Pure
And Simple Revolutions
In Nepal And Venezuela
By Pratyush Chandra
22 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
For
a decade or so, the media has been talking about new color and flower
revolutions with colorful revolutionaries like "orange" ones
in Ukraine. But, after so many sponsored, colored and sanitized revolutions,
as additions in the market of "a series of products deprived of
their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat,
…politics without politics… the other deprived of its otherness"
(1), once again we are witnessing pure-and-simple revolutions and revolutionaries,
in Latin America and Asia (and of course, there are many in the streets
of Paris, and among the immigrants in the US, too). Nepal and Venezuela
are two hot centers of pure-and-simple revolutions.
The parallel between the
Nepalese and the Venezuelan movements that I draw rests upon some of
their basic commonalities. There might be people for whom such comparisons
would be outrageous - how can one compare the sophisticated experiments
in Latin America with a violent and uncompromising movement of Nepal?
Although it is not my purpose here to make the Nepalese movement palatable,
but this parallel allows me to expose some of its basic facets.
1. "The Object and the
subject of power"
Broadly, I attempt to understand
the Nepalese experience as part of the global struggle for democracy,
self-determination and socialism. As I see, both the Maoist movement
in Nepal and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela (along with other
Latin American movements),
evolve as continuous critiques of capitalism and its political forms,
especially formal bourgeois democracy, from the perspective of the downtrodden
classes and communities in the respective countries. The element of
negativity defines the basic unity between them.
In the Americas, there are
many "sui generis" laboratories of revolution, where people
in their daily practice of "humanist and cooperative logic"
transform themselves colliding at every step "with the capitalist
logic of profit" and their own exploited existence.(2) In this
daily experience they find their own power and political expression.
"Rather than putting the Venezuelan people asleep in order to enslave
by making the act of voting 'into the beginning and end of democracy,'
Chávez wrote in 1993 that 'sovereign people must transform itself
into the object and the subject of power. This option is not negotiable
for revolutionaries.'"(3)
On the other side of the
global south, who understands better than the Nepalese, the farce of
voting as "the beginning and end of democracy"? They also
know the various ways in which this farce could be enacted. Each time
their grassroots consciousness become a decisive challenge to the status
quo, a newer version of this farce has been enacted in Nepal to distract
them, co-opt a few representatives, de-popularize policy-making and
dissipate whatever energy is left in the streets.
Even the day, which is celebrated
as the "Democracy Day", was the day when Indians re-instated
the Shah Dynasty on the throne with an arrangement with the Nepali Congress
to preempt the radicalization of the uprising in the countryside. Eight
years after that, when the unrest on the unfulfilled promises seemed
simmering again, elections were held in 1959. B.P. Koirala won on the
plank of providing 'land to the tiller'. But in December 1960, King
Mahendra banned all parties
for dividing the country and found, on the basis of researches probably
done in the US' universities, that the parliamentary system, being a
foreign creation, was not much in "step with the history and traditions
of the country". The homegrown panchayat 'democracy' institutionalized
the indigenous Hindu hierarchy as a political system with the King on
its top as the reincarnation of Vishnu. Destroying commons, unprecedented
commercialization, uprooting the people and growing unemployment radicalized
the youth and forced the rural poor to self-organize in the 1970s; and
the political elite - the royalty, with the democrats' assent - needed
to stage another 'democratic' farce - a referendum on the panchayat
system, with far more ballots than registered votes. Finally, right
at the time when global imperialism was full of expectations for its
hegemonic stability in the late 1980s with the crumbling of East Europe,
a new compromise in Nepal was reached in 1990 to preempt the organized
revolutionary tide that seemed certain.(4)
The history of Modern Nepal
is the history of the crisis of democracy, as a system of "elite
decision and public ratification" (5). The exploited and downtrodden
Nepalis have time and again refused to accept this opiate of voting
as "the beginning and end of democracy" and took the burden
of exercising democracy in the streets and in their daily lives. The
Nepali ruling classes and their international sponsors in their desperation
have tried many exotic forms of putting them to sleep in order to control
them, but have repeatedly failed. The Maoist uprising is the longest
and most systematic (in official terms, brutal) attempt by the Nepalese
landless, poor peasantry and the proletarians to transform themselves
"into the object and the subject of power". And thus they
refused to be duped.
