Due to the recession lakhs have lost their jobs in sectors like textile and others, have these people tried organizing and support these hapless “class” of people?

What kind of communism is he trying to show us? What is the difference b/w him and Amar Singh who try to play these mindless number games while lying the slumber of an Air-conditioned AKG Bhavan?

While in Kerala Comrades seems to have gone a step ahead in terms of arrogance. They ve joined up the filthiest of the filthiest in the society after floating their party-entertainment channel-kairali.

In my own village, many Dait families are betraying Karat- many have bought Pressure Cookers, and some have started eating biscuits. Worse still, the market economy is betraying Karat even more- many Dalits are now hiring upper caste men to till their land.

cheers
CBP

Maybe the comparison between Kronstadt sailors and peasants of Nandigram were a bit far-fetched. However, the essential dilemna remains the same.
There is no revision in the definition of “Fascism” by categorizing Trinamool under the same . I can argue till the “cows come home” though this may not be an appropriate forum . We could take it up separately if you are willling.
The phenomenon, recently observed, of progressive liberals lending respectability to such lumpen forces is, to put it mildly, “unfortunate”.
Let us fight the CPM by creating a genuine Ledt, Liberal, secular and democratic 3rd force instead of selecting the path of least resistance which people ranging from Sujat Bhadro of APDR to a faction of CPI(M-L (with a total membership of 500), SUCI and Mahasweta Devi have conveniently done.

On ethics, well, I would simply say that realism is an ethical position. For if its true that it was ‘realism’ to lay the basis for the destruction of the regime seventy years later (as it happens I’m not convinced about these connections) its hardly realism at all. The CP(M)’s “realism” needs critiquing. It wasn’t realism. It was simply adaptation.

On another note, and related to the land issue, i’ve been thinking a lot these days about the whole matter of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’(PA)…there still remains on the left a somewhat teleological notion of that concept as a necessary stage of a future developed society via capitalism. At some level the matter of WB points to this problematic notion.

Now this is not the case with either of the two well-publicized cases in Bengal, but certainly something i found in my own research in Southern Africa–not all politics around PA is a politics of opposition: because they’re emerging from two decades of economic stagnation, one finds new mining enclaves attracting thousands of people looking for employment, and people happily giving away land. Of course, if and when the crisis gets worse, capital will ‘prune’ workers and/or leave, but it throws up some difficult questions for the left. How does one speak of anti-capitalism when those caught in its wake are willing to jump at it?

This point may be incorporated in that stageist theory by some, but i’m thinking about a more earnest analysis.

I LOVED your reponse toa certain Mr. “R” … good job.

first of all, and I agree entirely that the CPM had to go. one cannot speak of communism–unless one means by the term its soviet or chinese variants–when also engaging in theoretical gymnastics to justify dispossession. nor can one speak of being a people’s party when the model of change is entirely top-down.

what i cannot understand, and here i hope folks can enlighten me, is why has caste not been a central political issue for the left in india? Not as an opportunistic means for electoral victories, but as a central problem of our times.
why isn’t the leadership of and issues taken up by our communist parties not reflective of the fact that caste remains a deeply oppressive structure, and one that the left must prioritize?

I do think there’s some confusion over the question of land-as-commodity, perhaps exacerbated by my reference to Marx on the commodity-form (and, in this case implicitly, on ‘primitive accumulation’). I seem to have given the impression that land in Singur, Nandigram and elsewhere is governed by a pre-market, pre-commodity logic, and that clearly isn’t true. The point, however, is that whatever the earlier histories of accumulation, transfer, and sale of land (of course land in India has been bought and sold for a very long time), in the flashpoints of conflict over the last few years, the question of land-as-commodity has come up quite explicitly. When peasants in Singur and Nandigram said ‘Our lives but not our land’, they meant it – there was clearly a bundle of economic and affective attachments at work that challenged the naming of THEIR land as commodity. Now that might have changed had the price been higher – though in these cases I doubt it (land in Singur, it was easy to see on the strength of a single visit, was fertile, multi-cropped, and pretty remunerative). Or it might have changed had the peasants and agricultural workers been offered the shareholder status that Aditya suggested as a hypothetical alternative, or perhaps if they’d been guaranteed a lifelong income equivalent to their current benefits (however you compute those). The point is that these are hypothetical questions – in these cases Buddhadeb and Co. Ltd. genuinely had no idea that there was anything in the least problematic in simply grabbing the land. I’m not denying that there are probably many parts of the country where people might be happy to part with land that binds them down, at an appropriate price. However much I dislike the kinds of ‘developmental’ strategies based on consensual land alienation that the state and private companies envisage, I can’t argue with the right of people to give up their land if they really, actively want to.

