[Reader-list] From Nonadanga to Workers' Power- Pothik Ghosh

[asit das]

http://radicalnotes.com/content/view/168/39/



*From Nonadanga to Workers' Power*  [image:
Print]<http://radicalnotes.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=39>
 [image:
E-mail]<http://radicalnotes.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=emailform&id=168&itemid=39>
  Saturday,
28 April 2012
* Pothik Ghosh*


*तू है मरण, तू है रिक्त, तू है व्यर्थ,
तेरा ध्वंस केवल एक तेरा अर्थ.
*(You are death, you are emptiness, you are useless,
In your decimation lies your only meaning.)
*                                            - Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh*

The resistance of Nonadanga is – for the working-masses of Calcutta, West
Bengal and beyond – a shining example of struggle against capitalist
repression and exploitation. The Nonadanga movement is a wake-up call for
Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal government.  It
is an indication that the popular upsurge, which unseated the 35-year-old
CPM-led Left Front regime in West Bengal 10 months ago, was neither meant
to clear the way for Mamata’s Trinamool Congress to appropriate state-power
by forming a new government in West Bengal nor was it meant, at a more
general level, to affirm and consolidate the hegemony of and consensus for
competitive electoral politics. The different people’s movements – whether
they be in Jangal Mahal or Darjeeling, Dooars or Calcutta city – were all
directed against the deviation of the Left Front and its largest
constituent, the CPM, from the fundamental ideological principles of
Leftist politics.

The determined resistance the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority
and its slum-eviction drive has come up against at Nonadanga proves the
popular upsurge against the Left Front and its then government in West
Bengal, not so long ago, was, without doubt, not an instrumentality for
effecting a change of guard in the control room of state-power. By the same
token, it was also not meant to play a partisan role in determining who
would win the competition to usurp the privilege of enforcing and
implementing the policies of neo-liberal capital. The Nonadanga struggle
proves the working-masses care nothing about which party or electoral
coalition gets to enforce the neo-liberal policy-vision by winning
electoral and governmental power. Instead, it reveals that the
working-masses will persist in their struggle until they have repulsed the
neo-liberal assault on their lives and livelihoods, and have decimated
capitalism, which is at its root. We hope this message, which rings loud
and clear, gets across to Mamata Banerjee, CPM and all those political
parties and non-political organisations that consider serving capital and
its socio-economic and political system their good fortune and a matter of
great honour.

In this context, the Nonadanga movement – which has emerged in less than a
year since the change of regime in West Bengal  -- is an indication that no
radical transformation in the material conditions of the working-people as
a whole would be possible until and unless they manage to generate a new
configuration of social power, based on the working-class logic of
self-emancipation and self-activity, by forging a unity among their
different struggles even as they keep intensifying those struggles in their
separateness. As long as the working people, and the various left and
progressive organisations that are part of their different struggles, are
unable to accomplish that their dogged but divided struggles will continue
to become cannon fodder for electoral competition and capitalist
class-power that is the foundation for such bankrupt politics.

That is perhaps why the Nonadanga resistance should also compel the working
people of not merely Calcutta and West Bengal, but all of India – together
with the various left-democratic forces that are part of their larger
struggle – to engage in self-criticism. We ought to view the experiences of
our past struggles in West Bengal through the prism of repression and
resistance at Nonadanga and the larger socio-political context within which
it is situated. This would probably help us understand that as long as
different sections of the working-people continue to wage their respective
struggles against their particular oppressions in their separateness they
would continue to find themselves incapable of constituting the new social
configuration of working-class power. That is because capitalist
socio-political organisation has the capacity to continually reform itself
at its various levels by redressing the problems and demands of some
sections of the working class, at times even managing to significantly
reduce repression on those sections. But this system, which stands on the
ethic of competition for hierarchy and domination, can never extinguish the
culture of repression and oppression because without oppression (primitive
accumulation) accumulation of capital through extraction of surplus-value
(exploitation) is simply not possible. As a matter of fact, capitalism is
compelled to continually reduce oppression on certain sections of the
working class by transferring the crisis in accumulation, which is embodied
by heightening oppression on those sections and the resistance it thereby
provokes in them against such oppression, to other sections by
simultaneously changing the organic composition of capital and recomposing
the working class. It is this that segments and divides the working class
and makes it appear as a sectionalised amorphous mass called the working
people. In other words, capitalism, as a system of exploitation, is the
condition of possibility of oppression and the repressive violence that
renders such oppression most clearly evident. In such circumstances, every
struggle against oppression must transform itself also into a struggle
against exploitation and accumulation of capital.

