scribbles

Belated Responses to Gaza - 3

2009-03-03T16:47:00.002Z

This Wieseltier poem actually says it all, and no need for exegesis:

CALL-UP

So they'll call the Little Prince
stick a submachine gun in his hand and say:
you might have come from another star
but now you're here
and that's not an elephant you see
from under the painted hat, but a tank.
The lamplighter's a terrorist
and if you don't wipe out those sheep
it'll be your head instead.
That's how it is, little prince.

on the chavez referendum

2009-03-02T20:35:00.007Z

So what is happening in Venezuela today? What does Chavez's victory in the recent referendum mean for the future of democracy in Venezuela and in Latin America? Following this victory, Chavez and other elected public representatives will be able to stand for as many terms as they like, and can only be removed by popular mandate. Chavez's earlier attempt to pass this measure, as part of a wide-ranging set of constitutional reforms, had failed the popular vote earlier; now, stripped of its associations with the other measures (which included gay and lesbian rights, workplace democracy, but also a closer integration of executive, judicial and legislative powers), it has passed the test of public opinion. It reverses a previous constitutional provision that only allows elected representatives two terms of office.

Predictably enough, Chavez was attacked for despotic pretensions during and after the referendum. What can this mean, ask the mainstream Western media, both on the liberal left and the right, but a desire to extend authoritarian controls over the country, in keeping with the Venezuelan leader's obvious love of self-advertisement, and the charisma he so evidently commands? The more hysteric versions of this have been: Chavez wants to appoint himself President for life, and this is just a cleverly executed manouevre to legitimize it. This is one in a long series of policy measures, beginning with the nationalization of the oil industry, passing through the threatened use of military force to expropriate inefficient businesses and place them in the hands of workers if they so desire, and the withdrawal of private TV broadcasting licences, designed to culminate in Stalinist, one-party authoritarian rule. So we're told.

Chavez has also been defended, and idolized, with fervour that sometimes breaks the bounds of the rational. Any criticism, any apprehensions about the trajectory of his political regime are scrutinized for signs of an imperialist agenda, in hock to the United States' foreign policy agenda. Chavez is a great revolutionary democrat, and accusations of authoritarian tendencies can only come from a Right that is deeply invested in the repressive projects of the war on terror, the stabilization of neo-liberal capitalism and economic imperialism, and the maintenance of US global hegemony. So we're told.

How, then, can the signs be read? Chavez very clearly seeks a third term as President. It is worth remarking the fact that he found the issue urgent enough to have to resolve just a few months after his reforms package had been rejected - the first time he had suffered an electoral reversal of any kind during his rule. He clearly wants to preserve his power, and he wants it urgently enough to take it to the people a second time. This was an enormous gamble, it was a wager that could not be calculated. What would the consequences have been had he lost, for his credibility inside Venezuela and in world politics at large? He would have, irresistibly, appeared as a power-hungry demagogue, desperate to indefinitely defer the passage of authority. But he gambled, and he won.

I don't have the competence or knowledge to conduct a political psychoanalysis of Chavez, to dissect his intentions, secret wishes, dreams, and pathologies. Let us assume, for the moment, that power and popular approval - both of which he clearly has in good measure - involve a certain temptation to despotism, a certain inflation of political ego. For balance, let us also assume that he identifies himself with the socio-political transformation of Venezuela quite sincerely, that this is not a corrupt, greedy bid for power but one energized by a quite genuine commitment to the ideals that he publicly upholds. What then emerges as significant, in the first place, about the events of recent months is the form of the referendum, elevated to a founding political principle by Chavez, that was used to secure this advance in authority.

Why the referendum? Is it a 'populist' measure in the simple sense of the term, a symbolic public ratification of political will, a manipulation of Venezuelans that rides a temporary crest of public approval for Chavez? This is unconvincing. All the evidence points to a genuine, grass-roots democratization of Venezuela over the last decade, whether one sees Chavez as an agent or an enemy of the process. Even if we were to dismiss the 'Bolivarian revolution' enacted by Chavez and his supporters as a disguised bid for absolute power, the forms it has taken - the extension of power to local councils and collectives, the devices of democratic self-management offered to industrial and other workers, the resurrection of political debate in the barrios, the reduction of absolute poverty, the spread of basic literacy, the democratization of health services - cannot be understood except as a profound extension of democracy, if the word is to have any meaning. Perhaps Chavez is riding the wave cynically, waiting for it to accommodate his dreams of world domination; perhaps right-wing alarmists are right about the nature of his agenda, but even if this were true, it is undeniable that the wave of popular mobilization that has rocked the country in the last ten years is, in the most radical sense, a democratic wave. If Chavez is a Stalin in drag, as right-wing journalists believe, he would have made sure to have clamped down on forms of popular authority that he could not direct. Instead, he has extended these forms immeasurably, and laid himself open to a democratic calling to account.

A decision to institute the referendum as the prime machinery of political decision-making and ratification can only make sense in such a profoundly democratic context, where power is seen to reside with the people, and their choices and decisions carry all the weight of an order. This involves taking an enormous gamble on one's own popularity, and laying oneself open to recall at a moment's notice. Morales, significantly, has triumphantly ridden out a recall referendum in Bolivia, a situation that one can easily envisage in Venezuela in the not-so-distant future.

The fact that Chavez and Morales need popular approval so desperately tells us something important about the deeply democratic shifts in political authority that have characterized the recent history of Latin America. Both leaders have 'gone to the people' repeatedly, and barely ever returned from the polls disappointed. Numerous international observers and watchdog agencies have confirmed the freedom with which Venezuelans and Bolivians have voted, and the fairness and adequacy of electoral processes. Allende, at the height of his popularity, never commanded half of Chile's vote. Neither Chavez nor Morales has ever commanded less.

'Riding a wave' is too thin a metaphor to capture the meaning of this. The power asserted on the streets when Chavez was removed by his political opponents in a US-backed coup in 2002, which forced the leaders of the coup to restore him to power, is not power that can be manipulated at the touch of a button. When Chavez's first reforms package was rejected at the polls, he accepted his defeat as gracefully as a political leader can. Whether one sees this as the sign of a profound commitment to democracy or as a pathetic attempt to recoup some Brownie points and lull democrats into a false sense of security, the point is that Chavez did not consider, for a moment, the possibility of ignoring the popular mandate and pressing ahead with reforms that were clearly very close to his heart. There can really only be two convincing explanations of this. First, that Chavez's commitment to democracy is at heart genuine. Second, that whatever the content of Chavez's own beliefs and agenda, he does not consider himself powerful enough to reverse what a 'people's verdict' has decreed - he understands that power flows to him, not from him.

Consider Chavez's successful attack upon the term limit. Some democratic countries institute term limits, others don't. The United States adopts a partial version (which doesn't apply to all elected representatives). The U.K. doesn't have it at all. India doesn't have it, except for the purely honorary and practically redundant President of the Republic. So a decision to reverse term limits, on its own, need not have to bear the oppobrium of an attack on democracy. Most of the time, a term limit is just a pragmatic safeguard against individual despotism, and has no bearing upon the many efficient structural despotisms that govern life.

The question in Venezuela, which is in the grip of a deep political and social transformation, has to be posed in different terms. Chavez's measure implies, in the context of Latin American politics, a remarkable wager on democratic approval, which might succeed or fail. By removing constitutional limits upon his own authority, and upon the authority of other elected representatives, Chavez has declared complete reliance upon the weight of public opinion in a deeply politically aware country. He knows from his continent's recent history how quickly this can change - witness Bolivia's repeated and successful mobilizations that toppled non-performing administrations, prior to Morales' assumption of power. In Latin America at the present conjuncture, with its constellations of popular protest, its radical-democratic movements of workers, peasants, unemployed, tenants, and homeless people, its feminisms and its alternative-sexualities movements, its rising expectations and its growing demands, the test of public approval is a demanding one.

But the politics of Venezuela, as shepherded by Chavez at present, also entail a wager on democracy itself, on the capacity of more and more direct forms of democratic decision-making to transcend the limits previously set by liberal-democratic, consensus-based politics. This is a more ambiguous wager, though also one that is potentially richer. It can yield disturbing results. Why, for instance, is Chavez apparently so critical of constitutional checks and balances, of the independence of legislature, executive and judiciary from one another? If we leave aside for the moment the hysteric accusations of bloodthirsty tyrant and Pol Pot-in-the-making that have been showered upon Chavez, one can see in these measures a desire to strengthen democracy's executive arm, to enable decisions to be made more quickly, executed more quickly; for justice to be dispensed more speedily and efficiently. None of these, by themselves, are suspicious desires - they attest the desire for a democracy that can deliver freedom, security and justice with greater dexterity and readiness. But the wager undertaken here is that the partial collapsing of these checks and balances will only produce a greater efficacy in democratic functioning, that 'the power of the people' will not be abused by a paranoid executive, that the democratic force exercised by popular opinion will be able to fill in the place of legal safeguards. These are deeply problematic assumptions. They militate against the liberal dogma that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the truth of that dogma has been proven enough times in the history of the twentieth century to allow a certain scepticism about Chavez and Venezuela's efforts to transcend it.

Of a piece with this is the urgency of the question of the term limit, and this brings me to another worrying question. Why did Chavez feel this question, rather than, say, gay rights or workers' control, needed to be decided so quickly, by a referendum? I personally would quite like to see Chavez at the helm after 2012, if he continues along policy courses similar to his present ones. But what was the fear of losing power in 2012 - for the liberal and right-wing critics may well be correct here, this was the fear that drove the decision to go to the people - based on? If we reject 'totalitarian' explanations of Chavez's imperatives, the disturbing thought remains that he sees this revolution as somehow bound up with his own person, perhaps that he lacks faith in his likely political successors. Now this lack of faith, this centrality of Chavez to the transformation of Venezuela, may well be true, and it may also be true that the current democratic upsurge can only be brought to fruition with him at the helm. But is this, by itself, not worrying? If Chavez's 'revolution' has not been able to accomplish a mature accommodation to the prospect of the passage of power, will this not bring it into conflict, eventually, with the checks on power that are so necessary for democracy to work? How long will it take to find a way of sustaining radical-democratic impulses that are freed of the need of reification, of their personification in a master-figure? Can this even be done?

An attack on both term limits and the separation of powers represents a very specific act of faith, a very particular kind of 'wager on democracy'. This is the belief in a self-reproducing circuit between a mobilized, politically aware people and a responsive, radical-democratic state. The latter draws its authority from the wishes of the former. Now such a circuit almost certainly does exist, at a number of levels, in contemporary Venezuela. The political climate allows this richness of everyday political experience: the decisions of leaders do have to be brought to the electorate, the wishes of people and communities can find, swiftly, a place in governmental decision-making, or at least exert a significant pressure upon it. But how long can such a moment be made to last?

The answer to this riddle is crucial, for upon it rests the future success of radical democracy in Venezuela, and in Latin America at large. At present, there is an experience of freedom, in a very precise, practical sense, that is probably without precedent in the history of Latin America, an experience that can be likened only to a revolutionary opening. But such moments of freedom and popular agency have historically been liminal; they have separated the dissolution of accepted forms of authority from the realization of new, stable forms of authority. In such situations, forms of authority instituted, democratically, at the ground level have seemed to draw unprecedented force. Direct democracy has appeared both possible and efficacious. Yet in virtually all democratic revolutions, these have been the first victims. Whether it is Lenin disbanding the 'parallel' power of the soviets, or liberal democrats more gently damping down the more transformative impulses of the Eastern European revolutions, this violent or subtle expropriation of popular power has grounded the passage of truly revolutionary transformations.

Now if Chavez's proclamations and the Bolivarian Revolution are to be taken seriously, then the only step ahead would be the 'making permanent' of this explosive democratic ferment, the transformation of every day into a new, carnivalesque experience of democracy. This may be the richest political project of our times, but it is also a paradoxical, potentially dangerous project - for its ability to sustain the democratic nerve crucial to it through hard, embattled times has never been demonstrated. How can popular, direct forms of democracy be sustained by a regime that is driven to paranoia by global hostility and that faces the wrath of national and global corporations? How can democracy itself be made the weapon with which economic and political blackmail is to be fought against? This is another crucial question, for the history of the Left is replete with instances of democracy being sacrificed to 'save' the revolution: this has been by far the dominant trajectory of state socialisms of all kinds. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America, the success of the many transformations under way will depend on the precise articulation that is achieved between democracy and revolution.

So it may well happen, now and in the years to come, that Chavez will appeal for vigilance against 'the enemies of the people' (which he's done), institute restrictions on free speech and dissidence (which, quite remarkably given what he's faced, he hasn't). Much of this may use, quite sincerely, the rhetoric of protecting the revolution. Given the past experiences of global left-wing solidarity with revolutionary regimes, a good, Kantian, a priori tactic would be - assume such measures of restriction are unjustified, even if there are compelling reasons to support them. In this respect, I'd make the provocative claim that the right-wing suspicion of Chavez is something that left-wing sympathizers - like myself, for instance - should adopt wholesale. Not because it's true - most of the time it isn't - but because the dangers of a Stalinist regression are always going to be real enough to justify, from sympathizers, the most paranoic vigilance. Whenever Chavez takes refuge in the rhetoric of the 'necessary' sacrifice of democratic principles to facilitate the revolution, or enacts policy founded on it, liberal alarmists will be right, and just, in seeing the shadow of Stalin.

This will always be a spectre that is in some measure a diversion, it will always be at some level corrupted by the taint of self-serving, 'anti-Bolivarian' propaganda, or will be easily pressed into the service of such propaganda: in other words, the danger of an 'authoritarian regression' will be a rhetorical flashlight even when there's no justification for such suspicions. But as long as Chavez continues to play a role in this fascinating, and deeply democratic, transformation, he will have to answer questions of democratic accountability, he will have to be called to account for his decisions far more rigorously than a liberal-democratic politician. If this seems unfair, it is the history of the Left that is to blame for such suspicion, not that of its adversaries. Precisely because history leaves deep marks, and because the promises held out by the Bolivarian Revolution appear so genuine and so hopeful, the duty of suspicion, even of alarmism, is incumbent upon everyone who professes solidarity. The experiments in Latin America are too real, too full of possibility, and too important to be allowed the temptation of Stalinisms of their own, temptations which have to be real and potent even as democracy deepens across the continent, and moves leftwards.

But anti-Stalinist vigilance is, in the current context, an appropriate tactic for left-wing sympathizers, and nothing more: it cannot substitute for an attempt to understand, with some precision, the dynamics of the changes in Venezuela and in Latin America at large. These dynamics cannot be understood through the democratic/Stalinist or democratic/totalitarian dualisms. They are better understood as a genuinely crucial moment within the history of democracy, as a moment when the structures of existing liberal democracy can no longer accommodate the forces, the pressures, and even the new forms of popular sovereignty that threaten to emerge from within them.

The term limit, for instance, is founded on an essentially cynical liberal-democratic dogma: the rotation of power and influence is needed to stabilize democracy, to prevent the breaking of consensus through the establishment of alternative structures of power that might exist parallel to constitutionally ratified ones, and so term limits are necessary, because they prevent individuals from building such bases, and keep power rotating, and democracy stable. At some level, isn't this particular form of faith in democratic 'turnover' essentially a cynical declaration that a political representative's capacity to win successive elections is meaningless, that she should surrender her power, for the sake of 'stability', the supreme political virtue, to opponents or successors who may command none of the same support? The fear of democratically elected representatives turning their constituencies into fiefdoms is a justified enough fear - a glance at the politics of West Bengal, for instance, brings that home sharply. But is this the only fear that grounds the belief in a limit? Isn't there, for some of the proponents of this limit, also the fear that the capacity to win elections repeatedly might confirm upon an elected representative the legitimacy and support necessary to enact wide-ranging structural transformations, of the kind that Chavez and Morales have?

I agree, broadly, with the Chavistas on the question of term limits, and with their critics on the question of the separation of powers - that is, I see the former as inessential to democracy, and the latter as essential. But in a sense the questions posed to the strategists of the Bolivarian revolution, the question that can only be answered in practice, are the same in both cases: what place does the restraint of power play in your version of democracy? The success of your revolution has so far depended upon the articulation of two dynamisms, that of popular democracy from below, and an imaginative, bold and democratic leadership from above. The two have fused together in a project, but projects are by their nature temporary. When will the project fructify, stabilize into some kind of a structure, that no longer requires this kind of willed, voluntarist politics from above, but instead is able to reproduce the flow of popular, participatory decision-making, in the same way, for instance, that the silent operation of property markets and wage-labour relationships help reproduce the logic of capitalism? Is it not inconsistent to even expect this - that a particular set of state structures will stabilize, and reproduce, popular agency? If it is inconsistent, are we then to put our faith, ultimately, in the democratic intentions and good sense of the 'leaders', after all? And what degree of hope does history allow us to have of these?

Once again, even as I write these lines, I'm aware that these questions are haunted by the spectre of Stalinism, and this is frustrating, but also necessary. Lenin and Stalin, after all, also faced a hostile world order, attempts to break their regime economically and politically: the survival of the socialist project, and of a new path for world politics, was at stake. They made their choices, and the tragedies and horrors unleashed by these choices are well known, none more so than the truly tragic horror of Stalinism, the first, catastrophic experiment in socialist despotism, from which all the others flowed. The choices made by Chavez and Morales, in a similarly hostile global conjuncture, have been radically different, but they have yet to make the decisions that Stalin made so brutally: how is the relationship between popular, democratic mobilization and the preservation of the experiment ('socialism' in one case, '21st century socialism' or 'radical democracy' in the other) to be conceived, and forged, and administered? Soviet Russia gave us the first model, a repetition of which would be unbearable, and also seems unlikely. Contemporary Latin America is the latest in a long series, but also perhaps the most powerful, of instances of an opening where that elusive 'second way' can be discovered, and enacted. In the winter of this economic crisis, what happens in Venezuela, and Bolivia, and Argentina, and Ecuador, and a growing circle of countries, may matter more for the world's future than what happens on Wall Street.

Belated Responses to Gaza - 2

2009-03-02T18:19:00.005Z

Wieseltier again. This is, oddly enough for something posted in a piece entitled 'Responses to Gaza', a patriotic poem by an Israeli. It's also one of the very few patriotic poems I've ever found genuinely moving.

Garbage Dump, 2000

I didn't like your faces from the start.
The words you spoke sounded phony.
Your plans were tiresome.
Even your women dreamed about something else.
But I carried on next to you day after day.
I simply had nowhere else to go.

Your futures looked doubtful to me.
Your fondness for your mistakes and your lies made me sick.
Your blindness wasn't even innocent.
Some appendage sprouted in you, bequeathed from a lower order of mammals.
But I kept finding myself in your company.
I was an orphan, completely broke.

I saw you polluting everything around you without restraint.
The most simple solutions you took as castles in the air.
Only desolation seemed simple and real enough to you.
Your children learned to growl in helpless agreement.
But I didn't turn my back on your company.
Somehow I learned to love and to hope.

My love and my hope had nothing to feed on.
Shadowy corners in the junkyard were all heat and rust.
Even the nights were thick and hazy.
Sated, sleepy faces displayed a vacuous denial of mortality.
But I made up my mind long ago this is where I'll end.
My body and soul have ripened as fruit of this dump.

This is a meditation that unfolds in four symmetrically conceived verses. In each of the verses, four lines announce a crippling distaste for one's inheritance, a distance from it that allows the coldest of dissections, delivered in brief, contemptuous phrases. 'I didn't like your faces from the start.' 'Your blindness wasn't even innocent.' 'Your children learned to growl in helpless agreement.' 'My love and hope had nothing to feed on.' This, for Wieseltier, is what his national inheritance can be reduced to - this is what 'belonging' really means, this is what he belongs to.

This could, then, have been an angry poem of disavowal, in the vein of a Brodsky or an Akhmatova denouncing the crimes of their 'socialist fatherland', or in the vein of Ginsberg's wonderful lines, 'Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb', delivered to Cold War America. Such renunciations - of party, of faith, of nation, of the bonds one is made to wear and made to feel proud of wearing, by all the smoke-screens and lies woven around us - are what gives much political poetry its bitterness, its prophetic, Cassandra-like force that tears away illusion and posturing, that drives it to, in Seamus Heaney's words, 'prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.'

Yet Wieseltier's poem is not an act of disavowal, it is an act of belonging. The concluding couplets of each verse affirm that belonging, that attachment which has nothing at all to do with pride or with celebration or even with hope. 'I simply had nowhere else to go.' 'I was an orphan, completely broke.' 'But I didn't turn my back on your company.' 'My body and soul have ripened as fruit of this dump.' There is a helplessness to belonging, because belonging is what we are 'thrown' into, what every act of disavowal conjures up despite itself.

These lines nail, with an honesty that is stark, bare and bleak, the impossibility of belonging in the full sense, if one refuses to suture the wounds of history and the present by masking the truth, by denying to ourselves what it is that we belong to. Our 'belonging' entails necessary complicity with 'some appendage....bequeathed from a lower order of mammals' - the angriest indictment imaginable of military-patriotic fervour, of the drum-rolls of war and national sacrifice, of the sheer, amoral animality of the stories we tell to buttress this 'belonging'. And while Wieseltier writes these lines as an Israeli, with all the poignancy that this particular denunciation/affirmation of national belonging involves, I read the poem as an Indian, and would have read it as an American had I been one, or as a Palestinian had I been one. No form of national belonging is innocent of these charges, no form of national belonging has been unwilling to dip its hands in gratuitously shed blood.

