Marxists From World Over Debate: Many Issues At JNU
By Vidyadhar Date
08 April, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Various issues ranging from the Arab Spring, global capitalism, neoliberalism, Marxism, political movements, caste issues, ecology and culture were discussed at the three day international Historical Materialism conference – New Cultures of the Left - at the Jawaharlal Nehru university in Delhi last week.
It was a unique event in India. JNU is intellectually the most alive campus in India but it never had an international conference on Marxist issues before on this scale, veterans pointed out. It was also for the first time that a Historical Materialism conference, regularly held in the West, was organized in Asia, said Jairus Banaji, Marxist theorist and winner of the Issac Deutscher prize.
Banaji was a student in JNU in the early seventies and he is impressed by the lovely forest that has come up in the campus. It was a barren land in those days, the greening has all been done by the authorities which is creditable, he said. It was indeed an experience to be there. I was delighted by the sight of a peacock flying across the road near Aravali guest house in the campus.
Several strands of Marxism were visible at the conference though understandably not all were represented. Gilbert Achcar and Marieme Helie Lucas spoke on the Arab uprising and its aftermath.Jean Dreze, development economist, said in the session on anarchism and socialism that anarchism had been misrepresented and misunderstood in India so as to make armed revolutionaries unpopular. Quoting K Balagopal, the late activist, he said it was important to strengthen social movements at the local level to bring out the potential of the common people. There should be no top down approach. He also quoted the Russian anarchist and revolutionary Kroptokin who said animals .and human beings had cooperated with one another during the evolutionary process. He said many Indians had drawn inspiration from anarchism but the movement had remained sidelined in India.
Rohini Henman, author of books on labour, outlined a vision of the socialist revolution.
A strong criticism of the CPM in Bengal was made by Kumar Rana in a paper read out in his absence by Jairus Banaji during the discussion on the theme of Crisis of the Indian Left. He said there were good people in Left wing parties but their policies had failed. There was no Left intervention in the Left front administration in West Bengal. In fact, the government ran the party. Basic survival issues of people were neglected in pursuit of electoral politics. Even after the electoral defeat, there was little introspection. There was no change of leadership in the party. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the former chief minister, stressed in a long television interview that the party had done no wrong.
Satya Prakash, journalist, pointed out that there was a much bigger Left beyond the Parliamentary Left. The dalit movement, he claimed, had helped confer many more benefits on the people, than Left parties did. The West Bengal legislative assembly is the only legislature in the country where upper class representation had gone up over the years.
Jan Breman, scholar who has worked for years doing grassroots research in Gujarat, referred to pauperization going on on a vast scale in the state. Politicians asked villages to go to urban areas saying their future lay there but there were no jobs there either.
Vivek Chhiber, author of the book Postcolonial theory and the Specter of Capital, mounted a scathing attack on subalterns and post modernists for writing in a language which made no sense. Earlier, there was a long tradition of people who wrote in a simple language so that they could reach out to people. There were books like Maths for Millions. Now, an attempt is being made to completely reverse this trend and write a lot of bullshit.
That reminds me of Richard Dawkins’s review of the excellent book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called the Intellectual Impostures, which severely exposes much of the nonsense written by certain academics. – Manoranjan Mohanty, scholar, said people’s struggles on land issues were a major form of resistance to global capitalism. The State was aligning with corporates in the exploitation and the Left was not doing enough on the issue.
There was a proposal to take over land in the Mumbai Delhi corridor covering a huge area 1500 km long and 300 km wide which was being resisted by the National Alliance for People’s Movements.
Praful Bidwai, author and senior journalist, dealt with the havoc played by capitalism on the environment and people’s lives. M.J. Pandey, journalist and trade union leader of journalists, dwelt on the increasing corporate control of the media and the ideological swing to the Right and inadequacy of content. Due to intense competition, the Times of India was now beginning to be critical of Reliance.
A blistering attack was also made by academics including Satish Deshpande, Mukul Mangalik and and Sanjay Kumar on the corporatization of universities and thwarting of freedom of thought.
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change. Walking, cycling, public transport
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