee Myung-bak’s dependence on the US-Korea alliance and pushed the idea of “balancing diplomacy” that stressed Korea-China cooperation. The advocates of “balancing diplomacy” are emphasising the fact that we are now in an age when South Korea’s trade with China is worth more than its trade with the US and Japan put together.

These examples illustrate how China’s growing influence is making it harder for the US to handle Asian countries in the way it used to. However, the development of East Asian regional cooperation is not without its contradictions. Even while they are expanding their cooperation with China, the countries of East Asia have big concerns about the economic and military rise of China. These countries have historical enmities and territorial disputes with China and these conflicts could grow with the economic crisis. The US has been attempting to use these very concerns and position itself as a “regional balancer” in order to contain China.

Second, China’s economic growth has resulted in a military build-up. During the 12 years between 1996 and 2008 China’s (officially published) defence budget grew at an average annual rate of 12.9 percent. It is thought that actual military expenditure is higher. According to the estimates of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Chinese defence spending in 2011 was second in the world at $130 billion.

 
China began its full-scale military modernisation and strengthening programme in 2000. It has particularly focused on reinforcing its naval power, which is an extremely rational choice for the Chinese ruling class. For the overseas trade-reliant Chinese economy, which sucks in huge amounts of oil, it is essential that it secures both a stable supply route for oil and stable shipping routes. The energy shipping lane that runs through the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea to the Chinese mainland is particularly crucial. More than 80 percent of the oil that China consumes comes via this route.

During the 2000s China therefore targeted a large amount of its investment and aid towards countries bordering the Indian Ocean, in its so-called “string of pearls” strategy. This strategy attempts to secure a maritime sphere of influence, using the energy shipping route as its baseline. The key locations for this strategy are the ports of Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Chittagong in Bangladesh, as well as the Coco Islands and Hainggyi Island in Burma, Songkhla in Thailand and Phu Quoc Island in Cambodia. China has been pushing to use these ports and in some cases providing huge amounts of economic support to build new ports at these locations (see figure 3).

 

 

China also regards the fact that the US has dominated the Pacific since the Second World War with dissatisfaction and would like to push the US military out of the seas around China and much further east into the Pacific. China has made the core aim of its naval strategy to develop the capability to deny the US Navy the ability to carry out military operations within the “First Island Chain” (Okinawa-Taiwan-Philippines-Malaysia) and ultimately within the “Second Island Chain” (Ogasawara Islands-Saipan-Guam-Papua New Guinea) too (see figure 4). The intention behind this is to stop the US from intervening in disputes around the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea region and to protect the shipping lanes in the area. Around 90 percent of China’s trade relies on using shipping routes in the South China Sea.

 

 

China has been continuously expanding its naval power and in 2012 it successfully commissioned its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, making it the tenth country in the world to possess an aircraft carrier. It is currently building a further four carriers. It is also known to have procured ten nuclear submarines with ballistic missile capabilities. As for China’s air force, it is developing a fourth generation stealth fighter called the Jian-20 and has already carried out a successful test flight. China has also deployed a 3,000 km range anti-ship ballistic missile called the DF 21D, also known as the “aircraft carrier killer”. This poses a big threat to the US, which uses aircraft carriers to project its military power around the world. At the recent meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission new Chinese leader Xi Jinping stressed the defence of territory and sovereignty and emphasised the need for a strong military commensurate with China’s international standing.

Of course, it is not the case that China is taking a particularly aggressive stance. Instead for the time being China hopes to construct a peaceful local environment for the sake of continued economic growth. In its 2011 “White Paper on China’s Peaceful Development”, the Chinese government once again stressed its “peaceful rise doctrine”. In contrast to the historical experience of Europe, China says it will not seek hegemony but instead achieve its rise peacefully. Nonetheless China is making its neighbours wary, whether by its moves to secure shipping lanes or its expanding naval activities in the South and East China Seas.

Above all, whether China intends to or not, by expanding its naval power it is directly challenging US dominance in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The South and East China Seas are both of strategic importance to the US too. The South China Sea is both an important maritime route linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans and at the same time a lifeline for supplying the US bases in the Pacific region. Obviously the South and East China Seas are crucial for the countries of South East Asia, but the region is also important for allies of the US like Japan and South Korea. Some 80 percent of Japan and South Korea’s trade relies on using the South China Sea route and 80 to 90 percent of the crude oil and natural gas heading for North East Asia comes this way. The US cannot ignore such a threat to its maritime hegemony. If the US military were to be pushed much further east into the Pacific Ocean it would be difficult for it to provide support to its allies in the region. The US calls China’s defence strategy in its adjacent seas an “Anti-Access/Area Denial” strategy and it is currently working out a counter-strategy. (I will deal with this further later in this article.)

The contradictions in US-China relations

China’s rise and the US’s relative decline have been accelerated recently by two developments. One is the US’s failure in the “war on terror” and the other is the economic crisis that began in the US in 2008.

First, the “war on terror” was an attempt by a US in relative decline to recover its former position. The US aimed to consolidate its dominance by using its overwhelming military superiority to seize control of the region supplying oil to the other major powers. The failure of this strategy was a big blow to US hegemony. While the US was bogged down in Iraq other nations and other countries’ capitalists were able to use the US’s weakness to strengthen their positions. China was presented with an opportunity to expand its influence in East Asia.

Second, the economic crisis that began in 2008 weakened US dominance even further. The US was the epicentre of the crisis and it dragged down the rest of the world economy. Conversely, China escaped from the crisis quickly and was also able to revitalise other countries’ economies at the same time. During the course of the economic crisis China became the world’s number one exporter and the number one holder of foreign currency reserves. In December 2011 China’s foreign currency holdings totalled $3.2 trillion, and of this, 60 percent was held in US dollars, further increasing Chinese influence on both the US and world economies.

However, we must not exaggerate China’s rise. Some observers are even of the opinion that China is about to take the US’s current position and become a new superpower. Among these observers are those right wingers who adhere to the “China Threat” theory. It has become quite fashionable to predict when China will economically overtake the US. International institutions are all scrambling to predict when that time will come, with Goldman Sachs saying 2027, the World Bank predicting some time between 2023 and 2029, the EU saying 2021, Global Insight 2019 and the IMF 2016. However, the core issue that has to be considered is whether China’s current pace of growth can be maintained and this makes the prospects for China’s future economic strength quite unclear. The recent global economic crisis did spread to China and the country’s growth rate is already falling. It is expected that in the Xi Jinping era China’s growth rate will remain below the 7 percent level. If the Chinese property bubble that has grown even bigger under the conditions of economic crisis were to burst it could lead to major political instability. Currently the annual number of demonstrations in China stands at 180,000, meaning that every day, all over China, there on average almost 500 protests and demonstrations of various types.10 Neither is it an easy matter for China to switch from an economy reliant on exports to one focused on domestic consumption. Currently domestic consumption is thought to make up barely 8 percent of China’s GDP and there is a huge gap between rich and poor.

Since the end of the Cold War the US has been able to rule continuously as the world’s sole superpower. According to the IMF’s statistics for 2010, US GDP of $14.657 trillion was almost three times that of China, at $5.878 trillion.11 In 2012 the gap between US and Chinese GDP was still large (although it had narrowed somewhat), but the gap between the two countries’ per capita GDP is far larger. US GDP per capita in 2010 was more than ten times that of China, at $47,240 compared to China’s $4,260. With per capita GDP only 46.8 percent of the world average, China is still a poor country. When we examine military strength, the gap between the two countries is even larger. According to SIPRI’s statistics for 2011, US military spending is not only the highest in the world, but is equivalent to the defence budgets of the next 5 highest spenders put together (in order: China, Russia, UK, France, Japan). As figure 5 shows, the difference between the defence budgets of the US and China is very great.

 

 

If we one-sidedly exaggerate the rise of China there is a danger that we make the mistake of overlooking one of the core features of the current world order: the continued existence of an imbalance in strength between the US and the rest of the advanced capitalist states. Having said that, it would also be a mistake to understand today’s world as one in which the advanced countries are all actually subordinated to US hegemony. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have systematically developed this approach and this has led them to the conclusion that geopolitical competition is now a thing of the past.12

We need to recognise that while there is a big imbalance between the US and the other advanced nations, there are also considerable conflicts of interest between them too. We should not ignore the tensions and latent sources of hostility among the major powers. In the context of the recent world economic crisis we are currently seeing the outbreak of severe conflicts over exchange rates and trade between China and the US, whose economies have developed a relationship of mutual dependence. China currently accounts for some 40 percent of the US trade deficit and the US is thus strongly demanding that China allow the renminbi to appreciate. In other words, the US is pressuring China to pay the adjustment costs required for its own economy to recover from the crisis. However, as was the case with West Germany and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, US pressure on China is not likely to be successful. This sort of economic conflict between the two powers has a geopolitical impact and also combines with moves to occupy a dominant position. Although the effect may not be immediate, in a situation where stagnation continues for a long time conflicts of interest between major powers can give rise to major geopolitical clashes.

The US response and resulting instability in East Asia

Feeling threatened by the rise of China as an economic and military power, the US will actively seek a way to maintain its position at the top of the world rankings. The US already openly stated this in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. This report revealed the superpower’s worries, noting that: “Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the US and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages [in the absence of] US counter strategies.” It then continued, menacingly, to announce that: “It will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States or other friendly countries, and it will seek to deter aggression or coercion. Should deterrence fail, the United States would deny a hostile power its strategic and operational objectives”.13

However, after more than ten years mired in Iraq and Afghanistan the US cannot handle the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical competitor so easily and is finding it difficult to maintain its global hegemony. As Alex Callinicos has pointed out, the US establishment seems to be panicked by the idea that while it has been bogged down in the Middle East and Afghanistan the rest of the world has been overtaking it.14

This is the background to the emergence of the phrase “Pivot to Asia”. Hillary Clinton published an article in Foreign Policy in November 2011, entitled “America’s Pacific Century”. During his nine-day tour of Asian countries in the same year Barack Obama also repeatedly emphasised that “the Asia-Pacific region is my first priority.” In his speech to the Australian parliament he stated: “As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority,” adding: “So let there be no doubt: in the Asia Pacific in the 21st century the United States of America is all in.”

However, the idea that Asia is important is not exactly a new discovery for the US, which has always regarded itself as an Asia-Pacific power. Its 1990 East Asian Strategic Initiative, which included a plan to reduce the US military presence in East Asia after the collapse of the USSR, did not last long. The US quickly switched back to stating that it would play a core role in the region. This was because of its fears about the rise of potential competitors like China. The 1997 US-Japan Defense Cooperation Guidelines were created in this context. The Pentagon’s April 2001 Defense Policy Report also revealed the US’s intention to shift its strategic focus from the West to the Asia Pacific region, but during the Bush administration’s prosecution of the “war on terror” this inevitably fell by the wayside. However, even the neocon strategy was actually a way of responding to the changes in the world economy: the rise of China and the decline of the US. But, as we all know, this resulted in the Iraq War that ended in defeat for the US.

So Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” is not building upon results garnered by the former strategy. It instead takes as its starting point current difficult circumstances, which have been made even worse by recent failures. What’s more, due to its fiscal deficit the US will have to reduce its defence spending over the next ten years by between $400 billion and $1 trillion. It finds itself in a situation where it has to carry out its stated strategy within the constraints of a diminishing defence budget. As it continues to be the world’s sole superpower, the US has to show that its capabilities span the whole world and that it intends to maintain its hegemony not just in East Asia but in the Middle East and Europe too. After he was re-elected Obama headed for Burma, but with a military conflict breaking out between Israel and Hamas he could not take his eyes off the Middle East, where US control has been so weakened. In short, with the US bearing the scars of defeat and forced to cut defence spending by the economic crisis, it may feel anxious about the instability in the Middle East but has little option other than turning to Asia.

However, as Chris Harman pointed out in his speech at the Marxism event in Seoul in 2009, a wounded animal is more dangerous. It is clear that the US’s strategic adjustment will make the East Asian region even more unstable.

First, it is making efforts to boost its economic and diplomatic influence. It is actively setting out to check China’s expanding influence. One example of this is the Trans Pacific Partnership that the US is currently pursuing. The TPP is the main free trade agreement aimed at expanding the US’s economic benefits and influence in the increasingly economically important Asian region. At the moment Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Chile are participating in the TPP. These are all places that have close economic relations with China and have either concluded free trade agreements (FTAs) with China (Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile) or are in the process of negotiating one (Australia, New Zealand).

Above all, the US has begun actively to promote the TPP because it wants to recover the influence it has lost in East Asia and the Pacific region and block China’s efforts to promote an East Asian Free Trade Agreement (EAFTA) through ASEAN+3 (ASEAN plus China, Japan and South Korea). The US has actually tried to hold back the development of Asian regionalism for some time. During the 1990s the US also used its leadership of APEC to thwart the formation of the East Asian Economic Group and the Asian Monetary Fund. Despite this, with genuine movement towards regionalism in East Asia after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and against the background of the US’s estrangement from Asia during the Iraq War, APEC has become less important. During this time ASEAN+3 has made rapid progress in institutionalisation under the leadership of China. In the case of ASEAN+3, not only the US but all states outside the Asian region are excluded from membership. The US’s promotion of the TPP is therefore an attempt to prevent itself from being kept out of East Asian economic integration and even to snatch the leadership of this integration from China.

Of course, there are also economic reasons for the US’s promotion of the TPP. Some time ago Obama announced the National Export Initiative that included the target of doubling exports in five years from 2010. In order to achieve this target the US will have to pioneer new markets in East Asia and construct a new economic and trade cooperation system. If an East Asian Free Trade Agreement is concluded with the exclusion of the US it is thought that it might reduce the US’s annual exports by at least $25 billion and some 200,000 high income jobs would be lost.15

Obama is now making efforts to expand the number of countries involved in the TPP. During his tour of South East Asian countries after his re-election in November 2012 he managed to get a promise from Thailand that it would participate in the TPP negotiations. At the same time the then Japanese prime minister, Noda, also expressed his intention to participate in the TPP and agreed with Obama that preparatory talks should be speeded up. There is also a story that the US officially requested that South Korea participate in the TPP. (The South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade denied these reports when they appeared in the Bangkok Post.)

The US is also trying to prevent the leadership of East Asian regional structures drifting over to China and secure its own leading position by actively participating in regional security organisations like the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit (EAS). The US first participated in the EAS in 2011 where, despite opposition from China, it led a multilateral debate on territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Second, the US is attempting to boost its geopolitical and military influence in the region. It is responding to China’s military build-up by making great efforts to maintain its superior position. The US strategic response is well illustrated in its Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) published in January 2012. Entitled “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”, these guidelines for geopolitical strategy clarify the Obama government’s policy focusing on the Asia-Pacific region and aimed at checking the advance of China. This reveals its intention to neutralise China’s naval strategy, what the US calls its “Anti-Access/Area Denial Strategy”. The guidance document notes in particular: “In order to credibly deter potential adversaries and to prevent them from achieving their objectives, the United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged”.16

In summary, the US intends to oppose head-on China’s attempts to push the US military out of its neighbouring seas, beyond the First Island Chain and possibly even the Second Island Chain. In other words, the US is sending a message that it will continue to dominate the Asia-Pacific region. This is also revealed in the US attitude towards the territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas. (Both of these seas are within the First Island Chain.) As I pointed out earlier, the US has taken the position that the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands fall under the scope of Article 5 of the US-Japan Security Treaty.17 Thus if there is a confrontation between China and Japan over the Senkakus the US will respond jointly with Japan. The US has also stated openly that it will “take an interest in resolving the territorial disputes in the region”, targeting China’s disputes with its neighbours over various islands in the South China Sea. In her speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in July 2010 Secretary of State Clinton noted that “the United States, like every nation, has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea… The United States supports a collaborative diplomatic process by all claimants for resolving the various territorial disputes without coercion.” This puts pressure on China’s claims to possession over the South China Sea and offers a protective shield to those countries that are in conflict with China over these issues.

The US Department of Defense has proposed a strategy of “Operational Access”, meaning that even in a situation where a country denies access to the US it will have “the ability to project military force into any operational area in the face of armed opposition”.18 In June 2012 US defence secretary Leon Panetta said that the US would station 60 percent of its naval power in the Asia-Pacific region (at the moment it is 50 percent) in an effort to raise operational access capabilities.19 The construction of a Missile Defence (MD) system is one of the most important ways of neutralising China’s “Anti-Access/Area Denial” capabilities. The US has been cooperating with Japan on Missile Defence since the late 1990s and trying to get South Korea to participate too. It has also been trying to strengthen Taiwan’s military capabilities in order to guard against China’s ability to project its military power in the Taiwan Strait. Despite resistance from China, the US decided in January 2010 to sell $6.4 billion worth of the latest weaponry to Taiwan, while in December 2012 the National Defense Authorisation Act passed by the US Congress demanded that the administration sell advanced fighter planes to Taiwan. Aside from this the US has been trying to maintain its maritime dominance in the region by investing in stealth bombers, long distance precision strike capabilities, nuclear attack submarines and cyber-security.

Situated as it is so far from East Asia, the US desperately needs the cooperation of states in the region in order to respond to China’s military build-up. Without agreements that guarantee US access, overseas base construction and base improvements as well as joint military exercises with regional states, the US will not be able to pursue its strategy. For this reason, the US is strengthening its existing alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia and others while reinforcing security cooperation with other states such as Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. (To a certain extent this fits well with the interests of the East Asian states, which are concerned about the rise of China and keen to keep it in check.)

US efforts to besiege China by forging alliances in Asia
US strategy in Asia involves seeking “to maintain Japan’s strategic subordination, and more generally, developing a coalition of states capable of containing China”, as Alex Callinicos points out.20 Traditionally, Japan has been the most important ally in the region for the US. For a long time, it has pursued a strategy to strengthen its presence by siding with the US. During the late 2000s, especially under the Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama who championed Asia-focused policies, the relationship between the two countries suffered temporary setbacks, but the Obama administration was able to maintain its marine corps base in Futenma and “normalise” US-Japan relations by exploiting the sinking of the South Korean warship the Cheonan. The East Asian Community conceived by Hatoyama eventually came to naught in 2010 when Naoto Kan was sworn into office as the next prime minister.

Japan plays a pivotal role in implementing the US strategy to besiege China with its allies. Accordingly, the US wants Japan to enhance its regional status, which means increasing its contribution to maintaining security in the region. This partly reflects Washington’s need to cut its military spending. Recently the US has been asserting such intentions even more openly. At the US-Japan summit held on 30 April 2012 the two countries redefined the nature of their alliance as that of preparing for uncertainties created by the emergence of China in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time they agreed to facilitate cooperation between the US military and the Japan Self-Defence Forces (JSDF) to contain China and develop the JSDF into a truly “Dynamic Defence Force”. The concept of Dynamic Defence is meant to allow the JSDF to operate with greater mobility both at home and abroad, beyond its primary mission of territorial defence. In other words, it is to be freed from a purely defensive mission and expand overseas.

These developments enable Japan, which once imposed brutal colonial rule in Asia, to bolster its military capabilities. Over the last year alone the country relaxed its “three principles” governing weapons exports (deciding to participate in joint weapons development programmes with the US and its allies), revised the Nuclear Energy Basic Law to lay the legal basis for nuclear armament, and issued a report by a committee under the prime minister’s office calling for the “amendment of the Constitutional interpretation to allow the country to exercise its collective self-defence rights”. In its 2012 defence white paper Tokyo openly warned against a “China threat”, and on the basis of this, embarked on a build-up of military forces targeting China. Both the US and Japan deployed Global Hawks, the state of the art unmanned spy drones, off the coasts of Japan including the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands to tighten vigilance and surveillance in the area. Japan has already beefed up its military forces in Nansei Shoto (Japan’s south western islands) in the wake of the Senkaku flare-up in 2010. It also decided to deploy Osprey aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing capability at Futenma Base, despite fierce opposition from Okinawans. The Osprey is capable of infiltrating deep behind enemy lines or staging surprise attacks with its high cruising speed.

All of this happened under the watch of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). However, Japan’s military resurgence is likely to accelerate more rapidly since the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) secured a majority in the general elections of December 2012. The new prime minister Shinzo Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a Class A war criminal, and Abe himself is a right wing politician who denies Japan’s history of military aggression, colonial rule in Asia and its atrocities. Abe put forth the amendment of the Peace Constitution, recognition of Japan’s collective self-defence rights, transformation of the JSDF into a regular military force, and the legislation of its rules of engagement as his campaign pledges. On the day the new cabinet was launched, he announced he would ask a panel of experts for their opinions on the extent to which Japan’s collective self-defence rights can be exercised under the existing constitution. He is intent on asserting collective self-defence rights even if it means an amendment of the constitutional interpretation. The right of collective self-defence, in international law means the right of a country to intervene militarily when an ally has been attacked, even if the country itself is not directly attacked. So far Japan has been denied the right of collective self-defence and is allowed a self-defence force capable of engaging an enemy only when attacked first, in accordance with Article 9 of the Peace Constitution, which renounces war and the possession of military forces.

Next to Japan, South Korea is the second most important US ally in East Asia. “The US-ROK Alliance is a linchpin of stability, security and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Obama in June 2010. The South Korean right wing were overjoyed by the apparently flattering use of the expression “linchpin”, but in fact, his comment only reveals how deeply South Korea is tied to the instability in East Asia. The US intends to make South Korea one of the main pillars of its strategy to contain China. The joint statement issued at the conclusion of the 2012 US-ROK Foreign and Defence Ministers’ Meeting stipulated South Korea would actively cooperate with the US in implementing its strategy to contain China and implied that the scope of US-ROK cooperation could go beyond North East Asia to the South China Sea—meaning that South Korea can be caught up in regional conflicts in the course of defending US interests in East Asia.

The US wants South Korea to cooperate militarily with Japan. For a long time the US has hoped to strengthen security cooperation between the two countries and form a US-ROK-Japan trilateral alliance, but issues involving Japan’s colonial past have been an obstacle. Lately Washington has been hard at work to promote security ties between its allies: thus South Korea and Japan held a joint annual Search and Rescue Exercise (SAREX) and discussed the signing of a military cooperation pact and an acquisitions and cross-servicing agreement.

The Lee Myung-bak government, which secretly attempted to push through a military cooperation pact, postponed the signing when faced with public uproar at home, but the newly inaugurated Park Geun-hye government is very likely to resume the negotiations. The primary focus for the US is to ensure cooperation between South Korea, the US and Japan in building its missile defence system. In other words, the US wants to establish a new command and control structure whereby the three countries share military intelligence and engage in joint operations from the point of missile launch to interception. Although the US uses the “threat” of North Korea as an excuse for building the missile defence system, it is an open secret that its real target is China. As pointed out above, the US missile defence system is crucial in neutralising China’s “Anti-Access/Area Denial” strategy.

US exaggeration of the North Korean “threat” has to be briefly mentioned here. The US has used the “threat” posed by North Korea as a pretext for pursuing its strategic interests of maintaining hegemony in East Asia. For example, it accused North Korea of sinking the Cheonan warship as a way of strengthening the US-Japan alliance. It even deployed an aircraft carrier for a joint naval exercise conducted right under China’s nose off the west coast of Korea. The US also cites the North Korean “threat” as the first and foremost reason for trilateral security cooperation and for the missile defence system. It needs, in other words, to use the poorest and the most vulnerable country in North East Asia as a bogeyman to justify a system that really targets China. In South Korea there is widespread discontent that the US seems to want the tensions on the Korean peninsula to continue. All the same, the US expects South Korea to toe its line in dealing with North Korea.

The South Korean ruling class has posed itself as a loyal ally of the US to promote its own political, economic and military interests and elevate its international status. In the 2000s, the policy of leaning exclusively towards the US became contested by a section of the political elite, but Park Geun-hye from the Saenuri Party, which traditionally placed great emphasis on the US-ROK alliance, won the 2012 presidential election. Park, the daughter of the military dictator who ruled during the 1960s and 1970s, served as an acting first lady after her mother’s death; as president, she is certain to lend full support to the US policy of enhancing the US-ROK alliance.

The US is strengthening its security cooperation with other Asian countries too. It is striving to encircle China by promising to provide protection for South East Asian nations which have been alarmed by the rise of China. To this end, the then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, defense secretary Leon Panetta and even President Obama have visited Asia several times over the past two or three years.