But these are purely hypothetical questions, entirely irrelevant to what actually happened in West Bengal, Orissa, etc. Whereas the claim that land was not a commodity came directly, and explicitly, from hundreds of peasants, who expressed themselves vocally and articulately whenever asked about their reasons for not surrendering their land. Perhaps this was rhetoric generated by the heat of political struggle, perhaps it was strategic. But even if this was the case, what of it? The question of land sale in the first place was thrust upon them brutally, by state and party fiat, and their own concerns and views only entered public and official discourse at the point when they resisted, violently and successfully. But if we take those views – expressed in both individual words and collective action – seriously, then we need to acknowledge that at the very least, unlike the question of a suitable selling price, the question of the status of land as commodity was not a purely hypothetical one. In their own lives and experiences, this mattered.

Thanks. This is taking too much of my time, interesting as it is, so I’ll have a final say and leave it at that.

1. Economists, in general, do not ask where commodities come from. That is not myopia as such — all subjects have self-imposed boundaries within which they function. For the questions that economists are interested in, asking where commodities come from is not fruitful. This is not to say that this quesition is uninteresting as such: Sociologists are interested, I understand, in precisely this question.

2. It is, however, not true that economists think that everything is a commodity. Not even the most ardent of “free marketeers” would suggest that the justice system should operate on “market principles.” Or that driving licences should be sold freely by the government to whoever is willing to pay the (monetary) price. The focus of economists is on (the allocation of) commodities but to reiterate, this does not mean that they think that everything is a commodity.

3. I might note here that in the mid-90′s, the economist Kaushik Basu observed that India operated a parody of a “free market” system where things which ought to be allocated through a market system were not but things like justice (in many states), driving licences, kidneys etc. were, in fact, allocated via a market system.

The fact that justice at lower levels operates in many instances on “market principles” is known, but comes to our attention only when something spectacular happens — like when some Gujarat lawywers managed to obtain a warrant for the then President Abdul Kalam’s arrest.

3. In recent years, economists have become even more aware of situations where market principles do not apply. The Harvard economist, Alvin Roth, who specializes in designing what are called “matching markets” in fact has a paper titled “Repugnance” where he notes that in many cases, market designs are constrained because people find certain type of transactions repugnant. The variety of things that (certain) people find repugnant can be surprising. For instance, Californians apparently find the idea of humans eating horses so repugnant that enacted a law banning the sale of horsemeat for human consumption (via a referendum in 1998). See the opening paragraphs of Roth’s very interesting article:

http://kuznets.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/Repugnance.pdf

4. Coming back to Singur/Nandigram: Your point, if I understand it, is that the conflict in Singur, Nandigram and other places arose precisely because the peasants refuse to see “land” as a commodity to be brought/sold. Or perhaps, to use Roth’s terminology, the peasants find the idea of buying and selling land “repugnant.” I have no way of knowing whether that is true. Was land never brought and sold in rural areas in India historically?

I would be willing to buy this argument in what – for lack of a better word – are called “tribal” areas. I am less persuaded of the argument in peasant areas — but that’s not to say that it might not be true. I simply don’t know.

5. Even if peasants do regard land as a commodity, it does not follow that they will always agree to sell if offered money. There are any number of reasons why they might not want to sell their land. I would, therefore, say that the fact that the peasants did not want to sell their land in Singur and other places is no indication — one way or the other — of their views on land being a commodity.

6. Your point that industrialization is a red herring with regard to compulsory land acquisition is true. I think I mentioned that even in my previous comment. The issue is the exercise of eminent domain which can be done even with regard to agricultural projects — as Atreyee noted. Should we have the law of eminent domain? That is a complex question in its own right.

7. I don’t know what you think of economists but we — even those of us who are “neo-classical” — are concerned about the environment. Neither are all of us enamored of malls — most that I know don’t particularly care for them. Most that I know do care about development. But in no way do we equate that to more malls, etc. For an example of things that we do care about, here’s an article by two outstanding economists of Indian origin (I don’t know whether they are still Indian citizens):

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/why-no-one-with-a-solid-track-record-gets-health-hrd-women-&-child/464056/0

Thanks again, Bhochka. Best regards.

