The Pandemic and the State: Part-VI

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The Pandemic and the State: Part-VI: The Reform and the Revolution

Arup Baisya

The Two Combatants

Some Marxist scholars rightly argue that the reform is not the obverse of revolution. But a serious and sincere continuation of reform agenda does not automatically culminate into a revolution if two aspects of the relation between capital and labour are not considered. Firstly, the respective powers of the two combatants i.e. capital and labour determine the rate of surplus-value and the distribution of the newly created value between capital and labour. Though it is primarily determined by the presence of reserve army of labour below or above a certain threshold level, the balance between the respective powers of capital and labour is also dependent on the strength of the class struggle in a space-time. Based on linear logical reasoning, we can surmise that capitalist class can successfully lower the value of labour-power when the supply of labour is abundant and vice versa and the strength of the class-struggle is entirely dependent on this demand and supply balance. But this viewpoint is one-sided and deterministic. The intensity of class struggle is also dependent on the condition of political, cultural, and historical specificity. Capitalist class lowers the value of labour-powers by annihilating a series of workers’ historical and social achievements by partially eliminating commodities that cover their needs from the ‘standard of life’ hitherto regarded as normal. When the workers’ desire to incorporate new needs is met by the sudden degradation of the standard of life of the workers, the class struggle may intensify. The section of workers who are privileged and modern within the working-class hierarchy will be rapidly disillusioned over the system and the assertion of the resentment of these advanced workers will be the ideological core for working-class solidarity and intensification of class struggle. The cyclical over-accumulation that causes the crisis of capitalism will try to force the price of the commodities of labour-power down to a level much below its value so that it becomes conducive for the idle accumulated capital to re-invest for renewed production process by creating a condition of an excessive reserve army of labour through retrenchment. But the intensification of class struggle due to the fall in the standard of life may act as a countervailing force against the move of the capital to come out of its cyclical ebb. In these circumstances, communist forces must consider taking the historical and cultural specificity into cognizance to prioritise revolution over reform and strive for working-class solidarity especially between mental and manual labour. Secondly, the continuation of reform culminates into revolution provided the reform agenda is guided in such a direction that it compels the political class in power to direct the production process more and more for the production of use-value instead of exchange value. To accommodate the pressure of class struggle and/or if the political force in power so desires, the production of use-value in some sectors like health, education, etc. through people’s participation and free service without adding any value as profit may be adopted. But this pressure must be continuously extended to diverse sectors for working-class control over the production process through workers’ councils in the workplace so that production of use-value is prioritized over exchange value. The struggle for gradual reforms in that direction only will be culminated into revolution because the capitalist class may concede reform to a certain extent under certain circumstances, but will retaliate with counter pressure and repressive measures of the state if the rate of surplus-value falls below average rate of profit.

Revolution and neo-liberalism

The question of revolution may also be seen from a different perspective. A programme for revolution must begin with a question of ‘who is in control’ of the production process. Revolution does not only mean the dislodging or overthrowing ruling class from the control of the state but also the change of relation between state, capital, and labour in a radical way. It means the revolution is also a social revolution. From the global perspective, it also means bridging the metabolic rift between labour and nature to ensure the existence of an individual in nature through creatively controlled productive activity and that can be only be ensured by replacing the productive activity destructively dominated by capitalist-expansion or globalization of capital. The process of proletarianisation in a developing country cannot be articulated in isolation. The conditions of labour in developing countries are incomparably worse than the developed countries. But the countries concerned are an integral part of the system of capital and labour. The conditions of the labour market are deteriorating everywhere, including the western capitalist countries.

Before the present situation of Pandemic and lockdown, what was the status of Indian urban and rural sites? The combined development under imperialist capitalism had dismantled the social balance of classes in Indian urban sites where the hegemony of the bourgeois-landlord ruling class hitherto established over the diverse petty-bourgeois middle classes and the aristocracy of labour through the state institutions. The millions of workers with their rural place of origin started living in cities where they were denied legal rights and access to a wide range of benefits of cities. They lived with starvation wages, rickety dwelling-houses, and atrocious living conditions, but they were not fully integrated into the institutional hegemonic structure despite their vulnerability as a new working class under a coercive regime which was vigilant for creating a disciplined army of labour. In addition to the industrial worker, there was an immense rise in service workers. When this service worker does not offer the labour directly to the user of its effects but instead sells it to the capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of service. The overwhelming presence of this new class who were super-exploited under neo-liberal capitalist law of value was prone to strikes and demonstrations for their rights and wages. Like combined development (in the center and periphery), uneven development is ingrained in capitalism and the unevenness is ubiquitous throughout the system. The unevenness is accentuated when capitalism reached its imperialist stage of exploitation. This unevenness is marked by the presence of pre-capitalist relations which is moulded and shaped by the combined development under capitalism to ensure its profit and accumulation.

Karl Marx dwelt on the dual nature of labour under capitalism. On the one hand, argues Marx, labour is abstract labour, involved in producing commodities for the market, objectified as value, expressed in the exchange of commodities for money, from which capital extracts profit. On the other hand, labour is also involved in the production of use-value, concrete labour, both individual and social. Under capitalism, the two forms of labour are, he argued, in constant tension with each other. The creative, purposeful activity is subordinated to labour disciplined for the maximisation of profit. According to Marx, capitalism encounters an extreme variety of forms of land ownership, such as feudal, clan, communal (and primitive), state, etc., when it makes its appearance on the historical scene. Capital subordinates to itself all these varied forms of land ownership and remoulds them after its fashion. If one is to understand, evaluate, and express this process, the contradictory movement of acceleration and retardation must be the starting point in understanding the development of capitalism in India in the era of imperialism.

Pandemic realignment

The Pandemic and especially the lockdown disrupted both the production and labour processes. Capitalists’ desire for creating a huge mass of reserve army of labour has been achieved through retrenchment and reverse migration. The entire mass of both mental and manual labour has been disjointed from capital as the production process itself has come to a halt. There is no profit for capital without linking the living labour with dead labour. The social relations of production have reached a stationary stage when the two segments of the productive forces have been segregated in time and space. This is an unprecedented situation that has created the opportunities for power-struggle for both the combatants, capital, and labour, to redefine the social relation of production. The Capitalists can invest in newly emerging productive sectors in both departments I & II by lowering the value of labour-power and by pressurizing the state to bail them out due to the huge loss they have incurred during the lockdown. But the disruption of both the production and labour process and the dislocation of the workers from worksites have increased the transportation cost and the scarcity of labour even though the unemployment rate has increased. The capitalists need the state’s intervention for increasing consumer demands through the increased government expenditure. Furthermore, as the value chain has been disrupted, the process of extraction of profit by diverse capitalist classes through the addition of values to the commodities at various points of the value chain has been lost. The state now must facilitate the private players to ensure the transportation, stock, and delivery of the commodities. This new dimension has also created a space for the workers to fight back and compel the state to act in favour of the working class. The solidarity and the intensity of the class struggle may soon culminate into a revolutionary crisis. The state may retaliate in favour of the capitalists by adopting more and more repressive measures or act in favour of the labour by further extending the constitutional democracy which may be a part of reform in favour of labour. If the organisations of the working class fail to rise to the occasion to unite to achieve working-class solidarity and reconstruction of past valiant social struggles, the capitalist productive system may once again come out of its downslide even in the polity of constitutional democracy. At this stage, it is unpredictable how global capitalism will once again come out of its long-cycle crisis. History tells us that capitalism came out of its long-cycle crisis in the past through creative destruction, technological revolution, massive increase of reserve army of labour to reconstruct the production process to achieve an above-average rate of surplus-value. There are a lot of uncertainties in this transitional phase. But the working class inevitably has the only option of socialism, be it by treading the path of reform culminating into revolution or through a revolution in immediate future. But this transitional phase and the situation of uncertainties are not going to sustain for a very long period. The capitalists will act, it is to be seen whether the working class, the combatant of the capitalists, acts in a befitting manner with the agenda which has been thrown by the history before them. The advocates and proponents of neoliberalism have lost their confidence in their policy framework for capitalist revival. The Pandemic and the lockdown have given body blow to this neoliberal logic. But at present, the capitalist will act to reaffirm their neoliberal agenda by pressurizing the state to facilitate the market. But the political class is in dilemma whether to adopt neoliberalism or nationalist welfarism and trying to tread a middle path of some form of ‘Keynesianism’. There lies the task of the working-class organization to adopt a reformist agenda to compel the state to adopt a nationalist welfare policy by opposing neoliberalism and breaking the chain with neoliberal globalization.