2. "New Democracy"
As far as the details of
what the movements in Nepal and Latin America posit and the way they
posit are concerned, there are definitely many differences. But then,
as Lebowitz tells us,
"We all start …
from different places in terms of levels of economic development---
and, that clearly affects how much of our initial activity (if we are
dependent upon our own resources) must be devoted to the future. How
different, too, are the situations of societies depending on the strength
of their domestic capitalist classes and oligarchies, their degree of
domination by global capitalist forces and the extent to which they
are able to draw upon the support and solidarity of other societies
which have set out on a socialist path. Further, the historical actors
who start us on the way may be quite different in each case. Here, a
highly-organized working class majority (as in the recipe books of previous
centuries), there a peasant army, a vanguard party, a national-liberation
bloc (electoral or armed), army rebels, an anti-poverty alliance and
variations too numerous to name or yet to emerge--- we would be pedantic
fools if we
insisted that there is only one way to start the social revolution."(6)
The Maoist movement might
seem as a critique of global capitalism from outside the political economic
mainstream - the 'marginal majority' of the peasantry and the landless.
But the 'outside' is not equal to something autonomous from global capitalism.
In fact, on the contrary, in the stage of imperialism, capitalism flourishes
by preserving its diverse stages and even 'pre-capitalism' simultaneously
- backwardness and advancement together. The persistence of the agrarian
'outsiders', as in Nepal, contributes in stabilizing the global rule
of capital by providing a stable and informal reserve of potential proletarians
to be drawn as scums and blacklegs whenever needed, guardsmen for international
security and imperialist agencies, and peripheries for expansion of
the late capitalist economies like those of India and China. It is in
this regard that I find the "instability" in Nepal, the rise
in the democratic aspirations of the Nepalese people and their struggle
for advancement and development as a definite crisis
for the politics of imperialism, for global capitalism in South Asia.
One might object to the above
perception by saying that the Maoists have defined the goal of their
struggle as "new democratic", not socialist. Moreover, a new
democratic revolution, classically, intends to complete the 'national'
transformation towards capitalism. But it is important to note the factors
that left this transformation incomplete, and for whose elimination
we need a revolution. Even for Mao who defined "new democracy"
in the Chinese context, the most formidable hurdle in such a transformation
in a "semi-colonial" society was clearly global capitalism
that had reached the stage of imperialism ("the invasion of foreign
capitalism and the gradual growth of capitalist elements"). Moreover,
for him, "any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed
against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or
international capitalism… is no longer a revolution of the old
type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist
society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship." The 'new democratic
revolution' "serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path
for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there
may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy's
side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character
of the revolution remains unchanged", i.e. it is "part of
the world revolution", which "no longer refers to the old
world revolution, for the old bourgeois world revolution has long been
a thing of the past, it refers to the new world revolution, the socialist
world revolution"(7).
So the immediacies of the
'new democratic revolution' constituting the "sub-stages"
are determined by the task of intensifying the class struggle, which
is the only road towards the "development of socialism". Imperialism
or global capitalism with its 'national' hegemonic nodes peripheralizes
and retards economic development at various locations to stabilize those
hegemonies. Any democratic assertion from below in any form in these
peripheries is an assault on imperialism and its political arrangements.
Venezuelan and Nepalese movements are united in this regard.
Further, after Soviet Union
and China succumbed to the political economic exigencies of international
capitalist competition and the politics of "peaceful coexistence",
there was a temporary crisis for the world revolutionary challenge to
capitalism. With the vestiges of
official socialism swept aside, the global challenge to imperialism,
the "highest" stage of capitalism, is once again visible,
and only naive journalistic exercises, which fiddle with apparent dissimilarities
and descriptions, will find the linkage between the Venezuelan and Nepalese
movements uncanny. Even the police state of global capital is far more
aware of the underlying unity challenging its hegemony, forcing it to
mention the "demagogue" Chavez, the "anti-American dictator"
Castro and the "vicious" Maoists together in its National
Security Strategy 2006.
