New devotees of capitalism & Lenin's statue by Sankar Ray
Eugène Edine Pottier , communard of Paris Commune of the 1870s and poet who wrote the L'Internationale will turn agonizingly in his grave when the new-devotees of capitalism will raise their fist with a revolutionary posture, chanting the song on 22 April in front of the statue of Vladimir Illyich Lenin in Kolkata on his 139th birthday.. Yes, I mean the hypocrites - top leaders of CPI(M) , India's largest Leftist party , including three polit bureau members, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Left Front chairman Biman Bose and commerce and industry minister Nirupam Sen, the new in the 17-member pack will all be there and chant the slogan, 'Long Live Revolution',but faintly.
The very first public meeting, addressed by Sen, was at a seminar on 'culture and globalisation' , under the aegis of Spandan unit of the Indian People's Theatre Association, West Bengal. " In order to help develop consciousness, we have to walk along the path of globalisation", the new PBM said conceitedly. Among the participants was Harsh Neotia, CPI(M)-backed real estate tycoon who got delinked last year from the Gujarat Ambuja Cements, hived off to an MNC.
Sen, Bhattacharjee and Bose seem deliberately unaware of the growing criticism against globalization even from the non-Left circles among academics in the West in the wake of an unprecedented food crisis engulfing this planet. Michel Husson, a French economist and author of "Un pur capitalisme," [A Pure Capitalism] in an interview to L'Humanité, French communist daily, said, "This crisis was born from the bursting of the real estate bubble and is a relatively classic phenomenon. But what's new is the chain reaction that [was] unleashed. Financial deregulation and "securitization" led to very deep - and also extremely opaque - imbrications between investment banks and speculative funds. One rediscovers every day the scale of cumulative losses, which the IMF has just evaluated at $945 billion. The immensity of these losses explains why central banks' interventions have been unable to arrest the movement". The Fed, US financial regulator, slashed its rates below the inflation rate, injected liquidities, virtually purchased a big investment bank, Bear Stearns and even exchanged $200 billion in Treasury Bills for questionable mortgage loans. But all this ended in a damp squib as the real estate market continues to plunge. "Such a crisis can remain confined neither to the financial sphere nor to the United States: the United States is in recession and the IMF has just revised its forecasts for the global economy down again," Husson added.
Queerly, honchos of A K Gopalan Bhavan, national headquarters of CPI(M) like its general secretary Prakash Karat and ideologue Sitaram Yechury defend the LF government's new romance with globalization, ticked off by the mandarins of Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan, seat of party's West Bengal state committee. Karat told the media and the delegates during the 19th Congress (Coimbatore: 29 March-3 April 2008) that if the LF government disallows SEZs , those investors would go to other states, while expressing general reservations against the SEZs which " are specifically delineated duty free enclaves treated as a foreign territory for the purpose of industrial services and trade operations with exemption from customs duty and a more liberal regime in respect of other levies, foreign investment and other transactions. Domestic regulations, restrictions and infrastructure inadequacies are sought to be eliminated in the SEZs for creating an internationally competitive environment (italics added), according to a notification by the LF government in the Gazette Extraordinary on 28 June 2003. This was okayed by Sen as minister of C & I. Two years before the UPA government got the SEZ Act in the Parliament passed unopposed, LF government did it in the West Bengal State Assembly with the connotation 'foreign territory'. Karat has to keep the M A Bhaban in good humour. After all, West Bengal, with CPI(M) in power, will continue to be CPI(M)'s biggest coffer.
The French economist stated further that capitalism today – meaning the war-mongering neo-liberal strain - "escaped all control. Struggling against its financial offshoots should lead to challenges to the absolute freedom of capital circulation, but also, more fundamentally, challenges to the growing exploitation of workers around the world. It's necessary, in other words, to close the speculation-feeding faucet "at the source." Unfortunately, CPI(M) which, Karat's predecessor told the now-defunct Sunday Observer in the early 1990s, " is the only revolutionary party in India"
When we hear from Bhattacharjee and patriarch Jyoti Basu that the Left has to reposition itself in globalization, we find an echo of the anti-Leninist booklet, Global Capitalism and American Empire, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin who argued that globalization is "inevitable and irreversible." Political Affairs . mouthpiece of CP of USA gave a rebuff. Capitalism "will continue to internationalize itself through the process we call "globalization" which is just a euphemism for the domination of the world by a handful of powerful states dominated by financial and monopoly elites that continue to plunder the world in their own interests", it argued.
Lenin didn't foresee the specific historical development - "neoliberal" globalization dominated by one "superpower," but predicted the trajectory of imperialism . But all this seems irrelevant to the CPI(M) biggies who mastered the art of lip service to Marxism-Leninism, caring little for the severed menu of auto-rickshaw drivers or peddlers "selling food from behind wood carts". They know how to win elections. Which is why the party letter on organizing the unorganized a couple of years directed lower-committees to bring the unorganized together "boothwise", not town/villagewise. "Parliamentary cretinism", Marx coined one and a half century back in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Sankar Ray, Flat 8/13, MIG 2, Phase 2, Golf Green Urban Complex, Kolkata 700 095
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