And yet, knowing all this, one belongs. One builds answers, ways out of the tragedy, 'castles in the air', and one continues, all so often, to belong, with all the self-division and the pain that this creates. When Wieseltier writes that he 'was an orphan, completely broke', this is plain truth. He and his mother and sisters (his father had been killed serving in the Soviet Army) were among hundreds of thousands who made the hungry, cold trek from Moscow when the city was evacuated in 1941, the year of his birth. He ended up in Israel in 1949, an eight-year old who had already travelled, as a deportee, through Poland, Germany and France. Quite literally, he had 'nowhere else to go.' Israel was thrust upon him, over the years, as an experience of national chauvinism, paranoia and hypocrisy that he turned his back on with disgust, but at the same time he developed attachments to the land, the air, the trees, the cities and the people in ways that could not be reduced to the nationalism he was urged to feel by his society and its state. We all do, and this, really, is all that national 'belonging' can mean if we're honest, in its simplicity and its profundity. I have never read an affirmation of country, of belonging, of identity that has moved me as much as the concluding line of 'Garbage Dump, 2000': My body and soul have ripened as fruit of this dump. For most Zionists, this would be the statement of a 'self-hating Jew', the standard appellation for Jews who choose to separate their need for a home, for security, community, belonging, from the state of Israel as it exists today, for Jews whose Jewishness refuses to be bound by 'loyalty to Israel'. Wieseltier is writing from within Israel, but his 'patriotism' has nothing to do with notions of loyalty, or faith, or sacrifice. He can affirm his belonging while denouncing all that he belongs to, without looking for imaginary succour from Zionist or utopian fantasies.

But there is more than helplessness and a surrender to belonging in the kind of attachment that Wieseltier is bound by. There is something beautiful that is usually hidden by the collectively authorized forms of 'belonging', an experience that is personal, irreducible and authentic in the only true sense of the word. For at rare moments of freedom, belonging can break the bounds of duty and break into the realms of choice. In one of his most exquisite poems, Wieseltier plucks out a sense of belonging, of homeland, that transcends nation and myth, from a memory of his childhood in the small town of Netanya. As his translator Shirley Kaufman writes, this takes the form of 'a bittersweet nostalgia for his preteen years, uncorrupted by symbols of nationalistic fervour.' Here, finally, is a form of belonging that one needn't be ashamed of.

Far From The Flag Parade

It was sweet, dark and tangy
under the heavy branches
of the citrus trees bent
around Ein-Hatkehelt and Avikhail.
I called it homeland.
Shade streaming from the trees,
the heavy heads of the Shamutti oranges
scattered around me,
a glowing, saturated yours-for-the-taking,
far from the flag parade,
I called it homeland.
That was a long time ago. A kind of piratical act
of a boy who found
something he wasn't looking for.

'Homelands' envelop us all in embraces that are suffocating and unwanted. Sometimes, though, a truer sense of home can be produced by a 'piratical act' of the imagination, which lays claim to an experience that cannot be contained in ritual genuflections to the motherland, an experience which is a 'glowing, saturated yours-for-the-taking', bereft of all the symbolisms our senses of belonging are colonized by, an experience that is always, always, far from the flag parade.

Belated Responses to Gaza - 1

2009-02-25T23:51:00.018Z

Browsing through my favourite secondhand bookshop in London, several months ago, I came across a volume of poetry by someone I'd never read or heard of, an Israeli dissident poet named Meir Wieseltier. It appears that this selection is the only available English translation of his work, and more's the pity. His apparently iconic status in Israel points to some of the complexities that have to be hidden beneath the surface of his country's rampant brutality towards the Palestinians, and the shrill rhetoric and shriller missiles that define its policy. In 2000, as his translator Shirley Kaufman puts it, Wieseltier became

the distinguished recipient of the Israel Prize, his country's highest honor, awarded on Independence Day in the millennial year 2000 in the presence of the Israeli establishment (president, prime minister, minister of education, chief justice of the Supreme Court, mayor of Jerusalem, and so on) to its most antiestablishment poet.

Here is Wieseltier himself, in a poem that is precisely dated, and precisely targeted. It is dated April 15, 2002, four days after the Israeli invasion of the refugee camp at Jenin on the West Bank, which had claimed over fifty lives and unleashed terror in the daily lives of Palestinians, as numerous personal testimonies recount. Here's Wieseltier's account of the mentality that drives such slaughter:

Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out

If I die one day from the bullet of a young killer -
a Palestinian who crosses the northern border -
or one day from the blast of a hand grenade he throws,
or in a bomb explosion while I'm checking the price
of cucumbers in the market, don't dare say
that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs -
that my torn eyes support your blindness -
that my spilled guts prove it's impossible
to talk with them about an arrangement -it's only possible
to talk with guns, interrogation cells, curfew, prison,
expulsion, confiscation of land, curses, iron fists, a steel heart
that thinks it's driving out the Amorites, destroying the Amalekites.
Let the blood seep into the dust; blood is blood, not words.
Terrible - the illusion of the Kingdom in obtuse hearts.

One of the biggest tragedies of our times is the resonance of these lines. How I wished, while reading this poem, that it was written of a different time, that times had changed. That it was, like Auden's Spain, written seventy years ago, so that old injustices had been reversed, and spoke only of the memories of old women and men, and perhaps enshrined a popular mythology. That it was possible to shudder, and think, those were bad times, I'm glad I wasn't born in those times. But there is no waking from the repeated nightmares of history: if the poem seemed apt then, back last year, it seems a precise, prophetic indictment of the present predicament facing the Palestinians in Gaza today. A document about Jenin holds a clue to Gaza, and it is important to take note of this, for it is no coincidence. The resonant power of this sonnet, across two distinct historical events - for who would read it today and not be struck by the purchase it has upon the experiences of December and January? - tells us a story too stark to be ignored.

Reading it now reveals the Gordian knot that ties the present bombing to the permanent, everyday reality that Palestinians experience: a reality of checkpoints, daily humiliations, expropriations of land and property, and the eternal prospect of military invasion. It isn't hard at all to get to the heart of that reality if one simply inverts the standard myth: that Israeli military and state action is basically reactive, that these are punitive reprisals for terrorist action. This is a myth. Reverse it and you begin to approach the truth: a classic colonial occupation, the last of the settler colonialisms, has generated this sequence of events; the totality of the Israel/Palestine question can only be understood within this historical framework.

The Israeli rhetoric of reprisal, in its subliminal, and sometimes explicit meanings, is enacted in Wieseltier's poem, '....a steel heart / that thinks it's driving out the Amorites, destroying the Amalekites.' These are standard tropes of justification that circulate in state rhetoric, fundamentalist propaganda and popular discourse. We are told this is a timeless battle, not between Israeli and Palestinian but, transcendentally, between Arab and Jew; between, in short, civilizations. The creatures in Gaza and the West Bank are not fighting against a state that battens down on them with force and death, but against Joshua and Saul. They do this because this is what 'Arabs' or 'Muslims' do, as their election of a fundamentalist organization like Hamas to power proves. The daily injustices of occupation, the erection of a wall that annexes vast swathes of agricultural land the Palestinians need to survive, the herding of people into Gaza like pigs in a pen and blockading them from food and fuel: these are footnotes, glosses on the grand text of terrorist fundamentalism and anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism undoubtedly present, and growing, among many Palestinians naturally bears no relationship to the fact that the IDF soldiers who humiliate them at checkpoints are compelled to wear the Star of David on their uniforms, to the fact that Palestinians are routinely told by their adversaries that this brutality is necessary for the survival of Judaism. Israeli Zionism's disgusting manipulation of Jewish history, reified into myth, casts Palestinians in the manner Wieseltier distils in his phrase - they are the Amorites, ganging up on Joshua; they are the Amalekites, ambushing Saul. Or they are carrying out Hitler's orders, issued beyond the grave. Historical time and space are evacuated, and repopulated with this timeless conflict.

The repeated nightmares of history: this is crucial. The repetition, the sheer force of the same event recurring, time and again, over a condensed period of sixty-odd years, is striking. This takes the events of the last three months out of the purely tragic realm, for such a repetition, the brute beast of military power rising after every rebuff to lumber after its shrinking, almost entirely civilian prey, can only belong to the world of comedy. And that is why Jon Stewart, who recently broke a long, mostly consistent liberal silence on Israel in American public discourse, probably captured the true dimensions of what happened in Gaza most accurately, on The Daily Show. Not because he said anything new or anything particularly remarkable, but because he said it laughing. For only laughter can give the colossal events of December and January their true meaning, their magnitude. The parallel spectacles of a people bombed out of their homes, their sanity, their bodies - and, on another channel, the Panglossian reiteration that this was the best thing that could have happened, that Hamas had to bear full responsibility for it, that the Israelis, with the best and most lethal technology on offer, were simply forced to do it, as they were in Lebanon, as they were in Jenin, as they were everywhere....what could possibly capture this absurd concatenation but comedy? How else to execute the one meaningful act in the hysteric rhetorical world of militaristic, retributive discourse, and reduce the beast to its own size, give it its own shape and form? Not the shape and form of a beleaguered democratic oasis holding out bravely against another hydra head of the Axis of Evil, but that of a powerful military machine grinding down a subjugated, angry people. Only comedy can lay this bare, for that's what Israel and the United States' politicians, military strategists and analysts were, on prime-time TV: professional comedians rehearsing a tired, played-out routine. And it's only fitting that it was Jon Stewart who, by not saying anything very much at all but by playing their words and the images from Gaza in juxtaposition with each other, told it like it was.

The motive force of Wieseltier's sonnet comes from these lines: 'don't dare say / that my blood permits you to justify your wrongs'. Here the accusation, the injunction, is given its prophetic dimension by history and the present. The blood of Israeli people, as of all human beings in this conflict, is simply that: blood. The astonishing phrase that rounds off this line of thought is this: Let the blood seep into the dust; blood is blood, not words. The words that envelop the tragedies suffered by human beings in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are words that manipulate their blood, make it bear burdens it cannot possibly bear, make it speak against its will. These words are a vampiric act: they shed blood, grow on it, and extract more blood, as tribute. The Final Solution is paranoically, masochistically implanted in public memory, as a reminder of the fate to expect if you let up on the bombing. An Israeli friend who'd been through military training and experienced this propaganda at close quarters once told me of her experience as a schoolgoer, being taken to Germany at her government's expense, as schoolchildren are, taken to one of the concentration camp sites (I forget which), and being herded into a pitch-dark room, and forced to listen while the instructions of a guard were reproduced, in loving detail. The Holocaust being drilled into the heads of young Israelis, by the state that claims to have been founded to relieve Jews of that historic burden. 'And then', my friend continued, 'we were told that this is what the Arabs would do to us.'

Zizek writes in several places, more or less persuasively, of the ideological illusion involved in looking for the human depth that redeems inhuman acts, the veil that separates people and their acts, relieving them of the burden of their responsibility by propounding a distance between person and action. 'I am a politician who orders the death of hundreds, but deep down inside I'm a warm cuddly human being': this would be a typical instance of such ideological self-distancing. I persist, ideologically no doubt, to believe in 'human depth', and to believe that we often feel our decisions, our spines and our ethics bent and twisted beyond our control as we confront our world. But I see his point when I think of Wieseltier being handed the Israel Prize by, probably, Barak, Prime Minister in 2000, riding a crest of liberal hope. Barak more recently returned to his IDF roots as Defense Minister, in 2007, and, as barely needs mention, orchestrated the rape of Gaza. I can't help but wonder the thought ever crosses his mind: 'I am a politician who has just ordered the killing of hundreds, but deep down inside I'm a warm, sensitive liberal who reads and appreciates Meir Wieseltier....'

Such conceits of human depth, of course, suffuse the representations of the Middle Eastern tragedy in dominant discourses. From the professional lies of an Alan Dershowitz, to the debates on websites oriented towards a liberal Zionism, one side receives its due share of human complexity, whereas the other serves as straw man, depthless force of ressentiment, or rhetorical counterpoint to Israeli democracy, fundamentalist certitude pitted against liberal pluralism.

The 'liberal middle ground', not only within Israel but globally, reproduces this line of thought, often against its will. Philip Roth's absorbing and profound Operation Shylock, for instance, falls short despite its complexity. His dissections of Israeli society are acute and merciless: they show us a complex, suffering, flawed and fragmented people. His Palestinians, despite his efforts, remain at best a place-holder for the conscience of the liberal Zionist - even if, in all his other writing, Roth is no Zionist at all. Spielberg's Munich, needless to say an inferior work in every respect, but nonetheless interesting because it demonstrates a once committedly Zionist filmmaker grappling with realities he can no longer wish away as fictional, falls into the same trap. ' Is it really your father's olive trees that this is about?', asks a Mossad agent of a Palestinian guerrilla in the movie. The latter's silence tells us all Spielberg would have us know.

Roth and Spielberg, however, give us doubt and self-division that perhaps goes beyond the essentially cynical veil of ideological self-distancing that Zizek describes, for we live in history, and things are changing around us as we speak. The certitudes of a reigning consensus have been shaken over the last decade, and Wieseltier's selection for his country's highest prize tells us that some of this ferment, after all, must be in process in Israel as well. Hundreds of dissident Israelis, some of the bravest people on the planet, refuse to murder for their country, or to lie for it. If Wieseltier's Israel Prize tells us anything, it is that this mood has - or, in the present war hysteria, would it be more accurate to say, has had? - some force in the intangible realms of public conviction. And what of Ehud Barak, poster-boy of Labour Zionism? What of the state that claims to speak for every Israeli citizen, even Meir Wieseltier? A 'steel', yes, and an 'obtuse' heart - Wieseltier's last line sums it up - the heart of a physically brutal and a morally corrupt state.

2009-02-11T00:15:00.007Z

A dark night in Delhi. The street lamps that are on flicker desperately. They tell us it isn’t safe, tell us the night threatens us all. I’m in a speeding auto-rickshaw. B., a little and mild-mannered boy, probably still in his teens, is driving me back home. We take a fly-over, monstrous arch over a nightmare city, and come down at high speed. We take another, and B. slows down suddenly, peering out of the auto with worried eyes. A bunch of uniforms shuffles across our sight-screens. Policemen stroll over to the truck piled high with heavy wooden boxes, which has skidded to a halt at a peremptory police whistle. Their narrowed, shifting eyes pass over us once, as we slow down and pause by a broken signboard, the smoke from my cigarette curling in the lamp-lit air. The policemen’s eyes jerk us through, and we move on, surveyed and humiliated.

A pause as we gather speed through the dark streets. I bring out a lighter. Click. He takes out a box of matches. Snap. We move on, two glowing dots of red light zig-zagging through the darkness. Load-shedding. The summer’s going to be hard for little people with less food, clothes, money, access to shelter that they need to last out the season. The little people clear their throat. B. speaks.

‘Char hazaar se kam nahin lenge.’ Nothing under four thousand rupees. ‘A chalaan?’ I ask. He nods his head. The guys driving that truck are fucked, then. And it could have been B. I begin asking questions, and he begins talking. How much does he make in a month? He makes about five or six hundred on an average night, for this is his shift: the darkest hours of the cycle, between eight at night and eight in the morning. That would make, I calculate, about fifteen or eighteen thousand rupees a month, a comfortable sum. But B. doesn’t keep the money. Each day he has to hand over four hundred rupees to his boss, most of his night’s earnings. His boss sounds faintly humanitarian: apparently he pays for petrol expenses. Most auto and taxi maliks make their employees pay for fuel.

And then there’s the police. B.’s bitter. The daily humiliations, the lowering of the eyes when a uniform passes. The scraping of the feet and the bowing of the head. The random searches, insults, occasional beatings. Men bound up in small, petty lives taking out their bile on weaker men. The rip-offs that beset most auto-drivers at regular intervals: the misfortune to be caught without identification, or a license, or to be marginally over the speed limit. Four thousand rupees as a fine, a chalaan: it’s the standard going rate, though they might adjust it upwards during this phase of inflation.

So they need to borrow money. And it’s cap in hand, head down, at his master’s mercy the next morning. And it’s a temporary advance, to be deducted from B.’s wages for the next month. On a bad roll, for the next two months. B. is twenty, and he sags like an old man.

We’re nearer home now. A police car lies sprawled insolently across the road, we skid round on a speed-breaker and B. mutters a curse. I snatch a furtive glance at the uniformed body and face inside the car. But the body’s slumped against the back of the seat, and the face is young, asleep, strangely vulnerable. A person’s face and body, for once not filled out in monstrous shapes by the daily role they’re paid to perform.

We approach home. I feel I should say something. Awkwardly, I tell him I might write this up, send it somewhere, see if anything can be done. The puerility of such promises hammers in my ears like a storm. I’ll write, and I’ll be a degree less troubled, my political conscience slightly salved, for, in a small way, bearing witness. Testimony. Narcissism. And B. will go his way, handing his wages – his labour – to his master every day, paying tribute to the police every few weeks. Exploitation. Resignation. He’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.

I know this and so, I think, does he. But he seems neither expectant nor scorning, neither supplicant nor judge. B., a boy far away from home, nods his head gravely.

‘Haan ji, likhiye. Likhiye auto-walon ke baare mein. Likhiye ki humein tang na kare.’ Yes, write. Write about us auto-drivers. Tell them not to make our lives hell.

He nods his head once again, gravely, and then I get off, and he takes the money, acknowledges the tip, and I turn to go, and he’s gone.

2009-02-11T00:09:00.000Z

I suppose a year - and a bit - is a long enough time for a sabbatical. Time to start blogging again.

2008-01-01T03:12:00.000Z

The year began with Nandigram, and ended with the Bhutto assassination, the resurgence of the BJP, and carnage in Orissa. Happy 2008 to everyone.
And goodbye to 2007, and fucking good riddance.

2007-12-20T19:24:00.001Z

Here's another recently published piece, this time in Socialist Worker - it appeared in abbreviated form, so I thought I'd put the original up on the blog.

Freeing Land from the Tiller: Communist Experiments in Neo-Liberalism in West Bengal

Nandigram is a rural area in the East Midnapur district of West Bengal, a state governed for three decades by a Left Front dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Through the course of 2007, this agrarian belt has witnessed one of the most significant movements against global neo-liberalism and state power anywhere in the world. The issue was the acquisition of rural land for a Special Economic Zone, to be leased primarily to the Salim Group from Indonesia, close supporters of Suharto during his dictatorship. The MoU between the Indonesian corporate giant and the West Bengal government had been signed in July 2006. On 2 January 2007, an official notification informed the inhabitants that 25,000 acres of their land were to be acquired for the establishment of a chemical plant, as part of the proposed SEZ. None of the inhabitants had been consulted prior to this decision, and it had not gone through the authorized legal channels, the village and district representative bodies. A massive movement from below, seeking to defend rural land against corporate invasion, began at the beginning of 2007.

The countryside of southern West Bengal had already been convulsed for some months over a similar land takeover bid, backed by the Left Front government, by the Tatas, India’s biggest industrial house, for fertile agricultural land in Singur. By December, the resistance in Singur had largely been crushed. To prevent a similar loss of land in Nandigram, the villagers took to direct action. They responded to news of their dispossession by digging up roads and destroying bridges, making it impossible for the police or local CPI(M) cadres to enter. Violent clashes broke out between villagers and armed cadres at the beginning of January. The latter fired rounds of gunfire into the barricaded villages, hurled bombs and killed people, backed by muscle power from Lakshman Seth, the local M.P. The villagers retaliated in kind, killing a local party leader and burning down his house. The vast bulk of the villagers gathered under the stewardship of the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee or the B.U.P.C., the association set up to mobilize against the takeover of land, a loosely organized body of people from various political parties (including opposition Trinamul Congress members, far-left activists, Left Front supporters whose land was threatened, and ordinary villagers without political affiliations). There were expulsions of CPI(M) supporters who had participated in the attack on Nandigram.

Between January and March, there was something of a lull, as the movement in Nandigram consolidated its authority, the state remained blocked out of the villages, and Lakshman Seth and his allies made plans for a reprisal. Matters came to a head in March. On the 14th, a battalion of policemen and CPI(M) cadres disguised as policemen ripped through Nandigram, firing upon an unarmed crowd and hacking their way through the villages in an orgy of savagery that left at least 14 dead (according to official figures) and hundreds seriously injured, lying in hospitals that years of government neglect had left woefully unprepared for situations like this. Rape and sexual mutilation of the most horrific kinds were systematically used by party cadres as tools of retribution. The villagers managed to repulse the attack, in a heroic counter-mobilization, and drove out the ‘police-cadres’ (the term, used by the villagers, originated in the discovery that cadres of the ruling party had disguised themselves as policemen to participate in the blood-letting) on 16 and 17 March. The state and party had to withdraw, but carried on war by other means, including an attempted economic blockade of Nandigram, an attempt to starve out the resistance.

In the meantime, the West Bengal CPI(M), shamefully backed by the central party leadership, carried out a heavy but unconvincing propaganda campaign, pointing the finger at ‘the communal menace’, ‘the Maoist menace’, and any number of allegedly self-explanatory ‘menaces’ that would detract attention from what Nandigram’s peasants were actually, and obviously, engaged in: a grassroots popular movement to retain the land they lived and worked on. In a weak attempt to append the carrot to the stick, the chief minister made a couple of half-hearted pronouncements to the effect that land would not be acquired without consent. CPI(M) propaganda has consistently harped on this theme: why did the resistance continue despite the chief minister’s reassurances? The answer is quite simple. No party leaders had the gumption to visit Nandigram after the massacre. No serious relief measures were organized by the state, which instead sought to impose an economic embargo on the villagers. No compensation was offered to those who suffered from the violence in March. The enquiries of the judiciary and the Central Bureau of Investigation were consistently scuttled and delayed by the government, and none of the accused was brought to justice. There was little reason for Nandigram’s villagers to trust their chief minister, and every reason for them to consider him their enemy. Subsequent events were to bear this out tragically.