Immediate Task and Socialism

In these circumstances, what becomes the immediate task before the Indian communist? First of all, the monopoly-finance capital is in the driving seat in this phase of transition of the state and society and as such the monopoly-finance capital vs. the Indian nation is the principal contradiction and as the state is now supervised by the market, the delinking or severing the tie of monopoly-finance with Indian economy must have an alternative project of both state ownership and workers co-operative. The struggle for state ownership and workers’ co-operative or workplace workers-council is the content of the struggle between capital and labour. But due to uneven development and existence of pre-capitalist social relations along with the dominant contradiction between capital and labour, the working-class revolutionary movement must build unity with the poor peasants, oppressed castes and communities and nationalities. The poor peasants have a score to settle with landed gentry to free them from feudal oppressions especially in many hinterlands and backward regions. But the feudal class is continuously being weakened by the inroads of capital or under the coercion of eviction, but poor peasant must build its struggle against the feudal gentry to free them from primitive thought and this struggle must not be confined to the issue of land to the tiller which does not lead them to imbibe universal world view, but also the peasant movement must demand rural peasant committees for their collective decision-making process. The revolutionary force must promote this self-rule of the peasant communities and most importantly build the unity of the working class and peasants. Similarly, the Dalit and lower castes must free themselves from caste oppression and social ostracization. The revolutionaries have the task to establish the leadership of the working class in all these movements against pre-capitalist social relations, not through sermons and programmatic publicity, but through practice, example, and people’s movement. The most important movement against pre-capitalist social relations is the movement against patriarchy and for women’s rights.

Due to the capitalist development under the control of imperialist global capital, the ruling class of the Indian state can be identified as the global oligopolist and the Indian big bourgeois compradors. In the capitalist mode of production, the working class is the direct adversary and the agent of a revolutionary change. The workers and poor peasant alliance in urban and rural landscapes form the core of any revolutionary movement. But the extent of unevenness that is glaringly intrinsic in the capitalist development under imperialism, forms diverse intermediary classes who are amenable to side with a revolutionary alliance of workers-peasants in the backdrop of rising radicalization of working-class consciousness. The transformation of working-class consciousness from class-in-itself to class-for-itself teaches them to incorporate the interests of such diverse intermediary classes who are subject to diverse forms of caste, community, and nationality oppressions. The concentration of power in the hands of imperialists and big bourgeois compradors isolate the diverse section of the middle classes from the institutions of the state and their disillusionment on the existing state makes them ally for the working class for a revolutionary change. This necessitates the united front practice throughout the movement and from the beginning, as the imperialist domination is always detrimental to the interest of the intermediary classes and the oppressed identities. In all these struggles, the family labour and social labour needs to be considered intertwined within the ambit of the law of value and expropriation of surplus-value and the formulation of the programme on women’s labour and women’s liberty within the essence of social and workers’ movement becomes utmost important. The people’s movement to establish metabolic unity among man and nature for a new society based on co-operation instead of exploitation must also include the struggle to save the earth from the ecological catastrophe which is becoming more pertinent due to the capitalist exploitation of labour and nature and the rift between the two categories.

The transition of the state from bureaucratic to a state which is supervised by the market necessitates the centralization of power and capital. The inroads of financial capital both in the form of debt and credit finance and as speculative finance weakened and replaced the regional and community bourgeoisie with a class which is linked through the national and global financial value chain. The emergence of this new class is favourable for the drive for the homogenization of the market and its concomitant centralization of power. The regional bourgeois and the middle class are so weak that they cannot even defend the existing institutional arrangement of federalism on center-state relation which is being meticulously dismantled. So the radical federal reorganization of the state and decentralization of power become the democratic agenda of the revolution under the leadership of working-class, and this needs to be implemented in a post-revolutionary state with the working class as the ruling class for immediate transformation to the next phase of the building of socialism by ensuring the extension of constitutional democracy to its higher stage.

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The Pandemic and the State: Part V

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The Pandemic and the State: Part V: After a long hiatus, Revolution on the horizon: Ora Bhoy Peyeche*, Comrade.

Arup Baisya

Introduction

Before the corona pandemic started taking its toll, even before it had become a serious issue for the WHO to issue its advisories, this author wrote in an article that in the event of any economic meltdown for any internal or external shock, the global working class is going to raise their head once again post-Soviet collapse and subsequent collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ after a long period of hiatus. It was not wishful thinking but one of the possible futuristic outcomes which were ingrained in the past as present. One should not preempt the desire to be socialist as a Marxist preconceived motion. The inchoate desire for a change beyond capitalism does not automatically land us in the domain of Marxism. Marx himself became socialist before being a Marxist. So, the point of departure is not Marxism, it is the appraisal of the here and now with a deep insight to transform oneself to transform the society. It is not the philosophy of praxis with philosophy in the mind and practice in the body, it is not such a duality, it is rather a philosophy from praxis and praxis from philosophy and that is what Marxism is all about.

The race and the caste

When the tyranny of the abstraction where the humans become the object of the capitalist relation of production is challenged by the humans as subject overcoming the subject-object dualism, Marxism comes to the fore to renew and reconstruct itself. The determinism of Marxists’ braggadocio and their catechism gave legitimacy to whatever new phenomena that confront the observer as post-Marxist or post-modernist. The insightful new observations of the here and now does not make Marxism redundant, but Marxism shows us the path to transform oneself to transform the society for the free development of all the capacities and senses of the human being, the free and many-sided activity of every individual. When practicing politics lose sight of the connection between working-class struggle and the struggle for human emancipation in general, it either becomes a routine mundane affair or lifeless intellectual exercise. The revolution for Marx is not an event but a process for human freedom and emancipates the world from the alien power of capital. The process cannot have set rules, parallelism is scarcely relevant. But the parallelism, if not meticulously judged, always becomes a trap for unconscious minds. Thus, one gets inclined to equate the black racism in the United States with Casteism in India. The racism in America developed with capitalism and slave trade for money-economy and became the part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production of the United States, whereas Casteism emerged as a feudal relation of production and transformed itself to be accommodated within the hegemonic control of capital under combined and uneven development model.