The dissimilarities between
these movements are rooted in diverse "concrete situations"
in which the revolutionaries find themselves. Obviously, as Michael
Lebowitz time and again reminds us, "socialism doesn't drop from
the sky". Venezuela with its tremendous oil assets and relatively
higher level of systematic industrialization and proletarianization,
along with its (counter-)hegemonic relationship with other Latin American
countries bestow on the revolutionaries tasks very distinct from those
in the backward, aid-driven economy of Nepal. But none of these 'concrete'
local conditions can undermine the basic unity and complementary character
of these movements in challenging the "concrete whole" of
global capitalism. In fact, what makes the Venezuelan and Nepalese experiences
stand out among the plethora of anti-capitalist, anti-globalization
movements is the definiteness of their goals - the political-economic
self-determination, to create a situation where the laboring majority
would toil to satisfy their "own need for development". As
the Latin American working classes have evolved co-management and asambleas
barriales to reclaim their collectivity and its fruit, the Nepalis for
their self-liberation will need to first destroy the shield of the whole
hierarchy of the officialdom and its privileges fed and armed by foreign
aid and ensure a complete agrarian transformation to reclaim their resources
and labor from global capital and its local agencies.
3. The Inside-Outside Dialectic
However, there is an interesting
political economic dialectic that operates in Nepal and Venezuela making
these movements mirror images of one another. Both are engaged in the
process of transcending the dichotomy between the 'outside' and the
'inside' that global capitalism creates for its own expansion. The Maoists
are doing so by forging an alliance with the forces that are struggling
'within' - the trade unions, other working class organizations and petty
bourgeois parties/fronts, while the Bolivarians are trying to establish
a democratic space beyond the institutionalized framework of bourgeois
democracy that subsumes every participatory initiative into its competitive
dungeon.
As mentioned earlier, the
loci of Venezuela and Nepal in global political economy are highly dissimilar,
even opposite. Venezuela as a fully capitalist economy challenges capitalism
from within; hence the Bolivarian movement for a complete social transformation
needs to build and sustain apparatuses and institutions outside the
established political and economic paradigms. Co-management and barrios
formed on the participatory principles are the expressions of this 'convex'
need of the movement. As Massimo de Angelis rightly puts, "The
"outside" created by struggles is an outside that emerges
from within, a social space created by virtue of creating relational
patterns that are other than and incompatible with the relational practices
of capital"(8).
In Nepal, on the other hand,
the six decade-long Nepalese democratic movement achieved its partial
victory in 1990, with the accommodation of the "democrats"
in the power structure, which eventually frustrated the movement's vigor,
alienating its committed vanguards and grassroots - institutionalizing
"popular exclusion", without the semblance of "popular
inclusion" that bourgeois parliamentarism or representative democracy
provides for self-legitimacy. Herein lies the root of the internal instability
that has marred the political arrangement of 1990 and the secret of
twelve Prime Ministers in thirteen years. In fact, parliamentarism became
Monarchy's instrument of legitimacy.
It was this 'illegitimate'
arrangement that provided a ready opportunity for an independent political
mobilization of the 'excluded majority' - mobilization and dispersal
of the movement 'outside'/beyond a few urban centers. The cry for democracy
– for "self-determination" – reached hitherto
untouched zones of the society, giving birth to the "dual power".
Evidently, it aggravated the crisis in the established hierarchy (broadened
by the 1990 arrangement), which sustained itself and the hegemony of
its international sponsors by such exclusion - sustaining Nepal's peripheral
character, as a 'reserve' for capitalist expansion and accumulation.
The Maoists assaulted right at the middle of the passage, through which
the "included minority" leeched upon the 'excluded'. The consequent
internal mutation choked the parasitic political economic hierarchy.