We must ensure that our respective struggles against oppression do not turn
into struggles for the proper enforcement of the rule of law but, instead,
get transformed into struggles for the abolition of the very conception of
the rule of law that is intrinsic to and constitutive of the unequal
sociality of capitalism.  “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter” is an adage that could well have an analogy: “What is law for one
section of society is the exception to law for another.” The
legally-protected rights enjoyed by one section of society, more often than
not, spell repression for another section. And that is because our unequal
capitalist society – which is stratified and thus divided – makes possible
through the rule of law, differential legal rights for its different
sections or strata, which in turn enable the preservation and protection of
their differential identities and thus the reproduction of the entire
sociality constitutive of those differential identities.  Such an unequal
sociality of differential identities is crucial because otherwise
competition, which is the diesel of capital accumulation, would be
impossible. That is precisely the reason why a law that ensures and
protects the rights of one identified section of society comes up as a wall
of oppression and repression against another identified section lower than
it on the social ladder, and its struggles to level the ground in between
them. It would, therefore, not be incorrect to claim that the blanks that
exist in between the different laws constitutive of the sociality of
differentially included socio-economic identities constitute the happy
hunting ground for oppression or primitive accumulation. A bench of the
Patna High Court has, in a recent verdict, acquitted all the accused of the
infamous Bathani Tola carnage of 1996. This judgement sharply underscores
the intimate relationship between the rule of law and so-called illegal
repression and oppression like never before.

Needless to say the conception of the rule of law – which reproduces the
unequal socio-economic structure of capitalism even as it stands on it as
its ground -- doesn’t merely generate oppression but also separates and
divides the working people and their movement into various identitarian
ghettos. That is why this conjuncture of postmodern capitalism – when there
is such an unprecedented sharpening of socio-economic inequalities that no
section of the working people is unscathed by the experience of suffering
and havoc it is wreaking– has yielded a world of undeclared Emergency for
us to live in. The ruling class, unlike before, does not now feel the need
to officially declare Emergency because the identitarianised
sectionalisation and ghettoisation of the working people, and the resultant
competitive orientation of their respective struggles vis-à-vis one
another, enables state-power to be an expression of the covert dictatorship
of capital, concealed by a sheer cloak of democracy, over sellers of
labour-power. Italian political thinker Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the
“generalised state of exception is meant to explicate precisely such
concrete situations. And this generalised state of exception, which has
transformed the entire society into a factory if not a large fascist
concentration camp, is the appearance of the neo-liberal character of
contemporary capitalism.

Hence, in the final analysis, Nonadanga cannot exhaust our politics. Our
solidarity with and support for the Nonadanga movement would be effective –
as opposed to being merely symbolic like it is now – only if we are able to
take it to its right denouement. And this denouement would be the eruption
of a larger, cohesive, country-wide movement of urban resistance. If we
fail on that score, we will have condemned the Nonadanga movement to the
electoral cauldron of the CPM (and its Left Front), which is currently
waiting like a stealthy and cunning predator for the right opportunity to
pounce on its prey.

The Nonadanga movement has shown the way of unity in struggle to the
working-masses of this country. If, on the one hand, the political hitmen
of neo-liberal capital are busy dispossessing a section of the
working-people from its villages, farms and forests in the name of
development, thereby forcing it to flee to cities as a mass of completely
pauperised proletarians, the same hounds of capital are also expropriating
the urban working-people of their homes and their basic rights by
demolishing their slums to further the same project of ‘development’ and
‘beautification’. Worse, this political executive (read chattel-slaves) of
capital has turned rehabilitation into an alibi to push these uprooted,
homeless people into undeveloped areas outside the city-limits, where they
are provided neither with respectable homes fit for human beings to live in
nor with clean and safe drinking water. Besides, such bogus rehabilitations
are pushing uprooted sections of the urban working people farther and
farther away from sources of viable livelihood. The progressive increase in
distance between places of residence and sources of employment/livelihood
that is being imposed on the urban working-masses by this twin process of
eviction and resettlement/rehabilitation is leading to a progressive
lengthening of their average labour-day. This entire process – which is
enforced and realised through repression carried out by both governmental
and non-governmental agents – diminishes the value represented in the wages
that the working class receive. It also reconstitutes the urban space in a
manner that the vulnerability and precariousness of the proletarianised
population is increased – insulating the spaces of production from the
erratic reproductive domain, while the latter is increasingly made
dependent on the former, i.e., it is more and more subsumed under the logic
of capital. Consequently, valorisation of labour-power has rendered
socio-economic existence into a biopolitical realm, where determination of
social life, even at its bare biological level of the body and its vector,
is progressively becoming a matter of centralised systemic control. That is
yet another salient feature of our conjuncture of neo-liberal capitalism.

Clearly, repression and legally-sanctioned exploitation complement one
another. The two processes in inter-weaving with each other constitute
capital, its accumulation and its class-power. In such a situation, when
governments and the larger capitalist state-formation are pinning
adjectives such as Naxalism on to struggles against repression and
expropriation of peasants, Dalits, religious minorities, tribals and
sub-nationalities, we have neither any fear nor shame in saying that we are
all Naxals. In fact, we insist that this Naxalism-against-repression must
now be transformed into a description for a cohesive country-wide urban
resistance against capitalist exploitation and its neo-liberal class-power.





-- 

"nothing is stable, except instability;
 nothing is immovable, except movement."

engels, 1853