From Occupy Wall Street to Black Life Matters

The George Floyd’s murder acted as a spark to burn the prairie fire. According to some astute observers, the protest of the American people is not only the reminiscent of the Anti-imperialist emancipation of the sixties against the Vietnam War but also this time, the intensity and the penetration of the movement has surpassed the sixties. The renewed vigour and people’s movement necessitate revisiting Marx’s conception of the proletariat as the emancipator, the universal, and the revolutionary class. Ellen Meiksins Wood said, “Class struggle is the nucleus of Marxism. This is so in two inseparable senses: it is the class struggle that for Marxism explains the dynamic of history, and it is the abolition of classes, the obverse or end product of class struggle, that is the ultimate objective of the revolutionary process”. The abolition of class culminates into the emancipation of the world from the alien power of capital for complete freedom of humanity and humans as individuals.
“The black life matters” is a metaphor to delineate racism as a systemic characteristic of the social relation of production of the United States of America, the global citadel of capitalism. The Occupy Wall Street movement that was started in September 2011 is still vivid in the minds of the average American. The participants in the Occupy Wall Street protest occupied the space designed and constructed by the private capital and the occupiers turned it into space for public gatherings, as their structures for discussion and governance, for medical care and sacred space for music, dance, and art. The cross-section of people participated in debate and discussion until a consensus was reached. A new kind of democratic exercise was enacted partially stepping out of the market and the state and exhilarating liberatory democratic space were termed as the “Temporary Autonomous Zones” by anarchist writer Hakim Bey. Such was the daily practice of Occupy Wall Street paralleled in more than a thousand cities around the world.
The Occupy Wall Street movement shifted the focus of mainstream political discourse of austerity to cut social services and welfare measure, the tax cut for the riches, quantitative easing to bail out the corporate, borrowing heavily to fund the wars to the income inequality and burden of consumer debt. The massive protest against inequality brought a form of direct democracy with individual autonomy to the fore. While upholding a new sense of people’s power through consensual solidarity and bypassing the organizational and party hierarchy, it could successfully challenge the dominant capitalist discourse propounded by the republicans and the tea party movement. The practicing revolutionary left has a lot to learn from such democratic channelization of people’s anger against the system. But the capitalist system could subdue this popular uprising as the question of democratic participation was not judged from the perspective of the agency for which democracy is primordial for the transformation of the system. The Obama administration, through the FBI and Homeland Security working with local police, escalated their tactics, sending infiltrators into the movement to create divisions and throw the movement off course. It entrapped participants in crimes with serious consequences and used the media to create opposition. The seizure of power by the agency of change for the transcendence of capitalism cannot be achieved without the political organization of the agent. This hierarchical political organization of the agent of change is apparently antithetical to the concept of democracy, but when conceptualized as a Marxist proposition of seizure of power by the proletarian class for the end of the existence of class, it becomes a project for extension and deepening of democracy to the highest level where democracy becomes redundant with withering away of class. Such withering away of the class is the process of withering away of the state. The participatory democracy that the Occupy Wall Street movement upheld becomes part of the revolutionary praxis. This Occupy Wall Street movement erupted in the backdrop of a deepening global economic crisis post subprime shock. The Pandemic and lockdown shock gave birth to another movement which is metaphorically termed as “Black Life Matters”.
The breadth of the uprising is astounding with antiracism protests in all 50 states and more than 500 cities plus more than 13,500 arrests in 43 cities. There were larger numbers of protesters in the streets including cities and towns of all sizes. In Washington, DC, where the crowds were multi-racial and crossed all ages, people were united in their opposition to racism and police abuse and their calls for systemic change. Few reports suggest that this time there is some participation of organized revolutionary Marxist forces within this movement. Marxism which has not lost sight of the connection between working-class struggle and the struggle for human emancipation in general can only be the guide for a systemic change for the transcendence of capitalism. The “Black lives matter” movement is fundamentally an anti-systemic and anti-capitalist movement which cannot be victorious without settling the issue of the agent of radical change. The depth of the movement has brought the question of revolution in the agenda once again after a long hiatus. The active participation of the working class irrespective of their colour has set a revolutionary dimension to the movement. This huge working-class participation has primarily been motivated by the two recent developments, one internal and other external to the capitalist system. Globalization is inherent in capitalism. But the phase of neoliberal globalization linked with the restructuring of the production process and the shifting of the industries to the developing countries for labour arbitrage caused certain changes in the labour markets of both metropolitan centers and the peripheries. The increase of the reserve army of labour in the peripheries also creates downward pressure on the wages of the centers due to the homogenization of productivity of labour to a certain extent. The US economy was reeling under the pressure of the increasing unemployment rate even during the pre-pandemic period. COVID-19 has altered experiences of work and time and the state. When millions are put in that position, the networks of credits that fund production are thrown into turmoil. Capitalists make investment decisions drawn by the promise of future value, so today’s loss of production without a guarantee about when it might resume means havoc long into the future. For today’s multinational corporations, which care little about the use-values they sell provided they generate exchange value, the real economic impact of the disruption of supply chains is their effect on value chains. The US president was fretting between saving the economy and saving lives with his personal interest in facing the election and his business empire, but so far miserably failed in both front. George Floyd’s death gave a spark and rekindled the revolutionary spirit of the working class intermingled within an undefined mass of people who appeared before us as black and white. That terrified the ruling dispensation.

Indian Phenomena

A similar phenomenon happened in India too. The initial triumphalism of the power-that-be was met with the resilience of the migrant workers. If all forms of migrant workers are considered, they constitute almost one-third of the total population. We could identify them because they fought a defensive battle alone by defying the rule of both the market and the state. The market for the exchange of their commodity of labour-power was closed for them, but the market wanted them to wait at the site of their workplace for commodity exchange at an opportune moment. The state in support of the market initially tried to force them to follow suit in the name of disaster management rules of the Pandemic. But the migrants on their own volition created a space in the street beyond the logic of both the state and the market. They proved that life and life alone which contains their labour-power as its integral part is more important than the segregation of labour-power to sell to the market and keep the body for the state to control and dictate. The ruling dispensation which initiated the logic of saving the lives first under pressure from the elite classes, who were the initial victims of the Pandemic, has been caught in doldrums when the migrants started internalizing that logic. The migrant unconsciously defied the logic of both the state and the market. The ruling dispensation is terrified with the thought of a possibility that any conscious effort for popular uprising may jeopardize the ruling class hegemony.