The 1990 arrangement was critically shattered in 2005.
A decade long success of
the Maoist movement today has reoriented the aspirations of the Nepalese
petty-bourgeoisie forcing the "democratic" parties to form
an alliance with the revolutionaries against "the autocratic monarchy".
The 12-point agreement between the Maoists and seven parliamentary parties
last year, along with the unilateral ceasefire by the revolutionaries
marked the beginning of a critical phase in the Nepalese democratic
struggle, in the struggle for self-determination. This agreement creates
the possibility for an open 'competitive' struggle (as a manifestation
of the deeper class struggle) between democracy as a mere form or mode
of decision-making and democracy as practice or "a way of people
developing in struggle and emerging as a class for itself through a
process of self-transformation" (9). In other words, it potentially
opens the road for a confrontation between the practice of formal democracy
and
"insurgent" popular democratic "practice" based
on the collective needs and aspirations of the landless, proletarians
and the poor peasantry that the Maoists have helped in developing and
sustaining in their decade long armed struggle.
In other words, the "outside"
is increasingly reclaiming the "inside" - i.e., the Nepalese
movement is 'concaving' in, seemingly in contrast to the Venezuelan
experience. It is in this dialectic of inside/outside that these movements
realize the complete transformation of the respective societies. Only
by transcending this dichotomous binary can a society comprehensively
move "beyond capital".
4. "Sukumbasis"
as the protagonists
For many years now, the aid
and remittance economies have fed the mainstream political economic
institutions in Nepal. They nurtured a polity based on the 'cut and
commission regime', which in turn facilitated these businesses of foreign
aid and legal-illegal human trafficking. They survive on the toil of
millions of exploited and oppressed Nepalis working abroad and for the
agencies usurping the indigenous commons and resources. Internal and
international migration has been a persistent feature of Nepal motivated
by immense agrarian inequality, reinforced further by the commercialization
of the local societies through foreign aid. Industries that were established
in the country have been heavily dependent on foreign capital, especially
from India, and do not generate sufficient employment because of their
capital intensity. Of course, 'alternative' industries in service sector
like tourism have definitely flourished, but only the local population
knows what it means to work in this sector heavily based on informal
labor with no security and degenerating exploitation of human beings,
not just their labor. Hence, circular migration across the borders,
even beyond the seas, with falling back on land is a viable option before
the Nepali.
Regarding the rural scene,
a prominent Nepali political economist, Nanda R Shrestha says, "Overall,
near-landlessness remains prevalent as a permanent fixture of the Nepali
agrarian economy" and outmigration - especially, circular migration
to India - has been an important survival strategy, that helps sustain
"the hill economy in general and the hill near-landless in particular"(10).
However, since the 1970s there has been a remarkable degree of self-organization
among the landless peasants (Sukumbasis), which has been evident in
their organized land encroachments and spontaneous settlements, time
and again crushed by the Shah Regime. It is beyond the class capacity
of the petty-bourgeoisie and the legalist-opportunist politics of petty-bourgeois
radicals and democrats, who generally represent the landed gentry and
are ever ready to compromise on any concession from the royalty, to
give a radical turn to this 'new' peasant spontaneity.
