From what Arundhati Roy has to say, it’s like the upper classes of India are in effect conducting a hostile occupation of everybody else. I’ve heard her and others talk very bitterly about the problems in India, and talk about the resistance movements needed, but this interview goes beyond that. It’s almost fatalistic. She seems resigned to the prospect of rebellion, pogroms, police massacres, India spiralling down into chaos. I find it quite frightening:
Unlike industrializing Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labor to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons.
The government and the corporations reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down people’s throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only barometers the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit has hit the fan, folks.. . .
There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a series of judgments that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away . . . The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colors fade to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them?
. . .
While our economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some fucking superpower this.
I've got a lot of respect for Arundhati Roy . . . she doesn't seem to be a natural activist, if such a thing there is. I think she'd still rather be writing fiction, and has indicated that she felt far more natural doing that than writing politically. And it's not like she didn't have a career in fiction; The God of Small Things won the Booker! And yet she's basically abandoned that for activism, I guess because she thought it needed to be done. In a way one loss I feel keenly from all the destruction the Indian upper classes are wreaking is the loss of the books Roy might have written if their vicious ruination hadn't called her away from her writing.
But this interview scares me. It seems there are far higher prices being paid, and far higher prices yet to be paid.
It's sad. The British encouraged the caste system as a divide and conquer technique, and it's been working exceedingly well to this day.
The ideology that poor people "deserve it" is way to pervasive in the world today.
Sometimes it seems hopeless.
PLG, you don't have to look half-way around the world. Just look south. There is poverty a-plenty right here in our own hemisphere.
I don't doubt it.
Actually, I've posted about New Orleans; it's a horrible situation where the government seems to be deliberately condemning its own citizens to internal exile for the benefit of developers.
But India is a dashed important place, and where hundreds of thousands of people may have lived in New Orleans, a billion people live in India.
Plus, I think it's important to look half way around the world. We can get wrapped up in our own problems, or in exclusively the problems of whoever the US is attacking today. But the other people are real too, and injustice isn't only injustice if the US government is doing it; neoliberalism isn't only a US-based problem. I don't mean to suggest that you think otherwise. I'm just saying, the push for corporate rule is global, as is the resistance to it, as is human misery. I think we get important perspective on the problems facing us by expanding our view past the particular North American experience, so we can realize the general characteristics aren't just a specific set of North American institutions. Americans, for instance, often seem to think that if they can just get rid of the corrupt, rigid two-party system everything will change. Well, you know, probably not, because nobody else has it and they manage to have similar problems.
Look what NAFTA did for Mexican peasants, ... who thinks they decided that they wanted to live in freezing tenements, cleaning our toilets or slaughtering our meat, hiding out from immigration?
Look what capitalism did for Russia ... life expectancies down, homelessness, crime, prostitution way up.
Why are people committing suicide or flooding cities as beggars and prostitutes in India and China?
What's neoliberalism done for us here in Canada? Who remembers the extent of homelessness in Toronto before the mid-1980s, and what was it like in comparison to today?
I have been hearing (reading) lately about some problems in India. One accused Ghandi of being a 'reverse marxist', Ghandi did not treat the 'untouchable' problem believing that class would fade away in his New India. The flip side of Marx, who felt that the old world would fade at the abolution of classes.
Perhaps I should have paid more attention to more fundamental things - why bring it up now? If there are a wholelotoflittleproblems, there is sure as shooting (literally) a BIG PROBLEM BEHIND IT.
I am still digesting the entire interview - when she observes that: "non-violent movements have knocked at the door of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and have been spurned and humiliated." I see an black future predicted (arising from a black past, for that matter). This is reinforced when she notes that revolutionary Algeria has become reactionary, S. Africa honours Suharto, and the brave anti-Nazi fighters are now the neo-liberals promoting the WTO.
Perhaps this is best enunciated in the sentence: "While everybody’s eyes are fixed on the spiraling violence between government-backed militias and guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theater being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh." The powerful and the fragile are united in some kind of symbiosis.
If there is any light to be seen it is in small movements - the detris of the CPI in the multitude of smaller parties - and in her admiration for:"... the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I admire that."
Beyond that, the future looks as bleak as the past. Yet, with people around that can make such a pentrating analysis, things cannot be that bad. (Can they?)
I think that part of the problem is that the oppressive systems that she's talking about happen also to be very efficient oppressive systems. How do you take on a system that is so good at production that its opponents have to depend on it in order to attack it?
Well, while I agree that for its purposes the oppressive system is efficient, it's nearly always the case that opponents of a system have to depend on it in order to attack it. Doesn't matter if it's feudal or Athenian slaveholding property-owner democracy or Egyptian royalty+priests or what.
Actually, it might be argued that resistance to the system has actually become more frequent and more successful over the past century or so than it's ever been before. Take medieval England. Plenty of dynastic squabbles, fights with Wales and Scotland, blah blah blah. In hundreds of years, one or two peasant revolts--and they were ruthlessly suppressed. Ancient Rome--masses of civil wars, assassinations, internal strife of all kinds. Only one or two truly major slave revolts. Quite a lot of riots by the mob in the city of Rome, but the politics involved were generally inchoate at best.
The lower classes have actually gotten much better at revolting lately, or (flip side o' coin) the ruling systems have actually gotten less stable.