Marxism Revisited

But from a Marxist point of view, it remains to be answered who is the agent for revolutionary change. Those who consider Marxism as a set rule instead of a process of transition beyond capitalism will be inclined to cite the definition of the communist manifesto which stated, ‘The modern working class – the proletarians’, ‘who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. The proletarians are fundamentally different from other lower classes: ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” These proletariats in a Marxist sense are ‘doubly-free ’wage-workers, they are free to sell their labour-power or to die. But the majority of the working class in today’s world is slave-like contract-workers, the service workers, the so-called self-employed workers, the virtual workers, and other such workers. These workers are free to die, but not free to sell their labour-power. They are not the same as the industrial proletariats of Marx’s time. There is no social taboo for doing any kind of work in the American society though there are coercions of various kinds on non-whites for doing certain kinds of works and that makes this society so vibrant that the white workers and the people jump into the fray in the street with ‘Black life Matter’ flag aloft.
In Indian society, there are social taboos; the division of labour maintains the caste faultlines. The white-black, Hindu-Muslims, Uppercaste-Lowercaste is the time-space where obscurantist forces, be it white supremacist or Brahminical communalist, and the capitalists can live together for the use of the division through faultlines for their own respective benefit, so long as the hegemony of the system is not disturbed.
But this time, the active revolt of the American workers and the passive revolt of the Indian workers brought a new reality to the surface for the social observers to formulate the strategy for radical change. The black elites in the US and the Dalit elites in India have taken refuse behind the powers-that-be because the traditional hegemonic structure with some reforms from above places them in lucrative high-echelons of the power structure. For any radical change and revolutionary seizure of power, the identification of the uncompromising agent for change is of utmost importance to build a project for systemic change.
The formulaic version of Marxism ends with the communist manifesto as if it is the Quran and the Bible. Marx did not become a Marxist for discovering any formula or a theory to emulate and chose data to fit into it. Marxism is a process and it teaches us to analyse the here and now and also a moment of history. That’s why Marx could write to Vera Zasulich on the pre-capitalist primitive commune, “the commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia”, Marx could review and change his position on Asiatic Mode of production.

The Solidarity Matters

The mighty leader of the world superpower built trenches and fences surrounding the citadel of his power center due to the active revolt in the US, and Indian larger than life demi-god at the helm of affairs of powers ordered the American Boeing company to build two super-priced aircraft with all high-technology security apparatuses. When leaders distance themselves from the people to issue sermons and send batons and barrels for the people to follow suit, it is highly logical to conclude that they are scared by the angst and anger of the people and their solidarity. The rulers do not fear the protesting students within the university campuses, but they become apprehensive when the students dare to unite with the broadest masses of workers and peasants, to fight on the front of their struggle. Capitalism may or may not collapse by its own internal mechanisms. Marx did argue for the necessity of this crisis, but capitalism cannot be transcended without the agent and the highest form of popular solidarity for the revolutionary seizure of power.

Time only tells, “ORA BHOY PEYECHE*, COMRADE”.

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The Pandemic and the state Part : I

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( baisya_arup@rediffmail.com )


https://www.frontierweekly.com/views/may-20/13-5-20-The%20Pandemic%20and%20the%20state-1.html?fbclid=IwAR30gcti_fdH6q3g3HIL8SdF7yKpTqYCjtGTVHR2AHF2kvORL1lz-9Tfx1E


The Pandemic and the state : Part-I : Domestic situation and the task of the left

The Pandemic and the state
Part-I: Domestic situation and the task of the left

Arup Baisya

Introduction

The best part of Marxist discourse is that it teaches us to dig deep below the surface to uncover the underlying relationship and process and that’s why Marxism itself is a process. In this context, it is not incongruous when G. A. Cohen asks “If Physics, the science of matter, cannot be designated by any ism against any particular name of the scientist because it’s a progressive discipline, is it pertinent question to ask why the social science be designated by any such ism? Is it not a progressive science?” Marxism unveils the surface relation of commodity exchange, where the labour-power becomes a commodity for exchange in a Capitalist society, is the manifestation of the social relation of production which is dynamic and always in motion. But even after a prolonged period of demise of really existing socialism in erstwhile Soviet Russia and entire Eastern Europe, the dominant discourse of Marxist praxis is revolving around the surface categories and confines the working-class movement within the domain of the game of bargaining within the capitalist system.

The Plan Vs. the Market

This dominant and parliamentary left in India focuses on Plan Vs. Market contradiction and the state-planned economy prevailing over the Market rule as the point of departure as well as a qualitative change. This obscures the fact that capital and its process of accumulation and profit plays as the constant category in the contradictory denomination of plan and market and the real question of the class character of the state goes beyond the political imagination of the working class. They shift their coordinates of observation and rests on Galilean transformation and conveniently forget that the capital with its profit and accumulation is the constant from whatever coordinate one observes and that’s why the observer must opt for Lorenz transformation for relativity, the relativity of class position i.e. the dynamics of the social relation of production and the intervention of the class whose interest is served by the power of the state. Charles Bettelheim cogently said, “The effective process of work, production, distribution, consumption which take place in the workplace, in the production units, in the consumption units, and which the plan is supposed to determine, can only have a very distant relation to what the plan anticipates, a circumstance which can transform the latter into a “myriad reality”. Such a process of mythification can itself be analysed only in terms of class and ideological relations.” The long drawn out history of capitalism has revealed the fact that the ‘Leissez faire’ economy is a misnomer and capitalism cannot survive without the support of the state. The distinction between the neoliberal phase of the economy and its earlier phase is the mere domination of the market over the state. The plan and the market can pari passu exist and also one may prevail over the other. But the moot question is the dynamics of the social relation of production and the regulation of its movement by the political class power. So, the vision of the left to go beyond capitalism primarily depends on the empowerment of the toiling masses as a whole and proletariat in particular.

So programme for radical change must begin with a question of ‘who is in control’ of the production process. Revolution does not only mean the dislodging or overthrowing ruling class from the control of the state but also the change of relation between state, capital, and labour in a radical way. It means the revolution is also a social revolution. From the global perspective, it also means bridging the metabolic rift between labour and nature to ensure the existence of an individual in nature through creatively controlled productive activity and that can be only be ensured by replacing the productive activity destructively dominated by capitalist-expansion or globalization of capital. The process of proletarianisation in a developing country cannot be articulated in isolation. The conditions of labour in developing countries are incomparably worse than the developed countries. But the countries concerned are an integral part of the system of capital and labour. The conditions of the labour market were deteriorating everywhere, including the western capitalist countries before the unprecedented Covid19 Pandemic.

Capitalist Crisis and the lockdown

The Kondratieff crisis of capitalism started in the late 1960s or early 1970s that led to the neoliberal policy paradigm which has traversed its full cycle to reach the cul-de-sac. Though the meteoric rise of speculative financial market and the process of labour arbitrage and the accumulation through displacement, the rate of falling profit due to change of organic composition of capital for capitalist competition leading to monopoly capitalism could somehow be managed from time to time, the crisis of overproduction due to the unabated accumulation of capital prevail across the capitalist global system. The Capitalist policymakers strived to keep the capitalist machine running through a bubble economy. The debt bubble followed by the US Subprime crisis in 2008-09 which was mitigated by quantitative easing (QE) and based on the logic of “too big to fail” was on the verge of bursting before the eruption of Covid19 Pandemic and the lockdown thereon.

The concept of ‘Market Justice’ and ‘Money illusion’ that has been created during neoliberal restructuring has now come to a halt by the Corona lockdown, the root cause of this catastrophe being capitalism itself due to the complete metabolic rift between labour and nature. But this inevitable consequence of the journey of capitalism also gives rise to the opportunity of building new relation between human beings and nature in contradistinction to the primitive communism where men were part of nature as well as a part of the animal kingdom too as unintelligent unconscious being. Due to the Corona lockdown, the global supply chain and massive revenue-generating private productive and service sectors have almost been completely disrupted, and wealth destroyed. Due to a fall in consumption, oil shock and Russia – US tug-of-war on curtailment on production is looming large, but the revenue saved by oil-importing countries like India can be expended on health-sector. The offensive stance of the US against China necessitates closure ties between Russia and China for their mutual benefit.