As a result, the US succeeded in reaching an agreement in 2012 with the Philippines to enhance military cooperation and was given permission to resume its use of the Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base—once its two biggest foreign bases in the world—by the Philippines government in June the same year. The Subic Base was the most crucial strategic base for the US during the Vietnam War. In April 2012 the Philippines government requested US assistance in the midst of a confrontation with China on Scarborough Island. It is fair to say the Philippines gave the naval and air base to the US in return for the help. With these bases in hand, the US was able to considerably broaden its theatre of operation in Asia and tighten the noose round China.

The US also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Vietnam to enhance military cooperation between the two countries in September 2011. Having had disputes with China over the Paracel Islands, Vietnam began to allow US naval forces to visit its ports in 2009. In August 2011 it even permitted US naval ships to visit the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, 36 years after the end of the Vietnam War. On his visit to the base in 2012 defence secretary Leon Panetta stressed that “access for United States naval ships into this facility is a key component of this relationship” with Vietnam, and the Vietnamese government is considering whether to allow US access to Cam Ranh. Cam Ranh Bay, the main base from which the US waged the Vietnam War, is a strategic location for the US, lying within easy reach of the South China Sea.

The US government is also in discussions with the Thai government to enhance its access to the U-Tapao Naval Air Base. The base was used for B-52 takeoffs and landings during the Vietnam War. As illustrated in figure 7, the US is attempting to gain footholds in strategic positions in a number of countries surrounding China.

The US reached an agreement with Singapore in June 2012 to deploy its high-tech littoral combat ships in the country. Furthermore, Obama’s visit to Australia in 2011 resulted in an agreement to send 2,500 US marines to Australia’s Darwin Naval Base, US fighter jets to the Tyndall Air Force Base, and nuclear-armed vessels and submarines to the Stirling Base. The Darwin Base would serve as a rear base from which to oversee the sea lane that runs from the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca to the South China Sea.

The US is expanding military cooperation not just in the South China Sea but also in the Indian Ocean. In June 2012, Panetta met Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and talked about a “common security threat”. India has been watching with growing alarm China’s effort to increase its influence in the Indian Ocean, for instance helping Pakistan and Sri Lanka build ports. As with Japan, the US wants to make India a regional power that will contain China. In 2006 it changed its position against India’s nuclear programme and signed a US-India nuclear cooperation agreement as part of this strategy.

Figure 6: Strategic bases in South East Asia that the US is eyeing

 

Some of the countries that the US is trying to win over to its side have long histories of opposition to Washington: Burma, Laos and Cambodia—China’s traditional allies. Hillary Clinton paid a visit to Burma in 2011 and Laos in 2012, the first time a US secretary of state had visited those countries since 1955. Obama also included Burma and Laos among the first countries to visit after his re-election. Washington wants to pull these countries away from China and make them cooperate with the US. Burma is a case in point. A geopolitically important country for China, Burma has been supported economically and diplomatically by China throughout the last 20 years of economic sanctions imposed by the West. The country serves as a bridgehead for China to make inroads to the Indian Ocean. Currently China is conducting a strategic oil pipeline project with Burma to reduce the amount of oil that passes through the Strait of Malacca and secure more reliable oil supplies. As the New York Times noted, the US “embrace” of Burma must have come as a shock to China.

Of course, China does not sit idle, doing nothing about the US encircling it. China has been making continuous efforts to expand its influence not only economically but also geopolitically and to protect its “core interests” from the US and its allies. On his visit to the US in February 2012 China’s new leader Xi Jinping argued that China and the US should work out a “new type of relationship between major powers”. In other words, they should build mutual trust and respect each other’s core interests and concerns. The “core interests” of China include “sovereign and territorial
integrity”, which means maintaining its rule over Tibet and Xinjiang and adhering to the “One China Principle” regarding Taiwan. Since 2010 China also counts the South China Sea among its core interests. Beijing will not back down easily in disputes regarding these issues, considering China’s characterisation of its “core interests” as national interests that must be defended at all costs and under any circumstances, using force if necessary.

Conclusion
Instability in East Asia is growing as the result of China’s rise and the US’s strategy of maintaining its hegemony in the region. As the US encourages its Asian allies to strengthen their military roles and China responds in kind, East Asia is becoming a powder keg. According to a report released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the United States on 15 November 2012, the defence budgets of China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have doubled over the last decade.

While a war between the US and China is not inevitable, it is nevertheless clear that we are living in a dangerous world. Contrary to the widespread belief that the economic interdependence between China and the US will deter any geopolitical clash between them, increased trade and investment do not bring peace—as the classical Marxist theory of imperialism warns. Germany and Britain had close economic ties before the First World War, and the same was true of the US and Japan before the Second World War. Above all, East Asia is rife with destabilising factors such as territorial disputes and a divided Korean peninsula, any one of which can trigger a rapid escalation of military tension in the region.

Opposing imperialism is a crucial task for socialists. We must oppose the US’s imperialist expansion to maintain its world hegemony as well as the Asian governments that ally with the US to increase their own international clout. We must have no illusions or fantasies about Chinese imperialism either. China can never offer a better model for humanity. The answer is not to take sides among competing imperialist countries but to build an anti-imperialist movement from below. Imperialism is not a set of policies thrust upon us by particularly nasty rulers; it is the latest stage of global capitalism driven by capitalist dynamics. Therefore, to oppose imperialism consistently, it is ultimately necessary to oppose capitalism. Socialists have to make every effort to encourage workers’ movements to develop into an anti-capitalist movement.

 

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Notes
1: Thanks to Owen Miller and Kyle Chun for translating this article.

2: A major exchange of artillery fire in the Yellow Sea between North and South Korea that took place in November 2010.

3: The Japanese prime minister announced in July 2012 that the Japanese government would buy the islands from their private owner, thus effectively “nationalising” them.

4: US National Intelligence Council, 2008, pp37-39.

5: Measured according to current currency exchange rates with purchasing power parity in brackets.

6: Estimates after 2009

7: Hankyoreh, 17 April 2012.

8: Kim Chaech’ol, 2007, p165.

9: South Korea’s Democratic Party (Minjudang) is a liberal bourgeois party, often seen as left of centre or progressive. It lacks much credibility among working class voters because of its association with neoliberal reforms under presidents Kim Dae Jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008).

10: Chosun Ilbo, 16 November 2012.

11: These figures are from the IMF World Economic Outlook, 2011.

12: On the views of today’s Marxists on capitalism and imperialism see Callinicos, 2009, pp16-18. See also Panitch and Gindin, 2012.

13: United States Department of Defense, 2006, pp29-30.

14: Callinicos, 2011, p71.

15: Bergsten, 2007, p4.

16: Department of Defense, 2012, p4.

17: Article 5 of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the US (1960) states: “Each Party recognises that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations in accordance with the provisions of Article 51 of the Charter. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”

18: Olsen, 2012, p38.

19: This is from Panetta’s speech given at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue event that took place in Singapore in June 2012 – www.iiss.org/conferences/the-shangri-la-dialogue/shangri-la-dialogue-2012/speeches/first-plenary-session/leon-panetta

20: Callinicos, 2009, p220.

 

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References
Bergsten, C Fred, 2007, “China and Economic Integration in East Asia: Implications for the United States”, Policy Briefs PB07-3, Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Callinicos, Alex, 2009, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Polity Press).

Callinicos, Alex, 2011, “Alex Callinicos Korea lecture: Imperialism and international political economy”, published in Marx21, 11 (autumn).

Kim Chaech’ol, 2007, Chungguk ui oegyo chollyak kwa kukche chilso [China’s diplomatic strategy and the global order] (Polliteia).

Olsen, Paul A, 2012, Operation Corporate: Operational Art and Implications for the Joint Operational Access Concept (School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College), www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA566546

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin, 2012, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso).

United States National Intelligence Council, 2008, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,
www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf

United States Department of Defense, 2006, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, www.defense.gov/qdr/report/report20060203.pdf

United States Department of Defense, 2012, Defense Strategic Guidance – Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf
 
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All articles copyright © International Socialism unless otherwise stated
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=882&issue=138

The book argues for a gendered and political perspective on the trajectory of development and its impact on women. By T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
IS work necessarily emancipatory and empowering for women in a context of patriarchal structures and capitalist mode of production? Do national surveys capture and enumerate women’s work and the value of this work to the national income adequately? These are some of the questions posed in the compendium of articles selected from Economic and Political Weekly that focus on the multifarious dimensions of the world of work for women. Questions which remains invisible to policymakers, not only in terms of computing this work and its value in an academic sense but also in terms of addressing the macro-level issues about the growing size of informal work and the high participation of women in such work. The articles, carefully selected and edited by Padmini Swaminathan, a professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, cover a range of women’s work, the policies, or the lack of policies, that shape and influence such work and the need for a gendered and political perspective on the trajectory of development and the consequences it has had for women. The articles have been written over a two-and-a-half-decade period. The oldest one in the series, “Dynamics of Sexual Division of Labour and Capital Accumulation”, written by Maria Mies, was published in 1981.

The collection is divided into four sections which, on the face of it, look disparate but are in fact connected in the way each section looks at the world of work of women, first conceptually and then interrogating the data systems that themselves incorporate invisibility. The third section is about sectoral perspectives that look at the myriad forms of labour and the conditions of work where women can be disempowered despite being employed. Finally, there is the section on critiquing the policies themselves. The introduction, by the editor, begins aptly with an excerpt from the seminal report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1975), the first such report to emerge in post-Independence India. It underscored how the debate on women’s employment was not only a social or economic issue, but one with deep political and cultural dimensions. Therefore, many of the papers embody the notion that the nature of women’s work, whether as farm labour, in the export processing zone, in the bidi industry or even as bar girls, constitutes economic exploitation characterised by low wages. Hence, Pamini Swaminathan writes that “we do not have to labour the point that almost all the articles included in the volume in different ways allude to deteriorating work and living conditions”.

In fact, what is lacking is a broad and specific theoretical framework that locates all these experiences of exploitative work in a capitalist mode of production. Questions of political economy, then, are just relegated to the background while micro-level details and experiences dominate. This is not to say that all the essays lack a theoretical framework; in fact, most of the papers do encompass a broad political understanding, which may or may not be rooted in an economic doctrine. Padmini Swaminathan rightly points out that the concern regarding the paradigm of development needed far more and in-depth investigations integrated with gender concerns. A lot of time, she says, has been spent in policy evaluation studies that went no further than giving information about women being beneficiaries. The problem is that the policies themselves need to be critiqued much more harshly than is being done at present. For instance, a major part of the government’s efforts at creating employment are directed at creating scheme-based work at low wage rates. Much of these scheme-based work employed women, poor women mainly, and have largely tackled the social determinants of well-being without addressing the well-being of the workers themselves. These are issues that may need to be explored in the coming years given the increased and exaggerated emphasis by the Indian state on social policy interventions.
Modes of production

The first section explores the consequences of what Padmini Swaminathan calls the enmeshing of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. In fact, the coexistence of these two forms has had devastating consequences in social relations, the expressions of which have been seen in increased violence against women, a trend that has become all-pervasive. However, the central argument in the paper by Maithreyi Krishnaraj on women craft workers shows how craft, characterised by low returns, is reserved exclusively for women, while mobility is the preserve of men. She writes that the women are not helpers in the family craft but the main contributors; they perform the role of risk-bearers, providing the household with the basic minimum subsistence that allows the male members to seek alternatives. The craft labour is in addition to all the domestic tasks. The important argument here is that when macro changes, through a loss of demand for traditional products, competition-induced displacement, loss in resources through land policies, and urban-based industrialisation, reduce the opportunities for remunerative employment for a whole section of the population, women, like the craft workers in the study, reduce the severity of the impact of these macro changes on the household through their subsistence activities. Yet, they are undervalued by both the market and the household.
In this section, Maria Mies, writing on the women lace workers of Narsapur in West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, says how the social definition of women as housewives was a necessary precondition for the unlimited exploitation of their labour in the domestic industries and the informal sector. And production for the world market has made the sexual division of labour both in society and in the family not more equal but more unequal. In the process, women have become the losers on all the fronts, writes Maria Mies. Through their reproductive and productive work, they enable the family to survive, even when the men’s income is insufficient. While men free themselves from the act of production itself by becoming agents, traders, etc., women are not able to do so. Maria Mies writes that it was not only the traditional ideology that kept women domesticated; modern, material forces were equally responsible. The division of labour between men and women was not static and the dynamics of change sometimes reinforced, legitimised and maintained the asymmetric and unequal relationship between men and women.

Other papers in this section include Bina Agarwal’s “Work Participation of Rural Women in the Third World” (published in 1985) which focusses on the need for taking corrective measures in the data-gathering process and calls for re-examining analytical concepts as they relate to women; Prem Chowdhury’s paper on “Women and Work in Rural Haryana”, written in the early 1990s, which shows how, despite high participation by women in agricultural activities, their cultural and social evaluation has always been on the lower side; Ujvala Rajadhyaksha and Swati Smita’s “Tracing a Timeline for Work and Family Research in India”, which reviews the literature on women’s studies and social sciences in India, beginning from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. This chapter offers a historical insight into the gradual change that came in the understanding of women’s studies and social sciences and the separate trajectories they followed in the areas of work and family research. It laments an apparent disconnect and gaps of perception between the women’s studies perspective and psychosocial research, where the focus has been more on the individual. This paper as such does not add much to the overall debate.
In Section II, which is about women’s invisibility in data systems, all the four articles throw considerable light on how national data systems not only ignore or under-enumerate the economic contribution of women but also are not conceptually and technically equipped to deal with the peculiar circumstances where women are forced to take up activities to sustain the household. Joan Mencher and K. Saradamoni’s article, written in 1982, on women rice cultivators in three States, emphasises how every innovation in paddy cultivation threw women out of work even as there was an urgent need to create additional employment for the women. In the next article, “Valuing Work” by Devaki Jain, published in 1996, the author wonders whether time can be used as an appropriate measure to evaluate work, especially of women who lack assets. There are problems in the manner in which questionnaires on employment and unemployment enumerated female work. The system was not designed to capture the myriad productive activities that women engaged in. Further, looking at the employment and unemployment situation in the 1990s, Indira Hirway focusses on the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, saying there has been no satisfactory explanation for the decline in the work participation rates in the 1990s. NSSO data did not capture satisfactorily, she says, work in the subsistence sector and informal or home-based sector.

Deepita Chakravarty and Ishita Chakravarty’s paper on “Girl Children in the Care Economy”, published in 2008, looks at the paradoxically high proportion of girl children engaged as domestic workers even as work opportunities for adult women have been shrinking. The fact is that this phenomenon is not confined to West Bengal alone and could be a pointer to a larger crisis of survival in society, where both girl children and adult women have been forced to sell their family labour for domestic or other work. In urban areas, even where there are schools, the number of out-of-school children among the poor continues to be high.

The essays in Section III, comprising five papers, look at the actual working conditions in sectors such as domestic labour, the bidi industry and the leather tanning industry; the breakdown of traditional jajmani relationships; and the interplay of patriarchal structures and capitalist relations of production which results in both empowering and disempowering situations for women.

Going beyond working class women, one paper looks at the problems faced by women scientists in four institutes of excellence. Uma Kothari’s paper looks at women’s paid work and rural transformation, J. Jeyaranjan and Padmini Swaminathan look at the resilience of gender inequities in a Chennai setting, Meena Gopal’s work is on women bidi workers, Millie Nihila looks at the tanning industry, and the paper by the Forum Against Oppression of Women studies the specific case of the bar dancers of Mumbai.

 

Conceptual basis

Section IV, the last section, explains the conceptual underpinning for the selection of the articles in the volume, critiquing policy and its implications and consequences for work. The most interesting essay in this section is the one by J. Jeyaranjan, who looks at the pro-poor policies for women in Tamil Nadu, especially the working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It argues effectively how dovetailing the MGNREGA with other pro-poor social schemes like the highly subsidised rations or self-help credit programmes has contributed to its success here despite the fact that it is quite organically delinked from the main macroeconomic policies of the government. Jeyaranjan’s village-based study, located in Thanjavur district, argues that the transformatory potential of the MGNREGA is limited as it is a “social policy which is distinctive from and unrelated to the economic and industrial policy of the country”. He says that while welfare policies like the MGNREGA, the public distribution system (PDS) and the State-sponsored SHG credit programmes may alleviate poverty when implemented in letter and spirit and thereby empower women, it cannot transform rural economies characterised by low economic growth, poor investments in infrastructure and nil generation of decent employment.

This book has been carefully compiled and what it shows is that more such studies need to be done, locating the micro within the framework of macro policies which, despite the veneer of various social policy schemes, continue to be directed at the unbridled accumulation of capital and profits at the cost of labour. The social policy schemes themselves need to be exposed for what they are—the measly entitlements they encompass and how they have successfully managed to shift the debate from basic demands like land reforms, decent wages, decent and stable employment and social security.
http://www.frontline.in/books/invisible-labour/article4569989.ece

“Speech by Lenin at a Rally of Workers”, by Isaak Israelovitch Brodsky (1929).

 Lenin led a successful workers’ revolution, but are his ideas about organisation still relevant today? Does it make any sense to identify oneself as a Leninist in the 21st century?

One of the side effects of the continuing serious crisis of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain has been a renewed debate around this question. I don’t intend to go into the details of the turmoil in the SWP here—suffice it to say that after the serious mishandling of a rape accusation against a leading member and the party leadership’s attempts to end discussion of the matter, some of its outside critics on the left have taken the opportunity to declare the Leninist model of party organisation dead.

In turn, the SWP’s leading theoretician, Alex Callinicos, has mounted a defence of Leninism (implying along the way that the party’s handling of the original case should not be questioned). The arguments are important because the International Socialist Review [published by the Center for Economic and Social Research and associated with the International Socialist Organization (US)] and the SWP both emerged from the same political tradition. But it is possible to reject both the critics of Leninism and the interpretation of Leninism that Callinicos offers.

The left critics offer two main lines of argument. The first argument is that Leninism has always been undemocratic and elitist. The second argument is that it is implausible to think that the experience of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party that he led to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917 has any relevance for anti-capitalists today operating in completely different circumstances. I’ll turn to the first argument in a moment. The British Marxist Duncan Hallas (himself a leading member of the SWP until his death) responded to the second argument back in the 1970s:

If what is being said is that the Russia of 1917 and the Britain of today are so radically different that it is out of the question for the course of events in Britain to closely follow the pattern of the Russian events of sixty years ago then there is no dispute. We have no massive peasantry, no mass conscript army bled white by years of wholesale slaughter. The relative weight of the working class in British society is enormously greater and the bourgeoisie in this, the oldest of capitalist countries, vastly more substantial and experienced than its feeble Russian counterpart and so on and so forth.

If, however, what is being suggested is that there is, after all, some non-revolutionary road to socialism then we have to part company.

Hallas puts his finger on the crucial issue. For those who accept that capitalism cannot be replaced without a revolution and that the working class must be central to any such change (two big assumptions, to be sure, but ones that I will make here), then the experience of Lenin and the Bolsheviks — who successfully led such a revolution — cannot be ignored. However, neither can it simply be used as a blueprint, not just because conditions have changed, but also because Bolshevik practise itself changed over time. So it is necessary to look in some detail at the historical record.

Caricature

For most of the past century many mainstream historians and political theorists promoted a familiar caricature of Lenin and Leninism that was also unfortunately accepted by many on the left. According to the caricature, Lenin was an elitist who believed that Russian workers would not become socialists by themselves and needed to be led by a party of professional revolutionaries in which decisions would be made by a small group of leaders and intellectuals at the top. On this view, Lenin’s political ideas and practice led, after his death, to the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship, including prison camps, slave labour and the mass extermination of political opponents.

The caricature was useful propaganda for the West during the Cold War, but bears little relationship to reality. In recent years, no one has done more to challenge it than the historian Lars Lih, who systematically dismantled the myths in his mammoth 2006 study, Lenin Rediscovered. Lih’s book focuses on misinterpretations of Lenin’s What is to be Done?, written in 1902. It marshals an immense amount of historical and textual evidence to show that no one was more enthusiastic about the capacities and revolutionary potential of the Russian working class than Lenin. He wanted a disciplined, professional, centralised revolutionary organisation because this was the only way to combat infiltration by tsarist police spies.

However, Lih is so eager to refute the caricature that he ends up portraying Lenin as little more than an orthodox follower of Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the German Social Democrats (SPD) and the socialist Second International. The reality is more complex. For many years, Lenin was a great admirer of Kautsky, whose theoretical works offered a defence of classical Marxism and the necessity of working-class revolution. But in practice, Kautsky came to accommodate himself to the increasingly reformist practice of the SPD, dominated by trade union bureaucrats and an almost exclusive focus on electoral politics. Lenin identified with Kautsky because he took him to be much more of a revolutionary than he really was.

In practice, Lenin was developing a very different conception of the party to Kautsky. Lenin did not break with Kautsky until 1914, when the SPD supported Germany’s entry into World War I, but the differences between their approaches had started to become evident earlier. For example, in 1909, in a book entitled The Road to Power, Kautsky offered this conception of the party:

The socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it.

Kautsky viewed revolution as a force of nature, something that was beyond the power of individuals or political parties to influence. If that was the case, there was no need for the SPD to do anything other than increase its representation in parliament and wait for the moment when inevitable historical processes would hand it political power.

For Lenin, by contrast, the whole point of a revolutionary party was to prepare the way for revolution. Historical forces might present the opportunity for revolutionary change, but without active organisation and intervention, the ability to influence a mass movement during a period of intense crisis, and an understanding of when to advance and when to retreat, the moment would be lost. More than that, socialists would have to spend years patiently engaging in smaller struggles, both to learn how to lead as individuals and to build a party with the capacity to lead a successful revolution in the future.

Lenin’s goal was a party that brought together the most class-conscious and militant sections of the working class well in advance of an actual revolutionary situation. During a period of social crisis, such an organisation would be able to win the support of much larger numbers. As he put it in 1904:

… the stronger our Party organisations, consisting of real Social-Democrats, the less wavering and instability there is within the Party, the broader, more varied, richer, and more fruitful will be the Party’s influence on the elements of the working-class masses surrounding it and guided by it. The Party, as the vanguard of the working class, must not be confused, after all, with the entire class.

This was the basis of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks — two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party — in 1903, and in practice it led to a very different model of socialist organisation to the one defended by Kautsky. But when Lenin talked about “less wavering and instability … within the Party”, he did not mean that there should be monolithic agreement on all issues. On the contrary, as he argued in 1907, “There can be no mass party … without an open struggle between tendencies.”

Leninism under Lenin

To begin with, there was not much formal democracy within the Bolshevik faction. As the historian Marcel Liebman point out in his excellent survey Leninism Under Lenin, however, this was a consequence of the severe repression that existed in Russia before the 1905 revolution, so that the absence of internal elections “was characteristic of all Russia’s socialist organisations”. Liebman notes that “in their day-to-day actual political practice there was little to choose in this respect between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: down to the Revolution of 1905 they both employed the same methods, in which co-option of leaders was the rule and election the exception”. But the revolutionary upsurge and the influx of workers into the Bolsheviks led to the “democratisation of the party”. Lenin wrote in a short article in June 1906:

The St. Petersburg worker Social-Democrats know that the whole Party organisation is now built on a democratic basis. This means that all the Party members take part in the election of officials, committee members, and so forth, that all the Party members discuss and decide questions concerning the political campaigns of the proletariat, and that all the Party members determine the line of tactics of the Party organisations.

It was at this time that Lenin first articulated the principle of democratic centralism, which he summed up as “freedom of discussion, unity of action”. Lenin argued for the need to “work tirelessly … to see to it that all the higher-standing bodies are elected, accountable and subject to recall”. He continued:

If we have really and seriously decided to introduce democratic centralism in our Party, and if we have resolved to draw the masses of the workers into intelligent decision of Party questions, we must have these questions discussed in the press, at meetings, in circles and at group meetings.

Speaking in the context of what would prove to be only a temporary reunification with the Mensheviks, Lenin added, “this ideological struggle must not split the organisations, must not hinder the unity of action of the proletariat”. However, “before the call for action is issued, there should be the broadest and freest discussion and appraisal of the resolution, of its arguments and its various propositions”.

The party congress was to be the highest decision making body, and Lenin emphasised that “under no circumstances shall we submit to decisions of the Central Committee (CC) which violate the decisions of the Congress”. But he also reserved the right to “fight ideologically against those decisions of the Congress which we regard as erroneous”. The previous year the Bolsheviks had explicitly guaranteed the right of a minority “to advocate its views and to carry on an ideological struggle, so long as the disputes and differences do not lead to disorganisation”.