First of all, Suresh: thanks for your clarifications – they identified many of the key points of disagreement well. I’m not a sociologist, but following the way you draw up the lines of division, I think I’d be pretty much on the side of the sociologists on this one!

As a first comment, I’d like to make a very old Marxist point: a commodity is made, not born, and land has to become a commodity before it enters the kinds of economic calculations you describe. This is – as I think you acknowledge – a political process, and that’s the level at which we need to analyze what happened in Singur, Nandigram, New Rajarhat, Jagatsinghpur, and so on. The point at which you begin your argument – the definition of a ‘fair price’ – is something I believe most of us are familiar with, but which in a strict sense doesn’t apply to the struggles around land in many parts of India, where the conflict is not over the price of land – however generous – but over the transformation of the rights of landholders, sharecroppers and landless labourers into commodities. Thanks for your excerpt from the Kelo case: it dramatized the kinds of conflicts that characterize contemporary claims to land, but if anything it reinforces the points that many on this thread have been making – the destructive consequences of what is called ‘progress’ in today’s dominant idiom. I’d simply like to ask: where does the great fear of actually listening to people’s voices, and carrying out ‘developmental’ projects that are compatible with popular practices and rights, come from? As Aditya rightly pointed out, the work of imagining alternative kinds of industrialization is crucial. As I see it, the only ethically and ecologically acceptable long-term alternative lies in predominantly small-scale industries, characterized increasingly by worker control, that work with clean power – this, if you like, is the ‘regulative Idea’ by which we could measure contemporary ‘developmental’ measures. But that’s a personal opinion. What matters is the recognition that there’s something inherently, inevitably destructive, in the short as well as the long run, in the developmental policy that the Indian state, like most others, tries to put into practice. If Kalinganagar, Singur, Nandigram and Haripur don’t demonstrate this, I don’t know what does.

All this only reinforces my suspicion that, politically speaking, ‘industrialization’ is a vacant and meaningless term, a red herring, which obscures the real stakes, which involve, from the very outset, the kind of industrial projects imagined and implemented. It’s all too easy to freeze this debate within an industry v. agriculture optic. This is where, I’d persist in arguing, considerations of contemporary capitalism or ‘neoliberalism’ are not only relevant, but crucial. We’re not talking about a monolithic, unthinking refusal of ‘industry’ here – only of one of its possible modulations.
Another important feature of these land grabs that gets obscured by the obsession with industrialization is that, very often, land acquisition has absolutely nothing at all to do with industry, and real estate speculation actually often has much more to do with it. New Rajarhat exemplifies this – several thousand acres of prime and fertile agricultural land grabbed, with the usual combination of persuasion, threat and violence, not to establish new industries, but expensive residential complexes, malls and, most importantly, property that can be bought and sold with the sole motive of making a profit when the market’s booming. Bombay, Delhi and so many other places have similar stories to tell. The CPM (or, for that matter, the Congress, BJP or any of the others) does not only need to convince us that we need its own skewed vision of ‘industrialization’ in order to survive, it also needs to convince us that we need an economy driven by speculative greed to survive. A journey along New Rajarhat, a few months ago, was instructive: the buildings I’d seen last year, apparently barely weeks from completion a year ago, seemed frozen in time: nothing had changed, they were still half-built, because the bubble had burst and the companies that had acquired the land were reeling. The whole scene had odd resonances with science-fiction renderings of post-industrial landscapes – not that there had been any industry here to begin with.

One can even have such conflicts in places where a priori one would not suspect them, say the USA with its large land mass. I found the following interesting excerpt from a transcript of an Australian radio program during a web trawl:

Damien Carrick: As you say, it’s been a big issue in the United States. There was a few years ago a very big case, the Kelo Case; tell me about that?

Sean Brennan: It does. It’s not easy to stereotype I think the positions taken by people on these cases. The dissenting judges in Kelo for example, were essentially the conservative core of the court, whereas the more progressive wing, as it’s perceived on the Supreme Court, were the majority who favoured the city using its powers to effect the economic revitalisation plan that it had, increasing tax revenues, trying to create jobs, and so this was the right-left split there in Kelo, but the reaction I think has transcended those political boundaries since and of course when you come back to the Australian context this issue has cropped up in the Native Title context last week in the High Court, and coincidentally also in Queensland, relating again to Aboriginal land. And once the idea that the very limited amounts of land left available for Aboriginal ownership in Australia become vulnerable to developers getting their hands on it via the use of compulsory acquisition powers, it does put a rather different political complexion on the issue.