However, "the rage simmering
under every poor peasant's feet is finally being ignited by a cadre
of unwavering Maoists. Irrespective of political persuasion, few can
deny that this is a fire that can no longer be smothered by the state
and its armed forces no matter how much larger and better-equipped these
forces are in relations to any force that the Maoists can muster with
its limited resources. What looms heavy over Nepal's political horizon,
therefore, is the unyielding question of who the masses will side with
- with the forces of fractured democracy, with the ever-sinister hands
of the absolutely dysfunctional royalty, or with the uncharted territory
of the Maoist vision. Maoists derive their power from the people."(11)
It is evident that the agrarian
question which confronts Nepal today and provides the basis for the
Maoist upsurge, once again, puts the Nepalese movement in line with
the great "new peasant movements" (as James Petras describes
them) in Latin America and Africa that decisively threaten 'third world'
dependency and the global capitalist hegemony. In this regard, it is
worth noting that as global capitalism develops, 'unresolved' agrarian
question becomes more and more that of labour, less of capital. As Henry
Bernstein tells us, "the many popular struggles over land today…
are driven by experiences of the fragmentation of labour (including
losses of relatively stable wage employment in manufacturing and mining,
as well as agriculture), by contestations of class inequality, and by
collective demands and actions for better conditions of living ('survival',
stability of livelihood, economic security), and of which the most dramatic
instances are land invasions and occupations. There is now a revival
and restatement of the significance of struggles over land to the social
dynamics and class politics of the 'South' during the current period
of globalization and neo-liberalism." Referring to James Petras'
work on Latin America and Paris Yeros' work on Zimbabwe, Bernstein concludes,
"Contemporary land struggles… are significantly different
from the ('classic') peasant movements of the past, and are much more
rooted in the semi-proletarian condition: that of 'a workforce in motion,
within rural areas, across the rural–urban divide, and beyond
international boundaries'."(12)
5. "Human beings in
all their determinateness"
One may have doubts about
the "participatory" element in the Maoist movement. But this
doubt comes from a sterile presupposition and deification of trans-historical
pluralism and democracy. It is important to keep in mind the class composition
of every movement that shapes the character of 'democracy' and 'participation'
in it. The experiences of the peasant movements and struggles show that
democracy from below in a rural setting will come with all its 'violence',
'primitiveness' and 'distortions', devoid of the preconceived urban
sophistications. What is important is the raised political consciousness
of the Nepalese landless, poor peasantry and
proletarians, and their active willingness to decide and build their
own future. However, the tension between the participatory element and
its institutionalized alienation in the process of consolidating movemental
gains, which create status quoist interests, is always there, as also
with the Venezuelan experience.
It is well recognized that
a fundamental contribution of the Maoist movement has been to inculcate
the issue of self-determination at every level of the Nepalese society.
Even the most vehement critiques of the Maoists recognize that it is
the contribution of these "economic determinists" that the
issues of socio-cultural oppression based on identities, gender, nationalities,
castes have found definite political expressions. As one analyst complains,
the Maoists "were quick to identify" the ethnic discontent
in the Nepalese society and tried "to ride it to their purpose,
taking advantage of the supposed correlation between ethnicity and poverty".(13)
Another notes that the Maoist movement "has also set precedents
for alternative experiences, practices and discourses on gender equality".(14)
Dalit intellectuals, from
the communities that are lowest in the caste hierarchy, find, "Insurgents
have raised the economic, social and political issues of Dalits as well
as the issues of women, indigenous people and others". Further,
in "people's war", "Maoists refocused on social intervention
in their stronghold areas. Maoists have initiated a campaign called
'caste integration and people's awareness campaign' in order to overcome
hesitation of non-Dalits in breaking age-old practices of untouchability.
In the Maoist heartland in Rolpa district, the untouchability and caste
discrimination has been reduced. They have declared 'caste free villages'.
They have strictly made villagers not to practice caste discrimination.
The Bista System (in which occupational Dalit castes receive grain annually
for the services they provide to non-Dalit households), considering
it an economical exploitation as well as a way of maintaining feudal
relations of domination and subordination, has been transformed into
daily remuneration for labor, which is now the norm in the Maoist base
areas".(15)
Since its inception, the
Maoist movement in Nepal understood the fact that, "While no one
liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated
by others."(16) The Maoists facilitated the creation of a definite
space for solidaristic praxis where these autonomous ethnic, gender
and community-level struggles for self-determination could coordinate
their liberatory praxes. The active participation of the oppressed identities
in "people's war" has armed their identity assertion, their
aspiration for self-dignity and freedom against a brutally oppressive
Hindu hierarchy. In its turn, the 'reflective participation' of these
entities has strengthened the support base of the Maoist movement.