Within a few years, however, Lenin retreated from many of these organisational principles. With the final defeat of the revolutionary movement that had begun in 1905, a period of extreme reaction began in Russia from late 1907. It was a time of “disorganisation and disintegration” for the left, with internal conflicts and divisions as the various groups shrank dramatically. Within the ranks of the Bolsheviks it was a time of bitter faction fights and expulsions, with Lenin increasingly attempting to impose a single “party line” on the membership. No doubt in such difficult circumstances some tightening of organisational practices was necessary in order to prevent the Bolsheviks from falling apart completely, but Liebman argues convincingly that Lenin swung much too far in this direction, calling this the period of “Leninist sectarianism”.

Party transformed

As circumstances changed, however, so did the Bolsheviks’ organisational practice. The final break with the Mensheviks came in 1912 during a period of renewed working-class militancy in Russia. Then came the war years, difficult at first, but finally leading — as Lenin believed they would — to a new revolutionary upsurge in February 1917 and the overthrow of the tsar. In the process, the Bolshevik Party was transformed. Here is Liebman’s description:

Having been obliged by force of circumstance to organise in a not very democratic way, or even in a basically anti-democratic one, the Party opened itself in 1917 to the life-giving breeze of democracy. The rules of underground work, though they did not wholly vanish, became less important than the methods of public discussion. The monolithic character that Lenin had tried to give the Party during the last pre-war years disappeared completely, yielding place to a variety of tendencies that were in many ways mutually contradictory. The right of these tendencies to exist … now became a reality.

This pluralism, as is well known, extended all the way up to the Central Committee, where key issues were debated out, often in public. In April, Lenin declared that “it would be advisable openly to discuss our differences” and Trotsky later reported in his History of the revolution, “Almost all the local organisations formed into majorities and minorities”. Members of the minority served on the party’s executive bodies were allowed ample space in its publications, spoke at length at its conferences and generally issued a minority report at the end. Even when, on the eve of the October revolution, Lev Kamenev and Gregori Zinoviev publicly disagreed with the seizure of power on behalf of the Soviets (workers’ councils in which the Bolsheviks now held a majority), putting the whole operation at risk, they remained on the Central Committee, despite the fact that Lenin personally wanted to expel them from the party.

Sharp disagreements and debates remained the order of the day after the Bolsheviks had come to power and during the Civil War that soon followed. In these extreme conditions, with the revolution fighting for its life first against blockade and invasion, then against a counter-revolutionary White Army backed by the capitalist powers, it is hardly surprising that the Bolshevik government frequently felt compelled to institute repressive measures against its political opponents. But in the early years of the revolution, such steps were seen as temporary expedients and were frequently lifted.

In 1921, with the economy in shambles and the future of the new Soviet state uncertain, factions were banned in the Bolshevik Party (now the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) itself. The measure was explicitly intended to be temporary, but as the revolution degenerated over the next several years and as an entrenched state bureaucracy led by Stalin took power, the ban became permanent. As the revolution died, so did democratic centralism.

As late as 1922, however, robust democratic procedures were still in evidence in the Communist International — the network of revolutionary parties from around the world launched in the wake of the Russian Revolution. One quote, from the Fourth Congress in November of that year, will suffice to illustrate the way in which minority voices were treated in Comintern debates:

Chair: The next speaker is Comrade Duret, who represents the tendency in the Communist Party of France that opposes the united-front tactic. He has asked us to allow him a longer speaking time in order to explain this point of view. The Presidium has no objection. Any objections? So this is decided. The Presidium grants the speaker forty-five minutes.

Alas, as the revolution in Russia degenerated, so did the Comintern. Within a few years, under the leadership of Zinoviev (then in alliance with Stalin) it had become a tool of the Soviet bureaucracy. At its Fifth Congress in July 1924 it called for the “Bolshevisation” of its member organisations and adopted “rules of conduct for building” Communist Parties. The fourth rule stated: “It must be a centralised party, permitting no factions, tendencies or groups; it must be fused in one mold.”

The ban on factions that Lenin had explicitly seen as a temporary measure justified by emergency conditions in Russia, thus became a permanent feature of Communist parties around the world. Soon they had become pawns of Stalin’s foreign policy that accepted without question whatever political line Moscow decided.

Leninism today

So where does all this history leave us? It is obvious that there is not just one historical Leninism. In periods of retreat and repression, Lenin adopted practices quite different from those he endorsed at the high points of struggle. Some of those shifts were justifiable, some perhaps not, but those of us operating today in conditions of relative freedom compared to the despotism of the tsarist state or the chaos of revolutionary Russia at the end of the civil war, should not look to these periods as models for our political practice today.

In some circumstances a revolutionary organisation may need to be tightly centralised and secretive, with democracy reduced to a minimum. But in most of the advanced capitalist world, we are not in such circumstances today, and the democratic aspect of democratic centralism should thus be as extensive as possible. This is not just because democratic decision making is good in itself, but also because it is a vital way in which any organisation or party comes to a realistic understanding of the world around it and of the way forward. As Duncan Hallas put it:

Such a party cannot possibly be created except on a thoroughly democratic basis; unless, in its internal life, vigorous controversy is the rule and various tendencies and shades of opinion are represented, a socialist party cannot rise above the level of a sect. Internal democracy is not an optional extra. It is fundamental to the relationship between party members and those amongst whom they work.

It is here that I part company with Callinicos’s model of a party with a Central Committee that is either monolithic or keeps its disagreements private, that campaigns in the organisation for its own perspective, but which faces no organised disagreement because factions are banned except in the months preceding an annual conference. The situation is even worse if a culture develops in which challenges to the leadership are regarded with suspicion or treated as a form of disloyalty.

The model of party organisation that Callinicos defends was criticised many years ago by none other than Chris Harman, a member of the SWP’s Central Committee and one of its leading theorists until his death in 2009. Harman assessed the SWP’s experience in the late 1970s and concluded that party leaders had accepted “the false premise that you can avoid the political pressures that develop in a period of difficulty for revolutionaries by restricting the number of comrades involved in the effective decision making of the organisation”. According to Harman:

We reached the stage where we feared that any discussion outside a very small group of comrades at the Centre would lead to unnecessary rows, to a factional atmosphere in the organisation, to more splits and more losses. Fear of ‘rocking the boat’ when times were difficult led us to down grade the importance of discussion over national perspectives, strategy and tactics.

Harman pointed out that formal democracy was maintained “by the responsibility of the CC to an annual conference, and by the existence of a party council … whose ‘advice’ the CC was not likely to ignore”, but formal democracy was not enough. Over a period of time

the only discussion about the political priorities and the direction of the organisation came to be carried on within a very narrow group of CC members and full-timers. The attitude towards the rest of the organisation was almost “Don’t let the children find out we don’t always get on”.

Another consequence of this form of organisation is that leadership bodies — including the Central Committee — come to be dominated by party full-timers, insulated from the day-to-day experience of members in their workplaces and on campuses.

Harman believed that the problems could be overcome by setting up a strong National Committee, drawn from the ranks of the organisation, to oversee the CC. But a National Committee can quite easily become a rubber stamp, and it is not in a position to challenge the Central Committee if it has no regular access to the information it would need to do so.

There would be a much more serious check on a centralised leadership body if the organisation’s members can group together to challenge decisions that they disagree with. Callinicos’ argument against this is that to allow such factions outside of a relatively short period each year is to allow permanent factions to develop that would seriously damage the organisation’s ability to intervene effectively in the outside world.

But this argument presents us with a false choice — there is plenty of space between no factions and permanent factions. A faction might form to contest a particular issue, then disappear when the question is resolved. Comrades who find themselves on the opposite side of one dispute may find themselves on the same side on another. In any case, as Leon Trotsky warned in the early 1920s, banning factions carries its own dangers:

If factions are not wanted, there must not be any permanent groupings; if permanent groupings are not wanted, temporary groupings must be avoided; finally, in order that there be no temporary groupings, there must be no differences of opinion, for wherever there are two opinions, people inevitably group together.

The bottom line is that revolutionary organisations today need to draw on the most democratic elements of Lenin’s legacy, and where necessary to create new structures and processes of their own. Democratic centralism requires not just formal democracy before unity in action, but a culture of debate and discussion, where those in the minority can express their views fully.

That is the real meaning of Leninism today.

[Phil Gasper is professor emeritus at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. He previously taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Middlebury College, the University of California San Diego and Stanford University. He currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. Gasper is co-editor of The Philosophy of Science (MIT Press, 1991) and a contributor to Explanation and Its Limits (Cambridge, 1990), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed., 1999), The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket, 2002), Enduring Freedom or Enduring War? (Maisonneuve, 2005), Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (Sage, 2007), Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (Sage, 2009), Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Lynne Rienner, 2010) and 101 Changemakers (Haymarket, 2012). His academic publications have also appeared in The Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, The Radical Philosophy Review of Books and Hypatia. He is on the editorial board of, and writes the bimonthly "Critical Thinking" column for, the International Socialist Review, and is a contributor to Socialist Worker, CounterPunch, ZNet and MRzine.]
http://links.org.au/node/3308

The two volumes cover, among other things, a period of tension in India-China relations over the boundary issue and Nehru’s role in it. 

 

 
 

THESE volumes cover a critical phase in the relations between India and China as they glided from the “bhai-bhai” phase to estrangement. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru does not come out well from the record. The compiler of his works, Madhavan K. Palat, comes out worse and confirms the impression of ineptness commented in an earlier review.

Nehru’s important letter to Prime Minister Zhou En-lai on December 14, 1958, complaining of Chinese maps, which initiated the correspondence in which the dispute was laid bare, is editorially sourced to “Subimal Dutt Papers, NMML. Also available in JN Collection and PIB [Press Information Bureau].” A competent editor, equipped for the job, would have properly provided the only authoritative source—the first White Paper, published on September 7, 1959. Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt’s papers are a secondary source. The PIB could not have released it before the White Paper. A footnote on Walter Lippman ends with his books published as far back as in 1913 and 1915, to the neglect of more relevant and copious writings later.

As far back as on November 20, 1950, Nehru declared in Parliament that “the McMahon Line is our boundary” while “the frontier from Ladakh to Nepal is defined chiefly by long usage and custom”, which is untrue. It was never defined. The McMahon Line was defined by an Indo-Tibetan exchange of very brief notes on March 5, 1914, which confirmed the line drawn on an annexed map.

This is what Nehru wrote to Subimal Dutt in a note dated November 11, 1958: “In regard to the controversy we are having with the Chinese government about our frontier in Ladakh, there is one point which we should bear in mind. I am told that the frontier as claimed by us is not only marked in our maps but is part of the McMahon Line. If we touch the McMahon Line in one place, then there is no particular reason why it should not be varied elsewhere” (emphasis added, throughout). These words should prod serious reflection. They expose the arrogant unilateralism which marked Nehru’s approach. Forget the contradiction between the 1950 declaration and this 1958 sophistry. But if anyone “told” the Prime Minister of India this utter falsehood, what prevented him from simply sending for the agreed map? What he was “told” was indeed an utter falsehood. The McMahon Line did not extend to Ladakh. It was confined to the north-east. To think that India’s Prime Minister entertained the idea he apparently did is disturbing.

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AND ZHOU EN-LAI in Beijing on October 19, 1954. Nehru ordered the withdrawal of “all our world maps” a mere two months after the Panchsheel Agreement of April 29, 1954, and a few months before his visit to China. The McMahon Line was properly depicted as a clear line in the official map. He made, however, an even more consequential assertion later. On September 12, 1959, well after the boundary dispute erupted in the open, Nehru told the Lok Sabha apropos the McMahon Line, that “in the Subansiri area or somewhere there, it was not considered a good line and it was varied afterwards by us, by the Government of India”. The line was not defined in words but on a map, which was an agreed treaty map. If a party can legally and morally alter a treaty map, so can it the words of a treaty, an unthinkable proposition. But if Nehru could vary the line in the east so could he in Ladakh, he evidently felt. He had done so earlier.

On July 1, 1954, Nehru wrote a memo ordering the withdrawal of “all our old maps”. The White Papers on the Indian States published in 1948 and 1950 had official maps which showed the entire northern boundary from the Sino-Indo-Afghan trijunction in the west right up to the Sino-Indo-Nepal trijunction in the east to be “undefined”. This was historically true. The McMahon Line was properly depicted as a clear line.

The 1954 map, which followed the memo, showed a clear boundary line in the Aksai Chin, a line which had no basis in history or geography, in law or morality. It is over this line that the Nehru-Zhou talks in New Delhi in April 1950 collapsed. It is over this line that New Delhi routinely blocks out foreign maps. The Economist of March 30, 2013, is the latest victim. The map on page 21 is defaced by the authorities; but, anticipating this, the paper provides, at page 20, helpful guidance for “using our interactive map at Economist.com/asian borders”.

There is a yet graver aspect. Our media and academia revel in accusing others of deception and cheating. They would do well to reflect on Nehru’s unilateral change of maps a mere two months after the Panchsheel Agreement of April 29, 1954. Its pledge to respect “each other’s territorial integrity” applied to India’s maps of April 1954, not those of July 1954. What would the Chinese have made of the change, which was made shortly before Nehru’s visit to their country in October 1954.

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

The Sadar-i-Riyasat Karan Singh (right) administering the oath of office and secrecy to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. On July 29, 1957, Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as Prime Minister. India was well aware of the existence of a boundary dispute with China even before the issue was joined in the correspondence with Zhou’s letter of January 21, 1959. Subimal Dutt warned Nehru on January 9, 1959: “The Chinese have not yet raised a dispute with us about Tawang, but I am not sure that they will not do so some time in future”. Zhou did so on September 8, 1959, but conceded it in April 1960. Tawang was ceded to India by Tibet in 1914. Now, China demands its return, which no Indian government can accept.

In the phase covered by these two volumes, there must have been considerable internal debate with Nehru as the prime participant. The volumes yield little information.

Nehru’s note to Subimal Dutt on February 6, 1959, was typical of the man—condemn sin, but practise it. It read thus: “I agree that a discussion in Parliament at this stage will not be desirable. But I do not like asking the Speaker to disallow this question. It creates a bad impression on Parliament as people get to know about it. I think it should be possible, as you say, to give an answer to the question without embarrassing ourselves or the Chinese. I do not see any harm in mentioning that some negotiations have taken place and will be continued, though Barahoti need not be mentioned. We might say that there are small pockets or territories on the border in regard to which there has been some controversy and discussions have taken place. In one or two of these disputed pockets, we receive a report that some Chinese soldiers came there just when the winter set in. Owing to climatic conditions, it is not easy to go there till the winter is over.” There was no excess of candour here.

SHEIKH ABDULLAH’S ARREST

An editorial footnote tells the reader: “Sheikh Abdullah was under house arrest from August 1953 to January 8, 1958.” House arrest means confinement in the detainee’s house as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi. On August 8, 1953, Sheikh Abdullah was taken to Udhampur under armed escort after his arrest and dismissal from office as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. He was imprisoned in Tara Niwas Palace Jail. It was a military operation as ordered by Nehru (vide Major General Hiralal Atal; Nehru’s Emissary to Kashmir; 1972). A critic, Mir Qasim, described what followed in Srinagar. The New Delhi-installed stooge, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, stopped his daily walks. His house was under attack ( My Life and Times; page 70). This writer has described in detail the planning and execution of that constitutional crime in his book due to be published in April ( The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012; Tulika Books, New Delhi). To this day both separatists and unionists denounce Nehru’s action. The wound is yet to heal.

Sheikh Abdullah’s prosecution on false charges of plotting to accede to Pakistan was also ordered by Nehru. His letter to Nehru on October 27, 1958, soliciting his advice in the selection of a suitable counsel to defend him might seem odd, but not if one knows the background. As Sheikh Abdullah writes in his memoirs Flames of the Chinar: “We tried to engage top lawyers for our defence, but under pressure from the government they all refused.”

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

SHEIKH ABDULLAH COMING OUT of the Jammu Jail in April 1964. The letter was not a request for advice. It was a taunt. Having installed Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed in power, Nehru defended the rigged polls he staged for mutual benefit. The protege knew he was indispensable to New Delhi and began to expand his reach. “It is not a normal situation. And difficult situations have to be faced sometimes in abnormal ways. Nevertheless, in spite of all this, elections have been held in Kashmir twice. You may say—and you may perhaps be right—that the elections are not of that high standard as we would like them to be or as they have been held in the rest of India. Nevertheless, whatever be the standard, it does give a great opportunity to the people. It has given them that opportunity. There are those difficulties. We cannot have it in ideal conditions anywhere. In these conditions, the situation throws up men to deal with those conditions. And the present Prime Minister of Kashmir, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, is a person who undoubtedly has shown quite remarkable qualities of organisation and leadership. He has done something. I am quite free to confess here that sometimes he has acted in ways which I have not liked at all—just as all of us may act in some ways—and I have ventured to draw his attention to these too. But the fact is that here is this great problem and this great responsibility which he is shouldering, and carrying this burden.”

But when Bakshi attacked Nehru himself, he had to be admonished albeit “as a friend and colleague”. He downplayed it, “Probably you lost your temper.” This is what Bakshi said at his press conference on October 2, 1958: “I would have kicked this prime ministership long ago but I don’t know what holds me here. It is preferable for the Muslims of Kashmir to eat pork rather than take the rice from Delhi. Does not smuggling go on in India? There is corruption in India everywhere. What is going on in Central government? Look to LIC [Life Insurance Corporation of India] and other concerns. Those fat Lallas—with their big bellies—are taking lakhs of rupees and dealing in smuggling day and night. Why they are not exposed? If a Kashmiri Muslim takes a four anna bit as a bribe, he is being bad named everywhere. But those Lallas are Hindus. Those smugglers and corrupt people are bearded Sikhs also. But Kashmiri Muslims—bastards—are Muslims because they have acceded to India.” Bakshi was rattled by charges of corruption which were being aired in New Delhi.

Would Nehru have permitted any other person to talk thus? This leniency was strange in a person so intolerant as Nehru. He denounced Prof. Nirmal Kumar Bose for his book My Days with Gandhi because of his comments on the Mahatma’s “experiments with his own sexuality”. According to Nehru, “he ran Gandhiji down”. Nehru had his friend Mridula Sarabhai thrown out of Constitution House in New Delhi because of her support to Sheikh Abdullah.

Volume 46 is rich in material on M.O. Mathai, who resigned as Special Assistant to Nehru on January 12, 1959, following press reports of corruption. Nehru wrote to Y.B. Chavan on January 28, 1959. “Mathai was of great help to me in a variety of ways. He was with me long before I joined government. I found him to be a man of integrity, loyalty and efficiency. His work did not directly deal with governmental problems. It was partly to organise my office, which he did very efficiently, and partly to process papers which came up to me. This saved me a good deal of trouble. It was not the kind of work which would normally be done by other Secretaries. In fact, I have today a Principal Private Secretary, who is a senior ICS officer, apart from a number of other secretaries, who do various kinds of work for me adequately. I do not at present intend having anyone in place of Mathai, because I do not think that particular type of work can be done by anyone else that I know of.” It was a unique relationship. To him Nehru confided about V.K. Krishna Menon’s waywardness. Mathai was an employee of the American forces in Assam drawing “a very high salary” before joining Nehru’s staff in January 1946. His assets were in the range of Rs.2-3 lakh. (How much would they be worth in 2013?)

The question cannot be evaded. How did Nehru, a man of refinement, allow so coarse a person as Mathai to get close to him? He was close also to Indira Gandhi. She sought his advice on her desire to visit Sheikh Abdullah very shortly after his imprisonment. Clearly, she did not believe in the charges her father had levelled against him. Mathai’s written opinion will be published soon enough.

TYAGI’S LETTER

A letter by Mahavir Tyagi to Nehru on January 31, 1959, warned him against making Indira Gandhi president of the Congress. “Please don’t be under the misapprehension that this lining up of supporters for the proposal to put up Indu’s name is due entirely to the force of her personality. It is being done hundred per cent to please you. If you are unable to understand this little fact, then I would say that there is a curtain over your eyes. I am writing this harsh letter because it is only with alum that this cataract can be excised from your eyes though the alum itself gets dissolved in the process. You must understand that today there is such an atmosphere of self-serving greed for position and that you would be hard put to point to two individuals who are true friends and can talk to each other openly. You must accept that the old values and dreams when we would take people of all hues to our bosom have shattered. Today the dreams of our individual ambitions are separate and we are all running after them. This is what is known as individualism. In this atmosphere, it is natural to have a mindset of fear, selfishness and suspicion.

“Today when the structure of governance is weakening, bribery and black-marketeering are holding sway, each one is engaged in stabbing the other in the back, when most of the leaders are adorning ministries and the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies and only the four-anna ordinary members are left in the Congress cadres, how is poor Indu going to hold up this weakened frame? So far the people have been forgiving you, saying what is poor Jawaharlal to do when he gets no time from government preoccupations. The responsibility for reforming the Congress is Dhebar Bhai’s. Indu’s election will take away this safety valve. People will start calling the Congress an offspring of the government.”

THE HINDU ARCHIVES

INDIRA GANDHI WITH MAHAVIR TYAGI at the All India Congress Committee session in Bombay on May 23, 1966. In a letter to Nehru on January 31, 1959, Tyagi warned him against making Indira Gandhi party president. Under Indira Gandhi that came to pass, but not before she, as Congress president, forced Nehru to sack the democratically elected E.M.S. Namboodripad government in Kerala from office in 1959. Her ideas of “reforming” the party and the government were different from those of poor Mahavir Tyagi’s. Nehru suffered him. Indira sent his likes packing.

Tailpiece: Beyond a doubt, Jawaharlal Nehru was one of the most clear-headed statesmen of modern times. This is very evident in his address to the International Commission of Jurists in New Delhi on January 5, 1959.

He said with breathtaking clarity and consistency: “There is, as the Attorney-General [M.C. Setalvad] said, the judge who protects the individual from the dangers of wrong executive action that is very necessary. I think, and yet it may be that in a changing society, the judge may be left a little behind by the changes that have come over society and may not quite represent that mood which happens to be the mood of society and which perhaps represents reality more than the statute law which the judge administers. It may be even the executive represents that much more for the moment, it may of course be that the executive acts wrongly and oppressively and should be pulled up, but there are all these aspects of these questions, which are not so simple as to be put down in a phrase, in a simple phrase.” Nothing can be, of course.

 

 

 

At the 1910 International Working Women’s Conference, preceding the meeting of the Socialist International, Clara Zetkin of the German Socialist Democratic Party proposed an international women’s day. This was partly inspired by a strike in America by workers usually considered un-organisable. Among them were women workers, mostly immigrants, in the textile and garment trades, who earned half a man’s pay or less.

In 1909 there was a strike in the New York garment workshops led by Clara Lemlich, a 17 year old immigrant. The police beat the young women and even sent them to the workhouse, but there was great solidarity from other workers and the women were successful.

Shortly after the first International Women’s Day had been celebrated, there was a terrible tragedy involving these same young workers. In 1911 a fire swept through the Triangle building. The internal doors were locked to prevent union leaders getting in. The women, some of them as young as 13, jumped out of top floor windows, holding hands, to their deaths on the pavements. People watched, weeping, in the streets.

On International Women’s Day 1917, women workers in Russia went out to demonstrate for peace and bread, against the advice of their male comrades who considered it ‘too dangerous’ – and the Russian Revolution began. Unfortunately, by the time I went to the USSR on International Women’s Day 1978, women had lost the gains of the Revolution such as free crèches and restaurants – and the day was marked by men bringing home flowers for their wives.

The making of a radical young agitator

In the USA in 1912, there was another famous strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, involving garment workers, also mostly women and immigrants, which became known as the Bread and Roses Strike. The cotton mills employed different nationalities – Italians, Poles, Belgians, Germans, Lithuanians, Syrians, Greeks. When Massachusetts passed a law reducing the working hours for women and children from 56 to 54 (!) the mills reduced their pay. They were already on starvation wages and the dirty overcrowded mills bred tuberculosis and other diseases.

The link between these two strikes was a young woman organiser for the International Workers of the World: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She was born in 1890. Her Irish American father worked as a mapmaker for the railroad and so was often away from home. Her mother had emigrated to America from Galway in Ireland and worked as a tailor.