Due to the breaking down of the global supply chain, production, and circulation of most of the essential FMCG products for exchange value are now operative on a very limited scale within the domestic market. Another such booming market is in the health sector and that too mostly confined in domestic requirement. Health and food are the two things that are required most now. The farmers’ produced needs to be reached to the people and exchanged. But an exchange cannot be possible as people who lost their jobs do not have money and due to disruption in the market-driven supply chain. One option for the Government in power is the intervention of state through large scale purchase of agricultural goods with support price and ensure delivery to the consumers, universal ration system, community kitchen, and putting money in the hands of the people. A similar massive intervention of the state in the health sector is the only option.

Two options for the ruling class

The illusory and anti-people ‘Market Justice’ took its toll on the people and then its Capitalist production process itself entered the blind alley of crisis due to overproduction and now collapsed by this Corona catastrophe. This should revive the concept of ‘Social Justice’ where the state acts for the welfare of the people. Indian Govt is making its move through baby steps without giving any sign of a paradigmatic shift. It allocated a very meager amount of money for people’s welfare, transferring some amount of funds to the states respecting the federal spirit. But to take a giant stride, the Govt needs to change its policy decisions which the govt is hesitating to take to keep the corporate private players, who are visualising this catastrophe as an opportunity due to wealth destruction, in good humour.

CII is still advising austerity and asking govt to keep the money for the bailout of banks in case of failure or run. Vedanta chairperson posing himself as a great philanthropist, upholding the plight of daily wage earners, and making a huge charitable donation is advocating a theory of “the state has no business in business” and advising the govt to withdraw from its business which is still under govt control. Private hospital owners started nudging the govt for fiscal support for their revenue loss. This indicates a new kind of nationalism is on the platter now whereby the rate of exploitation will increase with a new restructuring of the working class. In this policy framework, both the ruling class parties, BJP and Congress, may converge on policy issues.

But the most reactionary forces of the power-that-be are still eyeing on the neoliberal policy framework. The defining feature of the neoliberal era is the large-scale shift of this production process to low-wage countries. The rate of exploitation and accumulation of profit is increased through a low investment of fixed and variable capitals i.e. transfer of capital. Rising surplus-value through expanding the exploitation of Southern low-wage labour is the wage-arbitrage driven globalization of capitalist production process which directly corresponds to the reduction of wages below their value. The neo-liberal regime of monopoly capital has thus taken the full control in the production process of developing countries and to ensure the super-exploitation of labour and nature of third world countries and the abundant supply of cheap labour and wealth, the accumulation through dispossession or continuation of primitive accumulation is increasingly important for capitalism’s survival in its present phase of capitalist crisis. This accumulation through dispossession is creating a reserve army of labour which creating downward pressure on the wages. By uprooting of hundreds of millions of workers and farmers in Southern nations from their ties to the land and their jobs in protected national industries, neoliberal capitalism has accelerated the expansion of a vast pool of super-exploitable labour.

Global labour arbitrage or super-exploitation is forcing down the value of labour-power. The proletarians of the developing countries are its first victims, but broad masses of working people in the imperialist countries also face destitution.

The rate of exploitation (the ratio between necessary labour time and surplus labour time) is increased by increasing the absolute surplus value (lengthening working day) and by increasing relative surplus value (increasing the productivity of labour through technology). But the global labour arbitrage, the driver of the global shift of production to the low-wage nation, is the form of surplus-value for super-exploitation which is ensured in the global south for rising unemployment due to the inability of modern production method to soak up enough labour, a much harsher labour regime, political repression, etc.

The Pandemic lockdown has displaced the migrant workers back to their rural base. The huge retrenchment of workers is going on and thus raising the rate of unemployment. The huge social cost that needs to be expended for engaging the living labour with the productive machine for kickstarting the production process necessitates the intervention of the state with a policy of generating domestic market instead of export-driven growth only model. Though the export market has drastically shrunk due to the lockdown, demand crunch, and the global tendency of the countries for a shift towards inward-looking domestic economic policies, the corporates are averse to such paradigmatic shift from export-led growth only model to the domestic national economy. The most reactionary forces within powers-that-be consider it as an opportune moment to attract the FDI of the corporates to shift their investment from China to India when China is imposing state control over the market rule. These foreign private players may shift their production unit to India only when the cheap labour, ownership rights with 100% stake or by other means, land grabbing through forced displacement and other facilities are extended to them provided other factors like global scenario for export demand, etc. are favourably changed post-lockdown economic reconstruction. This entails curtailment of workers’ rights, enhancement of pre-capitalist repression based on caste and community, etc. But the ruling class is also aware of the fact that such a policy framework not only fail to resolve the crisis but also aggravate the crisis and class conflict and militant protest.

Ideological front

Indeed, the “theories” peddled by the Hindutva outfits for the treatment coronavirus like cow-dung and cow urine are met by people with contempt at this time and the crisis itself is a good teacher for building scientific temper. It is also naïve to ask the question to Mr. PM’s “Dia Jalao” program, “Where is the science in it?”. It is like asking “Where is the science in Space, Time or Spacetime?”. The argument that science is defeated in Mr. PM’s program is an unreasonable argument and self-defeating.

But an attempt has been made to transform it into an imaginary construction of “Patriotism” which reifies or fetishises the real social solidarity and thus obscures the real social consciousness which leads us to be patriotic to the people belonging to a territory defined as India.

What Mr. PM did was an attempt to take it to an imaginary plank to epitomise the meaning of patriotism within himself to arrogate the power of people as an icon who can rule and thus serve the interest of India Inc and corporates and becomes their darling.

The patriotism with a herd popular mindset behind an icon is a transient phenomenon and may be effective for a very short term. But the herd mentality, if not reversed very quickly, has its adverse ramification. The loss of rationality and good sense may even confuse the long drawn out battle against the invisible enemy through a misleading signal. The counter-narrative of patriotism needs to be built from below by the power of the toiling masses and educated rational minds. Everything does not go as smoothly as the ruling class envisages, this is now unfolding itself.

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The Pandemic and the state : Part-II

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The Pandemic and the State Part-II: Politics Commands: Why Vacillate?

Arup Baisya

This revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in riding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. (Marx in German Ideology)

Freedom and capitalism

Engel reiterated Hegel in Anti-Durhing, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”. What is this necessity? The answer to this question is unveiled in how Marx dealt with Capitalism as a process. The capitalist world as delineated by Marx is an inverted world where everything is objectified by the dynamic process of capitalism. Capitalism appears to be the subject that mediates through the human labour objectified as the productive force along with other material objects like a machine and raw material i.e. means of production. The capitalist law of value drives the relation between the Capital and labour, and within the domain of this relation, Capitalists become the capital personified.

The transcendence of the Capitalism is the journey from unfreedom to freedom, freedom of humanity through a transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship which, in essence, the evolution of democracy to its highest form surpassing the bourgeoise democracy through withering away of the state. The moment at which this journey to freedom can begin is the moment of revolution which precedes by a paradigm shift in the normal theoretical discourse. The Paradigm as defined by Thomas S. Kuhn “On the one hand, it stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community. On the other, it denotes one sort of elements in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.”