Between March and November, a low-level civil war raged in the villages of the area. CPI(M) workers encircled the resisting villages, and kept up a sustained barrage of gunfire, bombs, and threatening abuse across loudspeakers. There were further expulsions of party supporters from Nandigram; there was also, conversely, the flight of B.U.P.C activists and supporters terrorized by attacks by the ruling party’s cadres. There was armed violence on both sides, which was hardly a surprise, since the rural politics of West Bengal has for many years been characterized by the use of arms, which have been made plentifully available to villagers for use in inter-party conflicts, especially prior to local government elections. Reprisals and counter-reprisals ravaged Nandigram through the summer, though the forces and resources arrayed on the side of the state were infinitely greater, and the balance of violence was utterly lop-sided. Nevertheless, the government failed to secure re-entry into the villages of Nandigram. The barricades stayed up, the villagers on one side united in defence of their land, and party cadres on the other, wielding guns and waiting for their moment, to avenge the humiliation in March. So things stayed, for over seven months.

The latest instalment in this tragedy took place recently. On 30 October, the villages of Satengabadi and Ranichak were attacked by the police and by cadres in an attempt to regain the area. Between 5 and 10 November, cadres and local police stepped up efforts to ‘recapture’ Nandigram. A lightning raid on Satengabadi virtually destroyed the village, rendering over a thousand people homeless, their houses looted and burnt. On 10 November, the final capitulation occurred. Party cadres swooped down upon a demonstration by the BUPC, abducted 600 protestors, and used them as a human shield to secure re-entry into the villages. The state finally, after over eleven months of civil war, managed to re-enter the villages. Since then, there have been massive and spectacular acts of violent revenge, by party workers who’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. Rapes, killings, and torture characterized the re-establishment of ‘law and order’. At the present moment, there is a campaign of absolute terror and effective enslavement going on, as villagers are being forced to sign affidavits pledging complete obedience to the CPI(M)’s commands, and to join rallies organized by the party. Nandigram at present resembles nothing so much as a vast slave camp.

The spectacle of a professedly left-wing government first trying to secure land for a massive project of corporate expansion, then confronting a people’s movement with force and armed terror, has produced a politics of mass revulsion that all the attempts to stifle or deflect dissent have not subdued. This has been manifested in recent events in West Bengal that have rocked the stability of the ruling regime. Most dramatically, in September there were food riots against the hoarding and sale of food marked out for public rationing. These black-market practices are common in Bengal, and are usually organized through local party channels. A series of elections to students’ unions in colleges in West Bengal, in the wake of Nandigram, delivered decisive mandates against the Students’ Federation of India, the party’s student wing. An unexpected electoral reverse in elections to a local dock union supplemented this trend. A scandal over an inter-religious love affair in Calcutta, where the state government scotched an enquiry into the death of a Muslim boy allegedly brought about by the actions of the girl’s well-connected business family, affirmed suspicions that the Left Front was now consistently shielding vested propertied interests. The organized Left’s citadel is no longer secure, and social tensions that had simmered beneath the surface for many years are coming to the boil.

The epicentre of solidarity with Nandigram has been Kolkata, and here there has been a remarkable efflorescence of democratic disgust with the CPI(M): students, intellectuals, artists, lawyers, and doctors have, for the first time in decades, gathered together to protest, often in the face of brutal police attacks and arbitrary arrests. On 14 November, Kolkata saw a spontaneous demonstration of over 100,000 people, marching silently to protest the carnage in Nandigram. It was a red-letter day in a city where demonstrations for many years had meant nothing more than exercises in self-publicity conducted by political parties, usually the ruling Left Front combine, and where the memories of an earlier Kolkata, vibrant with political passion and engagement, had apparently long died. Poetry, discursive analysis, demonstrations, candlelit vigils, boycotts of government awards by intellectuals once close to the Party: every possible means is being used to shame the mighty. The enormous outpouring of solidarity in Kolkata has been immensely moving, especially since previous acts of state brutality and corporate invasion in the country had evoked nothing on this scale, and it had become passé among most educated middle-class Indians to turn a blind eye to the conditions of the country’s poor.

Things are changing, and it is a time of possibilities, openings, and dangers. Some of the noise around Nandigram has come from political rivals of the CPI(M), just as compromised or more, without any of the CPI(M)’s earlier history of agitation for the downtrodden, who have jumped on to a convenient bandwagon. Some of it comes from the Indian far left, in its many guises, which faces internal strife, inner authoritarianism and dogmatism, and, most of all, the constant threat of repression, in a country where attempts to resist the writ of the state, no matter what their provenance, are labeled either terrorist or ‘Maoist’ and rendered fit for arbitrary, Patriot Act-style counter-mobilizations of terror. Some of the initiative comes from mobilizations loosely described as ‘people’s movements’, some of which command much popularity but are without the organization or coordination needed to mount an immediate political challenge. However, the messiness and internal contradictions of the present moment should not blind us to a key fact. Neo-liberalism in India has hit a road block. Projects for corporate expansion, economic restructuring and land seizure, backed by armed state force, have been announced across the length and breadth of the country: Maharashtra, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, the North-east, to pick random examples. Each project has become a site of prolonged resistance and conflict: Nandigram may be the most dramatic, but it is by no means the only one. There may be no blueprints at hand that tell us what ‘alternatives’ may look like, but the resistance to global neo-liberal capitalism has been near-universal, it has been uncompromising, and it has come from the bottom up. A movement of resistance, in other words, that a real Left would be proud to be part of.

Where does India’s ‘real’, which is to say officially designated Left, actually stand? The jury is still out, though the evidence continues to mount. The shameful silence of the central leadership of the CPM has destroyed the party’s credibility as a force that can claim political principle and commitment. An outright condemnation of the Nandigram violence from the party leadership would have saved the face of the official Left, though there is precious little they could actually have done: the tail wags the dog, and the actions of the West Bengal party unit clearly determine Politbureau stands, rather than the reverse. The CPI(M) clearly sees its continued hegemony in West Bengal – where most of its seats in Parliament come from – as necessary to its continued relevance in Indian politics. The price being paid, however, is the increasing absurdity of the party’s claims upon ‘left-hood’. The central leadership has to, therefore, resort to more and more ridiculous justifications and lies covering up what really happened in West Bengal. The agitation against the takeover of land is consistently depicted by Party propaganda as a machination of either the Trinamul Congress and the right-wing BJP, or as a Maoist conspiracy. There have been, however, muted and not-so-muted voices of dissent from within circles once considered close to or part of the official Left project in India: prominent party members have resigned and condemned the Left Front’s handling of Nandigram, others have spoken out against their Party’s official stands and had their voices muffled, and there appears to be churning within the official Left at various levels.

Whether there will ever be a credible, reformed CPI(M) freed of corruption and compromise is an open question: it is clear, however, that this is ruled out as long as the Party does as it pleases in West Bengal. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was recently praised by Henry Kissinger, who said the Communist chief minister reminded him of Deng Xiaoping. Not coincidentally, Bhattacharya has also been the darling of the corporate media in India, which was therefore faced with a crisis during Nandigram, not quite knowing which way to look while he executed the policies they wanted in a manner that didn’t quite smell of roses. Lakshman Seth and Benoy Konar, proven to be the chief masterminds and instigators of the attacks on Nandigram’s peasants, have neither been brought to justice, nor disciplined, nor even reprimanded by the Party leadership.

As a conclusion, let me present two contending claims about Nandigram and what it symbolizes for Indian politics. First, the view of the official Indian Left. Bengal, we hear, is a citadel of left-wing resistance to the politics of communalism that dominates Indian politics, the politics of imperialism that globally encircles it, and the economics of neo-liberalism that threatens its experiments in left-wing economic and social reform. The survival of the Left Front government in West Bengal is supposedly crucial to the continued relevance of the CPI(M) in national politics, and is thereby essential. The ‘law-and-order’ problem posed by the movement in Nandigram threatened the continued political and economic alternative held out by the Indian Left, and thus needed to be resolved by firm state action. It was necessary, therefore, to ‘recapture’ Nandigram.

Let me now put matters another way. There is, indeed, urgent need for global resistance to the politics of empire and neo-liberalism that seeks to swamp the world, and stamp out the possibility of any alternatives. But the Left Front Government in West Bengal – and by implication the official Indian Left – has long given up on that fight, beyond empty pieties that never actually threaten the hegemonic structures of the world. And now, with Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s embrace of global capitalism, West Bengal under CPI(M) rule represents one of the prime entry points of global capital with its neo-liberal strategies into India. The politics of Stalinism and the economics of neo-liberalism have given birth to a monster.

The experiences of the twentieth century have taught us that ‘the Left’ is always a complex noun. It cannot, however, possibly be complex enough to include the Party in West Bengal. A party that pushes for the introduction of Special Economic Zones, bypasses popular consultations of any kind in making its decisions, makes deals with the corporate group that bankrolled Suharto’s massacre of Indonesian Communists, and nourishes and protects thugs who shoot peasants and protestors, may be called all sorts of things, but ‘left-wing’ is not among them.

Nandigram’s peasants were not fired by such geo-political calculations as I have just outlined: they simply wanted to hold on to their land, and they refused to buy into the myth that they were being offered a better deal. But the meaning of their resistance has experienced the political transvaluation that turns immediate battles for survival into epochal acts of resistance. It has become one of the central nodes in the chain of global movements that seek to resist a neo-liberal hegemonic project that rests upon the intensified exploitation of labour, the arbitrary acquisition of resources, and the stifling of internal political dissent. To achieve the success of this project, it was necessary to destroy the movement. The CPI(M) in West Bengal, having decided to do so, has demonstrated its inherent similarity with the other forces on the Indian political spectrum: its common function with them as neoliberal capitalism’s slave, victim, and agent.

2007-10-09T00:22:00.000+01:00

A working-class dream dies and is replaced by another.

The miners’ strike of 1984 is defeated. Coal miners and mining – an occupation, a community, a world and its meanings – disappear. Margaret Thatcher crushes the militant centre of British working-class life and politics, and changes the face of Northern England. The pits empty out; men are made redundant. The jobs will not come back. Something flowers, though, in the midst of this defeat. A boy from a family of striking miners begins to dance. He achieves his dream against his family, his community, the childhood he’s been given, and the boundaries within which he has been taught to leash his talent. He leaves the dying for the new; he becomes a professional ballet dancer. This is the story told by Stephen Daldry’s 1997 runaway blockbuster, Billy Elliot.

There is a plausible hard-left way of looking at this. Thatcherism ushers in a new world. The textures and horizons of working-class solidarity, and also of a whole way of life, are eliminated, and replaced by individual achievement. The boy in the film accomplishes his dream in a manner worthy of Hollywood. The space that once belonged to working-class solidarity is emptied out, and all that can replace it is the celebration of individual success. Millions fail, but there is a boy who succeeds, who dances, who wins against the odds. And this personal success redeems the bitter experiences of his community, personal and collective failure and defeat. Somehow things are put right. The miners lose the strike, their work and the shape of their lives, but it’s all right because a boy dances. This is how a hard, unblinkered leftist might well see the film.

And none of this is untrue. Billy Elliot does offer us such apparently mawkish consolations, and it sentimentalizes and softens defeat. As an evocation of a particular moment in recent British history, it is in many ways false. It is a fantasy of individual accomplishment ultimately redeeming collective defeat. But is this sentimental evocation of a lost working-class world, then, really a disguised celebration of the triumph of capitalism, an apologia for Thatcherism? There’s more depth to the film’s portrait of a changing Britain than this. The fable of a working-class boy who wants and manages to escape his world is more complex than it might appear at first. To understand this, we need to go back to an earlier film, made years before Thatcher murdered coal mining and miners, in an era when that working-class life was too real to be sentimentalized into fantasy.

In Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Billy, a boy from a mining family befriends a kestrel, masters it, teaches it to fly back to him and perch on his wrist. For a brief while, assisted by a caring schoolteacher, Billy’s pleasures in the bird take wing, he discovers there can be more to life than the mining pit he’s destined for. But soon his brother, brutal and brutalized, kills the bird to punish the boy for a small misdemeanour, and this destroys the dream. The oppressions of a mining town’s family and community life, which the boy’s relationship with the bird symbolized an escape from, return, reinforced and inescapable. Class persists, and people are fixed in it through the compulsion to labour, to know their place and stay there.

People in the village are not necessarily bad, but not necessarily good either. They have no time to love one another, to cherish one another’s dreams and desires. Work is too grinding, school prematurely hardens boys of Billy’s age into the men they must become. Softness is despised, and life has to go on but is rarely happy. One moves from tedium to tedium, frustration to frustration, defeat to defeat, and little moments of tenderness and hope – like Billy proudly bearing the kestrel on his wrist – are easily ground to dust, leaving no trace. The film ends with the boy sobbing, controlling his tears, and burying his beloved bird. ‘Not going down t’pit’, he yells defiantly at his brother at the start of the film, but he almost certainly will, and he’ll stay there through his life. This, of course, is the Ken Loach of Cathy Come Home, grimly social-realist, deliberately eschewing dramatic resolution and climaxes that square the circle. We are offered neither the dramatic consolations of hope, nor those of despair, and we are denied also the satisfaction of catharsis.

In the late 1960s, when Loach made the film, there was virtually no other life imaginable for a young boy brought up in that time, in that community, despite the contemporary, and anodyne, reassurances of general social dynamism and class mobility. The working class that Loach loves and feels for as a socialist can also be, as he recognizes and shows us, a space of immense cruelty, heartlessness and humdrum routine. Contra left-wing certitudes, it is not a necessary space of revolutionary upheaval and transformation. It is, rather, a world where people in working-class communities subdue their dreams and transgressions, perform and repeat the social roles ascribed to them. The thankless, repetitive chores of their labouring existence circumscribe, limit, and brutalize them. Loach’s late-sixties style is founded on a political aesthetic where cinema performs the function of social criticism with sober senses, and precludes the illusory completeness – and nobility – of drama.

Death confers the finitude that casts life into a whole, unchangeable pattern, and memory transforms lived life into the structures of drama. Three decades on, Stephen Daldry makes Billy Elliot, and the times have changed. Nostalgia is the founding aesthetic now, and the light of a generous, but resigned, posterity glows upon the working class that once eked out its existence in the pits. Daldry quite evidently glances backward at Loach; his eponymous hero shares a name with the older director’s creation. Very little remains of the world of the heavy-drinking, unionized male miner that Loach castigated. It was a life that Thatcher snuffed out in 1984. On the other hand, the dream of escape has been realized – ironically for most, in the form of a total destruction of livelihood and community; happily for a few, in the form of the individual talents and slices of good fortune that pull them into a new existence. As a consequence, both – the world of the mining community and the world of the dreaming boy – can be retrospectively romanticized. The miners are reasonably gentrified, clean and well dressed and well fed. Their poverty and despair are invoked but never convincingly shown, their need is never shown, and nothing ever leads to real dehumanization. People are basically tender towards one another. They sacrifice themselves for their loved ones, but the sacrifice is never truly made, for no one is truly destroyed. Scabs are chastised, but not ostracized or cruelly humiliated, by their striking workmates. And then there’s the boy who wants to dance, who pursues his dream and fulfils it, and in some measure redeems the failed strike. This redemption is conveyed poetically in the film: the last, soaring moment, the aging father, once so hard and proud, now soft and wobbling with joy as his son leaps into the stage’s shimmer, to the notes of Swan Lake.

The misery and the suffering have been real, but art is ultimately redemptive. The workers are dead, they are redundant, society has no use for them – they live through their children, the generation that redeems their failure, not through the accomplishment of the collective dream that they once shared, but through its displacement on to the terrain of individual talent and genius. There is no such thing as society, as Thatcher once famously declared.

But there’s more depth to the film. Its sympathy with the striking miners is serious. If the movie describes, at some level, the success of Thatcherism, it nevertheless celebrates, and pays homage in a number of ways, to the struggle against it. And there is a tension between the two motifs in the film – the boy’s struggle to break free of his world and that world’s struggle against its annihilator, capitalism.

In one scene, the boy reads out a letter from his mother, written to him while she way dying, to his ballet teacher. It says, in brief: Billy, I’m proud of you, be what you are, live your dream, remember that this is what I want for you. It is, for me, a deeply unsatisfying scene. It’s an effective tearjerker – my eyes filled up – but it’s too easy, kitsch, Hollywoodish, it takes too little effort to produce a scene like that. It’s been done all too many times before, if usually with much less sensitivity. But it does effectively describe the boy’s dream, the content of it, its relationship to his life, his family, his world. He wants a way out of the certainties and limits of a coal miner’s life. When forbidden to dance by his father, he kicks strike posters in anger (while in the background T. Rex’s Children of the Revolution blares). He lashes out at the chains that bind him to his class and prevent him from moving away – and up. And in the process, he lashes out at the solidarity that gives working-class identity political meaning, because this is an identity and a politics that belittles and excludes his desires and dreams.

Another moment describes this working-class existence in different terms. Billy’s father decides to scab to pay for his son’s dance education. Here the choice is a bitter one, between his duty to his comrades and to shared working-class life, and on the other hand to his son and to the future. Once again the resolution is perhaps too easy: he leaves off scabbing, and is welcomed back into the fold, sobbing in his elder son’s arms. Workers accepting a strayed comrade back so easily? No blood spilt? This is far too easy. A strike can be just but unkind, and the miners’ strike was brutal on all sides. And Billy’s future is nevertheless financed; the whole mining village pitches in for his benefit, which, again, is less than plausible. But it’s a moving moment all the same – the father cannot scab, even for his son – but his decision is not a tragic and hopeless one, he doesn’t have to compromise the principles he has lived by all his life to help his son up the ladder. When push comes to shove, he finds a way of saving his son from the bleakness of his own future, and does this without betraying his comrades.

And then, of course, redemption happens – Billy makes it to the Royal Ballet School, and becomes a great dancer. This is rose-tinted fantasy. But it is also moving, and it works. It’s fantasy, but a fantasy worthy of the history it explores. And after all, it explores only one human possibility within the historical tragedy of the miners’ strike, which may be softened but is never belittled or diminished in scale. The film ends, of course, on the crescendo thrill of Billy dancing to Swan Lake, a triumphant affirmation of the worth he wrested in defiance of his upbringing. But it is preceded by a juxtaposition, in successive frames, of images that sit more ambiguously beside this celebratory finale. Billy’s bus, headed to London, tearing him away from the dying world of the miners. Billy’s brother yelling to the boy that he loves him, words lost to Billy, who cannot hear them through the windowpane his nose is pressed against. And finally, a joyless and dark return to work – the strikers, Billy’s father and brother among them – are pressed against each other like sardines in a tin, their headlamps knocking against each other, as the cage they’re locked in pushes them down, once again, into the heart of the earth, a mine that will soon be closed.

Billy realizes his dream, and asserts his claim upon the world in a way his father could never have done. But the horizons of his talent are not all that change in the course of the film. Much more changes, in at least one major life-world. Pre-adolescent boys tentatively explore sexualities that are not straight, and enter professions that their straight male worlds forbid. Billy is not a ‘poof’, but his closest friend, Michael, is. Michael eventually ends up in London, a miner’s child with a lover who is both black and gay, and they sit, at the movie’s close, beside the quintessentially male militant working-class father and son to watch Billy perform on stage. During their childhood, Michael briefly, embarrassedly kisses Billy, and is rebuffed, but not cruelly. And Billy comes to accept Michael for what he is, and – briefly, embarrassedly - returns the kiss towards the end of the movie, as he leaves for London. Men and their sons wear women’s clothes in private. Through ballet, a boy who’s being pressed into boxing discovers a new body and a new way of taking pleasure in it. Billy becomes androgynous through his dance, and his father and brother, contemptuous of poofs and wankers and ballet-dancing men, come to not only accept but also respect him for what he is. Lives, identities and relationships change as an old order ends.

The strike ended in tragedy, in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods, in despair and the apparently permanent victory of Thatcher and the social injustice she embodied and celebrated. Nothing can possibly redeem all this. But still, flowers did bloom in the desert. Within a year, miners were doing the unthinkable, and leading gay parades. At the May Day demonstration in London this year, I personally witnessed the wider historical meaning of this: a rally for workers was led and punctuated by troupes of gay and lesbian activists. And as same-sex couples held hands and kissed and danced, an old working-class man, bent and wizened, grinned toothlessly at me and made a V-sign. Poofs and dykes were no longer the object of militant workers’ hatred. And in the world of cinematic fantasy, Billy danced on stage, and Michael took a gay lover. These redemptions do not outweigh or even balance the tragedy of the strike’s defeat. But neither are they unreal or unworthy.

Billy in Kes reminds those of us who value the rights and hopes of labour that the world of the worker is not pretty or fair or kind, that it is also a world where the weak, marginalized and dissident get screwed over and are thrust into unwanted lives and roles. Billy in Billy Elliot reminds us that a miner’s son can live his dream, and if doing so means copping out of a worker’s existence, it also means work, it also means pain, and it can produce beauty. The final moments of the film can move one to tears. The father, now older and weaker, stumbles through London – an unfamiliar, dizzying world to one who’s never left Durham in his life. Bemused by it all, dragged on by an impatient elder son, he stumbles to an aisle seat at the ballet, and his old head nods and his old eyes shine with tears and rapture as, on stage, his son explodes into music, motion and magic. Kes offers us a vocabulary of grim realism, Billy Elliot one of redemptive fantasy. Both films are recognizably enough made from the Left, though in different registers. Both films challenge some of the Left’s holy cows. That is reason enough to value them both.