Elizabeth had two sisters and a brother. She remembered some comfort in her early childhood in New England, but later they lived in the Bronx New York near the railroad in what was described as a cold water flat. Elizabeth describes huddling round the kitchen stove, the only heat, and all the children in the same bed with coats over them to keep warm. But she didn’t think she was as badly off as some of her neighbours, who only had a piece of bread to eat.

It was a multi-racial area: Germans, Polish, Irish, Italians, Jewish immigrants. Her mother forbade the children to use racist names. Children worked in sweatshops and adults worked in the mill, where the machinery had no guards. They lost fingers and one girl was scalped when her hair was caught in the machinery.

Elizabeth’s parents brought their children up with books and she got good grades at school. She was interested in socialism from an early age. She used to attend debating societies. When she was just 15 the Harlem Socialist Club asked her to speak, so she spoke on What Socialism Will Do For Women. Some of the statements she made included:

“The state should provide for the maintenance of every child so that the individual woman shall not be compelled to depend for support on the individual man.”

“The one system of economics that gives every human being an equal opportunity is socialism.”

“The barter and sale that goes on under the name of love is highly obnoxious.”

When she was asked if she believed in ‘free love’ she responded with characteristic quickness: ‘What’s the alternative? Slave Love?’

She became a brilliant speaker and was asked to speak all over New York and in other cities like Philadelphia and Boston. When she spoke at street corners, she stopped the traffic. David Belasco, a famous New York impresario, wanted to engage her as an actress. She replied, ‘I am in the Labour movement. I speak my own piece’.

Although she was still a 16 year old schoolgirl, the union the International Workers of the World approached her to become an organiser. They promised her parents to take good care of her and she was so eager they let her. She went to the IWW convention and visited mills, factories, mines. On a speaking tour in Montana, the local organiser persuaded her to marry him but it only lasted a couple of years.

US socialism and the workers’ movement

The IWW had been founded in 1905 by active trade unionists and socialists, among them Big Bill Haywood, Secretary of the Western Federation of Miners, Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Socialist Party, and Mother Jones, who was 75 and had organised workers for years. (She would live to be 100). At the time, most of the unions in America were craft organisations which did not admit unskilled workers. This excluded women who were in the majority in the textile mills, black workers, the vast number of workers newly arrived from Europe, maritime, construction, agriculture and mining workers and itinerant workers travelling from camp to camp in the west.

Conditions in the mines and lumber camps were atrocious – for example, they provided no bedding for the workers. Bosses hired private detectives and gunmen to oppose strikers. The workers were considered un-organisable. The IWW decided to organise them – and they succeeded. There was even a Cowboys and Bronco Busters’ local (i.e. branch) of the IWW!

Employment agencies got workers jobs for a fee, but once they had earned enough to pay it they were sacked so the agency could send another worker. In Missoula, Montana, the IWW held protest meetings outside the agencies. The city council banned street speaking. Six IWW activists were in jail.

The organisers, Elizabeth and Jack (her husband), sent for ‘all footloose rebels to come at once to defend the Bill of Rights!’ They came in their hundreds, riding the freight cars like in westerns. As soon as one speaker got arrested, another would take his place and soon the jail was overcrowded. They had to set up temporary facilities. These were so bad that the IWWs sang and shouted and woke up the local residents. The meetings were arranged so that the speakers would be arrested in time for supper, which meant that the town was feeding hundreds of prisoners. The IWW got a lot of support locally, and finally they won.

Elizabeth was asked to go to Spokane where the authorities used the same tactics. This time the treatment they received was more brutal. The police kicked out teeth, blacked eyes, broke jaws. 28 men were forced into a 7 x 8 cell, steam was turned on till they nearly suffocated, then they were removed to ice cold cells.

The food was so poor that they developed scurvy and three men died. The IWW would not let Elizabeth speak because she was pregnant – pregnant women were not seen in public in those days. But she was arrested on the way to a meeting and spent a night in jail with a couple of prostitutes. Elizabeth found out that the jailers brought men in for them to carry on their trade, so she wrote an article about it which embarrassed Spokane and got women warders in the jail. The IWW won.

Elizabeth went home to New York to have her baby. Jack had not visited her in the 6 months she was at Spokane but once the baby, Fred, was born he wanted her to go back to him and lead a conventional married life. She was only 19. She did not want to.

‘Besides’, she told him, ‘I don’t love you any more and you bore me’. She preferred her work with the IWW, and this led to the Bread and Roses strike. It was called that because of a poem written by James Oppenheim:

Workers’ militancy

The strikers said, ‘Better to starve fighting than to starve working!’ Two young Italians from the IWW, Ettor and Giovannitti, organised the strike, with a strike committee for each mill and open air meetings in the park. One day a woman, Anna LoPizzo, was killed on the picket line. Although 19 people saw a militiaman shoot, the authorities arrested a striker and Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories because they had advocated picketing.

That kept them out of the strike for eight months. But they sent for Elizabeth, and the man with whom she fell deeply in love and was to live with for ten years, Carlo Tresca. He arranged a mass funeral for Anna.

The IWW had pamphlets translated into all languages and made speeches easy to understand. The strikers went on speaking tours and collected thousands of dollars. They set up a soup kitchen and distributed food. A nearby town gave them a cow.

The IWW arranged for children to be sent to sympathetic families in New York. They came back at the end of the strike with toys and clothes and presents for the families. A young teacher was sent to escort a group to Philadelphia. When the mothers arrived at the railroad station with the children, they were surrounded by police who tore the children away from their mothers and clubbed them.

Some were taken to the Lawrence Poor Farm. It was a reign of terror. Writers, senators and clergymen denounced the police. Reporters came to investigate the conditions at the mills and there was a hearing in Washington. Fifty striker witnesses came and showed their pay packets. A couple of weeks later, the strike was over.

The strikers had won a 5 – 20% wage increase; increased overtime pay; reduction of a trial period from 4 weeks to 2; no discrimination against any striker; a promise to get Ettor and Giovannitti speedily released – the strikers said they would come out again if not. They did – in September.

A leader of struggle

The famous journalist John Reed described Elizabeth like this: “She was sitting at a lunch counter on a mushroom stool, and it was as if she were the spirit of this strike that had so much hope and so much beauty. She was only about twenty-one, but she had gravity and maturity. She had gone on strike, bringing with her her mother and her baby.

He explained that her work that winter was ceaseless. ‘Speaking, sitting with the strike committee, going to visit the prisoners in jail, and endlessly raising money, taking trains only to run back to the mills. The striking women would wait around for a word with her. In the midst of this excitement Elizabeth moved calm and tranquil. It was as though she reserved her tremendous energy for speaking’.

Other successful strikes in mill towns followed. Elizabeth was a key organiser at a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey. She practically lived there and knew many of the 25,000 strikers. She spoke at outdoor meetings continually.

The strikers were harassed by wrongful arrests. Pickets and spectators were beaten and even killed. Elizabeth herself was charged for incitement to riot (as with Ettor and Giovannitti) to keep her away from the strike. She was speedily acquitted when it came to trial, but unfortunately the strikers did not win this time.

Elizabeth said she was never in such a hectic strike as the New York cooks and waiters’ strike. Again, they were mainly immigrants. When there were conflicts between police and pickets in front of the hotels, strikers went round to back, the kitchens, and pulled out workers. Well-dressed sympathisers went as diners into hotels, blew a whistle and the cooks and waiters walked out. Unsanitary kitchen conditions, the tipping system, the poor clothes the waiters wore under their fronts, all were exposed during the strike which was soon won.

When Elizabeth was travelling, she always stayed at the homes of workers, sometimes sharing the children’s bed or sleeping on a couch. She preferred this to lodging in a hotel as she got to know the workers and their living conditions. By 1914, she said, the iron was driven into her soul and she became ‘a mortal enemy to capitalism’. ‘Private guards, armed thugs, sheriffs, police, state troopers, militia, judges from justice of the peace to the Supreme Court were at the command of the employers – north, south, east and west’.

In July 1915 she wrote about women in the unions. She pointed out that women are accused of being selfish, over-emotional, devoted to fashion, disinclined to study, which can equally apply to men. If these faults are more common in women, it is because they have been denied all social rights and are economically dependent. She asked for women to organise ‘side by side with their men folks’ in the IWW and take an active role. ‘The IWW has been accused of putting women in the front. The truth is the IWW does not put them in the back and they go to the front’.

In 1916 Elizabeth went back to the west, to Mesabi Range where the miners were waging a bitter strike. The mining company employed a gang of gunmen. The journalist Mary Heaton Vorse described them as exactly like the plug uglies in the movies. They came to raid the home of a striker, Nick Masonovich, and in a scuffle in which they knock Mrs. Masonovich to the ground, a bystander was killed.

The authorities jailed the whole family, including the baby, the lodgers and 15 IWW organisers – on the same grounds as in Lawrence, they were responsible for the shooting because they had ‘incited picketing’. The family kept no guns. One of the children saw a ‘plug ugly’ shoot the bystander, but they were not going to get a fair trial.

Once again Elizabeth was most concerned to keep Mrs. Masonovich out of jail. She got a famous lawyer who defended workers, Judge Hilton, who suggested plea bargaining. Three of the miners pleaded guilty of manslaughter and were to go to prison for 3 years at most, while Mrs. Masonovich and the 15 organisers were released.

At the trial the miners were sentenced to 25 years. Bill Haywood accused Elizabeth of saving the organisers at the expense of the miners, although they were released after 3 years as promised. Elizabeth’s biographer, Helen C. Camp, has documentary evidence to back up Elizabeth’s version, but it was the end of her career in the IWW.

Decline of a movement

After the US joined the war, Elizabeth was indicted along with 160 others for conspiring to impede the war effort: in other words, campaigning for better conditions and higher wages. It was a trumped-up charge. The IWW, along with many other organisations, had opposed the war, but once the US had entered they stated they would do so no longer.

All but one of the men in the Chicago indictment had registered for the draft. Elizabeth opposed the war, but she refused to go to Chicago for a mass trial. Her defence was that she had not been working with the IWW between April and September. She was tried separately and acquitted.

Others who did go were jailed, even if they had already left the organisation. They were fined a total of 25 million dollars, and received prison sentences of 10 or 20 years. The IWW, as a huge force, was shattered.

Elizabeth went on to take part in campaigns to defend workers from wrongful arrest, but in 1927 she became ill and exhausted and for ten years she took a break from politics. When she returned to activity, it was as a member of the Communist Party.

She suffered persecution and imprisonment in the McCarthy era, but in 1962 she was invited to speak about the IWW at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb. Elizabeth declared she was proud to be one of the IWW, and she compared them to the Civil Rights Freedom Fighters activists in the South. They certainly shared the same courage

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/199-women-on-the-left/16330-elizabeth-gurley-flynn-a-radical-leader-of-workers-struggles

The theories of Permanent Revolution and Deflected Permanent Revolution remain of central importance despite the doubts expressed in Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket 2012), xxi, 812pp.The history of revolution matters. It is not only that the English and French Revolutions, for example, brought about the current capitalist social order. More, those and other revolutions remain a demonstration that it was possible to overthrow a ruling class, and to transform society permanently. The process of the English Revolution itself produced the modern understanding of the word ‘revolution’, where beforehand it had denoted only a cyclical change. Yet, the heirs of these bourgeois revolutions have long since been concerned to deny their very importance, precisely in order to contain any possible demands for further revolutionary change. This is the irony of the bourgeois revolution; that it opens a door that this new ruling class itself is desperate to shut.

The very concept of revolution has consequently been under attack for pretty much as long as the idea has existed in its modern form. Since the 1970s in particular, many tendencies of revisionist history effectively have sought to eliminate the notion of revolution as a significant force in the development of society. It is always possible, particularly in the ‘empiricist’ tradition of Anglophone history, to find that revolutions changed very little, and that in fact continuity was the order of the day over any period of tumultuous upheavals. This procedure can reduce revolution to an unfortunate, and probably counter-productive, belch in social development. Revolutions can also be tidied away by showing that they were not really about major social transformation, but were really conflicts over now obscure points of religion, for example, that did not have any lasting legacy.

Apart from the empirical debates, two particular conceptual issues come out of these controversies. Firstly, there is the relationship of intention and results; are revolutions not really revolutions if the actors involved did not know what they were doing in advance? It might seem obvious that it is not necessary for social revolutions to be understood beforehand in the intentions of historical actors, for such events to arise out of class struggles and deep social contradictions. Nonetheless, overtly or not, this issue has been important to many supposed refutations of the Marxist understanding of history and revolution.

A second issue concerns definitions of revolution and social change: what constitutes a revolution? If social change happens necessarily over an extended period of time, then how are revolutionary events to be understood within the overall longer social transformation? Here the answer to entirely predictable empirical findings of ‘continuity’ is to insist upon the non-gradual and non-linear processes by which society develops. The ‘continuity’ argument pre-supposes a very simplistic notion of social change in which there are certain changes of quantity, such as in the amount of exchange in the market, or in the production of certain commodities, but where no real change in quality is allowed. Underneath many arguments about continuity lie assumptions about the economics and human behaviour that preclude the perception of a new system emerging. Perceiving this kind of qualitative change within the totality of social movement is crucial to a dialectical understanding of history.

Ideas and Experiences of Revolution in History

The experience of revolution does not only change definite social-economic structures in society, it necessarily entails transformations in social understanding, such as in the idea of revolution itself. The history of conceptual change in notions of revolution gives Neil Davidson an organising principle for his ambitious attempt to encompass the entirety of debates about bourgeois revolutions. To an extent, the early sections of this book are a straightforward intellectual history of political concepts up to Marx. Nonetheless, there are no narrow limits placed on the analysis here. Davidson might have been forgiven if he had started with some observations on the cyclical understanding of social conflict in the ancient Greek polis and then skipped straight to the discussion of key seventeenth century figures such as Harrington, Hobbes and Milton, whose ideas were directly affected by the events of the English Revolution.

The concern here is however to be thorough, and so there are interesting comments on medieval thought as well, including the perennially fascinating thirteenth-century ascetic Joachim of Fiore whose mystical theory of the stages of history unintentionally inspired radical millenarian movements in the late middle ages (pp.10-11). As Davidson points out, ‘cyclical’ thinking based on Classical literature became dominant once more during the Renaissance, and until the 1640s in Britain in particular. Yet, there is a trick missing here, in that rather more ‘advanced’ understandings of ‘revolution’ can be detected among heretical and millennial currents deep into the medieval period. These resurface periodically and most abundantly during the English Revolution, but their emergence has a long social if not intellectual prehistory.

Christopher Hill referred to a ‘third culture’ distinct from the Royalist and Puritan world views of the seventeenth century (see for example the analysis in Milton and The English Revolution, Faber and Faber, 1977), in which a concept of this-worldly social revolution might be said to be immanent. In contrast to this view, Davidson’s concentration on the analysis of key thinkers as such tends to downplay the extent to which revolution was a social and conceptual reality; that is to say, the analysis tends to emphasise the conservative aspects of leading thinkers’ ideas against the revolutionary context from which they emerged. To an extent this is a matter of nuance, and Davidson’s account is fascinating, but the very encyclopaedic ambition of the book affects the balance of arguments, conceding more to the perspective of revisionist views than might have been intended.

Davidson’s first seven chapters concern the key writers who discussed the nature of revolution between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, with a following section of another seven chapters on Marx and Engels and their followers all the way through to figures such as Trotsky, Lukács and Walter Benjamin. Inevitably this takes in a huge range of controversies along the way, and so the argument slips between analyses of each thinker’s conceptual apparatus, to the actual history of revolutions, and back again, through various debates sparked by revisionist challenges, or controversies between Marxists. This effort at completeness gets in the way of a focused development of a clear, overall thesis, though certain tendencies of thought become gradually firmer in the course of the book. The final two sections, mainly examining post-war schools of historical and political analysis, become an overview of debates between Marxists, and a consideration of the revisionist attacks on the very notion of revolution in history. Without a doubt, this thorough programme makes the book an immensely useful reference for a whole range of Marxist historical debate, and for the serious student, this will be a very helpful orientation point.

There are some particularly large scale controversies that reappear at a number of points throughout the book that do act to thread the book together thematically. One is the attack on Marxist history coming from various revisionists of the 1970s and later. Davidson is sharp at pointing out many of the flaws of their approach, remarking sardonically at one point that ‘it  is always educative for Marxists to be told what they think’ (p.107), highlighting how a reductive caricature of Marxism is most often used to critique the arguments put forward by much more sophisticated writers.

Not entirely separate from this theme is Davidson’s consistent critique of the ‘Brennerist’ school of history, whose major move is to separate the birth and emergence of capitalism from the bourgeois revolution itself. The damage this separation does to the Marxist theory of history is quite considerable, since it tends to consign social revolution to the margins of history. Davidson himself puts to question the extent to which a bourgeoisie existed and was conscious of its actions in revolutionary periods, but the interpretation of Brenner and his followers abandon that problem altogether in the face of revisionist critique.

Davidson is quite scathing of some of the attempts to re-interpret Marx and the Marxist tradition by Robert Brenner’s followers. Arguments of Ellen Meiskins Wood, and even more, Georges Comninel, come in for trenchant appraisal (see pp. 155-6 for example). This is important, and well argued, but the polemic is scattered across many different chapters. Another significant, but more accessible, critique of the Brennerist line can be found in Henry Heller’s recent The Birth of Capitalism. It is a fair way through before Davidson clarifies what appears to be his main concern about Brenner’s view of history, saying that if his school is right then we ‘are solely dependent on the outcome of the voluntarist clash of class wills’ (p.398). This is certainly the case, although the presence of any specific class struggle often seems elusive in Brennerist accounts. Equally, however, there is the opposite danger that the intervention of conscious social forces is downplayed.

Social and Political Revolution

In the course of elaborating the conceptual history of revolution, Davidson draws an increasingly hard distinction between political and social revolutions, effectively designating the latter the only really revolutionary events. These must also be the key moment in the transition from one mode of production to another. Questions of definition are thus explored in relation to one revolution or another; for example the American War of Independence is examined, and found wanting, over whether it can be considered a genuine social revolution (pp.56-9). Davidson does not adopt definitive positions in many of these discussions, but the impression left is that most revolutions have been found to be less definitely revolutionary than the Marxist tradition might have supposed.

Partly, this is to do with the theorists of the bourgeoisie, which Davidson discusses, being themselves ambivalent about revolutionary processes, which from the English Revolution onwards, were obviously full of danger for any aspiring ruling class. If the question of property is raised in the context of a mass mobilisation against an old ruling class, then anti-capitalist criticisms are bound to appear on the agenda. This is part of the contradictory nature of bourgeois revolution. On the eighteenth-century American revolution for example, it seems odd to counter pose the possibility that it was a bourgeois revolution with the fact that popular insurgencies connected to it were significantly anti-capitalist (p.56). Of necessity, there would be a number of poles of social conflict involved in the elites of the American colonies asserting the rule of national capital against imperial rule.

There is no conundrum in a bourgeois revolution against an imperial rule exercised by a capitalist nation; in the American case it was necessary precisely in order to establish an independent centre of capital accumulation. Only a schematic approach to history can make this a problem, rather than an example of the historical specificity of any particular revolution. Also, as Davidson points out, the anti-capitalist elements involved in the American Revolution could be contained largely within issues of the franchise. Even as early as the English Revolution, the question of democracy accompanied the revolution, and was a destabilising force from the point of view of the leading bourgeois forces. Democracy may be an eventual product of bourgeois revolution, but itself highlights the social contradictions of the process.

The point that democracy is contradictory rather than being simply a characteristic of bourgeois rule is missing here. Davidson, in many instances, turns the poles of political and social revolution into dichotomous categories, rather than tools of dialectical analysis. The political and social aspects of revolutions are always in flux, and interpenetrate each other at the very moments they appear to be separate. To treat them as categories of static definition is to miss the socially fluid possibilities inherent in any revolution. The demand that the great ‘social’ revolutions are the absolute moment for a change in the mode of production is applied too rigidly, and begs a discussion of the nature of modes of production. Did slavery in America really represent an alternative to capitalism, or was it always a form of exploitation entirely predicated upon wider capitalist relations? Davidson is not able to adequately explore this question, but it needs to be answered if Davidson’s definition of what constitutes a real ‘social’ revolution is to be sustained.

Treating the terms social and political revolution, or indeed, bourgeois, democratic and socialist revolutions, as static terms that require categorical definition automatically produces problems when applied to historical cases. Categories will never fit; they slip too easily into being ideal, pure cases which actual history can never fulfil. It makes no sense to analyse the Dutch, English, American, and French revolutions separately as if they should exhibit the same essential characteristics. They are each moments in the development of both capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and thereby they must necessarily exhibit sharp differences. This is because each bourgeois revolution, to a large measure, was dependent for its nature on the outcome of the previous one. The impact of the bourgeois revolutions, even as early as that of the Dutch, was never restricted to that one nation, but always had international implications. Davidson is naturally aware of this as a fact, but never quite integrates it as a historical process into the agenda of his analysis.

This is perhaps why the case against the revisionists appears to cede too much ground at points. Davidson argues that it is not necessary for there to be a bourgeoisie that is active in the revolution for that revolution to be bourgeois. If we dispose of simple reductive views about the relationship between intention and outcome, the only problem is the historical nature of class. Revisionist scholarship is very resistant to seeing a historical class in any other but fixed terms: if the bourgeoisie has a particular core definition, such as ‘factory-owner’, then it is easy to discover that the bourgeoisie did not have anything much to do with any revolution. The case against the Marxist interpretation of history is complete and impregnable at that point. Yet this (and other less literal positions) is obviously an inadequate definition, since social classes are not in fact static entities that exist in a single, positivist form across centuries. A bourgeois class has existed in various changing forms over time, and has mutated according to how capitalism itself has developed and restructured social relations.

The ‘bourgeoisie’ before 1640 in England was very different from how it appeared a century later, as the Industrial Revolution began to get underway, but this social transformation was only possible because of the revolutionary struggles that established the sway of capital over the whole society. The forces that drove the Parliamentary side in the English Revolution can be clearly connected to the development of capital-driven, market-based social relations in the most developed parts of England. Thus the bourgeoisie, understood in a dialectical sense, was certainly in existence in 1640, and played a real role in that revolution.

A strong defence of a non-reductive Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution was provided by Brian Manning in his The English People and The English Revolution, but Davidson does not seem to give it much weight (pp.367-8), also swiftly passing by Henry Heller’s reassessment of the role of a bourgeoisie in the French Revolution (Davidson was much more positive about Heller’s work in an earlier article; ISJ 113, pp.159-75). Both Manning’s history of class struggle from below and Heller’s analysis give non-reductive accounts that expose the weakness of the revisionist caricature of Marxism as well as its own myopic view of history.

As capitalism developed internationally, and as old regimes decayed, both the nature of the developing bourgeoisie changed in each country, and the overall character and impact of the social relations of production were transformed. The context for bourgeois revolution was significantly different in each case as a result of the last. Yet Davidson appears very often to be analysing each revolution in isolation, and measuring it against an abstract, ideal bourgeois revolution. The exercise, while full of interest as it goes along, is methodologically problematic. Implicit in the title of the book is the notion that perhaps the bourgeois revolutions were not as revolutionary as all that. Yet this really boils down to the necessity for the bourgeoisie to both effect a revolution and then bring it to a close. One vital addition Marx made to the already existing theory of revolution of his time was to find that the bourgeoisie had only opened the era of revolution, and as a class it would be unable to conclude that era. The age of permanent revolution had arrived.

Permanent Revolution

Davidson worries at the relevance of the concept of permanent revolution, it seems perhaps because for him the transition to bourgeois rule was in fact mostly, even normally, achieved not by a revolutionary transformation from below, but by a ‘revolution from above’. If the latter is the norm, then the concept of permanent revolution always had a limited utility, as its relevance was mainly to Russia, and perhaps China. Davidson’s questioning of the status of bourgeois revolutions is not purely academic; it is connected to the validity of the claim that the age of bourgeois revolution will directly open up the possibility of socialist revolution.

Central to the emergence of Marx’s concept of permanent revolution was the experience of the 1848 revolutions, where the bourgeoisie largely turned against revolution, fearing more the demands and activity of the workers below them than the princes and aristocrats above them. Classically it is in Germany and Italy that the revolutions failed to sweep away the old political order, and the unification of both countries was left to later actions ‘from above’ from the late 1850s to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. For Marx, briefly, the lesson right after 1848 was that the baton of revolution and human progress had been passed onto the proletariat; hence the new era was one of permanent revolution.