Apologies for the long excerpt. I personally think that some form of industrialization is necessary to support our 1 billion plus population. (Whether industrialization is historically inevitable, I have no idea. I am not a historian nor a sociologist and economists in general have a bad reputation for prediction.) It would be nice if we could do our industrialization without any land acquisition under compulsion. But industrialization or not, I think land conflicts will happen in India as they have happened elsewhere. To reiterate, I think it best that we evolve transparent and fair procedures for dealing with such conflicts.

That’s all I have to say. Thanks for indulging me.

In Kerala many people were irritated by the Lavalin, internal fight and the naked communalism displayed by CPM.

I have always maintained that in the first place, all those who think the peasants should pay the price for industrialization, should come forward themselves and offer their property to the peasants to adequately compensate them. This way historical necessity will be adequately taken care of and its burden shared equitably.

On another note, is there really no other way to ‘industrialize’ than the neo-liberal way (Suresh, may you pardon me; you could check wikipedia for what it means)? This mode involves the following:
1. We need capital investment desperately in order to industrialize.
2. For that we need to prepare a proper ‘investment climate’, i.e. lure capital into our state by giving them real incentives like cheap but really productive agricultural land, acquired by the state from the peasants. It also means reining in the working class and present them bound hand and foot to the Tatas and Salems. We should also overlook environmental regulations and let them knock down mangrove forests and other ecological ‘resources’ etc etc.
3. Only then will capital come and deliver us to Progress.

In such a scenario, investment decisions are left to the corporations concerned – what they want to produce, with what technological choices etc.

The peasant correctly says, as Bhochka pointed out in his impressions of Singur, that he does not want compensation. Would any of our worthies who are dying for industrialization, want to trade their property (land, house or anything else) for a pathetic job from where she can be kicked out at the whims of the employer? At present they at least have fertile land and that is their life-long guarantee of livelihood.
Now, this does not mean that industrialization is not at all possible. The peasant increasingly understands that the future does not lie in agriculture and is willing to be persuaded provided there is an attempt to persuade in the first place, and there is a worthwhile exchange. Now, what if, instead of the paltry compensation, you were to say to him/her that you will be made shareholder in the industry (not a pathetic wage labourer) and that you shall get a percentage of its profits life-long. This is a proposal that was put forward by some of the much-derided intellectuals but nothing came of it. There will despite this persuasion etc, always be peasants who will not want to sell their land for any exchange. That is their right. In that case you will have to look for land where peasants are willing for such an exchange. You cannot give the Tatas the land they want, exactly where they want it, if the peasants concerned are not prepared to part with it.
Finally, is it really the case that we must invite just any investment – else will be extinct? Irrespective of what we produce – be they ecologically disastrous like automobiles? And with whatever technology? Can we, at the beginning of the twenty first century think of other kinds of industry – those that are based on alternative fuels like solar energy? Can we think of industries that are less ecologically destructive? This is not the place to elaborate on the possibilities that are already being experimented with worldwide. This is just to indicate that the picture is not as simple as one that involves a choice between a ‘pro-industry’ position and a ‘Luddite’ position – though I do not mind a Luddite one also, personally speaking. But that is another matter.

“A bit negativistic in nature – somewhat like the so-called intellectuals of Bengal who had to ultimately dive into the laps of the Trinamool Congress. (the prodigal sons deciding to return to the fold of the Left Front).”

However, those involved in the debate happen to be debating something else. Join it or don’t that is your prerogative but you can’t demand that people address what you decide should be the ‘main issue’.
You find the people here to be:

“A group of intellectuals pontificating in cyber-media? Trinamool Congress ? Maoists? CPI(M-L) ?”

And yet you want them to respond? Strange, to say the least.
By the way, after reading through your vituperative comment, I went back to earlier comments and responses and find that while you claim that your ‘facts’ have rendered Aditya speechless, you yourself have neither responded to the Chopra (North Dinajpur) issue, nor to Keshpur and have denied any knowledge of the APDR report. Is that what you mean by ‘main issue’, i.e. an issue that is most convenient to you?