2007-07-18T23:31:00.000+01:00

Here's a piece by me that appeared in the last issue of International Socialism (www.isj.org). The version in the journal was edited quite a bit, and in the online version they managed to consistently misprint the CPI (M) as the CPI, so I'm posting the original, full version here.

Nandigram and the Deformations of the Indian Left

The Battle Lines

On 14 March this year, the state government of West Bengal, headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) sent several thousand police troops into the rural district of Nandigram in East Midnapur, the scene of a three-month old movement by peasants against the establishment of a Special Economic Zone on their land. The land in question was to be turned over the Indonesian-based Salim group[1] for the establishment of a multi-purpose SEZ comprising chemical and pharmaceutical units, shipbuilding, and real estate. Over 19,000 acres of peasant land in its various forms – cropped land, homestead, schools, mosques and temples – were to be acquired. Peasant resistance ushered in the New Year – at the beginning of January, villagers began digging up and barricading roads, blocking the entry of the police and generally of the state and party apparatus into their land. Clashes between party cadres and villagers broke out several times between January and March, culminating in the decision of the Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, to send in the police on March 14. Whether the Left Front government actually orchestrated the massacre of villagers (official estimates tolled 14 dead, the unofficial count ran into hundreds) or not, it certainly stood by and watched while policemen, CPI(M) cadres, and cadres disguised as policemen ran amok among the villagers, in an orgy of killing, torture and rape. Since March, Nandigram has witnessed further confrontations between party and peasants, the fraying of the livelihoods and networks that held the local economy together, and the slow strangulation of protest by the state government.

Nandigram exposed the horrific possibilities at the heart of the Bengal Left’s embrace of global, ‘neo-liberal’ capital, but this was not unprecedented. The uprising and repression in Nandigram had been foreshadowed at Singur, one of the most fertile and prosperous tracts of agricultural land in the state and in the country. Here the West Bengal government had turned over a thousand acres of cultivated land to the Tatas, India’s biggest industrial house, for the establishment of a motor factory, a takeover that entailed the loss of over 20,000 livelihoods. This had galvanized a movement that had its roots in the villages of Singur, but also sparked off solidarity campaigns in Calcutta, attempts by the chief opposition party, the Trinamul Congress, to climb aboard the bandwagon, initiatives by far-left Naxalite groupings, and protests by left-leaning cultural activists and intellectuals across the country, disgusted by the prolonged deformations of a party and government many of them had once identified with. Singur brought the issue of Special Economic Zones, with their conjoined logics of mass displacement, the right of companies to administer their territory largely independently of state law, the abrogation of constitutionally guaranteed labour rights, and the violation of environmental standards, to the forefront of national politics. During and after the mayhem at Nandigram, these themes were repeated and amplified, and the battle continues.

The paradox of an apparently left-wing administration embracing the most brutal and intrusive contemporary regime of global capitalist expansion threw into relief the antagonism between India’s chosen path of economic development and the livelihoods and aspirations of the majority of its citizens. But this tension was not, it hardly needs to be said, new in itself. SEZs are the flashpoint of this tension, but not its only expression, since land can be grabbed for many purposes – real estate hubs, factories, townships – that may or may not take the form of SEZs. Land grabs have been the source of major confrontations and struggles between local communities, big business and the state in Jharkhand, in Orissa, in Punjab, in Maharashtra, in Gurgaon, in Gujarat, and various other places. Nandigram and Singur, however, catapulted the issue into the national media, and produced a range of publicly visible protest initiatives.

The most important sites of resistance to state-sponsored corporate invasions, though, remain the land and people affected by them. At Kalinganagar in Orissa, where a bauxite plant is planned, fierce resistance continues despite the charming decision of the national government to install anti-personnel landmines against the incursions of resisting tribals. (India, in keeping with its general attitude towards global human rights regulation, is not a signatory to international anti-landmine agreements). At Jagatsinghpur, also in Orissa, the South Korean steel company POSCO has been allotted land for an SEZ, and here the local resistance has taken the form of kidnappings of company officials, who are unharmed but held captive in order to induce the government to take account of the demands of those affected by the project. In Jharkhand, dozens of SEZ projects hang in the balance, unable to get off the ground because of fierce mobilizations against them. At Singur, where the controversy first erupted, villagers still regularly breach the wall separating them from the Tata factory site, despite the heavy presence of punitive state mechanisms. At Haripur, not far from Nandigram, the central government had planned a nuclear power plant. Here, as at Nandigram, local inhabitants have blockaded their villages off from the entry of the state and the police, and set up something akin to an autonomous zone.

The pattern is obvious: in each case, powerful companies and a mammoth state apparatus have negotiated agreements on massive land grabs, but in each case actual construction work has been indefinitely stalled by the strength of local mobilizations. In this sense, the expansion of neo-liberal capitalism in India has finally hit a genuine road-block, and confronts, in its own way, as intense a crisis as the populations affected by its projects do. Given the utter lack of consent, the state and the companies involved have at present only two options. First, to back off entirely. Second, to violently repress resistance. The first option jeopardizes investor confidence, the kickbacks doubtless enjoyed from these agreements by implicated ministers and bureaucrats, and, in more general terms, the future of the strategy of unmandated land acquisition. The second option produces instant crisis, as at Nandigram, where, despite the scale of state and party brutality and the annihilation of an entire local economy, the CPI(M) has been forced to suspend, for the moment, the planned SEZ. In a way, this clear ‘no’ sent out to current economic policy in India parallels the resistance to NAFTA and FTAA in Latin America, though perhaps without the depth of ideological ferment visible in the latter instance. In both cases, the dominant trajectory of capitalist growth has run up against the obstacle of utter, uncompromising popular refusal, and the political actualization of this refusal in acts of resistance. The cosy myth of a consensus around a particular model of economic growth, apparently ‘value-neutral’ but actually deeply ideologically constituted, has been shattered. Nationally and globally, this is a crucial moment in the history of capital.

The new battle lines that are beginning to take shape around land acquisition in India cross and blur the antagonisms of official party politics. Increasingly, the major political formations in India seem united over the legitimacy both of the currently hegemonic national economic policy, and of state repression to enforce this policy. West Bengal, a state run by the organized Left, is at the helm of the SEZ drive. In Maharashtra, the Congress is in charge of actualizing comparably brutal drives of local displacement for the establishment of these zones. In Orissa, a coalition of the Biju Janata Dal and the BJP, India’s major right-wing formation, have been administering, with the aid of the Army, a similar assault upon tribal communities for the purposes of land acquisition, an assault that puts even Bengal in the shade. In Gujarat and Jharkhand, the state-level BJP administrations are the initiators and executors of this drive. In each of these cases, land is acquired for the purposes of corporate takeover without any consultation of local populations and their representative institutions, let alone any democratic mandate for this policy. This is at the heart of the new consensus – the takeover of land that sustains thousands of people, and its transfer to companies that are accountable only to their shareholders, is presented as a fait accompli, something the state has the right to do, regardless of the wishes not only of local populations, but also of their democratically elected local representative bodies, the panchayats, gram sabhas, and district committees. In this matter, the divisions between Left, Right, and centre, real and bitter as they are in other arenas of national politics, have virtually ceased to matter. Conversely, the opposition to this does not run along the lines of party politics either. The CPI(M)’s propaganda machines have been working overtime to convince us that the resistance to the Nandigram and Singur land grabs were machinations of the Trinamul Congress, on the one hand, and the revolutionary left-wing Naxalites, on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth: the uprisings in these places stemmed from the extremely rational desire of local agrarian populations to hold on to their land, and the resistance organized by them cut across party lines, and in Nandigram consisted overwhelmingly of people who had been supporters or even members of the CPI(M).

The real battle being fought here, then, is not principally between rival ideologies, between capitalism and socialism or between Left and Right, though of course we can and usually do assign ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ valences to the objective positions taken up in this struggle. It is, rather, a direct confrontation between democracy and capital, which are increasingly incommensurate with one another. If democratic accountability is to be taken seriously by those who govern, the policy of corporate land acquisition cannot be conceived of as an inevitable outcome, a matter for policy makers and administrators to formulate and implement as a matter of right: it must, since it entails the disruption of mammoth numbers of lives and livelihoods, pass through established democratic structures and channels, and secure a mandate. But this is plainly impossible, given the consequences such policies have for the people they affect. If this form of capitalist penetration runs up against the road-block of absolute refusal, as it has done, then pushing it through, on the part of the state, necessarily involves the curtailment of democratic procedures and entitlements. But the use of coercion to push such an agenda through invites further, and increasingly more militant, forms of resistance, and the impasse, far from being resolved, grows. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

Losing the Left

For most people in West Bengal, the spectacle of the organized Left’s recourse to bloody massacre and authoritarian repression is nothing new. The CPI(M) in this state wins election after election, partly on the strength of land reforms it undertook in the 1980s (and is now abandoning), but also partly on the strength of sustained electoral rigging and intimidation. It cushions corrupt and venal bureaucracies, a trade union culture stripped of its once legendary vitality by utter subservience to party dictates, a politics of patronage and nepotism at all levels, and, across vast parts of the countryside, local networks of party authority that function as armed fiefdoms, with their local bosses. Lakshman Seth, the CPI(M) MP from Tamluk, the constituency in which Nandigram is located, and in many ways the architect of the March 14 massacre, is only one of many cases in point. Thirty years of unbroken Left Front power prove that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and while many on the global Left celebrate the CPI(M)’s achievement as an example of democratically mandated Communist success, they would do well to remember that they speak of a state-level administration that subverts democracy at every point, and is in the process of reinventing itself as a party driven by corporate interests and the aspirations of the upper middle class. The enormous leeway given to real estate speculation[2], the abysmal state of primary education and health services, and the eagerness with which the government has embraced global capital, are all indicators of this. A poster at a recent demonstration against the massacre gave us an effective, if hysteric, evaluation of the West Bengal government – ‘CPI(M) = Capitalist Party of India (Murderer)’.

This is an evaluation that many on the far Left in India would extend to the organized Left in toto, not only as it operates in West Bengal but also in its larger dimension as a not insignificant force in national politics. They would point out, with truth and reason on their side, that there is a long history of violence, intimidation, and bullying here – that the official Communist movement in India has both blood and compromise on its hands. They would point out, unassailably, that the Party has never repudiated Stalinism – indeed, its annual conferences still contain accolades to the Soviet Union that sound like 1956 never happened. They would point out that the Left Front government in West Bengal was party to the massacre of Bangladeshi settlers in the Sunderbans in 1979, and also that Jyoti Basu, chief minister of the state from 1977 to the end of the twentieth century, superintended the brutal eviction of hawkers (‘Operation Sunshine’) from the pavements of Calcutta in 1994 to make the city look pretty for John Major’s visit. They would point to the organized Left’s assaults upon revolutionary Naxalite and Maoist groups in West Bengal, and perhaps also claim that these latter formations represent the only true, authentic face of left-wing politics in India.

For its part, the CPI(M), nationally, has done more than its fair share of work in giving weight to these accusations. The central party leadership lied through its teeth while citing figures of consensual land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, it has consistently refused to issue a condemnation of the West Bengal state unit’s repression of popular protest, it has refused to acknowledge the resistance to the SEZ as anything but a conjuration of its political rivals, and it has, unforgivably, done absolutely nothing to restrain the excesses and brutalities of party cadres in Nandigram, which continue today, three months after the massacre, as a matter of course. A large part of this has to do with the nature of political compulsions on the organized Left – the Party is utterly dependent on the units in West Bengal and Kerala, the only major states where it is powerful, for its clout in national politics, and indeed for its continued existence as a serious force. In effect, whatever the compulsions that drive the central leadership’s endorsement, this constitutes a break, perhaps irrevocable, with radical and progressive politics, and more generally with anticapitalism.

At this conjuncture in Indian politics, these failures and betrayals are fatal. There are social movements across the country, most of which share left-wing values and perspectives, that have organized bravely against big dams, corporate takeovers of land, the exploitation of labouring people, the ecological consequences of industrial capitalism, and the continuing erosion and marginalization of the livelihoods of millions as a result of national economic policies. Till Nandigram happened, it was possible for the Left to share a common platform with these movements, as for instance during the World Social Forum and its offshoot, the Indian Social Forum. After Nandigram, it is difficult to see where this shared space is. The organized Left, it is true, has taken up significant issues in Parliament: for instance, in its protests against airline privatization and pension reform. It is true, though also bitter and ironical, that it was this Left that provided a public space for arguments against the course of national economic policy, and in particular – here the ironies grow hideous – the establishment of SEZs. Countless numbers of party loyalists have been shaken to the core by the events in West Bengal, and there are major inner-party struggles within the CPI(M). In Kerala, the Communist Chief Minister, V.S. Achyutanandan, follows a policy trajectory radically at odds with his counterpart in West Bengal (though there have been significant moves within his state unit to oust him and move rightwards). But the dogma of party line, the compulsions of loyalty towards comrades (however erring) and the need not to break rank hold back these tensions, and refuse them meaningful public space. Officially, the CPI(M) is opposed to the current economic policy of the Indian Government, and the track it has been on for over a decade. Equally officially, the CPI(M) nationally endorses the policies and chosen trajectory of its West Bengal unit. These are irreconcilable positions. Perhaps these are dialectical contradictions that will be resolved through some miraculous Aufhebung. But if we are reduced to praying for magic to save the organized Indian Left from itself, we must at least acknowledge how grim things are.

So at a time when the struggles against global capitalism in India are more urgent and relevant than they have ever been, the Left has apparently deserted the battleground. At any rate, after Nandigram the CPI(M) has lost any claim it had upon the trust of movements and mobilizations that actually do the work of resisting the invasions of capital. But it would be a serious mistake to see this, as many on the far Left do, as something inevitably written into the script of the organized Left decades ago, or to see these betrayals as anything but tragic. The official Left in India, for all its Stalinism and all its compromises and blunders, was historically at the forefront of massive mobilizations of workers and peasants, and nowhere more powerfully than in West Bengal, where generations of Communists worked tirelessly for the rights of workers, sharecroppers and poor peasants, and against brutal social inequalities. This was a Left whose power, both in West Bengal and Kerala, was founded on its responsiveness to agrarian discontent, its ability to mobilize politically around it, and its responsibility in leading land and labour struggles. This was the Left that led one of the largest labour movements in history, in Bombay; this was the Left that organized incredibly important peasant movements in Bengal and Telengana in the 40s and 50s; this was the Left that put India’s most progressive land reforms into place in the states it governed. If this Left has been lost, then mourning, rather than celebration or vindication, is the response most appropriate to left-minded people.

More may have been lost, however, than a legacy and a memory of historic struggles, which were fought, after all, by other – and better – men and women, in other times. There is and has been, after all, an active – though far from powerful – official Left outside its regional centres of accumulated power. In Delhi and across North India, in large parts of the south, in Maharashtra, and in various other parts of the country, organizations of women, teachers, students, workers, and social activists affiliated to or allied with the CPI(M) have worked, and continue to work, against the kinds of policies that drive the poor and the marginalized to the wall and embed social injustice within the governing political ethic. As a left-wing student who grew up in Delhi, I have always experienced the official Left, in meetings, in campaigns, and on demonstrations, as a space one could turn to for succour and comfort, for political solidarity, despite the frustrations and differences one may have had with the official line of the Party. The mobilizations against the Hindu Right at the time of BJP rule, mobilizations which many of us either supported or took part in, would have been unthinkable without the presence – indeed, the protective umbrella – of the organized Left. I believe this is also the relationship that many of India’s most serious social movements – the Narmada Bachao Andolan, for instance – have had with the Left: a relationship of simultaneous irritation and gratitude, disappointment and solidarity. At any rate, a shared space used to exist. That may have disappeared after Nandigram, as the political paths of a party that calls itself left-wing, and movements that follow some of the best values of the Left, increasingly diverge, and traverse antagonistic paths. Medha Patkar, India’s most important social activist and arguably the leader of the global movement against big dams, was the most prominent public face of the protests around Nandigram. This is symptomatic of the necessary but deeply tragic constellation of oppositions and fissures within progressive circles after the massacre.

The Tensions of Resistance

The Left’s greatest failure of imagination and nerve comes at a time when the battle against neoliberal capitalism in India is intensely alive and vocal. To make the difficult, but necessary, choice against India’s present economic policies, would have involved more than the airing of platitudes in Parliament and party mouthpieces; it would have involved the serious, responsible attempt to construct alternative paths of development, based on ecological sustainability and social justice. It would have involved the prioritization of human welfare over profit, the deepening of democratic participation as a bulwark against capital, and the formulation of innovative and dynamic models of socio-economic growth and redistribution. This was the choice the organized Left in India failed to make, and Nandigram, horrifically, metamorphosed that failure into an unpardonable crime. But the loss of the organized Left throws the choices and pitfalls of the resistance to global capitalism actually happening in India into sharp relief. It is necessary, then, to briefly consider the forms of this emergent resistance.

First, and most importantly, there are the resistance movements launched from the grassroots, involving those affected directly by the contemporary Indian model of capitalism. The corporate takeover of basic human and natural resources produces, at each step, more or less complete refusal on the part of the local communities who stand to lose. This refusal may or may not crystallize into powerfully organized resistance. Over the issue of land grabs for SEZs, it seems, more often than not, that it does. Political parties and outfits may or may not join in the resistance. If they do, it ensures a certain amount of headline-grabbing mileage for the movements in question, important in itself. But even where the resistance is much less related to party political divisions, as it is in most cases, the threat experienced by communities from the state and from capital produces, inevitably, its own strategies of mobilization and organization, its own internal structures of solidarity and dissent, its own debates and ferment. At Singur, at Nandigram, at Haripur, at Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur, and in Maharashtra and Punjab, the immediate, automatic act of refusal has been clarified into structures of resistance, through the formation of committees, the election of representatives, the planning of short-term and long-term strategy. These structural solidifications of resistance, however, need to be situated in their immediate social contexts, which often enough have the shape of deeply divided and hierarchical local community relations, fissured by class, caste and gender. Does the process of resistance to corporate projects, and the partial unity it necessarily engenders, disturb older and deep-rooted patterns of local injustice and exploitation? The answer is still open and unresolved. The incredibly vocal and militant participation of Nandigram’s women in the resistance points in one direction, but the persistence of certain caste divisions and the reluctance of some of the lowest groups in the caste hierarchies to join the movement in Singur points in another. There is no automatic logic that weds the opposition to big capital to a ‘progressive’ political consciousness that calls all sources of injustice and hierarchy into question. But equally, there is no guarantee, in a time of uprising, ferment, and the need to create a consensus around resistance, the existing social orders will maintain their stability and not undergo a process of internal churning. The question that time alone will answer is this: what forms of political consciousness, what attempts to link the immediate struggle to wider and related socio-political tensions, will the experience of resistance produce?

Second, there has been, since Singur and Nandigram, an efflorescence of largely uncoordinated citizens’ initiatives, loosely seen in terms of ‘civil society’. The sudden outburst of protest in Calcutta in the wake of the West Bengal government’s land acquisition policies exemplifies this. Calcutta, a city that for decades has seen virtually no serious progressive oppositional politics, and where the staleness of both the ruling administration and the official opposition (the Trinamul Congress) has produced a crippling sense of cynicism and jadedness, woke up to a frenzy of mobilization and activism that testified both to the residual strength of Bengali nationalism and a deeply entrenched left-wing structure of feeling, a sympathy for the disprivileged that, ironically, the organized Left had in earlier times done much to produce and disseminate. Students’ associations organized protest and relief campaigns, medical teams who visited Nandigram galvanized a sense of active disgust among doctors and nurses, who took to the streets in large numbers, and associations of lawyers, journalists, and artists also joined in the campaigns of solidarity with the resistance. Similar initiatives were set in motion in Delhi, and the symbolic effect of protests in the capital city were, as always, in excess of their immediate practical value – they helped force the issue of land grabs into national media headlines. These citizens’ mobilizations are enormously important, for, while the real battle continues to be fought in villages, tribal belts and local communities affected by the takeover of their land, publicly visible manifestations of solidarity in high-profile metropolitan spaces help sustain the mood of opposition and demonstrate the mythic nature of the neo-liberal policy ‘consensus’. On the other hand, many of these campaigns emanate from an immediate feeling of disgust and betrayal, and it remains to be seen whether they will be able to reproduce the resilience of committed activism, through coordination and organization, over a sustained period of time.

Third, there are the social movements that have been campaigning for social justice and ecological sustainability. Many of these – the campaign against the Narmada dam, the fishworkers’ movement in Madurai, various organizations working for the rights of Dalit, women’s groups, and associations set up to fight for unorganized labour – are clustered under the umbrella of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), which held a month-long protest sit-in in central Delhi shortly after Nandigram. These are groups that vary immensely in size and importance, but demonstrate the range and plurality of progressive initiatives in India. Most of them have no direct links with any political parties, though some of them are on good terms with the movements of the far Left, and others have worked closely with state administrations where they’ve been responsive. There is a continuum between some of the more progressive NGOs and these organizations: the lines often blur, but the tensions between social-welfarist drives and more radical, political forms of mobilization are felt at various levels. SEZs are an issue that a range of social movements and initiatives can unite around, and there are encouraging signs of this unity being forged. But it is too early to say whether these organizations can produce a plausible challenge to the agenda of the Indian state and big business, and whether these largely single-issue campaigns can coalesce around a coherent political platform that seriously disturbs the governing consensus.

