The cynicism of power, if you will, has got the so-called Left. In a sense, this is not very new – communists in power have always been diabolic to say the least. But this one takes the cake – pressed as it is in the service of capital. How else does one explain Sitaram Yechury’s insinuation that the entire struggle against forcible land acquisition in Singur, is motivated by corporate rivalry. How else can one read his statement that “There may be some whose interests would be hurt when the Rs 1 lakh car comes out. It is for the media to find out who could be behind all this”…There is of course a sense of deja vu in this cynical attempt to de-legitimize all opposition – such were the fairy stories fed to gullible followers about the soviet empire until one day, lo and behold! it vanished from the face of the earth.
And while CPM leaders in Delhi work overtime to deflect the real import of the struggle, the party in West Bengal is out on the streets. Believe it or not, the various party organizations are out in the streets in defense of the project. They have even got the land sellers to form an organization strangely and revealingly called “Pragatisheel Swechha Jomi Bikreta, Shilpa Sthapan o Nagar Unnayan Committee”. The name itself is a manifesto: Committee of ‘Progressive’ Land Sellers (progressive because they believe that industry is the future of the world and oradined by History) and those committed to Industrial Entrepreneurship (which these hapless land sellers will never become!) and Urban Development. We will of course have to wait for Industrial and Urban Development to settle in before we start finding out what happened to these hapless people. According to news reports, they will be made to ‘address’ Mamata Banerjee – the Trinamool Congress leader who is on hunger strike on this issue. They will tell her that “the farmers want Tata Motors on their land in Singur.”
Meanwhile a small detail worth remembering – the number of landless labourers in West Bengal has gone up by 2.5 million in the past five years taking the total number up to 7.4 million, according to the secretary of the state land reforms department. The secretary also reported that – in a clearly allied development – agricultural land in the state had been reduced by 1, 20, 000 acres in the same period. (Parthasarathi Banerjee, EPW November 18 2006, pp 4718-20). Industry minister Nirupam Sen also announced that the government has plans to acquire something to the tune of 32, 000 acres more for industrial development. Quite apart from the fact over time this will completely reverse the effect of land reforms and is likely to lead to major social turmoil, the developments really underline the complete hegemonization of the CPM mind by the ‘logic of capital’ – so much so that they have completely bought into the idea that only the Tatas can save the state. Let us be clear that no amount of capital investment will create the jobs to absorb the millions who are being thrown into landlessness and destitution – at least in the medium term (and that is as long as the Left Front government lasts!).
Let us be clear what this argument is not about. It is emphatically not about whether or not capital investments should be invited to the state? It is rather about the terms on which investments come. It is also about whether, once mass dispossession from agriculture is effected, one is not placing the state and its population almost entirely at the mercy of private capital? In other words, the point is that the ‘logic of capital’ is really a self-fulfilling logic – once you are within it, you cannot see the world any other way. The argument really is about exploring other ways of seeing and developing other indices of well being than growth rates, GDP and so on.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
It would be nice if there was further explanation of “other ways of seeing and developing other indices of well being” that you could identify and enable people to understand. Are you speaking about Gross National Happiness a la Bhutan? Or are you just fulfilling a utopian wish that places farmers and villagers in a sanitized vaccuum of well being that really doesn’t take into account their voices at all?
It’s so easy to talk of the evils of industrialization, of which there are quite a few, but it’s much more difficult to make a convincing argument for the “service of labor.” And it’s not just Inida — farmers have gone through this same situation in Mexico, and those who prefer to retain their traditional forms of life (which in itself begs the question of whether there isn’t a way of life even more traditional) didn’t seem to enjoy that utopia that the Left said they would.
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rwb: Thanks for this comment. Helps me clarify a thing or two – even though it will not, I am sure, satisfy those who want a clear blue print of an alternative future. My point is a very modest one: let us try and think about other ways, for we do not have the comfort of many of the certitudes of the 20th century. some people have but i certainly do not and many others who are resisting the onslaught of corporate capitalism do not seem to either. Many perish defending their own forms of life but that cannot become an argument for repeating such stories elsewhere. ‘It happened There too’is a common argument and many in this country have been reminding us of the ‘enclosure of the commons’ in Britain to say that that is how it ‘always happens’. My answer is simply that it doesn’t. In Sweden, for instance, the idea that nature cannot be privatized is so strong that you can actually move into any area and put up your camp – as opposed to say England where it constitutes trespass and organizations like the Ramblers Association have only managed to get the ‘right of access’ and ‘right of way’ as late as in 2000, after decades of campaigning. this of course touches only the surface of the problem. dispossession from property or land owned by peasants for generations is a question of an entirely different order and concerns larger questions of democracy and power. EP Thompson once wrote that his history of the ‘making of the working class’ in Britain intended to rescue the artisans who perished in the storm of industrialization from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. For him these forms of life were already ‘in the past’ when he was writing. For us, they are right here before us – and no logic of History can justify their dispossession. Let us not take this to be our fate, ordained by some larger historical logic, and instead put our heads together.
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Actually,the left tactics rule/struggle slogan is turning to be a new slogan.The land reform agenda has been given up.the largr majority of small peasants who are becoming the worst victims of the market forces.indian electoral left like their counterpart in western european countries are facing a crisis of legitmacy. After reaching the office,they are not able to understand the logic of non-parliamentary struggle.Even though they are always saying so. Rather than becoming a counter hegemonic power in the society,the electoral left of india is in the service of ruling block in the society.This was first realised in kerala in 1957. later,this problem reflected in other states also. A kerala,bengal and tripura model indian left experience didn’t give much benefits to the working class-peasants.What we want now is to audit the parliamentary politics of indian left.The liberal democratic experiment of indian left is still in foundational politics of the enlightment.Their industrialisation model is the romantic perid of industrialisation. When a large number of peasants are on the verge of extinction, how can a left force adopt an aggressive indusrialisation model promoting middle class consumerism.
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If any words are uttered about kerala and the kind of thinking the marxists hold there; I am sorry to say there is not a single comrade in kerala who will recognise with these thoughts. They are simply political manoeuverists who simply dont understand marx or his theories. “Kerala marxists” made mammooty the cheif guest for their conference held in chennai. This can be last the nail in their coffin. They are behind corporates, theme parks, express highways. They contradict the wholde theories upon which kerala achieved so much. they are bucnch of hopless trolls
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