The Paradigm shift and the revolution

Once the capitalist paradigm through which to view the society has been found, the theoretical endeavour goes on adjusting any systemic anomaly which comes in conflict with the observation. If one fails to adjust the anomaly, it is the “the carpenter (the theorist) who blames his tools”, not the capitalist paradigm. This dominant paradigm is rejected only by substituting it with another. This substitution or a paradigm shift begins when the anomalies are so strong that it leads to crisis and those who adhere to reform or revisionism within the capitalist system resist or ridicule such paradigmatic shift. They are determinists and at the same time voluntarists who think that at any given time, the range of possibilities is determined by what has gone before, but within this range genuine choices are possible. This very general principle, however, by no means exhausts the Marxian position. It is more important to consider Marxism as the revolutionary idea which can emerge as a dominant paradigm after a prolonged period of stability of a given capitalist social order to be followed by a revolutionary transition to a new social order.

The proletarian character of a revolution, in fact, depends more on the dominant role of the proletarian ideology and of the party which embodies this ideology, than on the “numerical” strength of the proletariat. Despite the example of a proletarian revolution in a backward country like Russia under the leadership of a Bolshevik Party, the demise of the organised working class in large industries during the neo-liberal restructuring instilled a defeatist mindset within the practicing Marxists who interpreted the Marxist philosophy more as an idea to adjust working-class position within the paradigm of capitalism than as a philosophy to transcend capitalism. But at this given moment, the anomalies which have emerged within the system and surfaced for the observer to visualise are so strong that the paradigmatic shift for a radical politics of change can challenge the efficacy of the capitalist paradigm and grab the imagination of the masses to become a formidable force to break the notion of TINA factor to transform the working class into a ruling class for a new social order.

The Indian development and the working class

In the first part of this series “The Pandemic and the state”, the options before the ruling class and the communist parties are dealt with. This part of the series deals with a revolutionary political line that can emerge mot only through ruthless criticism of capitalism but also revisionism. This necessitates the brief mention of the history of the development of the Indian economy to keep it in perspective.

From the experience of the colonial period and the Chinese experience of ‘erosion and retention’ of feudalism under imperialism and the Chinese revolution, it was presumed that the intertwining of feudal class and the capitalist class alliance of imperialism and feudalism thereon provides the best conditions for imperialist super-profits. So, the battle against caste or feudal class is the battle against feudalism and as such, this struggle by itself is the struggle against imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. The real manifestation of this struggle in the vast expanse of the agrarian sector is the struggle against the ownership of land and other means of agricultural production of the upper castes.

The objective reality of the rural and urban landscape of India has already undergone a drastic change. After long post-independent dirigiste Nehruvian development strategy under uneven and combined global development model and especially after neo-liberal development spree post-eighties, there has been a long haul of concomitant proletarianisation and pauperisation. The migrants who were only represented as dry data for the policymakers and analysts to make them fit in capitalist law of value have now struck a decisive blow to the mass social consciousness by their passive rebellion of exodus against the systemic capitalist rules of disciplining labour. The workers in the service sector who sells their labour-power to the capitalists who in turn sell the service of the labour to the consumers also deserted their site by defying the order of the state and thus temporarily snapping ties with capitalist relation of submission and discipline. This exodus and strenuous journey to their home by itself is a rebellion on their volition. They find themselves in a cultural and political void where there are strong anomalies in the prevailing system, but the absence of any radical political endeavour for a paradigm shift. This itself challenges the myth ingrained in the defeatist mindset of a section of the left that the politics and ideology of a proletarian party cannot bring the revolutionary agenda into fore in absence of large-scale industrial workers who are really subsumed into capital.

The Govt policy and the Indian big bourgeoisie

Now it is amply clear that the Indian ruling class is settling down for a policy of “Privatised Keynesianism”. Both the rate of unemployment and the rate of exploitation are increasing in real terms. New sectors have indeed opened for the capitalists for trillion-dollar business and accumulation of profit. But the menacing crisis of overproduction due to accumulation of wealth is not going to be resolved in near future, rather it is deepened further due to Pandemic and lockdown. The new opportunities of investment with the strong support of the state are not going to compensate for the job losses before and after lockdown, the unemployment rate which indicates a capitalist crisis beyond a threshold is not only going to prevail, but also deepen. Unlike previous instances of capitalist history, the new technology Cybernetics instead of generating new employment opportunity retrenched workers, this time the Robotics or AI is going to play the same role.

A balancing act between the market and the state in which the present dispensation in power is envisioning to serve the interest of the domestic bourgeoisie is not going to generate the domestic market in the backdrop of the high unemployment rate. The rural agricultural economy can be revamped only in the backdrop of an industrial and urban earning population whom the agricultural produces feed. In the backdrop of the breaking down of the global value chain, large scale FDI in India cannot be expected at this moment. The foreign manufacturers of spare-parts may shift their production to Vietnam and Mexico for labour arbitrage, but not in India in the immediate future, at least before economic revival. When US President Donald Trump imposed import tariffs, the Indian big bourgeoisie Jindal’s JSW invested one billion dollars for establishing a steel manufacturing plant in the US. Mittal, Jindal, Adani et el invest in foreign countries in steel, mining, etc. Indian big bourgeois is a partner in mining activities with Chinese companies in Africa and they adopt the form of colonial exploitation in African countries.

The Pandemic and productive restructuring

Due to the lockdown and the Pandemic, the focus on productive sectors has been undergoing a shift towards the manufacture and as a result, the old manufacturing capitalists are once again coming to the limelight surpassing or reducing the one-sided influence of capitalist like Ambanis, etc. In this crisis situation when both production and labour processes have been drastically disrupted, the diverse section of the big powerful bourgeoisie is keen on grabbing the opportunity to exploit the domestic market and unitedly putting their weight on the govt to create pressure for the domestic policy of “Privatised Keynesianism”. But this policy of the Govt is going to face popular resistance from the masses including the middle classes because this will not only fail to address the systemic crisis but also aggravate the crisis. The certain belated gesture of addressing the grievances of migrants and popular classes through a small bit by bit measures is the sign of vulnerability of the powers-that-be too, but it is logical to conclude that these positive gestures will revolve around the domain of dominant paradigm and will be reversed in case the increasing pressure from the masses challenges the very foundation of the dominant paradigm itself. The rhetorical stance of the Govt by delineating this policy as “vocal for local” and “country going global” instead of the Nehruvian model of import substitution actually bears the essence of this “privatized Keynesianism” with an eye on FDI in future with a focus on export. Will the popular resistance transform itself into a political struggle for radical change under the pedagogic guidance and leadership of a proletarian party?

Critique of revisionism and Marxism

For this to happen, a ruthless critique of both capitalism and revisionism needs to be launched while leading the proletarians for the broadest popular unity. To achieve this broadest unity of the masses, we must also understand that like combined development (in the center and periphery), the uneven development is ingrained in capitalism and the unevenness is ubiquitous throughout the system. The unevenness is accentuated when capitalism reached its imperialist stage of exploitation. This unevenness is marked by the presence of pre-capitalist relation which is moulded and shaped by the combined development under capitalism to ensure its profit and accumulation.