Finally, there is the revolutionary far Left, in its various factions and forms. To many, the Naxalites and Maoists represent the authentic vanguard of popular resistance, as the only politically organized and ideologically coherent movements that are genuinely committed simultaneously to fighting against big capital, and to mounting a radical offensive against the state. But this is far too roseate a picture. The far-left in India is a patchwork of deeply divided organizations, all loosely committed to the legitimacy of armed resistance to the state, but some more open to the question of parliamentary participation than others. One of the most disturbing features of their history has been their unwillingness to rethink the need for armed revolutionary violence of the most savage sort. In the context of prolonged state repression of an order of savagery that far exceeds their own, the decision to keep the option of armed resistance open is in a sense understandable. In Nandigram, the counter-violence of villagers against the CPI(M) was clearly produced by a sense that it was either kill or be killed: in such a situation, it is not easy to stand back and pre-judge ‘Naxal’ strategies of resistance. It is possible, however, to ask whether such violence, which breeds its own vicious-cyclical logic, can actually be politically productive. In various parts of India – Bihar, Chattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh, for instance – the cycle of state repression, exploitation by big landholders, and revolutionary violence has bred situations where we are often left with little more than the machinations, brutality, and terror wreaked by rival mafias. This is not the only form of ‘resistance’ practised by far-left outfits, but it would be fair to say that it has been a dominant trajectory, ever since the tragic foundational episode of Naxalbari, where revolutionary left-wing idealism soon gave way to internecine warfare and bloodshed. Those who celebrate the revolutionary drive of the Maoists and Naxalites against the corruption and degeneration of the organized Left tend to forget something very important. For the longest period of its existence, this organized Left occupied the very ground that the ‘far’ Left does today: it took up issues of deprivation and injustice at levels where none of the mainstream political formations had anything to say, and it drew its legitimacy from that. It was always crippled by its internal authoritarianism, by the blind dogmas of party line, and by its slavishness to the shifts and turns of Soviet policy. But the revolutionary Left today, for all its principled opposition to capital, is usually equally authoritarian in its internal structures (equally committed to ‘democratic centralism’), equally defined by party line, and as blindly worshipful of Mao as Communists used to be of Stalin.

It is difficult to see a progressive and genuinely democratic left-wing politics emerging from such locations, though the real and often heroic resistance offered to capital and the state by many far-left groupings should not be undermined. It is also true that the ‘far’ Left is a complex animal, not only divided into a range of legitimate or underground parties split over tactics, strategies and ideology, but also spread across other spaces – civil and democratic rights campaigns, citizens’ mobilizations against state terror, independent radical trade unions, and social movements of various kinds, where one can usually find both conservative and revolutionary factions. One is left, once again, to hope for internal transformations, or for the emergence within the far Left of strands that valorize not only revolutionary zeal and consistency, but also work towards achieving cross-regional, democratic mandates for their politics. This would, however, mean eschewing both the violent excesses and the righteous vanguardism that permeates so much of their politics today.

It is, in the final analysis, the question of democratic mandate that defines most sharply the dilemmas confronting the resistance to corporate capital in India today. The state, for all practical purposes, is accountable only to itself. The ‘legitimate’ political parties, from Left to Right, are rapidly coming to share a neo-liberal consensus with no foundations in popular consent, and are accountable, increasingly, only to top-down structures of leadership. The corporate companies who have staked out such a powerful claim to the land and the resources of the country are accountable, of course, only to their shareholders. And the various movements and mobilizations that have risen to resist them are accountable mainly to their adherents, and have not been able to formulate a coherent politics that can be called into question democratically: if this is true of the Naxalites, it is also true of the far less ethically problematic rainbow coalition of social movements, which usually organize around limited issues, and have trouble widening their horizons into a politics that can command generalized consent, and establish a real hegemony.

It is here that the loss of the ‘organized’ Left pinches most sharply, for it means the loss of a space, however limited, of constitutionally protected and ‘legitimate’ political opposition, forced to justify its tactics and practices by appealing to more than either revolutionary purism or vague moods of discontent. This is the impasse in which the opposition between capital and progressive resistance finds itself today. There is no democratically accountable location within the ‘legitimate’ political spectrum from which attacks upon the embrace of state and capital, with its disastrous consequences for the whole country, can be mounted. At the same time, the discontent with the chosen paths of national development has never been more sharply pronounced and more visible than it is today, and this has produced a rich harvest of oppositional mobilizations, engaged in the search for a definite political space to anchor themselves to. It is the kind of situation where one finds oneself feeling that something has to give. India is crying out for a real democratic Left, stripped of old dogmas, and able to face up to its role with responsibility, accountability and humility. For that, however, significantly new forms of political radicalism and left-wing practice, a break from the dead past and the stifling present, are needed. Perhaps the clamour of democratic protest in the wake of Nandigram signals a new beginning, a signal towards new directions. Perhaps global capital and the powers of the state simply remain too strong, too resilient, to allow a dent to be made. It is a moment of political impasse that we live through at present, even as tensions mount and boil and break to the surface of our times.

[1] Mohammed Salim, the Indonesian businessman to whom the land in Nandigram was to be turned over, helped bankroll Suharto’s genocide of Indonesian Communists. The Communist-led government of West Bengal is eager to do business with him. If ever proof was needed of the irony of the current conjuncture of the Indian Left, or of the way capital swallows up and transcends ideological animosities in its expansionary drives, it is here.
[2] Real estate is at the heart of the new model of development in various parts of India. The township of New Rajarhat in Calcutta, a recently constructed urban space that was built upon the displacement of an agrarian community, is a testament to the physical excision of poor and underprivileged communities for the establishment of luxury apartments, malls and enclaves of leisure, residence and work for the upper middle classes. This logic permeates urban planning in most of India’s major metropolitan cities, most visibly in Bombay, and in Gurgaon near Delhi.

2007-03-22T19:32:00.000Z

The bullets have flown and found their mark. The blood of children has flowed, as Neruda once wrote, without fuss, like children's blood. The dust has not yet settled, as Nandigram seethes, but an uneasy truce prevails. The villagers, as they promised to do, have given up their lives but not their land, and have driven out CPM cadres and policemen (or 'police-cadres', as they call them there) from their villages. The SEZ has been scrapped for the moment, but the local hostilities in Nandigram continue unabated. Rumours abound. Will more bodies be found, will the trail of blood the papers spoke of be traced to its source? Will the chopped limbs of children be found buried, will we uncover mass graves? Is Lakshman Seth gearing up for another offensive? Are local cadres regrouping to avenge their expulsion from their villages by the resistance movement? The Left Front partners are divided, but have reluctantly crept to Buddhadeb's side. The Politbureau and many affiliated intellectuals have, against the conscience of some within their ranks, thrown their lot in with the Bengal unit. The tail wags the dog. Real political confrontations have broken out again on the streets of Calcutta, after over two decades of dormancy. Things have fallen apart, the centre has ceased to hold, the state government has lost what legitimacy it had amongst the poor of West Bengal and, yes, among all leftists of any integrity. It's still difficult to write with balance, but the time's come, perhaps, for some colder stocktaking, to apprehend the political dimensions of what happened last week.

Nandigram was a Pyrrhic political victory for the resistance to the Salim plant. The blood and trauma - both of which are unredeemable - should not allow us to forget that, for the first time in the country, neoliberal economic strategy has suffered a defeat at the hands of a popular movement. It is absurd to attribute this to the machinations of the Trinamul and the Naxals, as the Politbureau has done. They were there, but only as a part - and by no means the major part - of a grassroots movement as spontaneous as any mobilization can possibly be. An ideological principle, which asserts the right of capital and state to conspire, without accountability or check, to take over land, destroy livelihoods, and displace and disperse people in their thousands, has been handed a moral and political defeat by a massive uprising of peasants. In its nature, if not in form or substance, this resembles similar successful backlashes against neoliberalism elsewhere in the world - the defeat of the coup in Venezuela, the rout of water privatization in Cochabamba in Bolivia, the resistance of French students to legislation endorsing repressive employment contracts. An SEZ in Nandigram would have meant the establishment of a regime of extraterritorial sovereignty for a company accountable to no one but its shareholders, not subject to the compulsions of national law, unhampered by legally enshrined labour rights. There will be other SEZ projects, on other sites, accomplished with force and coercion by the state in the service of global capital. But Nandigram, it seems, may preserve its freedom from such despotism. The Salim group - run by the man who financed Suharto's genocide of the Indonesian Left - will probably lose a major profitmaking opportunity.

What is hard to get one's head around is that this singular defeat of capital by a peasant uprising is also a defeat of the organized Left in India. This happens to be the very kind of movement the central party leadership, and the Party's affiliated intellectuals, have been eager to celebrate elsewhere in the world, and the SEZ policy, as initially formulated by the Indian government, found its bitterest political opponent in the Left. In its rhetoric and at least some of its practice, the national CPM and its junior allies stood at a sharply divergent angle to India's current economic policy of keep-the-rich-happy neoliberalism. How could this have happened, then?

In the first place, the tail is clearly wagging the dog - the central party leadership does not control the West Bengal unit, but is actually hopelessly dependent on the latter's continued electoral success for its presence as a significant force in Indian politics. And once we wade into the muck of the West Bengal CPM, a party that at national level still seems to stand for political principle becomes transformed into a gross inversion of itself. In Bengal, the culture of the organized left is defined by cronyism, corruption, local-level thuggery, intimidation of political opponents and dissidents, and electoral rigging. Further, the state has witnessed, in the last decade or more of Left rule, a total collapse of many basic social services - public health, for instance, is absolutely abysmal. Since the state-level New Industrial Policy in 1994, the CPM has lurched dramatically to the right. The Governor recently said that just one primary health centre has been opened in West Bengal in the last ten years, and it is clear that medical services are being thoroughly privatized. Hawkers have been brutally cleared off Calcutta roads to prepare the city for the visit of a right-wing British politician - this was in 1994. Buddhadeb's ascension coincided with a massive attempt by the party to court middle-class popularity, in the form of new luxury apartments and malls, amusement and water parks, housing enclaves for the super-rich on agricultural land, and - as in other metropolitan cities - the tying of the economy to the drives of real estate speculation. Buddhadeb's SEZ policy, in common with that of other states, sought to introduce industrial capitalism into West Bengal on the most unfavourable terms imaginable for labour, local livelihoods, and the environment.

Inside West Bengal, then, the CPM had almost completed the journey towards becoming an objectively right-wing party, devoted to neoliberal capitalism, some time before last week's carnage. The very term 'Brand Buddha', touted by a press which learnt in degrees to love the new-look CPM, is enough to demonstrate that. So is the slogan Tata Buddha Lal Salaam, routinely chanted by party cadres during the Singur land acquisition. The Left could boast a long history of goodwill among the Bengal poor, a goodwill earned by years of brave political struggle prior to the assumption of power and the enactment of radical land reforms in the 1980s, but all this had begun to change some time back. Effective power inside the party was no longer wielded by committed Communists - however dogmatic - and political activists, but by local musclemen and ganglords, who ran their electoral domains like fiefdoms. Lakshman Seth, the local MLA from Tamluk and probably the chief architect of the massacre on the 14th, exemplifies this degeneration of a party of principle into a party of semi-criminal bosses and contractors. People like Lakshman Seth and his subordinates mobilize CPM voters in their thousands, intimidate political opponents and their sympathizers, run networks of patronage and corruption, and this, more than the strength of the government's record, keeps the wheels of the Left Front electoral winning machine oiled. And it is through these networks, principally, that the CPM cadre in the state reproduces itself. The rot is not solely or even chiefly in the leadership. It is in the rank and file.

In Nandigram, not only last week but over the last few months, these two elements of Left Front rule - the shift to the right in economic and social policy, and the stabilization of uncontested power at local levels through the deployment of patronage, violence and intimidation - came together. And equally seriously, it demonstrated the accumulation of arrogance that three decades of uninterrupted power has bred in the Left. Did Buddha really believe that his SEZ policy could be passed by fiat, on the strength of his massive majority in the Bengal Assembly? Did he really believe that peasant smallholders, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers would give up their homes and livelihoods without a fuss? Had he really forgotten the sense of a right to the land in rural Bengal, shared by rich peasants and poor labourers alike? Did he expect no resistance? And when resistance did happen, and he was forced to withdraw from the SEZ policy, did he really believe that Nandigram could be retaken by the state authorities without violent confrontation? Had he, above all, forgotten the long political heritage of the Left in West Bengal, which outlasts the actual demise of radical or democratic principles and practices within the government? Unbelievably, the answer to all these questions seems to be yes.

In the second place, beyond the politics of West Bengal, the Indian Left as a whole may be undergoing a major, and cancerous, rightward shift. Many of us on the left had lost faith in the CPM in West Bengal, if indeed we ever had that faith in the first place. (Enough has happened since the initial assumption of Left Front power to shake any such naivete to its roots, beginning with the massacre of settlers in Morichjhapi in 1979 by the first LF government - and that was 'back in the good old days'.) But we managed to optimistically drive a logical wedge in our minds between the 'good CPM' - the party at national level, and in states other than West Bengal - and the 'bad CPM' - in a word, West Bengal. This was not without foundation. Who, after all, did we instinctively turn to as the Babri Masjid came down and Gujarat burned? Who did we take refuge behind when the BJP was in power, and Hindu Rashtra, at times, seemed like a real possibility? Who did we trust to take a consistently anti-neoliberal line in Parliament, in the days of the NDA, but also from within the UPA, as a progressive force of pressure? Who did I march with on every march for democracy in Delhi, even as I mentally cursed their authoritarianism and easy assumption of the high moral ground? Which intellectuals did I turn to to explain the implications of India's economic and foreign policy in our times? Who led the unorganized workers of the capital on their successful struggle for minimum wages? Who organized concerted public campaigns against the police attacks on workers in Gurgaon? Who embodied a clutch of memories and histories, a gesture towards a brighter horizon, despite the present, and despite itself? Who did we - did I - ultimately feel grateful for, in a sense politically indebted to, despite frequent feelings of disappointment and impatience? Who, though always, always disappointing, also represented possibility? Always, and alone, the Left.

I do not believe that we were - that I was - wrong in believing some, or even all, of this. There are many on the far Left who would disagree violently with this, but I do not believe these democratic, fruitful strands within the organized Left were wishfully imagined by us, that we were fooled and misled on every occasion. But there are signs that those hopes may be disappearing from us, that we may no longer have any kind of a claim on what we were habituated to see as 'the Left'. As an acquaintance on a recent demonstration against the Nandigram massacre sensitively remarked, 'I cursed this Party for so long, but always, in some sense, as my Party, in some form as internal criticism.' We shared something with this Left. Always officially committed - shamefully - to Stalinism, always so ready to trot out the party line, always so apparently rigid and full of certitudes that didn't match up to reality, this Left remained our Left, to rail against but to hope for the renewal of, to reject but to clutch on to desperately and fiercely, to mull over, to obsess about beyond what was good for our health, into the small hours of the morning. But 'to-day the present.' And what is that present? Where do we go, now?

Nandigram opened a wound in us that has not stopped and will not stop bleeding. To watch a Left in whose history and future you still feel complicit, organize gangs of cadres and policemen to mount an armed attack on a popular resistance movement, to watch them seal off a district and do whatever they bloody please - it does something to you. Turns you inside out. Hollows you out. And at this moment, silence - even consent - from the Politbureau? From intellectuals one trusted and respected? Many within the organized Left no doubt feel torn and anguished, angry with what happened. But party line overrides inner doubt, and all their private anguish comes to nothing. It feels like a guilty silence, but the fact of conscience does not absolve them of responsibility. And there is a bigger question at stake here. Rural populations are fighting, with their lives on their line, against the invasion of big capital, for their very right to exist, all across West Bengal, and across India. For any party or formation that considers itself in any sense committed to left-wing principles, there is clearly only one stand available. But the organized Left in India, bound by the compulsions of political expediency to the West Bengal line, is standing on the other side. You cannot support neoliberalism in Bengal and credibly oppose it in Gujarat. You cannot fight state brutality in Orissa and claim it as your prerogative in Bengal. You cannot resist SEZs in Maharashtra and embrace them in Bengal. What are you claiming, anyway - that you have the capacity to mould capital to your will, make it dance to your tune? The choice is stark.

And to not make that choice against this developmental strategy, this neoliberalization that takes away livelihoods and rights and irreversibly damages local ecologies, represents a failure of nerve. It signals that the party has given up, decided to play the game of capitalism on the enemy's terms, to not even think of constructing terms of its own. A failure of nerve, and of imagination. And it's particularly striking at this moment in history, when, after years of apparently living in 'the end of history', radical social movements and politics have resurfaced elsewhere in the world, trying in messy and contingent, but democratic, ways to formulate alternatives. Could conditions for a left-wing effloresence have been less propitious anywhere in the world than Latin America, the empire's backyard, multinational capital's favourite destination, the land of brutal right-wing dictatorships, civil wars, American military incursions and coups, and banana republics? But it is precisely there, and at this moment in time, that a wonderful patchwork of experiments in left-wing democracy have emerged, many of them romping to electoral success last year. Contrast this with the Indian Left.

And, darker still, is the possibility that this signals not just a lack of vision or courage on the part of the Left, but also a discernible rightward, neoliberal shift in its very heart. If we stand aside and assume an illusory objectivity for a moment, do we not see the patterns of a sort of political convergence, not irreversible, but nevertheless powerful? The patterns tell us a story. The enthusiastic adoption of a neoliberal strategy and the repression of any oppositional voices? Look to the Congress in Maharashtra, the BJP/BJD in Orissa, the BJP in Gujarat - and the Left in Bengal. The open use of state power to wreak terror and trauma upon the state's own citizens? The Congress - Delhi, 1984. The Right - Bombay, 1993, and Gujarat, 2002. The Left - Nandigram, 2007. The point is not that Buddha is comparable to Modi - he obviously isn't. The point is that basic forms of political choice and practice now seem shared across party lines, signalling an unprecedented political convergence.

In Kerala, where Achyutanandan is pushing from within the CPM for a very different kind of politics and economic strategy to the practices of the West Bengal government, there seems to be an open schism, and significant pressure from within the central party leadership for the adoption of Vijayan's line of conformity to neoliberal capital. It is clear, then, that the national Left's effective endorsement of what happened in Nandigram is spurred by more than political expediency. There seem to be strong pressures, at the heart and through the body of the official Left, towards another version of the world with no alternatives, where capital holds all the cards and the state is its policeman. What does this do to the many, many Communists working with courage and commitment, in states other than West Bengal, against the most destructive invasions of capital? What does it do to social movements that believed, for a while, that the Left could be a genuine ally in their struggles? What does it do to those of us who constitute, in our ideas or our practices, an independent left, who still haven't entirely stopped clutching at the shattered pieces of the clay image of 'the Left' we'd built up? I was treated to a poignant example of this recently at Delhi University, at a public meeting, when one of the most committed and eloquent left-wing teachers on campus virtually implored some SFI cadres sitting there: 'As Communists, you should commit yourselves to labour. You can't be spokespersons of capital. Capital will look after itself. Defending it is not your job.' It was a moving affirmation, in many ways, of the Left so many of us desired and desire, that we may have imagined into a spectral being that we loved, 'well but not wisely'. In any case, the appeal was answered in no uncertain terms. The cadres sat there implacably, and then one of them spoke. 'So the company is supposed to suffer, and not make any money? What will happen to the company?' Listen, everyone, hush. That's the Communist speaking.

For many who have opposed the CPM from the left for years, Naxals, sympathizers, and others, all of this may come, not unjustifiably, as a vindication of the radical claim that the official Left had 'always been like this', and that in a sense it's all for the better, 'because now they have been exposed for what they are.' And even if there was a time when things may have been different, when the CPM may have genuinely represented a force for the disempowered, that time is gone, and Nandigram has sealed its departure. As I write this, I can find no reason, here and now, to argue with those claims. But that produces a feeling not of vindication, but of sadness, and a great weight. For if we have lost that Left irrevocably, what do we have? Giving up on the Left means giving up on the entire legitimate political spectrum for any hope of meaningful change, for initiatives that will reverse our slide into political, economic and ecological disaster. If those initiatives will not come from the Left, they will not come from any other political party either. The intensity and range of our social movements are considerable, but where is the democratically accountable and representative political force that will take them on board and give them succour? If the Left continues on this trajectory, it will lose, for once and for all, its position as a force that could disturb and destabilize the complacent consensus politics of neoliberalism, and effectively question capital.

If there is despair, it came from Bengal. If there is hope, it also lies there, in the initial shuffling, and then the sudden vibrant explosion, of oppositional civil society. This remains largely limited to Calcutta, though elections in colleges in the Hooghly belt have recently dealt a blow to reigning CPM hegemony. Calcutta, the last time I visited it, as every time, seemed to me to embody a strange theatrical performance of politics, as a spectre. The forms - the husks - of once meaningful political rituals pervaded the city, sprang out at you through torchlit marches, blaring loudspeakers, street-corner meetings, walls bathed in political graffiti. But none of it meant anything, every ritualized gesture was held securely in place by the weight of three decades of virtual single-party rule, and the protagonists of each streetside political drama were clearly hired performers, doing what they had to do. In the last week, everything has changed. There has been a low-level simmering for a while, but it seems evident that now the city is a riot of political mobilization and commitment, and each demonstration - each bandh, even, in this bandh-infested city - is in its messy way a festival of democracy. Students driving the police back. Lawyers taking to the street. Doctors demonstrating against police and state brutality. Peaceful demonstrations of thousands being teargassed and then regrouping. Groups collecting money, planning resistance strategy, debating tactics. Individuals finding themselves faced with complex political choices and affiliations. It's all a mess, but it lives and feeds and grows, and it feels new. Even from afar, even from the TV screens, even from telephone conversations and email exchanges with Calcutta, it feels different. The consequences of all this are unknown - but the future's open.