A well worn argument here is that the Italian and German unifications represent cases of ‘revolutions from above’. A failure of the bourgeoisie to fulfil its revolutionary role means that the task is taken up by other social forces, most ironically in these cases by the ex-feudal state and aristocracy transforming itself into the elite of modern capitalist regimes. Davidson argues in fact that this fashion of revolution has proved to be the norm of ‘bourgeois revolution’; that transformation normally happens from above, and the bourgeoisie strictly speaking does not often carry out a popular struggle to transform the mode of production of a society (pp.443, 468-70, 586). The chronology of this is noted; the revolutions from above happen after a certain moment in world history (during the eighteenth century) where the ‘global dominance of the capitalist system’ passed the point of no return (p.586).

The French Revolution is then singled out as unique in its revolutionary nature, being the only successful bourgeois revolution ‘from below’ to take place after this tipping point for the capitalist system. On one level this is true enough to the facts, although the argument does depend on excluding the American War of Independence from consideration, which is problematic at least. Yet the real dynamic of bourgeois revolution seems to be missing here. The bourgeoisie, after the French Revolution, began to draw back from revolution in the face of the rise of the working class. The real tipping point in terms of revolution is not some putative moment in the eighteenth century, but the defeated revolutions of 1848. In Germany, middle class liberals, as Engels argued, were more afraid of working class agitation than they were of the aristocracy they were supposedly trying to overthrow (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany). The result was defeat for the liberal revolution. After this point in history, it is indeed the case that certain ‘tasks’ of the bourgeois revolution were likely to be driven forward by non-bourgeois forces, not only in Russia, but also in other major revolutionary episodes like the Mexican revolution that began in 1910. Yet it was bourgeois liberalism that was inhibited, not capitalist development itself.

The Japanese ‘revolution from above’, the Meiji Restoration, is often added to Germany and Italy as an instance where the transition to capitalism is accomplished without a revolution as such. This could add further substance to the notion that the transition to capitalism is generally an anti-revolutionary event. While it is possible to exaggerate how ‘unrevolutionary’ all these episodes actually were, the main problem lies in taking them out of their context in the development of capitalism in Europe and the world in general.

The classical bourgeois revolutions were in fact the crucial events; the French Revolution produced a wave of French campaigns, including Napoleon’s, which really were, in part, a revolutionary re-shaping of Europe. Feudalism was swept away across most of Europe, and not without popular support, particularly early on. The restored regimes of 1815 could not turn the clock all the way back. The French Revolution was an event experienced by Western Europe as a whole, not just France. It would be possible to attempt to class the French invasions as ‘revolutions from above’, but from a certain angle, all revolutions are in part from ‘above’ as well as from ‘below’. Parliamentary forces in England, for example, had to invade less ‘progressive’ areas of the country. At that point it would be possible to start arguing that the English Revolution too was some sort of revolution from above, but then the stage has been reached when the category has been drained of useful meaning.

In actual fact then, the dominant history of bourgeois revolution is of revolution from below, until that point where the development of capitalism meant that a social force existed with the potential to exploit a revolutionary moment for anti-capitalist goals. That point was reached in the revolutions of 1848. By this point also capitalism was well on its way to dissolving the old structures of class societies outside Europe. The impact of maturing capitalism on the wider world, and resistance to imperialism at various levels, introduces entirely new dynamics, which all but rule out further ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions. The question then became how far the struggle against imperialism would lead to the establishment of alternative centres of capital independent of the imperial core, or whether the struggle would be able to destroy imperialism and capitalism altogether. It is thus that Marx’s concept of permanent revolution, born of 1848, needed the elaboration that Trotsky gave it in the wake of the acceleration of nineteenth-century capitalist imperialism.

One key aspect of the theory is the conclusion that it would be up to the working class to achieve many of the possible positive gains of bourgeois revolution, democracy for example, since the bourgeoisie of a country like Russia would be more likely to support an existing state for fear of the radicalism a revolution would produce. World capitalism, by this point, was creating bourgeoisies in less developed nations that were largely dependent on imperial capital, and so were counter-revolutionary forces in their own societies. Capitalism was now acting to preserve and incorporate rather than undermine old forms of rule and exploitation outside the original centres of capitalist development. Meanwhile, class struggles acted both against the old and the new in a country like Russia. The mutually re-enforcing interconnections between the different sources of class conflict could be, and were, explosive.

Thus Davidson rightly emphasises that Trotsky’s permanent revolution was firmly bound up with the analysis of ‘combined and uneven development’. However, he offers a few surprising judgements which seem to marginalise the concept. Firstly Davidson claims that the crucial aspects of Trotsky’s theory developed late in his writings (p.225). Yet many passages from Results and Prospects (1906) clearly reveal already the great potential of ‘combined and uneven development’ in explaining the possibilities for revolution in less developed societies at that stage of world capitalist development (see chapter 1, The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development.

Part of Davidson’s case here is that Trotsky, in downplaying permanent revolution later during the internal struggle with Stalin, was not dissimulating but revealing his true position (pp.252-3), and that his earlier analysis was meant to be confined to the Russian case. This seems to be an oddly myopic reading of the original text, whatever may be said about Trotsky’s position shortly before his final expulsion from Russia by Stalin (the long quotation from Trotsky on p.253 reads more naturally as a tactical defence of the concept of permanent revolution than a disavowal of its contemporary relevance). However, the underlying reason for all this discussion appears to be that the ‘absence of any further discussion of “revolution from above” [on Trotsky’s part] is mitigated by the fact that Trotsky was at this point focused almost entirely on Russia and did not consider the wider implications of this version of permanent revolution’. The implication should have been that ‘there might be another route to bourgeois revolution than through the agency of the working class’ (p.224).

Trotsky wrote in Results and Prospects that: ‘History does not repeat itself. However much one may compare the Russian Revolution with the Great French Revolution, the former cannot be transformed into the latter. The 19th Century has not passed in vain’. Davidson’s analysis is oddly lacking in awareness of this dimension. Revolutions ‘from above’ were made possible and necessary through the international impact of previous revolutions, and were carried out precisely in order to avoid more revolutionary change. This does not make them typical at any point, just a possible alternative to revolution when the latter is still an immanent possibility.

When Davidson argues that ‘permanent revolution’ cannot apply to ‘advanced capitalist states’, as this would detach it from the lessons of combined and uneven development, it appears that a problem has been created by the terms of analysis itself (p.307). The capitalist system exists as a totality, but Davidson seems to be falling back into a stageist conceptualisation of the problem where each nation has its own individual path through capitalist development, so that the forms of development in subordinated parts of the world do not directly affect the imperial centres. This stageist conceptualisation seems to be at the root of the otherwise unnecessary worrying over the differences and overlaps between bourgeois, democratic and socialist revolutions (pp.307-8). Rather than being only stages or categories, these terms are descriptive of the balance of class forces at different points in the development of various revolutions.

Deflected Permanent Revolution
The argument becomes strained when it reaches the discussion of Tony Cliff’s theory of ‘deflected permanent revolution’, which Davidson attempts to assimilate to his inflated category of bourgeois ‘revolutions from above’. The ‘deflected’ revolutions of the post-war period in some cases can be interpreted as clearing away remnants of pre-capitalist political and social relations. However, more central to their meaning was the impulse to throw off imperial domination in order to achieve independent industrial development in any given combination of state capitalist and orthodox capitalist forms. If the era of bourgeois revolution is now closed, as it appears to be in Davidson’s view, then the whole period of revolution as such closes: ‘Permanent revolution and, consequently, deflected permanent revolution may now be historical concepts’ (p.627). The assimilation of Cliff’s theory thus needs to be seen in the context of Davidson’s underlying misgivings about the importance of revolution in history.

Yet, the concept of deflected permanent revolution cannot be assimilated to a characterisation of ‘revolution from above’ as the twentieth-century route to modernity, without doing considerable violence to the experience of the events concerned. For example it seems simply crass to argue that these revolutions are rarely seen as bourgeois because (referring to the use of socialist vocabulary) ‘an extraordinary form of collective false consciousness had arisen, first in Russia itself, then spreading to the colonial and semi-colonial world’ (p.619). In any case, the intrusions of imperialism had forced transitions in modes of production in different ways across most of the world by this point, so the issue was the extent to which various nations would remain under the full domination of imperialist capital, or be able to establish their own independent alternatives. That is a vastly complicated story that is not much explained by the notion of bourgeois revolution from above.

Conversely, ‘deflected permanent revolution’ is not a categorical explanation but a tool of analysis. It asks the question, what groups are able to organise and lead popular discontent, in order to seize state power and to establish some degree of autonomy from dominant centres of capital? To object that the term can cover both social and political revolutions, as Davidson defines the Chinese and Cuban revolutions respectively (p.464), is therefore to miss the point. It is questionable whether the Chinese Communist Party victory in 1949 itself represented a social revolution, since the process surely began in the revolution of 1911 at least. Nonetheless, what is certainly common between the revolutions in China and Cuba is that they were highly conscious attempts to rid themselves of destructive, comprador bourgeoisies and dependence on imperialist centres. In neither case was the urban working class able to exercise any leadership in the revolution. This was also crucial in determining the nature of the break from western imperialism, but in itself the revolutions are not well characterised as ‘revolutions from above’ labouring under an extraordinary false consciousness.

If the events analysed through the concept of deflected permanent revolution were simply bourgeois revolutions, then that stage of history is completed by the transition to capitalism under various forms of state capitalism in Eurasia and Africa. However, this is only sustainable as an analysis if the contradictory impact of capitalism across the world is ignored. Capitalism creates a situation of permanent revolution because it is unable to sustain stable social forms, particularly in subordinated parts of its world system. Capital must disrupt and destabilise as it reproduces itself, destroying existing structures as it seeks to expand; it does this everywhere, even if the worst effects tend to be felt in the so-called periphery. Thus there is no reason now to assume that ‘deflected permanent revolution’ has run its course, and that its lessons are not still relevant. Every time an existing political regime becomes unstable, the question of political and social revolution will arise once again, and the social revolution will either be deflected once again, or a working class breakthrough may occur.

Indeed, it would seem that in the wake of the great economic crisis since 2008, the lessons of permanent revolution, and Cliff’s extension of it, are as important as ever. Cracks had already appeared in the neoliberal phase of capitalism, with South America in increasing defiance of those norms to a more or less radical extent. Now with the Arab revolutions, a whole range of old regimes have come under popular attack; the foremost question was and remains which social forces could seize the initiative and find a new path out of this crisis of capitalism. The issue has been whether the working class in the Arab states, most particularly Egypt, can succeed in establishing its leadership of the revolutionary situation, or whether the initiative will once again be deflected into the hands of other social elements who will reach, eventually, some sort of accommodation with a shifting but still capitalist world order. The record of past revolutions in all parts of the world is of the utmost use at this point, but they need to be understood within their own contexts, and in terms of the worldwide totality of capitalist development, in all its contradictions, if they are to be grasped adequately.

At the end of the book, Davidson advises revolutionaries simply that organisation and the Party is necessary if we are to hope that anything will change (p.629). It is hardly possible to disagree with this, but whatever his intentions, the course of Davidson’s arguments in this book undermine the sense that revolutionaries are acting with the flow, at least, of historical possibility tending with us rather than against us. Despite the arguments against revisionism here, the case that social revolution is a historically limited phenomenon is actually strengthened by the discussion. There is no question that this is a learned and immensely useful survey on the literature of revolution, but for a focused analysis of bourgeois revolution its net is almost too wide for real clarity to emerge.

Despite Davidson’s attempts at complete coverage of all possible aspects of analysis, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ frequently becomes unmoored from its own historical development. Consequently, the wrong questions are asked, particularly of revolutionary events that post-date the ‘classic’ period of bourgeois revolution, when there was no clear opponent to threaten the victory of capital. The presence of a threat to capitalist rule is the very significance of permanent revolution. The threat is quite real as stable regimes for the rule of capital have been the exception rather than the rule in subordinated parts of the global system, where authoritarian states, or worse, are particularly likely to be the norm. Political revolutions, ‘bourgeois’ revolutions, will therefore keep happening, as they regularly have done since 1945. Yet the result, unless the political revolution transforms into the social, will be the return of the problems and conflicts at the root of revolution in the first place. The contradictions of capitalism and imperialism have not gone away, and so neither will permanent revolution. This is the dynamic underpinning the events of the Arab Spring. Far from ‘deflected permanent revolution’ being irrelevant, its lessons are quite sharply relevant here.

As the last thirty years of neoliberal governments in western economies has shown, capital has a constant need to restructure society in order to feed its own expanding reproduction and surmount its contradictions. These processes lead to social confrontations throughout the world, in areas deemed developed and underdeveloped alike. Capitalism causes disruption and transformation as a normal course of its development and reproduction, and so cannot avoid laying the ground for revolutionary events. Revolution is therefore a permanent aspect of capitalist society, whether a post-revolutionary bourgeoisie likes it or not.

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/16301-in-defence-of-permanent-revolution

The 2013 edition of the annual Socialist Register, a valuable publication, is devoted to “The Question of Strategy.” It contains 19 articles by more than 20 authors on the Occupy movement, new left parties and electoral strategy in Europe, the new progressive governments and movements in Latin America, and so on. Oddly, however, there is not a single article on the strategic lessons of the Quebec upsurge in 2012 and the massive student strike that shook the province for some six months, helping to bring down the Liberal government. A surprising omission, especially in view of the fact that two of the Register’s three editors are Canadians. There is not even a mention of the Quebec strike and its strategic lessons in the editors’ preface, dated August 2012, written following the strike and in the midst of the Quebec election campaign.

Fortunately, a French journal, Contretemps, founded by the late Daniel Bensaid, recognised the importance of the Quebec struggle. In a recent issue (January 18, 2013) it published an interview with two Québécois — one of them a leader of this year’s strike, the other a leader of the 2005 strike — about the lessons they draw from these experiences. They also discuss the meaning of the election of the Parti québécois government and the role of the left party Québec solidaire and some of the problems they see in its relation to the student movement and other social movements.

The following is my translation of the interview, which was also published on the web site of Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, a Quebec journal. The most recent issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme (No. 8, Fall 2012) features a number of excellent articles analysing “Higher education – Culture, commodity and resistance” from a critical left perspective.

The endnotes and hyperlinks are mine.

* * *

From the introduction by Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme:

Our French comrades of the journal Contretemps met with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, former co-spokesperson for the CLASSE (the major student organization in the “maple spring”), and Eric Martin, a co-author of Université inc. (Lux Éditeur, 2011), research officer at the IRIS[1] and member of the CAP/NCS.[2] They were interviewed by Hugo Harari-Kermadec on December 15, 2012.

This interview is a prelude to an article in the next issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme,[3] in which Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois critically reviews the student struggle of last spring, its original dynamic and its relation to the social movements and to politics.

‘The movement launched some seismic waves, their full impact yet unclear’
What is the situation in Quebec since the victory of the Parti québécois on September 4, 2012?

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois: Since the election we have been experiencing a certain return to reality, which is difficult for a part of the student movement. There is disappointment, since the mobilization, unprecedented in Quebec history, was not translated in the electoral results which were fairly tepid, with an electorate that was extremely divided by thirds. The Parti québécois [which won with a weak plurality] had promised some progressive but timid reforms. The increase in tuition fees has been cancelled (for the moment), the closing of a nuclear power plant has been announced, some nice measures in the first weeks. And since then we have gone from retreat to retreat. In terms of public policies, there is no change, and the PQ is again demonstrating its inability to be a real political alternative to neoliberalism. It’s sort of a return, not back to square one but not far from that. There is some disillusionment due to the fact that this movement was not immediately able to correct the direction in which Quebec was going.

Eric Martin: From the standpoint of the political consciousness of the youth, the movement launched some seismic waves, the full impact of which is not yet clear; it will be revealed in the long run. But it is the Parti québécois that proved incapable of reaping the harvest that the movement sowed in people’s minds. Thirty years ago, this party purported to carry the historic aspirations of the Quebec people and youth for emancipation, and proclaimed its proximity to the interests of the workers, its “bias in favour of the workers.” But in the end it showed it was incapable of seeing that an historic window had opened with the student movement, that the social crisis is deeper than education and poses the question of the future of Quebec, while the PQ did not even take advantage of what was being delivered to it on a silver plate. On the contrary, they closed the window, made some technocratic reforms, without any debate. And by retreating at the least reaction, because this government is very skittish media-wise. So the government is already discredited, and it will soon fall. What awaits us is the election of a right-wing party, either the return of the Liberals or, worse still, the Coalition Avenir Québec.

GND: The big promise of the PQ for education was to stop the fee hike and above all to open a sort of major summit on the future of higher education in Quebec, which would discuss all the options including free education. But what appears is a funnelling to consensus, and we know in advance what will come out: indexation of tuition fees to the cost of living and, worse still, the pursuit of commoditization of the education system with the establishment of quality certification [which guarantees the skills acquired by graduates].[4] So there will be a deal with the business interests: we don’t increase tuition fees but we will step up the commoditization process. The attack will be directed against costs, but also content.

EM: The PQ bought into the concept of the knowledge economy in the 1990s, with the performance contracts in the universities. So for this party there is a sort of continuity: “Regardless of what the kids in the street are saying, we take power and we get back to serious business, the paternalist technocrats know what is the right thing.” That’s the fine voice of the OECD. In what way is that party a party of change? No way!

GND: Many people were saying there might be some possibility with the conference on education: the last one was in the 1960s, it was time to inquire as to the role of higher education in Quebec. What is even sadder, or frustrating, is that one of the former student spokespersons was co-opted by the Parti québécois[5] and is now telling people that this summit is part of the continuity of the movement. He is selling the movement to the PQ.

EM: The most frustrating thing is the disconnection between the talk, the discourse, and the functioning of the regime. There may be a major joint effort, with lots of studies on the table to show that it should not be done, but it will proceed anyway. And ultimately, that is what this former spokesman does. In Quebec we cannot express a demand that can be objectified, be translated politically and institutionally. It is blocked by a duopoly, as in the United States.

How do you explain the fact that a student spokesman, Léo Bureau-Blouin, ends up as a candidate and is even elected, when there is a strong tradition of separation between parties and social movements?

GND: It’s the student left that is intransigent on that. The CLASSE,[6] unlike the moderate wing of the student movement, is completely impermeable on this, even intolerant with respect to anything that smacks of electoral politics, a position that is open to criticism. The [FEUC] spokesman who was co-opted by the power elite comes from the concertationniste [collaborationist] fringe of the student movement which defines itself as a student lobby and not as a social organization or union.

EM: So there is a danger that the radicalized students will become even more intransigent on this, which prevents any form of dialectic between the street and the ballot boxes. It is impossible, then, to make a link between the movement and Québec solidaire, the party that represents a sort of social-democratic left, which is the best we have: an organized left force with the ecologists, feminists, etc.

GND: In my opinion, there is a false opposition in Quebec, an “opposition d’entendement” [opposed frameworks of interpretation] between corporatist, concertationniste student organizations, which are in bed with the Parti québécois, and conversely a student left that refuses any dialogue, any link with political parties. To the point that when the election came, the CLASSE had a position of not taking a position: “We will not take account of the electoral context.” Which I find problematic, because it’s a denial of the circumstances in which the social movements are nevertheless evolving.

EM: This is an old problem in Quebec. For example, the national question and the social question are separated. The independentist movements don’t want to talk about social questions, to avoid divisions among them, and the social movement (the Marxist-Leninists in the 1970s, now the libertarian youth) view the national question as a monopoly of the bourgeoisie. So we don’t manage to link these questions together dialectically.

The student movement in fact managed to make some syntheses, and that was its strength, but it did not succeed in taking the next step. Without trying to condense the movement in the National Assembly, to give it a political and electoral translation.

‘The government’s intransigence favoured the more militant pole’
From a more individual point of view, are there some who have joined Québec solidaire?

GND: Yes, that’s the big irony: the separation is formal, and in reality there are some student activists who do join Québec solidaire. We saw this during the election: the position of the CLASSE congress, which said “we ignore the election and call for continuing the strike,” was rejected by the students who had mobilized for some months; starting with the first general assemblies when the new school semester began, they voted the opposite way: “There’s an election, we have an opportunity to overthrow the government, let’s go back to class.” So that was a major disillusionment, showing the gap between a certain far-left within the structures of the student movement and the majority of the militants, including some of the most active, for whom it was now time to translate the movement politically. So there was no organized translation of this attitude in the public space, which was very difficult for the CLASSE.

EM: The first-past-the-post electoral system puts a premium on strategic voting. Québec solidaire got 6%, well below its standing in the opinion polls, because in order to push the Liberals out people had to vote for the PQ as the party of alternance. But it was tweedledum and tweedledee. Since the student movement had in some ways cut itself off at the knees, and with the issue of strategic voting, the election of the PQ came quite naturally, without much effort. And because that party has since then exhausted the last symbolic capital remaining to it we are heading toward a victory for the right at the next opportunity.

The fact that the ASSÉ had majority support for the first time in the student elections, was that linked to the preceding mobilizations? Is this an indication of a stronger politicization of this student generation, even before the spring of 2012, with the ecologist or the altermondialiste [global justice] movements?

GND: I don’t know if we can say that. It’s explained more by some strategic factors, and by the student strike in 2005 against the same government, against a cut in student grants. At the time, that was the biggest strike in Quebec history, before being exceeded by the one this year. An eight-week strike, triggered by the militant fringe but reclaimed by the concertationniste fringe through the exclusion of the militant wing from the negotiations because it refused to denounce violence. An agreement was signed with the Liberals, putting an end to the strike, without consulting the striking students.

This fizzling out, in 2005, had an impact on the student organizations. The dominant university federation lost half its members within a few years. It was a shock for the entire student movement. During that time, the militant wing went after the student associations, one after another. And by 2012 the militant pole was a lot more solid, a lot more organized, a lot bigger than in 2005. From the outset of the strike, the CLASSE assumed its leadership role in the public space, on the campuses. Which meant that even the federations jumped into the dance, at the end of February, early March, when the CLASSE was already established as the majority force and continued to be in the way the strike was represented. It is really this configuration that explains 2012. And during the strike the militant pole continued to grow, and that is where we see the effect of the politicization: during the movement people were leaving the student federations and joining the militant coalition, association by association, because the CLASSE was present in the public space, on the campuses, advancing its ideas, its general political analysis, which went beyond the issue of blocking the fee hike, and this attracted a lot of new members.

EM: Another thing that is linked to that is proof by contradiction — concertation does not work. Its strength lies in the relationship to the state. These federations lobby, circulate petitions. But when the state itself decides not to negotiate, it’s as if the Prince is no longer listening to his advisor. That’s when they become de facto irrelevant, they jump. They have to confess their irrelevance, and to line up beside the CLASSE, and say “do something.” The government’s intransigence favoured the more militant pole, which is what the government wanted in fact: a confrontation, which could not occur with people who do not want one, who are basically lackeys.

GND: The student federations did not lead any actions during the strike, or demonstrations. There were dozens each day, perhaps 20 percent of them called or organized by the CLASSE. We had at least one big demonstration per week, there were several each day in the regions. And during that time the federations were saying “we want to negotiate”; it made them look totally ineffective.

EM: With the result that there is now a campaign of disaffiliation from the FEUQ.[7] They have lost all their members.

‘Québec Solidaire proved unable to take a clear stand’
Is the present respite being used to open a debate in the CLASSE on the lessons to be learned from the mobilization and the electoral follow-up?

GND: That’s one of the problems with the end of the strike. Since the CLASSE said “we’re continuing” and people went back to class, there was no call to end the strike. It came to an end slowly, over two or three weeks. There really wasn’t an end to the strike, and immediately afterward there was the election. Then the work of preparing for the summit began, we drafted briefs… and people said to themselves “it’s not over, there’s the summit, perhaps there will be indexation….” There’s a certain indefiniteness, so for now there is no real balance sheet. This inability to take a break, to conduct a review is a problem perhaps. A congress of the ASSÉ[8] was scheduled for January, but in the circumstances this has been postponed to the summer. So in theory there would be an opportunity to make an assessment this summer, but I don’t know if we will be able to do that.

The ASSÉ is returning to its usual form?

GND: Yes, the CLASSE was dissolved in October. It was a temporary coalition for the time of the strike. It had been founded like that in January 2011, with the explicit provision in its statutes that it would dissolve when the strike ended.