However, this identity of
the oppressed and exploited in diverse social relations with a class
movement derives from the basic fact that this class of proletarians
and semi-proletarians are "human beings in all their determinateness".
Hence their complete liberation requires liberation from all forms of
oppression and exploitation. The unity between dalit, women, national
and other liberation movements is the laboring majority's self-assertion
as human beings. It means that they are fully aware of the secret through
which the global capitalist class, directly or indirectly, maintains
its power, i.e., by the 'parcelisation' of their 'selves' according
to sex, age, race and nationality, among other aspects.(17)
In "participatory"
experiences of both countries - Nepal and Venezuela, despite differences
in the levels of sophistication (due to the differences in the "levels
of economic development"), the element of force or "coercion"
is important. In the case of Venezuela, it is provided by the 'transitional'
State, while in Nepal, it is the 'provisional' state, constituted by
the Maoists, that stands in the background of those experiences. However,
arbitrariness is the price of the provisional and the insurgent nature
of the 'force' in Nepal. But post-2001 developments demonstrate that
the Maoists are fully aware of this problem, and their internal debates
and readiness to form an alliance with other 'forces' are indicative
of their efforts to transcend it. It will be interesting to see if their
resistance against the local representatives of the extraordinarily
dense and widespread imperialist network of relationships and connections
will bear any immediate success. Or, will global hegemonies and their
agencies succeed in buying a compromise and betrayal that the Nepalese
people have seen so many times in their struggles for self-determination?
References:
(1) Slavoj Zizek (2004),
'A Cup of Decaf Reality',
http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm
(2) 'In the laboratory of
a revolution': Interview with Marta
Harnecker, Venezuela Analysis, Sep 22, 2005,
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1562
(3) Michael Lebowitz (2006),
BUILD IT NOW: SOCIALISM FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, Monthly Review Press, forthcoming
(4) For an interpretation
of the political history of Nepal, see my short articles - 'Pre-1990
"Democratic" Experiments in Nepal and The Evolving Pattern'
(August 2005) and 'The 12-point Agreement and the Future of Democracy
in Nepal' (December 2005)
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/auteur.php3?id_auteur=172
(5) Noam Chomsky (1987),
ON POWER AND IDEOLOGY: THE MANAGUA LECTURES,
South End Press
(6) Michael Lebowitz (2006),
op cit
(7) Mao tse-Tung (1940),
'On New Democracy', Selected Works Vol. 2, Peking
(8) De Angelis, Massimo (2006),
'Enclosures, Commons and the "Outside"', University of KwaZulu-Natal
Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature,
Durban
(9) 'Completing Marx's Project':
Interview with Michael Lebowitz,
Weekly Worker 608, January 19 2006,
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/608/lebovitz.htm
(10) Nanda R. Shrestha (2001),
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LAND, LANDLESSNESS AND MIGRATION IN NEPAL,
Nirala, New Delhi. (New edition of 'Landlessness and Migration in Nepal',
West View Press, 1990)
(11) Ibid.
(12) Henry Bernstein (2004),
''Changing Before Our Very Eyes': Agrarian Questions and the Politics
of Land in Capitalism Today',
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4 Nos. 1 & 2.
(13) Deepak Thapa (2001),
'Day of the Maoist', Himal South Asian, Vol
14 No 5, http://www.himalmag.com/may2001/cover.html
(14) Mandira Sharma &
Dinesh Prasain (2004), 'Gender Dimensions of the People's War: Some
Reflections on the Experience of Rural Women', in Michael Hutt (ed)
HIMALAYAN PEOPLE'S WAR: NEPAL'S MAOIST REBELLION, Indiana University
Press.
(15) Tej Sunar (2006), 'Fighting
Caste Discrimination in the Context of Conflict in Nepal', DNF, available
at http://66.116.151.85/?p=3028
(16) Paulo Freire (1993),
PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED, Continuum Books, New York.
(17) Michael Lebowitz (2003),
BEYOND CAPITAL: MARX'S POLITICAL ECONOMY
OF THE WORKING CLASS, 2nd Edition, Palgrave.