And none of this new ferment is triggered by the Right. If anything, the popular revulsion at Nandigram is a testament to a left-wing structure of feeling, or at least a widely disseminated sympathy for the disempowered, that seems to have miraculously survived the demise of the Bengal CPM as a credible democratic force. Political sympathy, solidarity, that most intangible of sentiments, is out on the streets, muddled up as always with old feuds and rivalries and unsettled scores, a range of distinct and clashing motivations, daily sacrifices of principle, and undirected, violent anger. Nevertheless, it's all alive, and that matters. Or we had all better hope it does.

2007-02-28T21:26:00.000Z

I haven’t ever read anything written on Herzog, so I guess what I’m writing about may well be a staple of Herzog criticism, but it struck me that during Fata Morgana the movement of the camera bears a peculiar relationship with the objects and relationships that it films. I couldn’t believe it at first while watching it, but never, in the course of the entire film, does the camera ever actually zoom in on the set. We begin with half-a-dozen or more shots of a plane landing in a field, a shifting landscape of water and desert and cloud, punctuated by aberrant images – a man walking across the sand, factories on the far horizon, the tops of huts and shacks like a Lego set sprawled childishly across the thorns and rocks and cacti of the desert. Through all of this, the camera never moves in on its prey; rather, it follows the landscapes in their motion as though it were a car driving along a path, the distances from it of objects that lie off the track of its road being a constant. After a while we are treated to some sharp cuts and jumps, some of which amplify their preceding images – a distant shot of a car followed by a closer angle of the same car, for instance – but all of this is accomplished without the camera ever actually moving in slowly, zooming in upon its images. It’s almost as though we’re watching a series of photographs passing before our eyes without interruption.

About midway through the movie, the camera does begin moving in, tentatively – upon a line of slaughtered animal carcasses juxtaposed with a sardonic take on Genesis, a narrator telling us how heaven decreed that its creations should find protectors and caregivers to nurture them; upon the shapes of tin sheds and houses; upon images of children and beggars; upon a naturalist demonstrating the peculiarities of a monitor lizard he’s holding; upon stones and rock formations; upon sand dunes that metamorphose into waves on water and clouds in the skies with apparently smooth continuity. At moments like this, however, the camera refrains from zooming right in, mercilessly, but instead darts in and out again, in tentative flickering motions, tenderly and surreptitiously. It rests on a place, moves closer softly and quickly, and lingers for a moment or two, slides down the length of the set, before sliding back again. In a sense, the camera is making love to its subjects.

The camera, then, follows a line that is disjointed and discontinuous from the landscape it reveals. Indeed, we’re treated to something more akin to a revelation than an exploration, the voice of the narrators telling a story seemingly running parallel to the actual visual narrative, only touching it at points, to withdraw again. The music follows a similar trajectory – intimations of violence and pain and injustice on the screen immediately followed by soaring melodies, a hymn, an operatic tenor, a rousing blues, successive compositions by Leonard Cohen, as the landscape tears off at a run, past wire meshes and military camps and trucks and crashed planes and far-off hills. (But this landscape rushes past us, we never pass through it.) The relationship of the camera to its objects establishes, then, the form for the relationship forged between the principal narrative elements that keep the film moving.

But the juxtaposition of narrative, visual imagery and music in apparently parallel streams does not result in chaos and the breaking of all perspective, for it reveals deeper preoccupations. A wonderfully reconstructed Biblical creation myth – God transposed to a mythic, probably Central American, creator and creatress, the making of the world through the labours of Genesis – is countered by images of wilful destruction, of death and disease and poverty and misery. An ironical reading of Paradise is counterposed to interwoven images of serenity, serendipity, and violence and desolation. There is a particularly beautiful sequence, where ‘Suzanne’ is played across a barren desert landscape, and the image, in the central stanza of the song, of Jesus as a man dying for a beautiful cause, but bearing a promise of healing that never quite dies out (an image quite at odds with the avaricious greed, bloodlust and powerlust that characterizes so much of the history of practised Christianity), acquires an intense power and poignancy. A politics emerges from the film, an ironical affirmation of Utopia in the face of the banal, the absurd, and the wasted. The camera, which gives all of this light, shape and form – itself a principle of creation and revelation – rivets us to all of this, but also keeps us at bay, reminds us of our status as onlookers by refusing the cinematic depth that zooming close-in shots and slow zoom-outs would have created. We are denied a point of identification with the people and objects on screen, reminded on their awareness of their presence on camera, their unavoidable theatricality. The camera in Fata Morgana is the alienation effect in action.

Workers’ Recreation: Phoenix Mills And The World We Have Gained

2007-02-28T18:15:00.000Z

(In Bombay last month, I found myself, one evening, unaccountably sitting on the balcony of Phoenix Mills for hour after hour, feeling angry and desperate and perversely fascinated. I sat there for four hours, looking, not doing anything else. That is where this came from.)

1. Freeze this segment of the city at any moment in time, and you encounter a very particular Bombay, a Bombay mythologized many times over, but also a real Bombay. Social distances are crossed with apparent ease here. Blue collar and white collar bump collars on crowded streets; tea and paan shops, tiny cheap restaurants and permit rooms jostle with large shopping centres and expensive eateries; working-class neighbourhoods weave through the shadows of looming residential skyscrapers and towering office blocks; narrow alleys stuffed with pedestrian life seep into broad boulevards stuffed with slow-moving car traffic; flyovers where cars whiz by overlook messy junction points of humming, throbbing pedestrian roads. The sound of drilled metal and hammered concrete, the wet slap of cement and tarmac, fugue into the chatter of families shopping for the week or the day, the honk of impatient taxis and Contessas, the music blaring from bars. The smells of stale piss and the smells of brewed Barista coffee hover together in the air. The neighbourhoods thrum with the friction of crossing social worlds, visible to one another and part of one another. This is not Delhi, with its zoned off territories, its industrial units banished to the city’s edges, its gated communities and malls designed exclusively for the super-rich. Lower Parel is a messy junction of interchanges, an exhibition of classes, communities and histories passing each other on the street, unsmilingly but also, on the whole, unthreateningly.

2. But having frozen space in time, allow time to begin moving again in this space. And now these crossing worlds, these corruptions and porosities of social distance, seem less plastic than they appeared at first, and more tragic. This used to be part of Girangaon: working-class Bombay, textile mills belching smoke from their tall chimneys, factory sirens screaming at lunch hour and the end of shifts. Spinners and weavers and doffers and reelers and moneylenders and rentiers and khanavals fabricated, through their intimate exchanges and conflicts, a distinct world. Shahirs recited their poetry, lavnis and tamashas entertained working-class families and communities, religious occasions and festivals created, alternately, flashpoints of unity and discord, powerful unions organized workers into militant political activity. This was a locality, like others in Girangaon, created and sustained by the mills and the labour market that swelled around them, fuelled by the relationships, rivalries, lives and deaths of labourers. This place belonged to them.

3. The mills died. The strike of 1982 ended in unqualified defeat. Productive technology shifted from mills to powerlooms. The market shifted from cotton to polyester and other synthetic fibres. For several years the mill lands lay vacant and unused; the communities built around them began to float apart. Meanwhile, the city continued to grow. It grew richer but also poorer. It grew more congested. Slums occupied more and more space; commercially available land, on the other hand, became more and more profitable. Bombay became one of the prime real estate destinations of the world. Real estate, as was inevitable, turned its eye upon the mill lands. This happened at a time of an acute housing shortage in the city. Environmental activists argued, with reason on their side, that the lands left vacant by the mills provided a wonderful opportunity for the city to breathe again: the unused acres could be converted into parks and green public spaces. NGOs campaigning for workers’ rights argued, again with reason on their side, that the land that had belonged to workers should be developed for their use, their sustenance. In a time when slums dotted the landscapes of the labouring and ex-labouring poor, the vacant lands offered an ideal space for the construction of low-cost housing. Real estate agents and builders, with the state and money on their side, argued that this was the chance the city had, finally, to become ‘world-class’, to become Shanghai, to become Manhattan. Cleansed, purified, beautified. It was a long battle, dragged through the media, the deliberations of contending cliques of policymakers, experts and advisers, and the courts. But eventually the side with the guns and the money won: acres and acres of mill land were turned over, largely illegally, to builders and investors for ‘new development’. Lower Parel, and areas like it, came to acquire the landscape they inhabit now: a schizophrenic juxtaposition of supremely rich corporate offices leaning into the sky, surreal skylines punctuated by the grit and dirt of plebeian neighbourhoods, caked with dust and bursting sewers and crowded bastis and chawls. The process of corporate gentrification continues. The working and unemployed poor, in a city of vast and visible economic disparities, are being squeezed into tiny corners of land that had historically been theirs. ‘New development’ in Bombay distributes entitlements and opportunities in a manner that, even by the standards of contemporary global capitalism, is blindly avaricious and unjust. It identifies stakeholders on the basis of profitability, plunges real estate investment and speculation into the city as though the poor didn’t exist.

4. In this apparent criss-crossing of classes and spaces, a significantly new form of social distance is actually being produced: the inexorable work of capital upon plebeian livelihoods and localities, plebeian communities that structured these streets and alleys, and consequently the creation of a new patriciate, ennobled by access to the benefits of real estate investment and speculation. And Phoenix Mills, where I am sitting as I write this, stands at the centre of this new strategy of urban creation, a grotesque and fascinating monument to the torn and entangled histories of Bombay, a testament to the fantasies on whose purse-strings the engines of growth now run.

5. Phoenix Mills is a scam: the land the mill stood on was leased on condition that it be used for ‘workers’ recreation’. This obscene deployment of a worker-friendly clause in urban development law for the purposes of actually disinheriting what remained of the working class testifies to the transformation of the law itself, a transformation with deep historical roots fructifying fully at this moment in time. At one point, over a hundred years ago, the law that governed the space of factories was a weak but real instrument for the protection of workers, now it became an instrument for their disenfranchisement, their erasure from the spaces they had built and sustained, the spaces they had spun and woven into their masters’ profits. The millworkers of Bombay, and the complex local economy framed around their activities, had no space in the new, world-class city that was being imagined. They were an unnecessary impediment. They were, quite simply, superfluous.

6. I’m sitting on the steps of Level 1, High Street Phoenix. Behind me is a white room with large windows – the Bowling Company. A Sports Bar belonging to the same company. A seafood restaurant named Gopaljee. Below and behind me, there are outlets of Copper Chimney, McDonald’s, Bombay Blue, Noodle Bar, Spaghetti Kitchen, Gelato Italiano, Kareem’s, Domino’s. On my far right, Big Bazaar: socialism for the rich, or at any rate for the economically empowered. Below and beside that, several open-air food stalls. Below me and facing me, a large brick-tiled courtyard, where shopping families, children, groups of young people, and couples, wander and talk. Directly below me is a tiny patch of enclosed green, and a couple of large potted plants, behind which are groups of people sitting on marbled benches with small attached water fountains. They face Barista, Quorum, Planet M, and The Dollar Store. These are mostly built within structures inherited from the old factory: this room might have been the carding room, cotton may have been reeled in its neighbouring compound, and spun into yarn in the big oddly shaped structure behind that. No matter – it’s all gone now, and our focus is on the new and the living, not the dead. Still, the intersection of dead and living is eerie in Phoenix Mills. The building that now houses Spaghetti Kitchen and McDonald’s would once have housed mill engines: it is attached to a large stone chimney, rather tastefully decorated in white, with the words ‘HIGH STREET PHOENIX’ emblazoned across its body. It is an arresting and spectral sight, a perpetual, though unwitting, reminder of the lives and deaths that passed through these factory walls once.

7. Life is happening all around. People are shopping in Big Bazaar and Pantaloons, darting in and out of the enormous building named High Street Phoenix, eating and drinking in the restaurants and bars, simply wandering around. And I am struck by the fact that despite the obscenity and injustice involved in producing this space, it remains a pleasant space to be in. This is a week-day, and so it is relatively relaxed, free of the weekend rush. It’s buzzing but not noisy. It is a middle-class space with its own generosity, embracing the gamut of occupations and experiences that constitutes the Indian middle class, not just –as in Delhi malls – the sickening conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche. The crowd is not entirely devoid of plebeian faces: careworn office faces, careworn working mothers’ faces, housewives’ faces that have finally been granted some relaxation, the faces of young men with shiny belts and slicked back hair and nowhere to go, the faces of the children of the respectable lower middle class, the faces of women who feel secure here and wander about freely, on their own or with their friends and families and lovers. A walk along a courtyard licking an ice cream, a hungrily munched chicken roll here, a long involved conversation there, the clasped hands of a couple deep into each other across the courtyard. The meanness and generosity of Bombay, as ever, can never quite cancel one another out. It is a public space.

8. It is a public space, but the public has its limits. The public experience it offers is contained, it is privatized within boundaries of class that are porous at their outer edges, but nonetheless there. I see this on Friday nights and weekends, when the mall becomes a zoo: a desperate mass of working middle-class people, a crocodile queue jostling to enter the mall. It is a desperate crush of people, many of whom, worn out after a week’s work, have this chance in this space and no other to do their shopping for the following week. The streets outside are the same as they ever were: local groceries, tobacconists, engineering and car repairing workshops, fruit and vegetable sellers, assorted mechanical blue-collar skills, surrounding this weirdly unsure, wavering, swaying circus of the local patriciate and gentry, small and large, modest and rich. This circus is contained within the space of the mall: step outside and you enter an utterly different world. The surrounding streets still belong, temporarily, to the proletarians and plebeians. But they in turn are surrounded. The corporate patriciate and white-collar gentry inhabit the oases of calm, the high-rise buildings, that survey this landscape and the rest of the city. Their meeting point is here, in Phoenix Mills, where they stock up for the week, and demonstrate the essential unity of the community they belong to, separated from them, the others, the mass of people who spit on the roads, the dirty faces of children who stare hungrily into shopfront windows from the outside, the men and women living around the mall who have no idea how long their occupancy of these roads and alleys will last, how long before they are cleansed, and we have, finally, our Shanghai or our Manhattan. This is the slow, contested, but inexorable dynamic of segregation in the city.

9. Below me, the courtyard is humming with all the delicate variations of human relationships and interchanges. But beyond this, interchanges of a different kind are at work. Beyond a fence of aluminium plastered with billboards – Pantaloons, HSBC, Samsung, HT – the landscape shifts dramatically and surreally. A giant car park is being erected. Gangs of men, small figures with hard hats, stand on a half-built roof that is also a work-floor, yelling and grunting as they haul up a half-finished door, borne on the shoulders of a man climbing a rickety scaffolding. A gigantic crane looms over their bodies, swinging this way and that. Workers move around, fix walls, stop, look around, smoke, and return to work, on the seven floors of the car park that is being built, with speed and efficiency and sweat and, in all probability, terrible pay with no benefits. Stacks of bamboo line the back of a man moving, very slowly, between the towering skeleton of the car park and the work-floor where it is being assembled. Tall rods rise from the surface, providing the weight and balance for makeshift pillars that will later be finessed into the foundations of the different storeys. Loud hammering. Drilling. Four men picking an unsteady path across a walkway precariously balanced on a grid of wooden rods, cobbled into a platform to hold the weight of working men and their materials. On the sixth floor, a man very near the edge, crawling along the walkway inspecting his work. He’d better not have vertigo. Men balancing on one another, shouting loud instructions, hauling concrete and wood and metal, cleaning surfaces, hammering in loose bolts. Construction is factory work, but with a difference: here the workers are building the factory even as they work in it. Workers’ recreation.

10. The compound that surveys this back-breaking labour, the compound where I am sitting, is not, plainly enough, built for workers’ recreation. But in another sense, it clearly is built for that very purpose. Recreation in the literal sense of the word: to re-create, to create afresh. A new economy and new forms of work. This may be a space of consumption, but it remains a factory nonetheless. Tangible goods and intangible services are produced each moment. Men and women smile plastic smiles at you from behind food counters as they wrap your sandwiches and rolls. McDonald’s gives you the assembly line in miniaturized and perfect form: the young workers who hand you burgers and fries never stop for a moment, never sit, their hands and bodies move in pre-synchronized manner. Ford and Taylor are recreated in the juxtapositions and rhythms of their work. Security guards, many of whom may have worked in the old mill, or others around it, move around sleeplessly, watching you for signs of transgression, stifling yawns but unable to hide the tiredness in their eyes, behind their dull blue suits. Waiters and shop assistants scurry to your service, always ready to be of use, fortunate if you speak to them with courtesy. A complex, dynamic economy of labour persists within the walls of the old factory. An economy with new codes, new and intimate hierarchies, but an economy of labour nonetheless. All this happens in the shadow of the old mill chimney, and if you listen very hard you can hear ghosts clanking their chains, marching in through the gates when the whistle blows, marching out again when the day’s over, and you can hear, in your mind, the hissing steam of the engines in the mill, and smell the smoke as it billows blackly out of the now cleansed, white chimney. Dead and living labour mingle. History is lived. All that was solid has melted into air, but air has crystallized as real estate, has taken shape, again, in this new economy of exchanges, services, and construction.

11. I look across this bustling, chaotic jostling of economies again, and the landscape I’m part of produces itself, with a new clarity, before my eyes. Here, Phoenix Mills, with its complex interpenetrations of work, investment, and consumption. Before me, the looming husk of a car park, the scaffolding that supports it, and the men who slowly conjure it into shape and form. Across the road, the sounds and smells of car mechanics’ workshops, cheap eateries, and small groceries that constitutes Gandhi Nagar Road, the chawls and bastis that sit in the middle of the new Shanghai that is taking shape before our eyes. A short way in the distance, three giant tower blocks, heralding the future of lower Parel. The future of new Bombay.

2007-02-20T20:14:00.000Z

It's difficult to know how to start writing again. The world's been full in the last few months. The head and heart have been heavy. And I just haven't felt like writing, but now I do. There's a clutch of memories and impressions and preoccupations that just keeps growing.

Here's the most vivid of recent memories.

A village in Singur, West Bengal, not far from Calcutta. New Year's Eve. An old woman, one of the leaders of the local resistance against the land grab by the West Bengal government on behalf of the Tatas, sitting in the courtyard of her small house, telling us of a night of terror. 25 September last year, when a group of villagers demonstrated outside the Block Development Office in Singur, into the small hours of the morning. The crowd thinning out. At one at night, upon a signal from the office, the electricity is cut off. A group of masked men emerge. They are, in different accounts, local cadres of the CPM, policemen, and trainee policemen from the training school in Barrackpore. Whoever they are, they run armed amok among the demonstrators, beat them senseless. (As the old woman told us of that night, a young man standing there, one of the victims of the attack who had to be hospitalized for several days, nodded and added details.) She told us how she escaped, but how the roads were too dangerous, how she spent all night in a ditch, waiting for the masked men to go.

These masked men, and more like them, with or without masks, in the months that have followed, are acting on the orders or with the tacit approval of a professedly left-wing government. This is a government that publicly dismisses the deep-rooted grass-roots political backlash from peasants, once its loyal constituency, as the machinations and conjurations of its political enemies. But it is not that, except at a very superficial level. And we are constantly fed a pervasive myth: that the two issues at hand here, the 'large' question of West Bengal's future strategies for development, and the mode in which these are put into being, can be separated from one another. That the state violence in Singur and the virtual civil war in Nandigram are regrettable and unnecessary complications, avoidable hitches, on the path to economic progress. This is a lie. For the villagers who were beaten up on 25 September, for Tapasi Malik who was brutally murdered in Gopalnagar (local villagers are certain that the CPM boss there, Debu Malik, bears at least part of the responsibility for this), for the family who were peppered with rubber bullets and lathis in Khaser Bheri, these two processes are not separable.For them, this industrial policy means sticks on the back, teargas, bombs hurled into villages, a constant reign of state terror. This strategy of development and this policy of repression are mutually necessary.

This is nothing new in India, and those of us who ever believed that the presence of a Left Front government would halt or soften the brutality of these processes were naive, or lived in more hopeful times, when the words 'Left Front' meant something quite different, something much more genuine, than it does in Bengal today. Among people who live and work in the Narmada Valley, among the slum-dwellers of Delhi, among the people of Kalinganagar in Orissa, where there has been resistance to another Tata project, a bauxite plant, and where state reprisal has involved the planting of anti-personnel landmines, the effects of neo-liberalism have been felt repeatedly and violently. Governments and companies have liked to believe that the victims of their policies will be too weak or too cowed down to respond. In Delhi, this has largely been true. In the Narmada and in Orissa, it hasn't. And it certainly hasn't in Nandigram, and the signs are that in Haripur, where the West Bengal government has recently tried to survey land for the construction of a nuclear power plant, resistance has already begun crystallizing.

It's too early to either celebrate or mourn the outcomes of these localized acts of resistance. Their future still hangs in the balance, though the forces arrayed against them are immensely powerful. The present retreat of the SEZ policy, and the noises made by the Centre and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya about 'adequate compensation packages' (who will measure their adequacy?), cannot last for very long. The pressures of India's economic agenda, and the direction of the world, will not be easy to fight back, or, even more seriously, provide counter-models of sustainable and just development to.

But resistance there will be, and there is no way in which the efforts by states and governments to contain and blunt this resistance can avoid drilling a deep hole into what remains of democratic norm and practice. The logic is crystal clear. Land will be acquired. It will not be acquired consensually, since consent is unreliable, uncertain and at best slow, and the driving imperative of the current economic agenda is merciless, irreversible speed. Peasants, landless labourers, and sharecroppers, their mutual tensions and antagonisms notwithstanding, will collectively organize resistance. And this resistance can be heady, but also brutal, in response to the far larger brutality of the state. The razing of a CPM leader's house and the lynching of a policeman in Nandigram demonstrate what the consequences of this violent showdown can be, even for the probable victors. Whatever feeble social contract binds the allegiance of the disempowered and subaltern to the state they are supposedly citizens of is in severe danger of cracking, and cracking fast. Buddhadeb may declaim 'amader 235, oder 30' from the rooftops till the next elections come around, but the government he runs stands to lose in the not-so-long-run, for all its failures and forgotten promises, but perhaps most of all from what is happening now.