EM: But that’s a problem! In 2005, we experienced the same problem: we had created the CASSÉË,[9] which we dissolved after the strike, so it took years to rebuild a movement like that, which has now scuppered itself again. I am very critical of this. I think there should be a permanent structure like that. And the other problem is that once people leave the student movement they fall into a vacuum. There is Québec solidaire, a political party, and you will get active in it if you want to engage in electoral politics. But if you want to participate in a radical political movement, there is nothing outside the student movement. For adults, workers, there is nothing in between, apart from a few tiny communist or anarcho-communist groups. But that’s not where everyone will go to be active. And for the students, they have to re-form coalitions each time. It happens when an adversary appears, and when it falls the coalition falls apart again.

Did Québec solidaire not take account of the events to renew its forms of activism?

EM: That’s another problem. There were two main tendencies in Québec solidaire; the one I was in came from the Union des forces progressistes (UFP).[10] This Marxist tendency said “we have to organize the social movement.” But there were a lot of people in the other tendency, who came from the community movement, let’s say the citizen’s fringe, who were saying “We have to respect the autonomy of the community movement, so we should not interfere in the social movements.” That position has been dominant for a long time, which means that Québec solidaire has refused to play a role as organizer of the social movement, an initiator of coalitions. It has remained a sort of electoral tool, but not a force for actively unifying the left-wing forces. While the UFP was itself the result of an idea of a party-building process, which sought to merge the CP, the PS [PDS][11] and some small groups. This party-building project, as conceived by François Cyr, Pierre Dostie and Gordon Lefebvre, was unfortunately not translated into the way in which Québec solidaire now functions. There is an electoralist logic.

And on other current issues, like taxing the well-off, Québec solidaire has proved unable to distinguish itself: its interventions were not very firm, or are barely present. They are marginalized in the mass media but they don’t try, either, to organize the working class or the masses. The party is not voluntarist enough, aiming to organize people. [But] it is a good party, an immense progress compared with the 1980s and 1990s when we didn’t have a left party, nothing but the PQ.

It’s a purely electoralist party?

GND: No, we shouldn’t say that. It is a party that is still socially committed, but timid in its desire to present itself as the organizing pole. Moreover, there is a difficulty in going into the street. The idea of a party of the streets and the ballot boxes is not yet fully realized. Well, I am too hard. There are some difficulties in organizing the street, and the street has some difficulties joining the party. We have to understand that in Quebec there is a traumatism in the social movements, which is the experience with the Parti québécois. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as the first political vehicle for the Francophone working class, the majority in Quebec. It was an immense hope, that party. Many social movements bet everything on that party. Which explains why many people today find it hard to detach themselves from it. Even some people on the far left.

There was a first PQ government and they say it was a good one, but very quickly, beginning in the early 1980s, the PQ government turned against the unions, adopting a special law on the civil service to smash the unions’ power. That was a disappointment, a kind of traumatism, which explains the reluctance in the social movements to join a political party. Which now explains the difficulties Québec solidaire is having. And unlike France, there is no strong tradition of a left-wing party in Quebec. The UFP was the first experience, in the 1990s!

EM: And the reason is that in the 1970s and 1980s, there was an experience with a very dogmatic, Maoist communist party which ended up very badly for everyone, and it liquidated itself, at the time of the 1980 referendum.[12] So independence and Marxism died at the same time in Quebec.

As to the labour movement, it is stuck to the PQ because it has some difficulties in seeing concretely any other real force. Not in terms of principles: Québec solidaire, in terms of principles, values, has that. But from a pragmatic standpoint, the labour movement cannot support a party that has no chance of being elected. It’s a deadlock.

‘Radicalization is a process that occurs in struggle’
Has the international climate been a factor? Occupy Wall Street, the Arab revolutions, etc.?

EM: Yes, there was Occupy Montréal, just before the student strike, an occupation of the Place de la Bourse [in front of the stock exchange]. That was a sort of prelude, with its limitations: Occupy Wall Street was a sort of expression, a cri de coeur, that had some difficulty in translating itself into actions.

GND: Even more than that. Yes, the international climate of challenging neoliberalism had an impact, people in Quebec felt they were part of a kind of international wave; lots of people said that. A major influence in the terms, but not an organizational influence. The question of the 99% / 1%, a new way of talking about social classes… an imaginary that was taken up by the student movement.

But organizationally, I don’t think we should see a continuity. Those movements organized themselves through social networks, in a decentralized way, without formal structures. A horizontal organization that has its strengths, but which is not the mode of organization of the Québécois movement, which on the contrary functions like a trade union….

EM: … direct democracy but with a highly organized action structure.

GND: With a majority, not consensual, process. It is often written that the CLASSE was a horizontal network without an executive. Yes, there was an executive, which is an organ for execution of mandates, but not policy representation. There are delegates, but it is indeed an organizational structure. The movement wouldn’t have had that force if we did not have this organization.

But then how do you explain this radicalization as the movement developed?

EM: It’s the government’s contempt, 45 layers over and above what is permissible. It pisses in your face, and you end up saying “Shit, that’s impermissible”!

GND: There is also the duration of the movement, people experienced the system in their flesh and blood. One lesson that I draw from it is that radicalization is a process that occurs in the struggle, not through beautiful speeches. We are right. But it is not because we are right, that’s not enough to convince people. It’s not by sticking some ideas on the reality that we are going to convince people that things are not going well in the world. In the general assemblies [AGs], in some places, the strike votes were stronger and stronger! Which is contrary to logic; generally, the strike vote starts strong and then people steadily disembark.

But in the CEGEPs[13] it was the reverse! There were people who were changing their minds! I remember leaving AGs that were full of green squares strewn on the ground. The green square was the sign of people who were for the fee hike. And people were taking them off during the AG. And when everyone got up, there would be 50 green squares on the ground because people had changed their mind. That shows a process of politicization through struggle. Some people who initially began the struggle with some (let’s say) social-democratic principles, or Judeo-Christian, of sharing, etc. Some good reasons, but not politically spelled out. And well, many of those people, having been on strike for six months, being beaten by the police every day, scorned by the mass media, living in oppression, radicalized a lot.

Also, there was the loss of legitimacy of the government, riddled by corruption scandals, which had backed down on the issue of shale gas, etc. And there was a sort of latent dissatisfaction, which the student movement was able to put into words. We gave a lot of people a cause, not on the campuses but to all those people who were dissatisfied and who joined in the casseroles protests. That’s always the challenge for the left: to put words on a dissatisfaction that is already there. People are well aware that things are not going as they should. The ecological crisis, the financial crisis…. People see in their everyday experience that there are problems, and the student movement was able to say, outside the campuses, “one of those injustices, which is part of the general logic, we can defeat it, come join us in the struggle.” It is this capacity to coalesce the frustrations, to channel, that enabled us to have, all at once, without any organization calling for it, a movement of the casseroles. It really was born on the social networks, and suddenly there were thousands of people in the street every night, throughout Quebec. Suddenly, some people who were there, who agreed with us, went through the door they had opened.

‘They realized that we were on to something, and they no longer knew how to react’
Is that where the social networks play their role?

GND: Exactly. Once the social movement had done its job, the foundations, as we say in Quebec, “partir la patente” [to get things going], the social networks helped to add some dynamism, some self-organization. That allowed all kinds of citizen initiatives, neighbourhood assemblies, to emerge….

EM: It freed up the potential for people to be creative. And there was no longer any control, it was no longer the student unions that were making the decisions. An organizational platform on which the spontaneity was built. People think spontaneity is at the beginning, but it’s the result.

GND: Yes, the student organizations were there to lay the foundations for the actions, but at some point the CLASSE was carrying out a national action each week, some regional mobilizations, coordinating the strike votes, intervening in the media, in a negotiating stance with the government… But all the rest, 90% of what was happening, was autonomous, decentralized and spontaneous. This was a novelty in Quebec; in 2005 the social networks had barely got going. It was a novelty, for us but also for the establishment and the media. They were unable to understand what was happening. They have an analytical framework that says politics is the state, the parties, the unions. And it’s all machines, it works “top-down.” And this time it was completely different. They even criticized us for it! “But you are not controlling your members!” A total lack of comprehension. I said, “But we have 100,000 members, what do you expect… But what are you talking about?” The funniest thing was the student federations, which were saying “We are controlling our members!” Well, there were not that many any more, but it was also not true, their members were coming to us!

That movement was outside the usual framework. In fact, I saw an interview with a Quebec reporter by a French TV network, which asked him to describe Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. And this Quebec reporter, from a left-wing newspaper, who has a master’s degree in philosophy, replied: “He’s a young man, very articulate, blah blah, but his defect is that he has found a new form of langue de bois [wooden rhetoric], to avoid answering questions. He always claims he needs a mandate to speak! This is a new discursive strategy: he always says he has no mandate. He relies on this to refuse his responsibilities.”

EM: It’s the langue Dubois [laughter].

GND: And it’s not bad faith, it’s a failure to comprehend. For him, this could not exist. It could only be a discursive mystification. Another example: The minister asked me to order a truce to allow negotiations in peace and quiet. I replied: “First, I don’t have that power. Second, I don’t want to do it. Third, I will take your request, we will consult in our 80 AGs, give us a week and we’ll get back to you.” At that point, they hung up on me, on the state television [Radio Canada]. On the news program. One of the talking heads cut me off because, he says, I am refusing to answer the question. He was asking me repeatedly: “Do you agree to the truce?”

Another example. When the casseroles began, it was candy for the continuous news channels; they had helicopters flying over the city of Montréal, and everywhere, in all the streets, there were people banging their pots. And they called on one of the political commentators, a former federal minister. He says: “It’s very hard to describe, the student associations did not call these actions, it’s hard to see who is behind them.” Because obviously, there had to be someone behind them. “It may be a new form of … uprising.” He was having trouble articulating those words. “Popular uprising.” He was lost, wide-eyed. He did not understand. And they were afraid. They realized that we were on to something, and they no longer knew how to react.

EM: This door that was opened, the PQ is working to close it again. But things will continue to burrow from below, and the question is when will this energy that the people, or the youth, discovered for themselves is going to be used to do more than go beyond the bounds.

Notes
[1] IRIS – Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économiques.

[2] CAP – Collectif d’analyse politique.

[3] No. 9, to appear in mid-February 2013.

[4] See “Charest wants to transform Quebec into a “Right-to-Study State,” in this blog post.

[5] The reference is to Léo Bureau-Blouin, a leader of the FECQ, the federation of college students, who was elected to the National Assembly on September 4 as a PQ candidate.

[6] Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) – Broad coalition of the Association for student union solidarity.

[7] Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, the university students federation.

[8] Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, the permanent core body of the CLASSE.

[9] Coalition de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante Élargie (CASSÉÉ) – Expanded coalition of the ASSÉ.

[10] See “Québec Solidaire: A Québécois Approach to Building a Broad Left Party (Part I).”

[11] Parti de la Démocratie Sociale (PDS), the name adopted by the Quebec NDP in the early 1990s when it separated from the federal New Democratic Party.

[12] Actually, both of the major Maoist parties, the Workers Communist Party (PCO in French) and En Lutte/In Struggle, collapsed quite suddenly soon after the referendum, around 1983.

[13] Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel, midway between high school and university.