Karl Marx dwelt on the dual nature of labour under capitalism. On the one hand, argues Marx, labour is abstract labour, involved in producing commodities for the market, objectified as value, expressed in the exchange of commodities for money, from which capital extracts profit. On the other hand, labour is also involved in the production of use-value, concrete labour, both individual and social. Under capitalism, the two forms of labour are, he argued, in constant tension with each other. The creative, purposeful activity is subordinated to labour disciplined for the maximisation of profit. According to Marx, capitalism encounters an extreme variety of forms of land ownership, such as feudal, clan, communal (and primitive), state, etc., when it makes its appearance on the historical scene. Capital subordinates to itself all these varied forms of land ownership and remoulds them after its own fashion. If one is to understand, evaluate, and express this process, the contradictory movement of acceleration and retardation must be the starting point in understanding the development of capitalism in India in the era of imperialism.

Contradictions and revolutionary party

we can delineate the different contradictions which are at play in the present Indian society. These are (1) Capital vs labour & nature (1) Imperialist domination vs. nation (2) Competition within the compradors. (3) Compradors vs the people (4) Comradors vs the regional bourgeoisie (5) Landed gentry vs. the peasants. (6) Upper caste vs lower castes (7) Men and women (Patriarchy). But at a moment of time, one contradiction manifests itself as a principal contradiction. The Pandemic and the lockdown have changed the polity in such a way that the contradiction between Indian comprador bourgeoisie vs. the people has emerged as the principal contradiction which can be resolved in favour of the people only under the leadership of a proletarian party leading the masses. This leadership emerges from a paradigmatic shift to bring the Marxism as a revolutionary doctrine which also underlines the importance of praxis to establish the rights of the working class and their class empowerment through workplace democracy, organize the peasantry through peasant productive and organisational association for grassroot democracy and to ensure people’s participation through popular resistance movement and all these must be spearheaded with a vision to transform the working class into a ruling class, the idea of which becomes a material force when it grabs the masses. The migrants by their passive rebellion have sent a message loud and clear that this is the moment of history when the working class rises from the slumber for revolution by the slightest of internal or external shock riding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. The migrants by dint of their migration interacted with the world around them and unconsciously came out of the petty domestic wall of caste-community and language barrier. Are they destined to fail, or the communists will fail them? The History will answer in a decisive way.

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The Pandemic and the state : Part-III

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https://www.frontierweekly.com/views/may-20/23-5-20-The%20Pandemic%20and%20the%20state-3.html?fbclid=IwAR1nVSTN4MG3SIDOmUfVQlzpDBTfGhJtX8w0s25e_m-ofi_FLxyDgCrBzVk


The Pandemic and the State: Part-III: Multipolar World: The task of the communists


Arup Baisya
(baisya_arup@rediffmail.com)


Introduction

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power with an overwhelming majority in 2014 with a political agenda of supra-nationalist ‘Hindu Rastra’ through a socio-cultural mass movement of ‘Hindutva’. When they came to power and reelected in 2019, globalisation projected as ‘deregulated’ but actually regulated by dominant capital and the G7 group of states politically beholden to it, was the dominant feature of global capitalism. This is also true that this dominant feature has been facing serious political challenges from Russia-China which started advocating the idea of the Multipolar world since 1997 to extend their global sphere of influence to combat Pax-Americana. In modern capitalism under globalisation, the whole earth is considered an area of market exchange so that the economic side of social reproduction acquires the quality of the ‘world economy’. This space for social reproduction does not completely fit well with the project of the Sangh Parivar or Modi Government. Throughout the BJP’s rule to date, it has been a strenuous journey of the Modi Govt to adjust the national economic agenda to support supra-nationalist political agenda of ‘Hindu-Rastra’ and the agenda of an overarching social identity of Hindutva devoid of any diversity with the process of globalization. The inherent conflict within this broad adjustment leads the BJP Govt to keep an eye on the development of multipolar world order and project India as one of the rising powers in the global power politics. The BJP’s project is a continuation of the populist national plan of Nehru and Indira Gandhi but is different from the policy framework under the non-aligned movement during the Bandung era of Bi-Polar world. In right-wing nationalism, they ostensibly and routinely claim that efforts spearheaded by sinister external forces is a threat to the political community of Hindutva and within this discourse, they find the alibi to crackdown all forms of civil society activities and oppositional voices. This right-wing nationalism needs to shield it from the pressure to protect human rights, maintain the rule of law, and respect domestic pluralism. But this, in turn, accentuates the contradictions within the domestic bourgeois class and becomes an impediment for a smooth ride to achieve their supra-nationalist or popular nationalist political goal on the one end and on the other, the globalization that marginalises the large section people becomes antithetical to the people under the hegemonic ideological fold of Hindutva.

US Global Hegemony and Russia-China axis

The Pandemic and the lockdown which disrupted both the production and labour process in a big way have created the space for reconstruction of politics, economy, and culture anew. The US president Trump’s China-bashing has nothing to do with China’s much-hyped misinformation on the Corona epidemic, but rather with China’s bold move a step further away from the dollar-economy. The pandemic propaganda war between the US and China is an addition to the ongoing geopolitical competition that gave rise to the United States-China trade war, sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, and the battle over Huawei’s access to Western fifth-generation communications networks. If the dollar domination in the global market is adequately challenged, the loosening grip of the US to arm-twist the domestic politics world-over will be in jeopardy and the US can no longer hold its super-power position. The main immediate task to frustrate Washington in its military project has already been achieved to a great extent. Military partnerships and security cooperation with the United States has always been an object of political contention. The US military adventure in Afganistan, Iraq, etc. and the politics of regime change in Syria have met with strategic retreat. The nuclear arm-twisting with false-flag and mala fide propaganda blitzkrieg against Iran and North Korea faced befitting counter-offensive stance ignoring the US military threat and power of economic sanctions. The renewed plot of the Trump administration to destabilize the leftist Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro supported by the people and to replace him with the US puppet and traitor Juan Guaido has been foiled this time. Though the US sanction on Venezuela, sabotage on infrastructure, and stealing of its asset continue, the shrewd business move by the Russian company has offset the US sanction on Venezuelan oil trade. The partnership with US which was once viewed as an important aspect of foreign policy for security cover by the leaders of various countries like Duterte, Erdogan, Orban et el and even the US’s western allies are no longer considered as indispensable and all have found alternative potential security and economic relation with Russia and China. The cooperation between Russia and China has deepened during the Pandemic crisis for their mutual benefit and to combat the aggressive stance of the US.

Since October 2016, the Chinese currency, Renminbi is part of the basket of IMF currencies which have Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and thus has the status of the world’s ultimate virtual reserve currency. An IMF capital increase is overdue and a quota adjustment in favour of China and the corresponding adjustment in the SDR basket would enhance China’s currency vis-à-vis the rest of the world. For retaining the super-power status and hegemony over the world market, the US is desperate in maintaining the dollar domination in global trade. Only, for this reason, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for trading with Euro, Libya’s Gadhafi for introducing Gold-Dinar as a Pan-African trading currency was killed in the pretext of exporting democracy.