'Our lives, but not our land.' Much has been written about this slogan. An editorial page essay in the HT, by Indrajit Hazra, recently expressed incomprehension of this, in the light of the grotty, squalid and deprived existences apparently eked out in Nandigram. It doesn't matter, however, whether he perceives the texture of the villagers' lives correctly or wrongly. The point is that people in village after village have raised this cry, and meant it. Their lives, but not their land. The analysts and observers who hold that industrial development in India cannot possibly happen without the conversion of agricultural land, too, may be either wrong or right. If they are right, the ball is still in their court, because what Nandigram and Singur have shown us is the unqualified failure of the state and of development planners to formulate a strategy to accomplish this democratically. There exists no blueprint, and no precedent in India, for land acquisition that can move through all the accepted democratic channels, conceive of and offer genuine rehabilitation, and secure any measure of broad legitimacy among affected people. The consequences of this, beamed live from Nandigram, are on the daily news.

Singur, at any rate, seems lost. The Tatas have dug themselves in securely there, the land allotted to them has been fenced off, and there is draconian police security in place, periodically bolstered by the RAF. Early on in the long battle of Singur, the government posted 25,000 policemen around the villages, in a population of roughly 25, 000. One policeman per citizen, give or take a few. This will not end happily for the villagers of Singur, whether or not further blood is spilled. It is tempting to say that the battle will be fought in other places, that the centre of the struggle will shift elsewhere, and that these new confrontations may yet be won. That somehow this will restore the historical balance, and that while the resistance in Singur may just become a historical memory, it may be redeemed elsewhere.

It is tempting, but not possible. The woman who spent the night of the 25th in a ditch, hiding from the armed men in masks, declared that she would feed us in style when 'we have driven the Tatas out'. Whether bravado or genuine hope, that meal doesn't seem very likely now. For her, there will be no absolution in a struggle accomplishing success elsewhere. Whatever the eventual outcome of this long confrontation on so many fronts, whatever the resolution or lack of it, there will be something to mourn.

2006-07-14T02:12:00.000+01:00

I've just been listening to one of the best - though today relatively unknown - songs of political protest from the sixties, Phil Ochs' Ballad of William Worthy. It's a bullet aimed specifically at the ban on American citizens entering Cuba after the revolution, and sings of the defamation of a man named William Worthy, a reporter who'd travelled to Cuba. The refrain is particularly striking: Somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say / 'You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.' It's a potent dig at the idea that the world that named itself 'free' could maintain a forced separation from its Other, and remain 'free'. The idea that free-market capitalism could define a world as 'free', when the constraints on freedom produced by a war against 'godless communism' had generated a world that was in many ways similar to, and as unfree as, the enemy socialist bloc. It gestures towards memories of McCarthyism. And simultaneously, it points a finger to the 'free world's' enthusiastic support for murderous, dictatorial regimes of the Right, in every conceivable way and more as repugnant as anything produced by dictatorships of the Left. These are the wonderful lines that pin this lie down: Oh, why did he waste his time to see a dictator's reign / When he could have seen democracy by travellin' on to Spain? (Spain at this time, of course, was still ruled by Franco). The third flank of Ochs' attack on the 'free world' is a reference to the invasiveness of the West's relationship to the rest of the world: The only way to Cuba is with the C.I.A. Towards the end of the song, again, these lines: Oh there is really no need to travel to these evil lands /Yes, and though the list grows larger, you must try to understand / Try not to worry, if some day you should hear /'The whole world is off limits, visit Disneyland this year.' Here the forcibly maintained insulation of the American-led Western order from the rest of the world, and the maintenance of imperialist controls through the waging of constant war on the Third World, are tied concisely and forcefully to the wider assertion that the minds of people living in the 'free world' are being kept closed, and ignorant of anything like a world beyond this bloc's artifically imposed political and cultural borders with the outside. This is one of the finest late achievements of the left-wing folk music scene in the United States, which is of course the same world that Dylan was nurtured in, but eventually found too narrow in its vision and its range for his songwriting imagination.

2006-05-16T01:00:00.000+01:00

I refuse to believe it. Sri Lanka - aided by bad light and rain - actually saved the Test. I wasn't daring hope that this might happen, and in all fairness it didn't look likely. 537/9 in the third innings in overcast conditions, with a tail wagging for all it's worth...wish I'd been there. Confirms all my belief in the superiority of Test cricket. And say what you will about the torpor of dull five-day matches without results, there's nothing that quite beats a really exciting drawn Test. Results like today do not only bear drama and nail-biting finishes, but also embody justice. A draw's one of the very few ways in which genuine justice can enter the world of sport. And this was a just result. The thought of Chaminda Vaas hanging on there for four and a half hours, the thought of Murali keeping fifteen balls out of his wicket and barely staving Hoggard off, the thought of poor Flintoff bowling with all the heart he has, for 51 overs, and not being able to beat the tail...and of course, the thought that with Jayasuriya back for the next Test, we might actually have a real series on our hands...these are exciting thoughts. Test cricket, I love you.

2006-05-15T03:00:00.000+01:00

Went to Lord's yesterday, for a day of Test cricket between England and Sri Lanka. For a cricket fan this has to be a big moment, and it was, despite what seems to be an inevitable England victory. A beautiful ground despite the billboards, less-than-beautiful spectators sitting behind us who left beer cans and trash strewn in their wake as they left, and the redolence of international cricket's oldest history. An ambiguous experience. The stuffed shirts of the MCC strutting in and out of the Pavilion to which they had exclusive access, secure in their ownership of the venue and their claims to its 'traditions', a bunch of overfed gin-soaked Tories who couldn't be bothered to follow the day's cricket and left their reserved seats empty for the most part as crowds of genuine cricket-lovers thronged outside in vain. But not just that: also people watching avidly and formulating on-the-spot theories and prognoses, people sufficiently in love with the game to follow its intricate logic, the way it moved and shifted infinitesimally and produced its moments of beauty even as the (seemingly) inevitable result drew nearer.

And there was enough to thrill at in the day's cricket, regardless of the result tomorrow. An overcast morning, rain hovering in the air but staying teasingly at bay, and Matthew Hoggard produced lethal swinging deliveries - the swinging ball under a clouded sky being one of the ground's more wonderful traditions. Sri Lanka, starting at 91/6 against England's 551, looked like they'd fold before lunch, and I half-expected an innings defeat before the day was over. But Jayawardena batted beautifully, and the tail wagged. Tailenders are no longer clumsy hoickers: for each beautiful, crisp cover-drive by the captain, there was a similarly correct and elegant stroke by Vaas or Maharoof or Kulasekara, the latter two partly making up for their inability to make a mark with their bowling. The follow-on happened, but not without a certain recovery of dignity. And the rest of the day belonged to the Lankans: Sangakkara and Jayawardena had a century stand, and all of a sudden Hoggard didn't look quite as threatening, and Sajid Mahmood, who'd ripped through the middle order in the first innings, was driven and cut with mounting confidence. The sun came out after tea, and Lord's looked utterly beautiful as the ball raced off the bat across the green carpet of grass on the off-side, something that happened with mounting regularity as Sangakkara and Jayawardena carried out their fightback.

I always love watching Sri Lanka bat, and there's no team in the world I'd rather see as world champions - sadly, that won't happen for a while yet. But they rose to the occasion with spirit in the second half of the day. That continued today, and I wish I could have seen it. Today they avoided an innings defeat, the nightwatchman Maharoof making a half-century, and Jayawardena making what was from all accounts a magnificent hundred. I'm fantasizing about the tail wagging tomorrow and saving the match, or Murali taking nine for twenty or something similarly absurd, but it won't happen, much more likely that England will - deservedly - win by nine or ten wickets much before the day is through. Still, I saw a good day's cricket. Amazing, really, how there can be so much drama in an apparently dead match: batsmen fighting a losing cause and yet batting with complete command, a wicket falling at the close of day, and the sudden, unexpected tension produced by that. Flintoff steaming in with his remarkably varied repertoire at one end, Monty Panesar ambling in with his accurate and incisive left-arm spin at the other, fielders crowding in the slips and around the bat, the crowd building up momentum with its mounting applause and roars before each delivery in the final overs.

They love Monty. There's a touch of patronizing laughter in it: they love his inept fielding (and the poor man's worked on that! but the ball followed him all day, and he tried but fumbled and let a few by), his spindly clumsiness, and they love his turban, to them he's exotic and he's cute. One could sometimes get angry at this, were it not for the fact that English crowds have in the past been much more vicious: assaults upon dark-skinned cricketers, pigs' heads thrown into enclosures of Muslim women spectators, loaded racist abuse. I heard nothing overtly racist at all - as the demographics of English cricket change, attitudes also seem to be changing among audiences, imperfectly but positively. They love Monty: no one received half the cheers he did all day, not even 'Freddie' Flintoff. And one could hear the mockery transmute into something like admiration, as he belatedly took the ball and bowled a tantalizing spell, the best of the day. Nor was the laughter always tasteless: after he delivered the beauty that dismissed Tharanga for an excellent 52, a wag behind me yelled out 'now take a catch!'. Another followed up: 'and make an 'undred!' I cracked up.

And also the sprinkling of real aficionados: committed, nutty fans who've watched the game for decades and decades, and shower you with their reminiscences of bygone names. 'Keith Miller, now he was as hard-hitting a batsman as you could hope to see! But you know' - prodding me - 'if he had a weakness it was against top-class spin. Laker could get him, yes he could, on a turning wicket.' I felt thankful I knew cricket history reasonably well, having been through more than my fair share of cricketing fanaticism in my early teens. Laker? Laker of the 19 for 90 fame? Someone had watched Laker? Back in the 50s? I half-expected an old, dowdy-coated man to turn up nodding sagely and talking of Compton, or Larwood, or - why not? - Woolley. But it's this harvesting, and sharing, of memories that makes cricket - and all sports with their histories and their obsessive fandoms - special. Something as inconsequential as a six over the stands four decades ago stays in memory. Something as inconsequential as a game that takes five days to play and has the most intricate and inbred set of rules in the world can stir people to passionate reminiscence, and I don't know if it's just me, but I think that's beautiful. To delight in what is fundamentally trivial - as trivial as an unexpected harvest of wickets or a beautiful hundred, or even a single straight drive with its compressed glory - that's true cricket madness, true absurdity and true wisdom.

Cricket, sport in general, is not really inconsequential or trivial, of course. Many world-historical logics converge within it: class, capital in some of its ugliest forms, corruption, conservatism and entrepreneurialism, the creation of mass publics, and national partisanship, that double-edged sword that gives cricketing enthusiasm its bite but also its venom. But that can never be all there is; there are always moments at which the logic of a particular match takes over and creates hordes of spectators chattering themselves blue discussing the ins and outs of specific moments, with little regard for the moment for results and victors. Jayawardena drives Mahmood through the covers, the ball runs up against the billboard-lined boundary, and the woman and man sitting on my right, who I do not know, applaud the stroke and discuss his style, as though for that moment nothing else really mattered. Monty gets one to turn in really sharply, thinks he's found an edge, and appeals, only to be turned down, and huddled groups across the ground proffer their views, vocally, on the merits and demerits of the umpire's decision. Pleasures and excitements that will only last the day, for spectators at the ground and for people glued to their televisions and radios, all of whom will return, reluctantly, to the routines and rules of their everyday lives. But the world would be poorer without these pleasures.

2006-05-07T03:35:00.000+01:00

Two pieces of writing that are on my mind at the moment. The first by a friend of mine, a near-accidental product of long and difficult meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, theory and knowledge, theory and reality. The other by Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory, his passionate vindication of historical knowledge and knowing. The two citations aren’t about the same thing, but I think they speak to and with each other. They do for me – long live the reader!

In Defiance

The word reality has been hounded out of language. Unless qualified by ten adjectives, twenty clarifications, and the customary footnotes signalling awareness of all theories of discursive deconstruction, its best left out of all projects of research. What is real? Is there a reality outside subjectivities? Can that reality be approximated, be represented? Is re-presented reality still original/real? And what is original anyway?

But what are we really talking about? The limits of process, experience, sensation or the limits of language in expressing it? Surely, pain is real. The rifle butt descending upon an unarmed protestor- it seems obscene to reduce it to an image. Real pain, with real consequences of blood and mashed bones, of dead and mutilated bodies. Surely, absence is real. The absence of food in the stomach, of money in the wallet, of blood in veins? And surely work is real- shapes conceived in air, given form through flesh and blood- real hands, wielding real tools giving shape to matter- welding, beating, burning, shaping, moulding or cutting- until ideas take shape in matter.

So when did we surrender? When did life surrender to the doubts of its voyeurs? When did the speakers start stammering in consideration to their audience? When was the consumer enthroned as the judge and the jury and the executioner of all that can be ever created? But more importantly, why? In no stage in human history has doubt ever been doubted. But we are its worshippers. We have enthroned it. And in doing so, in doubt we believe. In triumphing, we have been defeated.

(Uditi Sen)

For what a philosopher, who has only a casual acquaintance with historical practice, may glance at and dismiss, with a ferocious scowl, as ‘empiricism’, may in fact be the result of arduous confrontations, pursued both in conceptual engagements (the definition of appropriate questions, the elaboration of hypotheses, and the exposure of ideological attributions in pre-existing historiography) and also in the interstices of historical method itself.

(E.P. Thompson)

2006-04-23T19:20:00.000+01:00

A dark, dry night in London last week. A friend and I were at Angel tube station, waiting for other friends to turn up so we could go to dinner. The street as crowded as ever, as pedestrians and buses and cars jostled for space and people poured out of the station with anxious, expectant or tired faces, their hunched shoulders signalling the end of another day, and the waiting for the comfort or dullness of home. J., my friend, was feeling cold, so she decided to stay inside the station. I felt dog-tired, it had been a long day, so I decided to go outside and sit on a bench. Sat down, looking at a starless sky and the facade of a big building in front of me, brown brick, full of offices and shops and hidden histories behind the facade.

A cough, deliberate and measured. A voice, saying something indistinct. I looked up at a man, asked him if he'd said something. 'I said, excuse me', he repeated with a touch of impatience, and sat down slowly and heavily beside me. A working man, I guessed, wearing an old coat, down on his luck but proud of his respectability. He stank of booze, but looked sober and mild. Glasses, squinting eyes, a frail body, not tall, not well. Pulled a notebook out of a pocket and a pencil out of another, gazed for a while at the building before us, and began to draw it, in wavering, unsteady strokes.

'Are you an artist?', I asked, for want of anything else to say. He looked at me for a while, and said, in slow, deliberate tones, 'I'm a carpenter.' Looked at me a little longer, as though to decide if I was mocking him. Satisfied that I wasn't, he began to speak.

'I draw for fun, you see. After work I come here, or go somewhere else, and take out this' - gestured to his notebook - 'and I draw.' He paused for a moment. 'I like drawing', he added, with great emphasis, as though to convince himself as well as me. 'I'm sure you do, and you're very good', I gabbled, but he wasn't listening.

'My girlfriend.' Pause. 'She threw me out of me house. My own house, you see? I got no money, and she - she threw me out. We had a fight. She threw me out. Her house, that'ud be ok. But my own flat. And she threw me out.' I murmured something indistinct and sympathetic. He carried on, looking at my face as he spoke.

'Now I'm waiting for a bus. I need 80p to get to my mum's house, that's all I need. I'll get it too. Don't you worry, I'll get it. And I got what's most important, mate - I got me beer. Most important thing.' Drew a can out of his inexhaustible pockets, opened it and winked at me. 'Just need 80p to get to me mum's place, too far t'walk from here, but I'll get there. I'll be fine, mate.' Looked at me again, too proud to ask for the money, and defiant.

I scrabbled around in my pockets, drew out a few coins. 'Here you go.' He took it at once. 'Thanks, mate. You're a gentleman.' Yes I am. A gentleman, that's why I'm handing you three copper coins when I could have given you enough for the tube and a dinner. A gentleman, that's why I'm washed out here after walking around central London doing nothing and you're here washed out after a day's hard labour, and a fight at home. And then he began, and even before he began I think I knew what the conversation would get around too.

'Women, son.' Deep sigh, an angry frown creasing his brow. 'You know women....you can't tell them anything. Never', - he leaned towards me confidentially - 'never tell a woman things, you know, you learn that in this life. They can't take it. Some words - don't use them. They can't take it, they can't. And most of all' - his voice grew louder now - 'don't use the C-word. You know what I'm talking about, mate?' I did, but I didn't want to. 'The C-word, you see. C-U-N-T. Never call a woman that, even if she's one. They make your life hell.' He subsided, sank back in his seat. 'Threw me out of my flat, she did that, yes she did. But I'll be fine.' And what did you do to her? I wondered. What else did you call her, how often, how many times a day? What had she done, spoiled your dinner? Kept you waiting? Had a headache? What would you have done had she called you a sod? A fuckwit? A poof? I'm only asking, you see, I don't know, I don't know your life and I never will. Hers neither. But you think I can understand you because we both have pricks, don't you? What makes you think that? What if I get up and walk away right now? Thoughts tumbled around in my head like leaves in a storm. I'd have liked to have met her too, you know. Known what she made of being called the C-word. Known what you'd done to her, what she'd done to you, what the two of you've done to each other over the years, months, days, minutes. But I'll nod quietly at whatever you say, what can I do? Give you feminist training, when all you have is a beer and my charity in your pocket? And other thoughts too, pushing uneasily against these. I have more coins, you know. I can walk home from here, I can take the tube, I can take a bus, I'm about to go for a nice Thai dinner that you'll never be able to afford, and they'd throw you out of the restaurant even if you could. That's what I am, you know. And this is what you are - you should hate me, really. But you like me, don't you, because I'm giving you 80p? Or is it because I'm listening to you? Tell me, mate, when was the last time anyone listened to you? Tell me about me, tell me what I am, tell me what you make of me, I must be strange to you as you are to me. And those words again, now as though he's lashing himself with them. 'Can't call your woman a cunt, you can't. Remember that, mate. Lessons in life. Forget them and you're done for.' 'Your' woman?

The storm subsided. He muttered something again about looking out for yourself, and staying clear of women, and I kept a poker face, I didn't laugh, I didn't cry. And then he began sketching again, and the conversation turned into something totally different. He drew like a child, but a child who knows he can be good some day. A child who wishes, perhaps, that he had more time to draw, but they want him at work again today till late. Grateful that we'd moved to safer ground, I asked him if he had to draw much as a carpenter. A stupid question. You can research the history of labour, yes you can, but you know nothing, do you? And he knows you know nothing, and he's being patient with you. 'No, I draw 'coz I like it, you see. My job, they give you plans, you build to those plans. Don't draw for that, but for me.' But he likes me because I'm listening, I'm not running away. He doesn't know I'm mining him for experience, using him as to figure this city out, he doesn't and won't know I'm writing about him now.

He's on to eyes now. 'I like drawing eyes. Not been drawing long, but I draw eyes, I like them, I paint them too.' There are two ways of drawing eyes, he tells me, see right here - a few jabs with his pencil and he's magically created an eye where there was blank white paper, and see right here again - the pencil moves again, shading an oval outline now, and we have an eye again. The irises, the pupils, the retina - he knows them all, and so does his pencil. He draws clumsily and not well, but he's doing magic, he's making things happen on this patch of paper that no one owns or rules but himself. Those hands set to work all day for the imaginations and profits of other men find their own zone of power at this time of evening, when he sits before tube stations and draws what he sees, drunk but steady, a steady hand, a steady eye. He's doing magic and he's proud of it. And despite myself I'm drawn in, we're talking about his art, he hasn't been at it long. 'But I'm getting better. I like it, you see.'

We're more relaxed now, though we've barely been speaking five minutes. 'Been a carpenter long?' I ask, conversationally. 'Thirty-two years', he replies. Seeing my eyes widen, he adds, 'Since I was a child, y'see. Used to help me dad, he was a carpenter too. Been carpentering since I was a child. I'm forty-two now, working for thirty-two years.'

'I'm a good carpenter', he adds after a while. The pride's quiet, but evident. The craftsman who works all day but is not just an eight-hour slave but also an artist, the man who's proud of what he does and creates, at work and in the evenings on his drawing-pad as crowds jostle in the city before him. 'I'm good at my work.' I'm sure you are. Are you the only one who knows it? Is there anyone who bothers to tell you that, even if they do know? Does that make you lonely? And then the conversation changes again.

'Thirty two years, yes. And I was in jail too, in the middle.' So he was in jail. Doesn't shock me much, I tell myself. Give me a few more years in Blair's Britain, and who knows, I may be mistaken for a Muslim and be slung in jail myself. 'How long?', I ask him. 'Ten years.' And then I ask, 'why were you in jail?' It seems natural to the conversation, flowing as it is, there are no secrets he wants to hold from me any more.

'For murder.' Casually, without a change of tone. Looks at me, without curiosity. Did my face change? I tried to make sure it didn't. 'Murder', he repeats. 'I killed someone', he says, unnecessarily. There's a pause, I don't know what to say. The smell of the beer's suddenly very strong. I look in his eyes, they're still mild and his frame's still weak. 'He was a burglar', he says, and leans back, as though exhausted.