http://links.org.au/node/3208

It is now widely accepted that the lower castes have
risen in Indian politics. Has there been a corresponding
change in the economy? Using comprehensive data
on enterprise ownership from the Economic Census
of 1990, 1998 and 2005, this paper shows there are
substantial caste differences in entrepreneurship across
India. The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are
significantly under-represented in the ownership of
enterprises and the share of the workforce employed by
them. These differences are widespread across all states,
have decreased very modestly between 1990 and 2005,
and cannot be attributed to broad differences in access
to physical or human capital.
The authors acknowledge the comments of an anonymous referee.
Lakshmi Iyer (liyer@hbs.edu) and Tarun Khanna (tkhanna@hbs.edu)
are at the Harvard Business School and Ashutosh Varshney
(ashutosh_varshney@brown.edu) is at Brown University, the US.
1 Introduction Focusing on the relationship between caste and entrepreneurship,
this paper sheds light on two larger narratives
about India’s emerging political economy. The fi rst
narrative has to do with India’s rapid economic growth rate
over the last couple of decades. Whatever one’s view on the
reasons underlying the fast growth – greater opening of the
economy to foreign goods and capital, the demographic dividend
arising from a large and growing young workforce, and
the greater liberalisation of economic activity within the country
in the mid-1980s – there is concern that not all sections of society
have benefi ted equally from economic growth, with inequality
steadily rising in the last decade.1 A narrative that the rich
have benefi ted more than the poor, the towns and cities more
than the villages, and the upper castes more than the lower
castes has acquired salience in several quarters (Varshney
2007). There is also some concern that levels of entrepreneurship
in India lag behind other countries with similar income
levels (Ghani, Kerr and O’Connell 2011).
The second narrative relates to an important new discourse
in dalit politics. Concentrating on the need for “dalit entrepreneurs”,
a category conspicuous by its absence in India’s business
history, this narrative has its philosophical and political
roots in the so-called Bhopal document of 2002. Getting together
in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, under the sponsorship of Digvijay
Singh, the then chief minister of the state, some leading dalit
intellectuals argued that “the imagination of the post-Ambedkar
dalit movement has been shackled…within the discourse of
reservations” (Nigam 2002: 1190). Questioning the adequacy
of reservations for dalit welfare in contemporary India, these
intellectuals articulated an important challenge faced by the
dalit community in India’s rapidly growing economy.
In the new scenario of the state’s retreat, when public employment is
shrinking, does it make any sense to simply reiterate the old slogan of
reservations – even if it is extended to the private sector, as is now being
demanded? Will the dalits always have to remain content with the
demand for such job reservations, which effectively means that they be
employed as proletarians in the enterprises owned by others – in primarily
upper-caste concerns or those owned by the state but nevertheless controlled
by the upper castes? Or must they now gird up their loins to
play for fundamentally different stakes, making room for themselves
in the new, free-market/global dispensation? Should they not also
have their own bourgeoisie, their own millionaires and billionaires?2
Indeed, dalit millionaires have been increasingly visible
over the last few years. Articles in leading newspapers and
magazines have focused on the emergence of such millionaires
(Aiyar 2011).3 In January 2011, the Planning Commission
invited these businessmen for a special meeting that discussed
faced. A new Dalit Indian Chamber of Industry and Commerce
has been formed.
It should be noted that the second narrative stands in considerable
tension to the fi rst. Case studies show that “the
growth of dalit entrepreneurship took off…during the 1980s
and more vigorously after the 1990s” (Jodhka 2010: 43). India’s
post-1991 reforms are, thus, connected to rising economic
inequalities in the fi rst narrative, but they are also linked to
the emergence of dalit entrepreneurs in the second.
Dalit millionaires may have burst on the scene, but how far
do they represent the general state of dalit entrepreneurship in
the country? More widely, what is the relationship between
caste and entrepreneurship?
This is an important question. As is well known, the caste
system was not only a scheme of social stratifi cation, but also a
division of labour. With each caste came a traditionally
ascribed profession. Historically, there was some fl exibility in
the system (Srinivas 1966), but this was limited. It is only with
the rise of democratic politics that the process of change was
considerably spurred. Substantially because the lower castes
constituted a majority of India’s populace, democratic politics
was their forceful ally in the 20th century (Rudolph and
Rudolph 1967; Varshney 2000; Weiner 2001). Not all of the
changes have been benign (Mehta 2003), but as far as representation
in state assemblies and Parliament is concerned, India
has gone through an Other Backward Class (OBC) revolution
(Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009), while the reservations for scheduled
castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have ensured that
their share is substantial in representative assemblies.
Has this political revolution been accompanied by corresponding
changes in the economic sphere? How has the caste
map of entrepreneurs changed? On the whole, the relationship
between caste and entrepreneurship remains underresearched,
though a variety of other political economy questions
concerning lower-caste welfare have been studied. Some
studies, for example, have shown an increasing convergence in
habits and rituals across caste categories (Kapur et al 2010),
but others document persistent differences in important development
outcomes such as consumption expenditure, education
levels, and access to public goods (Desai and Dubey 2011;
Banerjee and Somanathan 2007). The effects of affi rmative
action for SCs and STs also appear to be mixed. Pande (2003)
fi nds that political reservations lead to greater social expenditure
and more jobs for SCs, but not for STs. On the other hand,
Pandey (2010) and Cassan (2011) fi nd very limited effects of
such affi rmative action on educational outcomes for SCs.4
We examine the role of caste differences using a very different
metric of economic development – the ownership of enterprises
across the country. We are aware of only a handful of
research attempts of this kind. Damodaran (2008), Thorat,
Kundu and Sadana (2010), Jodhka (2010), and Varshney (2012)
have studied some aspects of this relationship.5 We build on
these studies and go beyond.
To arrive at our conclusions, we use comprehensive data
from the Economic Censuses of India, which enumerate every
non-agricultural enterprise in the country. Our fi ndings reinforce
the persistence of caste differences in important development
outcomes. As late as 2005, SCs and STs were signifi cantly
under-represented in the ownership of private enterprises,
and the employment generated by private enterprises. For
instance, SCs owned 9.8% of all enterprises in 2005, well
below their 16.4% share in the total population. Such underrepresentation
in the entrepreneurial sphere was widespread
across all the large states of India, and was present in both
rural and urban settings. Moreover, despite more than a decade
of rapid nationwide economic growth, the share of SCs and
STs in fi rm ownership and employment generation over the
period 1990-2005 increased only very modestly.
In addition to these broad measures of entrepreneurship,
there are signifi cant differences in fi rm characteristics across
caste categories. Enterprises owned by members of SCs and STs
tend to be smaller, are less likely to employ labour from outside
the family, and more likely to belong to the informal or
unorganised sector. All these differences across caste categories
are more pronounced in urban areas compared to rural
areas, suggesting that these results cannot be attributed purely
to social discrimination, which we might expect to be higher
in rural areas. Overall, our results highlight that SC and ST
entrepreneurs face signifi cant obstacles in entering entrepreneurship,
and in expanding the scale of their enterprises.
These differences in entrepreneurship are not signifi cantly
correlated to demographic or economic characteristics such as
literacy rates or levels of secondary schooling or the proportion
of the population engaged in farming. Neither are they
attributable to a variation in the choice of industries across
castes, since the industry mix has been converging rapidly
across caste categories. This suggests that we need to examine
more nuanced hypotheses to understand the reasons behind
the observed facts.
We also present preliminary results on the progress of OBCs
in enterprise ownership and employment generation. OBCs
are traditionally the “middle” castes – neither suffering the
extreme social and economic discrimination of the SCs nor
enjoying the social privileges of the upper castes. These castes
were given access to affi rmative action policies at the national
level only in the 1990s, though they started receiving reservation
benefi ts in education and government employment at the
state level in the late 1950s and early 1960s in southern
India. We fi nd that OBCs appear to be making signifi cant
progress in playing an important entrepreneurial role. By
2005, their share in enterprise ownership and employment
generation was very much in line with their population
share, having risen signifi cantly since the 1998 wave of the
economic census.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows – Section 2
describes our data sources; Section 3 examines caste differences
in the extent of enterprise ownership and employment
generation; Section 4 analyses differences in the characteristics
of enterprises; Section 5 summarises a few international
experiences with the empowerment of economically marginalised
communities; and Section 6 concludes.
2 Economic Census of India
Our main data come from the Economic Censuses of India conducted
by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO). The economic
census is a complete count of all entrepreneurial units
located within the geographical boundaries of the country,
with the exception of those directly involved in growing crops
(enterprises linked to agriculture, such as food-processing
units, are included). As such, it covers all non-agricultural
enterprises in the country. It is different from other enterpriselevel
data sets in India (such as the Annual Survey of Industries,
the National Sample Survey, and the Centre for Monitoring
Indian Economy’s Prowess database) in that it is a complete
census, it covers both manufacturing and services, and it includes
information on enterprises in the unorganised or informal
sector of the economy. The economic censuses provide
detailed information on the location and industrial classifi cation
of each enterprise, the number of workers employed, the
mix of family and hired labour, sources of fi nance, and the
caste category of the enterprise owner.
We have access to the micro-data from the 1990, 1998 and
2005 waves of the Economic Census. The 2005 wave covered
more than 42 million enterprises, employing around 99 million
workers. Of these enterprises, 39% were in urban areas and
they employed 49% of all workers.6 Most of our results are based
on the 2005 data, but we will show some of the trends over the
period 1990-2005 as well. We focus on the data from 19 large
states of India, which account for 96% of India’s population
and 95% of all enterprises.7 Since the ownership of publicly
traded fi rms or cooperatives cannot be assigned to a specifi c
owner’s caste, our analysis focuses only on the ownership of
private enterprises. For all practical purposes, thus, we capture
the smaller fi rms in the economy, some of which may have the
potential to grow larger in the future. Most international studies
of entrepreneurship also focus on smaller or younger fi rms.
We supplement the data from the economic censuses with
data on population sizes, and the proportion of SCs and STs
from the 1991 and 2001 population censuses of India.8 We also
obtained estimates of the proportion of OBCs in each state from
the 66th round of the National Sample Survey. These estimates
are very close to those in the National Election Study 2009
conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
3 Caste and Enterprise Ownership
Our fi rst major fi nding is that members of SCs and STs are
under-represented in the ownership of enterprises. SCs
accounted for 16.4% of India’s population in 2001, but owned
only 9.8% of all enterprises in 2005, which employed 8.1% of
all non-farm workers (Table 1). We should note that since the
majority of such enterprises are single-person enterprises (see
next section), this measure of enterprise ownership is highly
correlated with the extent of self-employment, and as such,
might be a relatively crude measure of entrepreneurship
(Ghani et al 2011). However, there is no universally accepted
defi nition of entrepreneurship, and we will investigate alternative
measures in future work. A similar pattern of underrepresentation
is observed for STs, whose members constituted
7.7% of the nation’s population, but owned only 3.7% of nonfarm
enterprises, employing 3.4% of the non-farm workforce.
These patterns are not specifi c to any one region or state of
the country. As Figure 1 shows, the share of the non-agricultural
workforce employed in SC-owned fi rms is lower than
their population share in all states, barring Assam. It is also
not the case that the states which were among the earliest
to have progressive movements to end caste discrimination
during the fi rst half of the 20th century (Kerala, Karnataka,
Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra) have a lower
degree of under-representation.9 A similar pattern is seen for
ST entrepreneurship, where even states with a particularly
high degree of STs in the population appear to be as underrepresented
as states with a lower proportion of STs in the
population (Figure 2, p 55).
In contrast to the under-representation of SC and ST communities
in entrepreneurship, we fi nd that OBC members are well
represented. OBC members owned 43.5% of all enterprises
in 2005, and accounted for 40% of non-farm employment
(Table 1). This is very much in line with their overall population
share of 43%. In most states, the share of the workforce
employed in OBC-owned fi rms was quite close to their overall
population share (Figure 3, p 55).
Two more points ought to be noted here. That OBC shares of
business enterprises in most states in 2005 roughly corresponded
with their estimated shares in the state population
does not mean that OBC enterprise shares were roughly the
same across states in the 1970s and 1980s. Given the many
55
studies we have on the changes in the caste structure of southern
India in the 20th century, it is quite possible that OBCs entered
the business sector sooner in the south than the north.10 Unfortunately,
there was no economic census in the early 1970s, and
even after the government started collecting such information,
the OBC category was not recorded separately till 1998.
As a result, we cannot be statistically thorough about the
hunch that OBCs entered business in the south much before
they did so in the north. Second, the existing economic census
does not identify the proprietor’s caste for fi rms whose shares
are publicly traded. South India has witnessed the phenomenal
rise of some OBC communities to the highest reaches of
publicly traded fi rms. For example, the ascent of the Nadars,
traditionally toddy-tappers who were subjected to enormous
deprivation and degradation, to a leading business community
of Tamil Nadu has absolutely no parallel yet in north India.11
Coming back to SCs and STs, the pattern of under-representation
in enterprise ownership and employment generation is
widespread even within states, which means these results do
not appear to be driven by a few pockets of underdevelopment.
When we examine district-level data, we fi nd that the enterprise
ownership share of SCs and STs is less than
their population share in more than 80% of the
districts. Even in a state like Maharashtra, which
had above-average per capita gross domestic product
(GDP), reasonably fast growth rates in the
post-1990 period, and a long history of progressive
policies towards SCs and STs,12 we fi nd that
the share of the workforce employed in SC-owned
enterprises is lower than the SC population share
in 25 out of 34 districts; the ST employment share
is lower than the population share in 22 out of 34
districts. Despite the success of dalit movements
in B R Ambedkar’s native Maharashtra, which
made dalits quite prominent in the political life of
the state and pushed all political parties after
independence to include dalit issues in their platforms
(Ahuja 2008), they were under-represented
in entrepreneurship as late as 2005. Politics and
economics remained mismatched.
Another example is Gujarat, which had a very
high economic growth rate over the past decade
(8.5% growth in GSDP over 1999-2008, compared
to 7.2% nationwide), and which showed a large
increase in the share of the workforce employed in
OBC-owned enterprises over the period 1998-2005
(from 22% to 39%), suggesting that caste barriers
were breaking down rapidly. Nevertheless, the
share of the workforce employed in SC-owned enterprises
remained at 7% in both 1990 and 2005,
and only three districts showed an increase in
this share over the period 1990-2005, suggesting
that SCs are unable to overcome the barriers to
entrepreneurship that OBCs are able to surmount.
A second major fi nding is that these differences
in entrepreneurship persist across space and time.
Table 1 shows that the share of SCs and STs in the entrepreneurial
sphere is low even in urban areas, where we might expect
explicit caste-based
discrimination is less.
The caste differences in
entrepreneurship do not
appear to be disappearing
over time. The share
of enterprises owned by
SCs in 2005 was the
same as it was in 1990,
while the employment
share in SC-owned enterprises
increased by
less than one percentage
point (Table 2). STs
also showed a modest
increase in their share
of entrepreneurship over
this long period (share of enterprise ownership rising from
2.6% to 3.7%; employment share rising from 2% to 3.4%).
Figure
In contrast, OBCs made signifi cant progress over the period
1998-2005, increasing their share of fi rm ownership from
37.5% to 43.5%, and their share of employment from 33.8% to
40%.13 However, the population shares for OBCs are estimated
from a sample survey rather than the offi cial population census
(which, for the fi rst time since 1931, will collect and release
such statistics only in 2013), and the 1990 wave of the economic
census does not include this category, making these
comparisons less reliable than those for SCs and STs.
4 Caste Differences in Enterprise Characteristics
One reason SCs and STs lag behind in employment generation
could be diffi culties in expanding the size of their enterprises.
This can be either because of caste discrimination (members
of other castes do not want to work with SCs) or because of lack
of knowledge or fi nancing constraints. All these factors can
also prevent SCs from entering industries that have signifi cant
economies of scale. In this section, we examine whether fi rm
sizes and other characteristics differ systematically across different
caste categories.
4.1 Caste and Enterprise Scale
We fi nd that fi rms owned by SCs and STs are smaller on average
than fi rms owned by non-SCs/STs (Table 3). Note that average
fi rm sizes are very small overall – the average size is 2.13 for
enterprises owned by non-SC/ST owners, 1.72 for SCs, and 1.89
for STs. The gap in average fi rm size between SCs/STs and other
castes is larger in urban areas than in rural areas. This difference
is also widespread – the average SC-owned fi rm size is smaller
than the average non-SC-owned fi rm size in all the states.
Part of the reason for this difference in average enterprise
size is the relative extent of one-person enterprises. The majority
of private enterprises in India are one-person fi rms; that is,
they consist of self-employed people. Among enterprises
owned by non-SC/STs, 57% have only one person. Among SCs,
this is 65%. The difference in the proportion of self-employment
is particularly pronounced in urban areas (50% vs 61%),
though the difference is present in both rural and urban areas
for SC enterprises. Interestingly, this does not appear to be a
major source of the size difference between ST-owned fi rms
and non-ST fi rms.
4.2 Employing Outside Labour
Are the differences in enterprise scale driven by differences in
the size of networks? For instance, if SC fi rm owners fi nd it
easier to work with SC workers, the smaller size of the worker
pool might limit the growth possibilities of enterprises. We
examine this by looking at the extent to which fi rms employ
hired labour, or labour from outside the family. In the overall
data set, we see that 51% of two-person and 26% of threeperson
fi rms consisted purely of family labour in 2005. So
employing people from outside the family is a fairly signifi cant
step in enterprise growth.
Consistent with the small average size of enterprises, most
fi rms in our sample do not employ any labour outside family
members. Among enterprises owned by non-SC/STs, 68%
operate with only family labour. This proportion rises to 77%
for SC and ST owners. More fi rms in urban areas hire outside
labour, but the differences among caste categories are substantially
larger in urban areas. For instance, 77% of non-SC/ST fi rms
and 81% of SC/ST fi rms hire no outside labour in rural areas,
but the corresponding fi gures for urban areas are 56% for non-
SC/STs, 67% for SCs, and 61% for STs. The result for ST owners
is interesting because the difference in the proportion of
one-person fi rms was lower for STs compared to SCs – but these
results show that ST fi rms face similar constraints in moving
beyond family labour.
The trends over time show that while average fi rm size is
declining over time for all caste groups, the size gap between
SC/ST fi rms and non-SC/ST fi rms has remained fairly stable
over time. For instance, 55% of non-SC/ST fi rms were singleperson
fi rms in 1990, compared to 61% for SCs. The corresponding
numbers for 2005 were 57% and 65%.
4.3 Sources of Finance
The vast majority of enterprises in our data set – more than
90% – do not access outside sources of fi nance. This is true
both in urban and rural areas. Of those who do access outside
sources of fi nance, fi rms owned by members of non-SC/STs are
slightly more likely to access institutional sources of fi nance
(3.6% compared to 2.6% for SCs), as opposed to accessing government
anti-poverty programmes, moneylenders, or nongovernmental
organisations (NGOs) for fi nancing.
More than three-quarters of the fi rms in our data set are
unregistered with any government agency, and hence belong
to the “unorganised” or “informal” sector.14 They are not subject
to government regulations such as labour laws or environmental
regulations, but they also cannot access government
fi nancing programmes or other institutional sources of fi nance.
Consistent with our results on accessing formal fi nance, we
fi nd that while 77% of enterprises owned by non-SC/STs are in
the unorganised sector, this proportion is more than 85% for
SCs and STs. As with all other differences documented earlier, the
caste differences in the extent of informality are much larger
in urban areas compared to rural areas, particularly for SCs.15
Do the above factors – smaller fi rm size, preponderance of
family labour, and informality – prevent SC and ST entrepreneurs
from entering certain sectors? We examine the broad
categories of activity for the enterprises in our data set. Overall
the differences are not large in the types of industries
entered by different communities. Throughout this period, SCs
and STs were more likely to be involved in agriculture-related
activities and manufacturing, while non-SC/STs were more
likely to be involved in retail trade. But there have been important
changes in the industry distribution over time – both SC
and ST enterprises have a greater share in retail trade and a
lower share in manufacturing in 2005 compared to 1990. In
this sense, their industry distribution has come closer to that
of non-SC/STs (Table 4). An important implication of this convergence
in industry mix is that the persistent under-representation
of SCs and STs and the smaller fi rm size of SC/ST enterprises
cannot be attributed to underlying economic primitives
of the industries in which these groups are involved.
4.5 Why Gaps and Lags?
What might be the possible reasons for these persistent gaps in
entrepreneurial activity across caste categories? We should
note that outright discrimination is unlikely to be the full
answer, since many of these differences in enterprise ownership
and enterprise scale are larger in urban areas where, following
Ambedkar, one expects discrimination to be lower. On
the basis of his studies in Panipat and Saharanpur, Jodhka
reports that caste did infl uence dalit businesses negatively, but
Caste appeared to matter least in procuring supplies. Only 5% of all …
respondents reported any kind of diffi culties in getting supplies because
of their being dalits. ‘As long as you can pay, no one cares who
you are’… A large majority of our respondents … faced no caste-related
discrimination in getting supplies or raw materials for their businesses.
This was so when the suppliers in almost all … cases were nondalits,
mostly from the locally dominant business communities, the
Banias, Punjabis or Muslims (2010: 47).
In short, while discrimination does exist, there are likely to
be many other factors as well. We are basically in a multivariate
explanatory space. The existing literature on entrepreneurship
suggests a number of possible explanations. Perhaps SC
and ST entrepreneurs lack access to capital to set up and grow
enterprises. Or perhaps they do not have education levels high
enough to become successful entrepreneurs. Maybe the growth
of enterprises depends strongly on network effects, both for
fi nding the right workers and for making links with suppliers
and customers. SC and ST enterprise owners might thus be disadvantaged
by their relatively smaller networks.
Many of these factors are known to be relevant in India.
Banerjee and Dufl o (2012) show that even formal sector fi rms
are extremely credit-constrained; informal fi rms are likely to
be even more so, despite the high rates of return to capital
among small enterprises (McKenzie, de Mel and Woodruff
2008). In terms of caste differences, SCs and STs have been
shown to have lower rates of landownership (Iversen et al
2011), and long-lasting gaps in educational attainment (Desai
and Dubey 2011).
Can low levels of landownership and educational attainment
explain the gaps in enterprise ownership at the state or
district level? We provide preliminary evidence by regressing
the share of SC/ST enterprise ownership in the state on the
levels of literacy, urbanisation, fraction of population
engaged in farming, and the fraction of
landless among farmers (proxied by the share
of agricultural labour in the farming sector, as
opposed to cultivators). We do not fi nd these
variables to have much power in explaining the
share of SC or ST enterprise ownership, controlling
for the SC or ST population share (Table 5,
Panel A, p 58). Of course, one possibility is that
the absence of correlations may be driven by
poor measures of the underlying phenomena.
For instance, literacy captures only one dimension
of educational attainment; perhaps what
matters for entrepreneurship is a specifi c type
or a particular quality of education, which we
are not able to measure accurately.
Further examination at the district level also shows a similar
result – the variation in SC/ST enterprise ownership share
across districts within a state is not signifi cantly related to
these proxy measures of access to capital and education (Table 5,
Panel B). The only exception is that higher literacy levels do
seem to be a spur to greater ST entrepreneurship.
5 Entrepreneurship and Social Structure in
International Perspective
As we think further about how entrepreneurship might fl ourish
among SCs and STs, it might be worth briefl y considering
the experiences of marginalised groups in other socially
diverse parts of the world. The relationship between entrepreneurship
and social structure has been studied in numerous
settings. A comprehensive survey is not in order here, but
selected experiences are worth highlighting. These collectively
validate the diffi culty of marginalised groups overcoming historical
barriers to become entrepreneurs.
Consider the Malaysian experience, for example, chronicled
by Gomez and Jomo (1999), and recently summarised in
Gomez (2011). Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was the
fi rst institutionalised attempt to redress the small economic
share of the numerically dominant bumiputeras (“sons of the
soil”, referring to ethnic Malays and other indigenous people),
and was triggered by the race riots of May 1969, at a time
when the bumis held only 1.5% of corporate equity. After four
decades of policy attempts to increase bumi representation in
business, the share of bumi ownership never rose above 21%,
well short of the 30% mandated target. Most famously, Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamed tried to bet on particular bumi
entrepreneurs, but managed to create a version of crony capitalism
whereby selected bumis fl ourished, but the bulk were
left behind. Further, the empires of many of the chosen few
collapsed during the Asian fi nancial crisis of 1997, and by
2003, Mahathir himself was complaining that policies to favour
the bumis had resulted in their having developed a
“crutch” mentality. His successor in 2003, Abdullah Ahmad
Badawi, changed course and favoured a “vendor” system
whereby he planned to help small and medium enterprises by
hooking them up to established corporations. This largely did
not work. In 2009, current Prime Minister Najib Razak backed
away from the long-standing goal of 30% bumi ownership in
several sectors, worried about deterring foreign investment in
a moribund economy and the possibility of getting stuck in a
so-called high middle-income trap.
The Malaysian failure to redress bumi economic marginalisation
in a sense mirrors that of post-apartheid South Africa.
The emphasis on Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has
sometimes resulted in the creation of BEE business behemoths,
but the empowerment of the disenfranchised has largely not
been forthcoming. In response to criticism of BEE, the government
passed the Broad Based BEE Act in 2003.16 Yet, blacks’
ascent to rarefi ed economic summits remains scarce, and
white skilled migration remains a perpetual fear.17
Studies such as those in Malaysia and South Africa are
largely qualitative analyses of the evolution of a particular
marginalised group. In the past decade, economists have tried
to quantify some of the barriers to entrepreneurship, infl uenced
by the work of De Soto (1989).18 While their work generally
does not focus on marginalised groups per se, many studies
have examined cross-country determinants of entrepreneurship.
In general, these studies show that more onerous
regulations deter entrepreneurship (Klapper et al 2006), that
reductions in the number of procedures required to start a
business help entrepreneurs (Bruhn 2010), and that increased
growth opportunities lead to increased mobility from informality
to the formal sector.19
Whether dismantling regulatory barriers specifi cally helps
marginalised groups is a conjecture worth examining in
detail.20 Many studies suggest that marginalised groups get
more of a helping hand from their own community, however
construed, than they do from the top-down dismantling of
generalised regulatory barriers. Munshi’s (2003, 2011) empirical
analysis, illustrates the importance of social networks in
fi nding jobs or climbing out of poverty. Iyer and Schoar (2010)
show that community ties infl uence the types of business
behaviour in a controlled setting in India. Kalnins and Chung
(2006) examine this matter for Gujarati entrepreneurs in
the hotel industry in the US. Vissa (2011) demonstrates that
in knowledge-intensive industries entrepreneurs tend to
privilege those who are from their own caste group and
speak their own language in attempting to form a business.
Chinese diasporic ties to particular locales on the mainland
are well documented as well.21 Perhaps the best theoretical
treatment of the importance of community, though, is
from several early studies in so-called ethnic enclaves by
Alejandro Portes, where he shows how communities invest
in public goods to overcome barriers to entrepreneurship,
particularly in the informal economy and among disadvantaged
communities.22
6 Conclusions
We started with an observation about how SCs, STs and especially
OBCs have made signifi cant progress at the level of political
representation in independent India. The evidence we have
presented shows that OBCs have made progress in entrepreneurship,
but SCs and STs have remained considerably underrepresented
in the entrepreneurial sphere. That is, for SCs and
STs, political gains have not manifested themselves in greater
entrepreneurial prowess. The rise of dalit millionaires, driven
in part by newer economic freedoms, does not appear representative
of the broader swathes of the SC/ST population, at
least until 2005. Such under-representation appears to persist
even in states with very progressive policies towards SCs and
STs, in states where OBCs have made considerable progress in
enterprise ownership, and in urban areas where outright discrimination
is lower than in rural India. Further, the patterns
of SC and ST entrepreneurship are not strongly related to broad
measures of educational attainment, access to land, or transition
away from farming.
While this is only a preliminary analysis, it does suggest that
we need to think deeper about the determinants of entrepreneurship.
For instance, a potential hypothesis is that the
growth of enterprises depends strongly on network effects,
both for fi nding the right workers and for making links with
suppliers and customers. SC and ST enterprise owners might
thus be disadvantaged by their relatively smaller networks,
particularly in urban areas. Testing these kinds of hypotheses
would require measuring such networks at a very local level.
We see our work so far as documenting some of the basic facts
about caste and entrepreneurship, and investigating some
broad patterns to provide a basis for more detailed theories
and empirical tests.
Notes
1 For reasons for the fast growth, see, among
others, Ahmed and Varshney (forthcoming),
Ahluwalia (2002), and Rodrik and Subramanian
(2004). India’s Gini coeffi cient of income inequality
increased from 29.6 in 1990 to 36.8 in
2004, based on data from the World Income
Inequality Database 2010 (http://www.wider.
unu.edu/research/Database/en_GB/wiid/_fi les/
79789834673192984/default/WIID2C.xls, accessed
on July 2011).
2 We cite this key paragraph from a well-known
report on the Bhopal conference published in
the Economic & Political Weekly (Nigam 2002:
1190). It should also be noted that the rise of
African American entrepreneurs in post-1965
US has served as an important political economy
template for these intellectuals.
3 Between 19 July and 22 July 2011, Economic
Times published many stories under a series
entitled “The Rise of Dalit Enterprise”.
4 A new book by Deshpande (2011) goes over all
these questions afresh, summarising the earlier
studies as well.
5 Damodaran (2008) provides narratives of how
caste and business have interacted in the rise of
new business families in India. Jodhka (2010)
studies dalit entrepreneurs in Panipat, Haryana,
and Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Varshney (2012)
asks whether the earlier breakdown of caste
hierarchies in south India, compared to north
India, is connected to the southern economic
resurgence since 1980. Thorat et al (2010) look
at all-India patterns in the caste background of
business owners. We disaggregate the all-India
data in newer categories.
6 Provisional Results of Economic Census 2005,
Central Statistical Organisation, Ministry of
Statistics and Programme Implementation,
Government of India, p 11. Obtained from
http://www.mospi.gov.in (March 2010).
7 These states are Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar,
Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal
Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra,
Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan,
Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand
and West Bengal. The excluded states are
Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir,
Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim
and Tripura.
8 The population census of India is conducted
every 10 years. These dates do not coincide
with the conduct of the economic censuses.
The results of the 2011 Census on the caste
composition of the population had not been
released as of June 2011.
9 To be more precise, one should speak about the
Madras Presidency parts of the south Indian
states and the Bombay Presidency parts of
Maharashtra. The states of Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka and Maharashtra also inherited the
territor ies of the princely state of Hyderabad,
where no such policies were instituted.
10 For the erosion of Tamil caste structure, see
Hardgrave (1970), Rudolph and Rudolph (1967),
and Subramanian (2000).
11 See Damodaran (2008) and Varshney (2012).
12 Gross state domestic product in Maharashtra
grew at an annualised rate of 6.6% over the
period 1999-2008, slightly slower than the
nationwide rate of 7.2%. Maharashtra extended
political reservations in district and village
councils to SCs and STs as early as 1961. Most
of the other states implemented this only after
the panchayati raj constitutional amendment
in 1993.
13 Note that these increases are not merely a
result of certain communities being granted
OBC status between 1998 and 2005, such as
the Jats in Rajasthan and UP. Even if we exclude
UP and Rajasthan, the OBC share of enterprise
ownership increased from 37.2% in 1998 to
41.6% in 2005, and the employment share increased
from 33.6% to 38.3%. Jats were granted
OBC status in Rajasthan in 1999, except for the
districts of Bharatpur and Dhaulpur (http://
timesofi ndia.indiatimes.com/india/OBC-listshot-
up-by-90-since-Mandal-I/articleshow/
1561919.cms, accessed on August 2010).
14 Formally, these enterprises are not registered
under or recognised by any of the following –
the Factories Act of 1948, the State Directorate
of Industries, Khadi and Village Industries
Commission, Development Commissioners of
Handicrafts, Powerlooms or Handlooms, Commissioners
of Textiles and Jute, the Coir Board,
the Central Silk Board, the Central Excise/
Sales Tax Act, the Shop and Establishment Act,
and the Cooperative Society/Labour Act.
15 We are not able to examine the pattern of informality
over time, since the questions on fi rm
registration in the 1998 survey were different
from those in 2005. This information is not
present in the 1990 survey.
16 The term “black” here refers to Africans, Coloreds
and Indians. Companies were more likely to win
government contracts if they shared ownership
with blacks, helped develop their human capital,
and hired more of them, among other actions. The
government gazette of January 2004 referring
to the new act can be found at http://www.info.
gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=68031,
accessed on October 2011.
17 “The President Says It Has Failed”, Economist,
31 March 2010; http://www.economist.com/
node/15824024, accessed on October 2011.
18 See Djankov et al (2002) and the Doing Business
Indicators of the World Bank for these
measures (http://www.doingbusiness.org).
19 See the introductory chapter in Lerner and
Schoar (2010).
20 In an interview, Milind Kamble, president of
the Dalit India Chamber, mentions some steps
in this direction (Saxena 2011).
21 See, for example, Pan (1999).
22 See, for example, Portes and Sensenbrenner
(1993).
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http://www.epw.in/special-articles/caste-and-entrepreneurship-india.html

Lenin’s name is not one usually associated with freedom of conscience. Was he not the doctrinaire sectarian who brooked no difference of opinion? Did he not trample over his own convictions in the callous quest for power?[1] Careful consideration of his texts reveals a very different picture, one in which he struggles to articulate a radical freedom of conscience. The problem for many readers in our context is that freedom of conscience is automatically associated with a liberal agenda, predicated on the “rights” of the sacrosanct private individual. Lenin and those around him attempted to articulate freedom of conscience in a rather different fashion, asking whether it might be possible to delink freedom of conscience from the liberal project. How might it be rethought from very different, collective situation? I explore this question in three instances, concerning religion, the national question and relations between the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and the Bund, or the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Here we find that Lenin struggles with the question of freedom of conscience, occasionally glimpsing a more radical, dialectical form only to fall short once again. Indeed, it seems that those around him pushed the internal logic of his arguments to their natural conclusion. In many respects, the project of a radically collective freedom of conscience remains an unfinished project.

      Before I proceed, a word on my approach to Lenin’s material: I do not succumb to the fetish of context, seeking to explain all by reference to the twists of events. Among the many problems with such a position, the ability of texts to transcend their contexts, both in the time of those contexts and after they have passed, indicates the limitations of the interpretive cage of context. Instead, I focus on the actual texts by Lenin, seek their internal workings, tensions, insights and false turns. In this way, we may explore at a deeper level the workings of his arguments, with both their problems and promise.

Religion

     “This is another instance of God (if he exists, of course) …”[2]

Freedom of conscience first comes to the fore in Lenin’s texts with respect to religion. Despite all his castigating of religion as both result of and contributor to suffering, as a feature of human existence that would be overcome through revolution and education, Lenin had to deal with a central platform of European Social Democracy.[3] As the Erfurt Program of 1891 stated, “Declaration that religion is a private matter [Erklärung der Religion zur Privatsache].”[4] This position was held even by those on the far Left that would form the Spartacus Group in Germany. For example, Rosa Luxemburg argues vehemently in Socialism and the Churches from 1905:

The Social-Democrats, those of the whole world and of our own country, regard conscience [Gewissen] and personal opinion [Überzeugung] as being sacred. Everyone is free to hold whatever faith and whatever opinions will ensure his happiness. No one has the right to persecute or to attack the particular religious opinion of others. Thus say the Social-Democrats.[5]

      For Luxemburg, the reasons for such a position were self-evident: opposition to the state’s efforts to control one’s political aspirations, let alone religious affiliations (the tsarist autocracy persecuted Roman Catholics, Jews, heretics, and freethinkers), and resistance to the church’s attempt to demand allegiance, especially by using a judicial system saturated with religious laws, means that one does not seek to impose the same type of control as a socialist.