Pandemic and the US-China tussle

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and disruption of the global value chain due to lockdown strengthens and fuels these dynamics. The closing of borders and the curtailment of international economic exchange increased the appeal of nationalist narratives. The US government has not focused on the policies of global cooperation in health and prevention. The US president Trump started blaming the WHO for its alleged favour towards China and threatened to discontinue its funding if WHO, which is receiving fund and other support from China, does not make the course correction, but this was rebuffed by the Director-General, WHO downplaying the US image of supremacy over the world body. The US package for economic revival is more of the nature of pumping liquidity into the system than of rescuing the distressed people with fiscal support. “The Fed can lend money, but it doesn’t give away money. … These are not liquidity issues. They’re solvency issues,” said Stiglitz, the Nobel Laurette economist, who fears that with the deficit climbing to upwards of 15 percent of GDP, Congress will be reluctant to add more funds to the rescue (https://tbsnews.net/analysis/tale-two-rescue-plans-73675, site visited on 20th May 2020). The US president is eyeing on monopoly business in shifting the focus of the productive sector to health and especially on the vaccine. In the health sector, the US production industries are dependent on the Chinese supply. President Trump has appointed the former Big Pharma executive and a four-star General to lead a Manhattan project style effort to develop a vaccine for novel coronavirus. The effort, called Operation Warp Speed, has set a goal to create 300 million doses of a non-existent vaccine by January 2021. After the initial denial of any major impact of the pandemic in the US, when Trump was busy mending his own fences in the domestic front due to the sudden spurt in the viral spread, both China and Russia have made a public showing of providing medical supplies, equipment, and trained personnel to Italy and other ravaged European countries. While doing so, they have promoted the narrative that they have stepped in where the United States has failed. The viral spread from China and the Chinese help followed the old Silk Route or the route of the Chinese Belt and Road project. The ancient trade routes to Europe and the Middle East originating from China ultimately converged in Italy. Vietnam can’t close its border with China. The Chinese have put immense pressure on the Koreans, Vietnam, etc. Asian countries cannot act as they want vis-a-vis China because it’s the big power in the neighbourhood. While Cambodia closed its borders to several Western countries in mid-March, it started military drills together with hundreds of Chinese soldiers (https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Cambodia-sticks-by-China-as-it-shuts-out-West-over-coronavirus, the site visited on 20th May 2020). The Chinese diplomacy and maneuvering during this pandemic crisis have outsmarted the US in influencing many countries to feel comfortable within the club headed by Chinese big power for support and help. But the main threat to US global hegemony has come from the Chinese move to extend the influence of Chinese currency over dollar domination in global trade.

China has successfully introduced the new crypto-currency e-RMB (Yuan) in its domestic market. When the Chinese central Bank-backed cyber-currency will be launched internationally, it will make the Yuan even more attractive among trading partners and as a reserve currency. China is also emphasizing state-controlled domestic production and market with a trend-reversal from export-led growth and in that event, China may divest its huge reserve of US treasury to the tune of about 1.2 trillion US dollars into purchasing assets abroad paid in US-dollars. The growing strength of Chinese currency within the countries where China is investing for Road and Belt project will reduce the need for dollar reserve in China. If a large proportion of world trade and reserve are denominated in Yuan, the dollar hegemony will be jeopardized.

This threat to the US hegemony both in Military strategy and dollar trade has agitated the US for China-bashing on the issue of Corona Pandemic. The Chinese trend-reversal in the policy of productive activity may increase the value of labour-power in the Chinese market and this may lead to some relocation of foreign industries making various components to the destination of cheap labour in Vietnam and Mexico, but not the industries of final products for the attraction of Chinese domestic market.

European Model

Is there any European model for meeting the economic crisis due to Pandemic for economic revival?

Washington led neoliberalism was already discredited after the 2008 financial crisis and its appeal has been further lost its impact during the pandemic crisis due to the US’s inability to help mitigate the deepening economic distress by the Pandemic and lockdown in Europe. When the millions of workers are thrown out of their jobs because of the pandemic and lockdown which halted many activities, nearly all European countries are reimbursing workers’ income directly through their employers at levels from about 60 to 90 percent of wages. Germany launched a very successful programme called Kurzarbeit during the last financial crisis during 2007-08. This programme allowed the companies to keep workers on reduced hours, with their reduced paychecks underwritten by the state and thus averted the joblessness.

Since the pandemic began, Germany has fine-tuned the program to offer more benefits and make sure more companies qualify. France’s work support programme has also swelled. Most of the European countries have undertaken a huge state-funded programme to address the labour market shock as an immediate fiscal measure. But heavily indebted countries and southern Europe with rapidly growing unemployment are pressing for ambitious Pan-European programme with large EU funds and “Coronabond”. For an effective European project, Germany and too some extent France must play the leadership role. Germany, for continuing with the center-periphery relation with its backward backyard, is still hesitant and resisting the call of the Southern European countries. Both the US and China also do not want that Europe emerges as one of the global powers in Euro-Zone to sustain their sphere of influence and dominance over the European countries which are economically weak and badly affected by the Pandemic. It is to be seen how long Germany can resist the pressure for a European bailout package. But the overall thrust of the European model to face the economic crisis due to Pandemic and lockdown is the state intervention to protect their labour-force and to address the rising unemployment rate.

The Indian scenario and the communists

The Indian big bourgeoisie is visualizing this crisis and the global situation as an opportunity to restructure the domestic production process and the productive activities for the accumulation of profit and to become the leader of the subcontinent. But their strategy to restructure the labour process to lower the wage rate and deepening the rate of exploitation will be counter-productive and will not give any leeway to bargain with the world powers. The Indian Government in power with its philosophy of “Hindu Rastra” is hesitant to tread the path of democracy for self-reliance to become a big power in the changed global scenario. To be a self-reliant big power, Indian needs to empower its peasantry and working-class and that necessitates abandoning the Hindutva Supra-nationalist project. The BJP Government has become a prisoner of indecision from the two diametrically opposite pressure from the rising unemployment and distressed agriculture on the one end and its political agenda to promote “Hindu Rastra” on the other. So far India’s policy thrust to revive the economy is somewhat in between the US model of crisis management of pumping liquidity in the system and the European model of rescuing the workforce but tilted in favour of the private capitalists while responding to the workers’ pressure with hiccups, and BJP government is still gerrymandering for electoral political space. It is indicative of a trend of diluting the Hindutva politics to some extent to opt for building and strengthening a regime of authoritarian national populism for which space has opened for them due to a shift in the focus of global politics and breakdown of global value chain due to lockdown. But this policy drive of the BJP Government will face popular resistance due to rising unemployment and distress. The success of the BJP vis-à-vis Shangh-Parivar’s project is dependent on the failure on the part of the communists and democrats to formulate an alternative project to be built from within the dynamics of people’s resistance. This is the opportune moment for the communists too for building mass resistance movement with a vision for raising the working class to the status of the ruling class and for a developed self-reliant democratic India. It necessitates the communists to adopt an alternative political agenda diametrically opposite to the national populist or ultra-nationalist project.

Alternative political Agenda

(1) To create a united workers’ front to build a radical movement and to opt for a radical programme for the solution of India’s peasant problem.

(2) To build co-ordination among all the people’s movement in the subcontinent and to oppose regional big-brotherly expansionism.

(3) To build fraternal coordination among all working-class parties of all countries with a focus on world socialism and to mount pressure for the working class rights, the democratic restructuring of international institutions, for funding of developed countries to meet the challenges of climate change and finally, for building alternative federal democratic institutions as an international center for the communists.

(4) To oppose the imperialist policy of expansionism and the attempt to destabilise the left party rule in Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

https://nayaganatantra.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/pandemic-ptiii/?fbclid=IwAR3TAMVYOo8Ab5Qs1STREITOKb9vHR2SbRh4cRqmBA_zY4OdOZ3HcDfhuXM

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