      Often Lenin repeats this position,[6] yet he also offers some qualifications.[7] Distinguishing between state and party, he argues that religion must be a purely private affair in regard to the former. By this he means that religion must be separated in all respects from the state – an end to state support of the church, to the possession of lands, state-derived incomes, church schools, even government positions for clergy.[8] In sum, “Everybody must be perfectly free, not only to profess whatever religion he pleases, but also to spread or change his religion.”[9]

      Yet when he turns to the party, he argues that the party must not make religion a private affair. Given that religion is both the symptom of economic oppression and one of the contributing factors to its perpetuation, the socialists should fight, publicly, against such oppression. Advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class “must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs.”[10] Now we come across a curious twist in this position, for one may well expect that atheism is an explicit requirement for party membership. Yet Lenin makes it perfectly clear that atheism is not a prerequisite for membership. Even more, no-one will be excluded from party membership if he or she holds to religious belief. As Lenin put it forcefully in response to the Bund, “Organizations belonging to the R.S.D.L.P. have never distinguished their members according to religion, never asked them about their religion and never will.”[11] More than one person among the various shapes of the right wing, let alone the workers and socialists themselves, were astounded at such a position, asking “Why do we not declare in our Program that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?”[12]

      One may identify three reasons in Lenin’s texts. First, opposition to religion actually strengthens the reactionary elements within religious organizations. Lenin cites Engels, in response to the ultra-Leftist Blanquist Communards and their war on religion, to Dühring’s proposal that religion should be banished in a socialist society, and in relation to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, waged against the German Roman Catholic Party (the Center Party) in the 1870s. In each case, the struggles directed everyone’s attention away from political issues and toward religion, thereby steeling the resolve of those attacked.[13]

      Further, attacking religion is a red herring, argues Lenin, for it diverts attention from the central question of opposition to economic subjugation. The reason: if the yoke of religion is the product of the economic yoke, if, in other words, religion is a secondary, idealist phenomenon, then an attack on religion misses the mark.[14] Should one achieve the hypothetical aim of abolishing religion, then nothing would change, for the bosses would still grind workers into the dust. Yet even with this argument, one might still be able to argue that the party should hold to an atheistic platform, while acknowledging the secondary role religion plays in the economic struggle. So now Lenin deploys his third argument, stating that any focus on religion splits the united front of the proletariat.[15] The Right knows this full well, attempting to break up the proletariat on religious lines, urging allegiance to the church and claiming that socialism has a program of godless atheism, dividing workers along religious and anti-religious lines, and fomenting anti-Semitic pogroms (especially at the hands of the “Black Hundreds”). So also does the bourgeoisie, which wavers between anti-clericalism in its struggle with the old order for political control and reconciling itself to religion.[16] For these reasons, the party does “not and should not set forth” atheism in its program.[17] Or, as Lenin puts it with one of his characteristic images: “Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.”[18] In other words, a united front is needed, drawing the line not between believer and atheist, but between workers and the owners of capital, whether landowners or the bourgeoisie. People who still hold to a religious position are welcome in the party, as long as they take part in the struggle:

Jews and Christians, Armenians and Tatars, Poles and Russians, Finns and Swedes, Letts and Germans – all, all of them march together under the one common banner of socialism. All workers are brothers, and their solid union is the only guarantee of the well-being and happiness of all working and oppressed mankind.[19]

      All of which raises the question: was Lenin consistent in his dealings with religion? At first sight, he appears remarkably inconsistent: the party may systematically seek to educate everyone concerning the deleterious effects of religion, yet it refuses to make atheism a platform, accepting religious believers in a united front against the capitalists and landowners. Did Lenin, then, wage a revolutionary war against God and yet offer sops to religion, playing up to workers in a cowardly fashion so as not to alienate new members? Critics certainly thought so, particularly among the anarchists, who wanted a more consistent line.[20] As may be expected, Lenin argues that the position is entirely consistent, invoking both the dialectic and the pedigree of Marx and Engels. The key is that the economic and political struggle is primary, while the issue of religion is secondary. In this light, the complex party platform in relation to religion – both a firm position against religion and the refusal to require atheism as a pre-requisite to party membership – begins to make sense.

      Yet Lenin does fall short on what may be called the dialectic of collectives, for here he is not dialectical enough. Behind his treatment of the party’s explicit platform on religion and the acceptance of a believer within the party lies the distinction between collective and individual approaches to these matters. In effect, he asks: do we operate from the basis of the private individual, allowing full reign to individual freedom of conscience even within the party, or do we begin with the collective and see what the ramifications are? This question is implicit in the statement, “We allow freedom of opinion within the Party, but to certain limits, determined by freedom of grouping.”[21] If the collective has come to agreed-upon positions, through open debate (Lenin was a great proponent of arguing vehemently and openly, for this produced a healthy party) and congresses, then those who join need to abide by those positions. At various times, he attacked Mensheviks, liquidators, the Bund, and many others, not because of his supposedly dictatorial ambitions, but because they did not abide by collectively-agreed positions. The same applied to religion.

      In “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” Lenin provides three examples: one of a priest, the other of a worker, and the third of the God-builders.[22] The case of the priest is not an accident, for it both sharpens the issue and was a common question at the time, especially in Western Europe. In contrast to the unqualified affirmative usually given, Lenin states: if a priest affirms the party program, if he shares the aims of the party and works actively to achieve them, then of course he may join. And if there is a tension between his religious belief and communism, then that is a matter for him to sort out alone. But if the priest sets out to proselytize within the party, actively seeking to persuade others to his religious point of view and thereby not abiding by the collective position of the party, then he is not welcome and will be stripped of his membership.[23] The same principle applies to a believing worker, who should not merely be permitted to join, but who should be actively recruited. All the same, should he too attempt to persuade others of his views, he will be expelled. So also with the God-builders, albeit with a twist: here he uses the same principle, pointing out that if someone says “socialism is my religion” for the sake of addressing workers, for the purpose of getting the message across, then that is no reason to censure such a person. However, if someone propagates God-building by whatever means possible – by argument, in the press, through a school such as one on Capri in 1909 – then that is unacceptable. Note here, however, that he does not state that such a God-builder should be expelled from the party; he or she is to be censured. Why? The God-builders, especially Lunacharsky and Gorky, were close comrades and Lenin was keen to keep them in the party. Indeed, he was notorious for working closely with those whom he attacked in print.

      At first sight, this argument seems quite reasonable, since anyone who joins a political organization should subscribe to its platform. Otherwise, why join at all? But is this a fully collective position? If we stay with the minimal notion that a more or less democratically agreed platform is binding on even the minority who disagrees, then it may be regarded as collective. Yet this approach hardly distinguishes the communists from any other political party in (capitalist) parliamentary democracies. For this reason, I suggest that we may go a step further: within a collective movement the imposition of one will over another is anathema. A collective will is not the assertion of uniformity from above, not even the vote of a majority over minority, but a collective agreement that arises from the complex overlaps of beliefs, aspirations, even foibles that are given full and open expression. Only when these many-colored expressions are allowed full rein, pursuing all manner of possibilities until they collapse in dialectical exhaustion, does a collective will emerge. Or rather, the very act of enabling such free expression and freedom of conscience is the embodiment of such collectivity, the result of which turns out to be a collective will. In short, a completely collective approach is the best guarantee for full freedom of conscience. The problem is that Lenin did not make that explicit argument.

The National Question

     “Sometimes closer ties will be established after free secession!”[24]

Does he make that argument in the case of two closely related matters, concerning the national question and religious minorities? Time and again, Lenin returns to what was called the national question,[25] namely the issue as to how the many and varied ethnic groups would relate to one another in a proposed communist state. These debates came to a peak in the mid-teens of the twentieth century, when reshaping Russia became a real possibility after the 1905 revolution. Would the communists follow a tsarist policy of subordinating all of the linguistic and ethnic variety of the Russian empire to an enforced “Great-Russian nationalism”? How would they respond to pushes for local languages to be taught in schools, to political autonomy by places from Ukraine to the Far East, from Tatars to Samoyeds?

      Time and again, Lenin reiterates the same position: “Whoever does not recognize and champion the equality of nations and languages, and does not fight against all national oppression or inequality is not a Marxist.”[26] It may concern the question of history in schools, the language of instruction in those schools, or the official languages uses by governments, or indeed the nature of such government itself; it may arise in proposals by local bishops, in response to Right-wing attempts to foster patriotism and anti-minority sentiment; it may come up in the context of debates in the Duma and even in bills proposed by the Social-Democratic representatives. But the response is the same: self-determination, national autonomy, linguistic freedom, no imposition of one nation over the other, and no annexations in any peace treaty, all of which was to be embodied in incontrovertible legislation. Or, as one draft of the proposed national equality bill put it: “All nations in the state are absolutely equal, and all privileges enjoyed by any one nation or any one language are held to be inadmissible and anti-constitutional.”[27]

      The reasons Lenin gives for such a position are remarkably similar to those put forward in defense of his position concerning a believer who wishes to be a member of the party.[28] To begin with, the imposition of one language, one ethnic identity and one system of education comes from both the reactionary defenders of autocracy and the bourgeoisie, inevitably supported by the church. Second, the focus on national issues is, like the focus on religion, a distraction from the central issue of economic oppression. Matters of language, ethnicity, education, and even the identity of states are strictly secondary concerns that should be subordinated to the primary one of economic and class struggle. And that brings us to his third point: nationalism splits the working class in terms of these secondary concerns. Indeed, these divisions are actively fostered by the ruling classes to drive a wedge between workers. By contrast, the working class is inescapably international, for economic exploitation and class conflict cut across national lines, uniting workers (and peasants). Workers of all languages, cultures, and ethnicities need to come together in a united front, for class is always primary[29] – precisely the same argument used in regard to religion.

      But now Lenin encounters a question unique to the national question, although it will turn out to be a question that brings him close to my argument for a radical freedom of conscience (for which I criticized Lenin for not being dialectical enough). If one espouses complete self-determination of peoples within a communist system, does that provide the right to secede at any time? Lenin is guarded. On the one hand, self-determination should permit room to secede from any coalition of states; on the other hand, secessions are not desirable for the good of the communist cause. In Lenin’s words:

We are in favor of autonomy for all parts; we are in favor of the right to secession (and not in favor of everyone’s seceding!). Autonomy is our plan for organizing a democratic state. Secession is not what we plan at all. We do not advocate secession. In general, we are opposed to secession.[30]

      He begins by reiterating the standard position: autonomy for everyone. But then he extends this point to state that every part has the “right to secession.” Note the subtle shift: autonomy appears without a qualifier, but secession is a right. The parenthetical comment clarifies what that right means: everyone may have the right, but we are certainly not keen on everyone exercizing this right, for if they all seceded, the whole project would be immeasurably weakened. Realizing he has perhaps let the cat peek a little too much out of the bag, he attempts to push it back. Well, autonomy is part of our plan, but secession is not really part of that plan, even if it is consistent with autonomy, even if you have a right to secede. In fact, secession is not in the plan at all; or rather, it is in the plan, for we are opposed to it.

      Has Lenin come full circle and undermined the standard position on self-determination and autonomy? Perhaps realizing the implications of his argument, he now adds a crucial qualifier: “But we stand for the right to secede owing to reactionary, Great-Russian nationalism, which has so besmirched the idea of national coexistence that sometimes closer ties will be established after free secession!”[31] In our current context, he says, in which tsarist nationalism and chauvinism have so alienated different groups, in which the Russian empire has systematically oppressed minority languages, peoples, and religions, the right to secession is needed. Now appears the first glimmer of a dialectical moment: in fact, closer ties may sometimes develop if everyone is allowed to secede. He is not quite certain at this point, his “sometimes” leaving the observation serendipitous. A few years later, however, the uncertainty of the earlier formulation dissipates and the dialectical nature of his argument comes to the fore. In the heat of events in 1917, Lenin reasserts the crucial positions concerning the renunciation of annexations and the real right to secession. But now its dialectical outcome is stressed with equal determination. Given that communism will be strengthened by greater cooperation, if not as large a state as possible, it endeavors to draw peoples closer together, yet it does so not through violence but through the free union of working people throughout the world. Or in a sharp dialectical formulation: “The more democratic the Russian republic, and the more successfully it organizes itself into a Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the more powerful will be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of all nations.”[32]

      One may compare a worker who is constantly harassed by her boss, micro-managed in order to ensure she acts as she should. The result is that she works badly, takes sick leave whenever possible, has low morale, and looks to escape at the first opportunity. However, should she be allowed to do things her way, to work in the way she sees best and without interference, preferably without a boss at all, it may actually turn out that she does a far better job, is happier, more efficient, and willing to become part of the larger whole. The closeness of this position to my earlier dialectical argument concerning radical freedom of religious conscience in a collective context should be clear. The more we encourage radical freedom, whether of national self-determination, of religious expression, or whatever, the more will it foster a deeper and longer-lasting collective experience.

Lenin and the Bund

     “For the sake of all the gods that be.”[33]

All of the above came to its sharpest expression in relation to religious groups,[34] especially the Jews. More specifically, the question of the Bund’s relations with the RSDLP pushes the dialectical position I have argued above to its next step: if full autonomy does take place, and if those who have pursued their own distinctive agendas do come back seeking a united front, then what do you do? Do they retain their autonomy in the new arrangement, or does one move past autonomy to a new level of unity? The first may be characterized as the Bund’s position; the second was Lenin’s preference.

      One of the most persistent themes in all of Lenin’s writings is the RSDLP’s opposition to anti-Semitism. Again and again he attacks the tsarist and right-wing “pogrom-mongers,” who attempted to whip up sectarian hatred, split the working class, and divert people’s attention from economic and political problems.[35] On a number of occasions, the social-democratic representatives in the Duma proposed clearly-worded bills stressing that position. Jews, along with other religious and ethnic groups, would not be discriminated against and would have full equality before the law. For instance, the bill proposed in March 1914 points out that of all the many peoples in Russia, the Jews are subjected to the harshest discrimination and persecution. In particular, states the preamble to the bill, Jewish workers suffer under the double burden of being both workers and Jewish. So the bill stipulates that no one in Russia, regardless of sex and religion, is to be restricted in any way on the basis of origin or nationality. More specifically, “All and any laws, provisional regulations, riders to laws, and so forth, which impose restrictions upon Jews in any sphere of social and political life, are herewith abolished.”[36]

      However, when it came to the Bund and its relations with the RSDLP, Lenin took a different line. The Bund repeatedly requested that it become part of the RSDLP, but that it should be accepted as an autonomous group within a federated party.[37] At the many party congresses, the Bund was nearly always present, repeatedly asserting its position, engaging in lengthy debates and negotiations. Yet, although the RSDLP accepted the Bund at the first and fourth congresses, Lenin persistently refused their unremitting push for autonomy. Is this not an outright contradiction with his position concerning national autonomy in a Soviet state? Not immediately, especially if we keep in mind the earlier distinction between freedom of conscience in regard to the state and in respect to the party. In regard to the former, Lenin clearly stresses the point that the Jewish question in Russia is a particular instance of the national question, sharpening the issue in light of the persecution of the Jews.[38] Thus, as with all groups, the Jews should have all the freedoms of any other religious and ethnic group in the new state. By contrast, the Bund’s membership of the party should follow the same guidelines for individual believers and even priests. They may join by subscribing to the party platform, but they are not permitted to advocate any position that is contrary to that platform – in this case an autonomous membership. The reasons given for this position are the same as those with respect to members with religious beliefs and the national question: the need to avoid a diversion that splits the working class along religious and ethnic lines, and thereby the need for a united front that cuts across those lines.[39]

      Now we come to the core of the differences between the Bund and the RSDLP. For the latter, class was the key and solidarity must be formed on class lines; all else is secondary, no matter whether it is religion or ethnic identity.[40] For the Bund, anti-Semitism was the core issue, for anti-Semitism is a universal phenomenon that leaps across class lines. The case for autonomy was made by references to workers who had participated in pogroms, indicating that anti-Semitism had taken root among the proletariat.[41] Not so, replies Lenin: anti-Semitism cannot be universalized, for it has specific class features, belonging at this day and age to the reactionary ruling class and the rising bourgeoisie. And if workers do join pogroms, it proves not that they are anti-Semitic, but that they have been deceived by the pogrom-mongers (as in so many cases in which workers are split by the ruling classes).

      At first sight, the case of the Bund is like that of the priest: join by all means, but do not attempt to advocate a position contrary to the core of the party platform. At this level, Lenin appears perfectly consistent with the position, outlined earlier, in regard to party membership. A closer perusal reveals that the situation is not the same, for the primary issue with the priest or indeed worker is religious belief, while the key issue for the Bund is membership with autonomy, on the basis of a universal notion of anti-Semitism. Now the situation of the Bund begins to leak into the national question, where Lenin articulates a clear position on self-determination and yet holds back at the last minute on the question of secession.[42] To recap, groups have full autonomy and the right to secession, but secession is not part of the plan at all. I would suggest that the Bund’s request pushes over into this territory, straddling both party membership and the structure of the state.[43]

      Earlier I criticized Lenin for falling short of a fully dialectical position, in which complete autonomy, pushed to its dialectical extreme, may well produce a far deeper unity, a stronger collectiveness – although he did glimpse such a dialectical approach in the declaration after the October Revolution. How does this apply to debates with the Bund? In many respects, the Bund pushed Lenin’s position to its logical conclusion, continually asserting the desire for membership with autonomy. In response to this persistent request, Lenin seems to have fallen short, at least in part, resisting this push in the name of avoiding diversions and building a united front. I wrote “in part,” since in one respect at least it seems to me he was correct, for persistent and unremitting autonomy leads inevitably in a case like this to Zionism: “you will turn the regrettable isolation of the Bund into a fetish, and will cry that the abolition of this isolation means the destruction of the Bund; you will begin to seek grounds justifying your isolation, and in this search will now grasp at the Zionist idea of a Jewish ‘nation,’ now resort to demagogy and scurrilities.”[44]

      Is this the outcome of the resolute isolation of the Bund? Now the situation becomes interesting, specifically through the Bund’s refusal to join on existing terms. Throughout the long and fractious relationship with the RSDLP, the Bund took many positions. At times they argued; at times they broke off negotiations and stormed out; at times they came to an agreement for a united front that broke down sooner rather than later.[45] However, it was less through their explicit arguments than their acts that the Bund realized the full extent of the dialectic of radical freedom of conscience that I have been pursuing. In order to see how this act-based realization unfolded, let me fill out this story with a few details.

      The General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia was established at a conference in Vilno in 1897, out of various Jewish Social-Democratic groups. At the first congress of the RSDLP, the Bund became members while maintaining autonomy in regard to questions pertaining to the Jewish proletariat. By the time of the second RSDLP congress, the Bund left the party after the rejection of its insistence on autonomy and recognition as the sole representative of Jewish worker issues. By 1906, at the fourth congress (usually designated as the “Unity” congress), the Bund re-joined, along with the Mensheviks. But the unity was short-lived and tensions continued through to the October Revolution and beyond. It is as though they took the RSDLP position on self-determination to heart and held to it.

      Yet in 1921, after the October Revolution, the Bund dissolved itself and many of its members joined the renamed Russian Communist Party as full members, finally relinquishing their stand on autonomy. I would suggest that this act provides an unexpected answer to a question Lenin already asked in 1903: “Is this isolation to be preserved, or a turn made towards fusion?”[46] Let me misinterpret Lenin slightly and push his question further, since we now begin to move beyond my earlier argument in relation to autonomy and the national question, where Lenin glimpsed the possibility of full collective autonomy: if you grant, in the name of a deeper collective, autonomy free reign and if it then achieves the dialectical result of thoroughly collective unity, what do you do then? Do you continue to allow autonomy for the sake of that unity, or is there a moment when the autonomy fades away, having achieved its task? Is the Bund’s joining with the party in 1921 the answer to that question? We may cite all manner of other reasons, such as the practical realization that they would be able to do far more as party members, that the new Soviet state required as united a front as possible. But I would suggest that the Bund in its own way, perhaps unwittingly, lived out the logic that lay at the heart of Lenin’s position.[47]

Conclusion: Radical Freedom of Conscience

On three occasions, Lenin faced the question of freedom of conscience in relation to collective issues. On religion he argued that one may join the party if one is a religious believer, but that one must abide by the party platform and not propagate alternative positions within the party. Resolving the tension between one’s own faith and the platform is entirely one’s own concern. On the national question he went further, advocating self-determination and the right to secession, but then arguing that although one may have the right to secession it is certainly not in the interest of the new state for everyone to do so. Yet after the October Revolution, he glimpsed the potential of a radical and potentially risky freedom of conscience in which its full expression would lead to a deeper and voluntary collective identity. On the relations with the Bund it was less Lenin’s own explicit observations or indeed those of the Bund that realized this dialectical possibility. Instead, I suggested that the Bund’s own acts, in terms of a long history of alternately joining the party, leaving, and then finally dissolving itself after the revolution, may well be read as a realization of the internal dialectical logic of Lenin’s own position – one that he was wary to entertain to its full extent.

http://newpol.org/content/dilemma-freedom-conscience-lenin-religion-national-question-and-bund

 

In a January 6 video, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, indicated that it is broadening the jihadi battlefield to include Kashmir and India

It is becoming clear that religious and jihadi forces in Pakistan and its neighborhood are taking a leaf out of, proverbially speaking, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s book on Islamism. They sense a political opportunity emerging ahead of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014 and nurse a dream of Islamic revival in South Asia in its wake. Pakistani religious scholar Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri’s so-called million-man march on Islamabad from January 14 and his failed bid to unseat the elected government through a mass uprising is rooted in this new thinking. He has millions of followers in Pakistan and India.

In the past, Islamic scholars have sought to interpret Islamic literature in order to make Islam relevant to contemporary times. However, their hopes for Islamic revival have generally been unsuccessful. Their path to Islamic revival has also been complicated since America became the first democracy in 1776. Over the course of past centuries, democracy has gained currency in people’s minds throughout the world, making it difficult for Islamic scholars to come up with an interpretation of Islam’s conception of power that could also be acceptable to masses in current era. However, this is changing.

Islamism was boosted by the 1979 Iranian revolution and since then the Islamic scholarship has closely studied the changing notions of power in modern times. The Islamists also note the case of Turkey where an Islamist government has been slowly removing secular influences from the country’s political and cultural life and significantly in a manner acceptable to the West. Morsi’s successful experiment with power in Egypt is revealing a new path for Islamists in other parts of the world, motivating them to use elections and other means of channelizing people’s energy to first capture power and begin a gradual enforcement of Islamic shari’a laws.

Mistakenly however, the Islamists are equating elections with democracy, disregarding its key organizing principles, notably individual liberty and equal rights for minorities, human-enacted legislation, freedom of the press and belief, and right to form political parties. Qadri, who claims to have authored 1,000 books on Islam, is known for using people’s religious sentiments to advance his cause and is keenly aware of the dynamics of power in modern times, especially the use of people’s uprisings in the wake of Arab Spring to advance the religious cause. He is also a deeply orthodox figure. In a video address to his followers, Qadri sobs, cries and repeatedly wipes his tears as he delivers a lengthy interpretation of a dream in which Prophet Muhammad arrived in Pakistan and urged him to be his host and to set up his organization Minhaj-ul-Quran.

Qadri adheres to the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam, whose followers express unconditional love of Prophet Muhammad. The Barelvis, who are present throughout India and Pakistan, are no less intolerant than the Taliban. In January 2011, a follower of the Barelvi group Dawat-e-Islami who was deployed as a member of an elite commando force to protect liberal Punjab governor Salman Taseer assassinated him for advocating reforms in Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Videos of Qadri saying that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are not applicable on non-Muslims, and also of those in which he argues that Muslims or non-Muslims, Jews or Christians should be killed for blaspheming the prophet, are available on the internet. Qadri is also emboldened by his growing acceptance in the West after he issued a fatwa against suicide bombings in Pakistan in 2010.

Qadri is not alone in sensing an emerging political opportunity. The jihadi forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan are also emboldened by Morsi’s success and are clamoring to fill in the vacuum emanating from the US troop drawdown. In Afghanistan, militant commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has shown willingness to share power through elections to establish Islamic rule. Afghan Taliban representatives recently participated in talks in Chantilly, France, where they discussed a path to power if the Afghan constitution is rewritten to their Islamist taste. Recently, the Taliban militants also issued a statement saying that Afghans will start living under Islamic rule from 2014 as the US leaves.

In a January 6 video, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, indicated that it is broadening the jihadi battlefield to include Kashmir and India. Almost acting in tandem, Pakistani military whose Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) shares the Taliban’s jihadi objectives entered a border conflict with India around the same time. In the same video, TTP emir Hakimullah Mehsud described his group as an international organization, offering aid to militants in the Arab world and stressing that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar is also the emir of Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, and that Omar’s policies after 2014 will be implemented by them. Significantly, Mehsud recently offered to hold talks with Pakistan and asked his fighters not to attack Pakistani security forces, showing willingness for an understanding with the Pakistani military.

In the past, Pakistan’s military and judiciary have often removed elected governments. Qadri’s call that the military and the judiciary should have a say in an interim government in Islamabad reinforced the speculation that he was assisted by the ISI. Pakistani masses were not ready to support his call to remove the elected government just weeks before it is set to complete, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, a full term. Inspired by the Islamists’ success in Egypt, Qadri thought he could turn Islamabad into a second Tahrir Square and transform Pakistan into an Egypt-like democracy with an Islamist face under a new constitution. Such a move was bound to fail, as his timing was wrong. As the US leaves Afghanistan, it is still possible that Qadri-like Islamists and jihadi forces may rise to destabilize Pakistan and extend their reach to Kashmir. For now, let’s hope that the ISI, their main backer which thinks of itself as the ideological guardian of the state of Pakistan, does not prop up Qadri-like forces.

Tufail Ahmad, a former journalist with the BBC Urdu Service and Press Trust of India, is Director of South Asia Studies at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Washington DC. He can be reached via www.tufailahmad.com
 
http://www.viewpointonline.net/the-rise-of-islamists-in-pakistan.html