What could I do? Strangely enough, I wasn't afraid of him - he wouldn't hurt a fly, I could see, though he'd killed a man and heaven knows what he'd done to his girlfriend, but at the moment he wanted to talk and wanted me to listen. But now I couldn't just get up and walk away, not once he'd told me this, because at some level, who knows, he may have been expecting me to do just that. Are we playing a game? Are we playing who-blinks-first? I latch on to his last comment. 'He was a burglar?' 'Yes, he'd have killed me if I hadn't shot first.' I look shocked. 'But then it's manslaughter - they gave you ten years for that? For self-defence?' He's pleased, I'm speaking a language he likes. He's been a convict, for Christ's sake, who knows the law better than him? Explains, with genuine, disinterested intellectual clarity, the British legal system's distinctions between murder and manslaughter to me, how he'd been tried for murder and got away with manslaughter, but still got ten years. Looks at me again, for the first time with curiosity. 'You're an Indian, aren't you? You'll be knowing about the British legal system, then.' Outwardly, I grin at him, 'yes I am.' Inwardly: now how the fuck do you know that? Next you'll be saying you know I'm researching the history of law! He doesn't, thankfully. He's remembering his days in jail. 'Learnt a lot there, mate. I had some good times, I had some bad times.' He coughs, loudly. I venture a question. 'Was it hard getting to work after coming out of prison? Did they make it hard for you?' He smiles, pretty much for the first time. 'Oh, I got around them.' That look of pride again. And why not? How many of your friends are on the dole? You got around them, and good for you too. My congratulations. But inevitably, other thoughts. Was he really a burglar? Did you want to watch him die? Did he try to kill you too, or were you making that up? Was there anyone else you ever killed?

I look up, and my friends are walking towards me. They look at us curiously, and wait politely for the conversation to finish. I end it clumsily, though part of me wants to stay. 'Er...my friends are here. I have to go. Nice meeting you, er...' Fucking hell, I don't even know your name. But you don't care. He looks up and sees three women. His views on women suddenly flash through my panicking mind. But nothing. He smiles, a bit weirdly but not unpleasantly. A beery drawl, now. 'Hello, girls.' 'Hello', they reply, tentatively. I hold out my hand quickly, and wish him all the best. 'Thank you, mate, it was good talking to you', he says, shakes my hand, and then I'm gone, we're off the road towards dinner.

I looked back once, and he was still there as we headed round a corner, head sunk into his drawing pad, his pencil sketching out buildings and faces and eyes, for the moment quite happy in his world. A working man, a murderer, a weak and frail person on a bench near a station, doodling, 80p in his pocket, an ex-convict, a small-built and short-sighted man waiting for a bus to come along to take him to his mum.

2006-04-22T22:39:00.000+01:00

I've felt for a while that I should blog about the Jantar Mantar agitations in Delhi that came to a head recently, the Narmada agitation in particular. But it's difficult to, since issues that press upon your mind and heart so strongly are very difficult to write about. The guilt of distance and the immediacy of the issue combine in strange ways, and produce not only anger but a certain numbness, the numbness that accompanies the revelation of naked, unashamed injustice. Others have written about these issues, blogged about them too, with much greater competence than I could possibly do. But I'll try.
Two major movements for justice and survival, both of them desperate and nearing the end of their tether, converged on Jantar Mantar over the last month. Victims of the toxic gases released at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in December 1984, accompanied by large numbers of their supporters, carried out a month-long march to Delhi to protest against the state's refusal to offer them protection and compensation, in the form of a sustained factory clean-up, provisions of clean drinking water not contaminated by toxic waste, and action against the company responsible for the death of over 20,000 people, and the medical disasters that have hit thousands and thousands more. Their demands were not met, they were not met by the Prime Minister, and so, having marched 800 km to Delhi to make claims and demands of indisputable justice, they decided to go on a hunger strike. Alongside them were their neighbours in victimhood, from the same part of the country. These were victims of another disaster - people displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada, protesting against the decision to raise the height of the dam, yet again, without making provisions for the relief and rehabilitation of the oustees. Medha Patkar, the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the most important social movement in contemporary India, embarked, at the same time as the Bhopal protestors, on a fast unto death to pressurize the government towards action. Action, predictably, was taken in the form of police lathicharges, arrests of demonstrators and hunger strikers and sympathetic activists and students, the hysteric campaigns of both the Gujarat BJP and Congress, and the counter-protests of sections of the media bent on demonizing the NBA as a movement that was 'holding the government to ransom' with their demands. Evict several hundred thousand people from their homes, submerge their villages and forests, flush them out of their habitations like rats, refuse to offer them anything resembling humane compensation, and of course you're the ones being held to ransom when they let out a yap of protest. It is, after all, always the Great Indian Middle Class that suffers, everyone below them is merely battening on the state for undeserved privileges. Beggars, displaced people, slumdwellers, industrial casualties, the unemployed - spoilsports who refuse to play up to the still persistent hallucination of India Shining.
I know how hopelessly rhetorical that last sentence was. It's anger, anger and helplessness, that makes me write like this. At moments like this you realize that the government you enthusiastically helped vote into power differs from its fascist predecessors only on certain issues, that when it comes to 'development' the state essentially remains the State, untainted by anything remotely approaching compassion for the human casualties of its projects. And I voted for this government, and would do so again, because the alternative is too nightmarish to bear to live with.
Perhaps, though, I'm exaggerating the case. Because these two remarkable, admirable social movements didn't return to their bases without hope. They suffered through the fasting and protests, the police beat them and made them bleed, and Medha Patkar carried on her hunger strike almost to the point of death, for 19 days. But at the end of all of this, both movements gained something.
The Bhopal protestors have gone back happier than they have been in a long, long time. It is true that the victims will not see Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide punished. That will not happen. Big business in India will never pay for its acts of criminal negligence, not even if it produced the biggest industrial disaster in history. But the Bhopal marchers returned with promises that the contaminated water they and their children have grown up drinking will be cleaned up, that action will be taken to clean up the factory site, that steps will be taken to make sure that the mountain of corpses and half-corpses stops piling up.
Promises. Merely promises. And of course the Manmohan Singh government will not honour its pledges, of course the marchers will be back, in some form or another, to claim the justice that is theirs by right, and the survival that being human, and being alive, entitles them to. Don't keep murdering us. That, in essence, is the only real demand the Bhopal survivors have been making. The murder won't stop, despite the happiness they rightly feel at the government's recent concessions (please check out www.bhopal.net, and the marchers' blog on it). But at some level a victory was won - the government was shamed into token concessions, and the movement for the Bhopal victims will continue, and can draw some heart from this. Networks of support have sprung up, over the years, among activist organizations, NGOs, university groups of teachers and students, and the rare but crucial honest journalist. That does mean something - not victory by a long shot, but an advance of sorts. And what has been acknowledged, though mostly grudgingly and covertly, is the scale of the suffering that continues in areas affected by the poisonous gases from the factory, and reproduces itself, through deformities, disease and death, down generations. This recognition of suffering is symbolically of great consequence for a movement that has no weapons except arguments, facts and the capacity to invoke moral outrage.
With the NBA, matters are different. The hunger strike was not an ineffectual one, but matters remain incredibly grim. A ministerial team headed by Saifuddin Soz was dispatched to investigate the process of rehabilitation. Soz found, of course, that there is no such process except on paper, and was too honest to conceal that, as the Prime Minister undoubtedly wanted him to do. The matter was referred to the Supreme Court, and the statement it issued was equivocal. Dam construction was not stopped, but the legitimacy of the demand for proper rehabilitation was partially conceded. One would think there's a logical contradiction between these two decisions, given that each increase in the dam's height flushes out more and more people by the thousands, and given the current state of rehabilitation work in Madhya Pradesh. Still, given the Supreme Court's shameful history on the Narmada issue, it came as something of a relief that the judges were willing to concede that oustees had the right to live as human beings. I personally was surprised. Medha Patkar broke her fast, and the movement now waits, making use of a very short break from relentless pressure to draw breath, recoup, and re-strategize. The next SC hearing is on 1 May, I think. May Day: wouldn't that be a great occasion for the state to make another attempt to destroy a movement of the poor and dispossessed? Or perhaps not, perhaps things will be different. One lives in hope.
But this wasn't all. The government seems to have pretty much washed its hands of Soz's report, though it had commissioned it. Soz went beyond his brief, clearly, telling his masters more than they wanted to know. And the central government developed cold feet following a sustained, vicious campaign by politicians from Gujarat. The full fury of Gujarat politics has been unleashed upon the Narmada protestors, and there's no greater and more destructive fury in all of Indian politics, as the 2002 pogroms taught us. The Gujarat Congress and BJP joined hands in demonizing Medha Patkar and her peaceful army of protestors. The NBA's office in Vadodara was ransacked, not the first time this committedly non-violent movement (who, of course, are 'holding the nation to ransom') has been subjected to such intimidation. Modi declared he was going on a fast to counter Medha Patkar's propaganda, and would not give up till the government had issued a clear 'no' to the NBA. So as Narmada protestors sweltered in the heat of Jantar Mantar without food, Modi leaned back in an airconditioned cubicle and threatened not to eat. How much blood does this man want on his hands? The government, of course, began shitting in their pants, especially since the Gujarat Congress threw their weight behind the sanghis in their demand for the fulfilment of the world's most reviled hydro-electric project.
Aamir Khan, bless him, who expressed sympathy with the victims of the dam, has been subject to similar demonization. The baboons of the Congress and BJP who ransacked the NBA's office also burnt his posters and tried to ban his films. Once again, the same strategies. Single out prominent individuals who have been involved with or expressed concern for the victims of this holocaust. Isolate a few names - Medha Patkar, Aamir Khan (who did nothing more than visit the protestors and offer them some sympathy), and of course most of all Arundhati Roy, who has come to represent Mephistopheles in the imagination of the Indian middle-class Right. Insinuate, without a scrap of evidence, that these individuals are doing what they do, saying what they say, writing what they write, from interested motives, for profit or for brownie points. Suggest, thereby, that these manipulative, scheming crypto-Commie propagandists not only represent but are the movement, and it becomes easier to ignore the thousands of human beings, directly affected by the project, who are the real object of fear and hatred. Their collective weight becomes transformed, by a gigantic act of manipulated and deceptive representation, into a show-trial list of familiar and famous people, people who've worked ceaselessly and tirelessly for the movement, and in Medha Patkar's case are pivotal to it, but who in actuality are not the movement, for the movement involves masses of people. And this mass involvement is what has to be denied and made invisible, each time a mobilization happens.
This, however, is ultimately impossible. Which is why, once again, the Narmada movement has managed, against the odds, to win a temporary stalemate. 'Win' is a peculiar word to use, but in the case of this movement, at this stage of exhaustion and despair, not being terminated entirely is victory, of a kind, though a very grim kind. Both sets of battles - that concerning Bhopal and that concerning the Narmada - have followed a particular logic over the last month or so, and I think this logic is going to be repeated as the despair and urgency of movements for social justice in India intensifies. In both cases, a mobilization on an apocalyptic scale, declarations of 'victory or death', strategic launchpads for a sustained pressure campaign. On the side, frenetic lobbying, appeals, pleas to be heard, mobilizations of sympathizers across the country and especially in Delhi. A staking out of physical territory in the heart of India's capital, close to the centre of power. The strategic use of a fragile but enormous moral power, through invocations of traditions of non-violent protest and satyagraha, that despite the seeming unlikelihood of this manages to jostle the government from its committed unconcern just a little. The state responds through equivocation, scared by the scale of anger and bitterness, scared also by the monumental patience of these resistance movements that simply refuse to die away, but equally scared by - and ideologically on the same wavelength as - mobilizations on its right. A hard-line refusal to do anything bends into a nervous set of equivocations and self-contradictory statements, but never bends all the way towards an acknowledgement of the real suffering of either the Bhopal or Narmada victims. Both movements retreat, but strategically, on what appears to be at least partly their own terms. This could provide limited time and energy to recoup a little, and at least there are now formal, written commitments that can be used as evidence against the state when it dishonours its pledges again, as it's bound to do. It all sounds very paltry, but for the moment it'll have to do.
In the meantime, of course, there are children and adults still dying of toxic poisoning, there are tribals and villagers being forced off their lands as dam waters rise and drown centuries of human habitation, there are the corpses of people, homes and failed hopes that bob up and down on dam waters and float around in air contaminated by industrial waste, there are ghosts of factory workers and dispossessed men and women who've starved or drowned, and there are policemen who specialize in drawing the blood and breaking the bones of protestors from both movements. There are also the state governments of both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, both of which are run by the BJP and the first of which is the most murderous in independent India's history. These aren't good times for people in these states to mobilize in campaigns that'll immediately be labelled as anti-national and unpatriotic, a labelling that'll be fully backed by rags like The Pioneer and, in most of its moods, the TOI.
But there's another side, and it's this: these mobilizations have gone on far too long, and have moved enough people and caused enough others to think, to simply vanish, whatever the overt and hidden forms of repression they're subjected to. And these causes, therefore, aren't entirely lost yet. Which, I suppose, is not to be forgotten easily.

2006-04-10T11:46:00.000+01:00

Victory. The new French employment law that Villepin was trying to pass has been scrapped. They took on the French state, they took on the power of business, and they won. I still can't get my head around it. But this calls for celebration.

2006-04-01T02:51:00.000+01:00

Are those patterns of sound actually in his head? Before they make their way down those nerves that stop at his fingers, are they in his head? The fingers - by what strange, studiously practised yet wild alchemy do they know each vibration, each note, each tone, each juxtaposition they tease out of the fretboard? The guitar itself is alive, throbbing and sparkling with colours and light. Garcia's on his guitar.

Garcia's on his guitar. The world's condensed into this river of sound that swirls around his instrument. The world flows from his guitar. This is worship. This is faith. I'm crazy.

And it's just air, Christ, just air, twisted and stretched and bent, air changed by magic into sound, air thick with smoke and marijuana and the sound of Garcia's audience clapping its hands, all air, but air bent on paths that are accidental, improvised, and invented.

Like every teenager who ever had a passionate affair with sixties rock and its offspring, I dreamed, several years back, of myself on a stage, bending air with a guitar, exploring the stratosphere with my fingers as they hopped across a fretboard. But, unusually, it wasn't Hendrix or Page or Clapton I imagined myself as, the guitar an extension of the body, following and shaping the body's rules and patterns. It was, instead, Garcia, his fingers imparting to his guitar a life and magic all its own, the musician almost audience to his own performance, his flight of creation. The pain compressed in that index finger that Garcia severed, one day, as he was chopping wood, mingled with the sweetness coming from that fusion of brain, fingers and strings. The beautiful, sweet, bearded face. It was always Garcia.

Garcia playing and singing 'I Shall Be Released'. And it kicks in, as it was bound to do sometime. The power and the genius of Dylan, behind Garcia as he transforms the song into something it had always and never been. It's only words. Released. Only a word, but a word with such resonance. History, desire and prophecy mingled in that word, in the voice that gives it resonance and depth. Words, but words from Dylan.

Garcia on guitar. Dylan reinventing song. The closest I'll ever come to religion.

And I was always too lazy - too afraid of being no good? - to ever learn the guitar.

2006-03-28T12:23:00.000+01:00

An extract from a poem by Seamus Heaney, 'Weighing In', from The Spirit Level:

To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.
Not to do so some time, not to break with
The obedient one you hurt yourself into

Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.
Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked
Blindfolded Jesus and he didn't strike back

They were neither shamed nor edified, although
Something was made manifest - the power
Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus' sake,
Do me a favour, would you, just this once?
Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes....
But every now and then, just weighing in
Is what it must come down to, and without

Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

2006-03-28T11:43:00.000+01:00

March 2006: labour in the world.

The United Kingdom: Major strike over cuts in pensions to local government employees under the LGPS (Local Government Pensions Scheme). Other government employees, those not covered by this scheme, are not facing a similar axe. Over a million public-sector employees are having their pensions reduced or being forced to work longer. UNISON, TGWU, NUJ, NUT and other unions are working together on this strike, which is supposedly the largest since the General Strike.
Thatcher, when she introduced a compulsory secret ballot for trade union decisions, was roundly opposed for interfering with the internal functioning of unions. And it’s true that she did this as a move to defeat working-class organization and militancy. But in the long run, it may have backfired, and accomplished more good than harm. Unions have in recent years swung back heavily to the left, even though their membership has shrunk in an age of casualization. And the legitimacy of the left-wing dominance of many unions, achieved through the most democratic means available, is not under a cloud. And in cases like the present strike, where the ballots have unambiguously turned out a vote for sustained industrial action, the extent to which the real and represented interests of public-sector workers coincide is much clearer than it would otherwise have been. The consensus seems to be: strike. And all the best to it, too. The whole wide world is watchin’, as Dylan once wrote.

France: Violent labour protests, involving the burning of cars and massive demonstrations, protesting the Villepin government’s decision to pass a law making it easier for employers to fire new hires in the first two years of employment – a form of ‘flexible employment’. This has tied in, once again, as in May 68, but perhaps more comprehensively in terms of actual interests, with student protest. Students are among those directly affected by the government’s decision, so the Sorbonne is occupied, and the occupation continues as I write (28 March) – so well over a fortnight, at the least. It’s interesting, the way radical movements invoke their past through oblique coded references – the student occupiers of the Sorbonne are circulating pamphlets, redolent with Situationism, soixante-huitard Maoism, and articulations of Marcuse with post-structuralism. May 68 is invoked, time and again – but, in a revealing turn of phrase, not as the revolution that happened, but ‘that which did not’.
I feel ambiguous. There’s a thrill when one reads passages like this. Legitimacy belongs to those who believe in their actions, to those who know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. This idea is obviously opposed to that of the State, majority and representation. It does not submit to the same rationales, it imposes its own rationales. If the politicizing consists in a struggle of different legitimacies, of different ideas of happiness, our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful. This is an excerpt from a communiqué from the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile (murmurs of ’68? A nod to Marcos and the Zapatistas? The language resonates..). It’s thrilling because in the middle of a difficult, meaningful struggle, the philosophic basis for a challenge to the hegemony of the French state and its apparatuses, as well as the apparatuses of global capitalism, is being articulated. It need not refer directly to the issue at hand in formulating its poetics: the point is that a poetics is being spoken, written, invented, as the movement continues. The colours and smells and feels of the occupation, of the labour protests, are invoked, in what is effectively an appeal to an international, virtual, online audience. There is a refusal of logics that many of us have thought, in moments of despair, to be hegemonic to the point of drowning the possibility of any kind of counter-hegemony. Something is opening here, and it is welcome.
But there is an unease, too – perhaps that is unavoidable in a time when the openness of the future seems, for once, demonstrable? – as I read lines like this. The scorn for the procedures of ‘democratic majority’ is more than a sneer at the vacillations and compromises of ‘bourgeois’ democracy. The principles of democratic voting, representation, and collective consultation, replaced in this radical discourse by a poetics of invention and affirmation, were not ‘granted’ by ‘capitalist democracy’, but wrested by patient and strategic deployments of all kinds of oppositional power – working-class, feminist, minority. The easy contempt and dismissal of these in the Sorbonne communiqué worries me. All that space given to the general assemblies paralyses us and only serves to confer legitimacy on paper to a bunch of wannabe bureaucrats. Well, yes, this can often be true. But is the answer as simple as this – It is part of our struggle to limit, as much as possible, the tyranny of the majority vote? That this vote can often be tyrannical, and run counter to the democracy it supposedly embodies, is not in question. Yet should we not also worry, especially given some of the historical trajectories of the Left, about the concrete accountability of movements, however radical and democratic in principle, to real, embodied interests and opinions? Even if this causes delays and fumbling and bickering, given the history of the Left, it seems to me necessary and unavoidable to institute and maintain mechanisms of accountability to something that has more flesh than a spectral idea, a logic of poetic invention, a conceptually watertight philosophic agenda. I’m not suggesting for a moment that that is what is actually happening in France now – it’s just that communiqués of this sort (and this is precisely their strength, their wonder) do and must always provoke arguments and tensions of the kind I’ve just mentioned.

India: Murmurs. Merely murmurs. But a Business Standard report, from January, seems unnerved. ‘…the sight of 400 Toyota Kirloskar workers blocking the entrance to the Deputy Labour Commissioner’s office in Bangalore before a scheduled “peace” meeting between the management and the unions on Monday was unnerving.
‘For it brought back fears of another Black Monday in July last year when protests by Honda Motor employees took a violent turn.’
These euphemisms make me mad. The ‘violent turn’ so coyly mentioned was this: the police at Gurgaon brutally beat up protesting workers, locked them up, and the government looked on. This escalated, and the campaign by the workers, which had initially begun because of the harassment and humiliation of employees by employers, came to be backed, with some success, by the Left. The Business Standard regretfully notes: ‘Apart from the dispute in Honda, there were several other examples of industrial unrest in 2005. And in each of these cases, the management had to beat a hasty retreat.’ Instances mentioned are Tata Motors and Apollo Tyres. One could add to this the defeated, but powerful, strike by airport workers recently, and the 60-million strong countrywide Left-organized strike last winter.
What is happening here? In general, the work-days lost due to strikes in India have gone down considerably, with the spread of casualization and flexible employment, and the expansion of an already overwhelmingly dominant un-unionized sector, because of the shrinking of the organized working class. But over the last couple of years – interestingly, since the assumption of power by a Congress-led coalition backed by the Left – industrial militancy seems to be on the rise. Part of the reason for this is the increased radicalism of the organized Left on a national scale (despite the repressiveness and corruption of the Left Front ministry in West Bengal, whose politics often seem directly at odds with those of the Politbureau). Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the (temporary) decline of the RSS, reflected in the prolonged crises of the BJP, have shifted, for the moment at least, the terms of political discourse. Social conflicts have displaced the politics of Hindu identity from centre-stage for the moment, though the question of which of these political fields has deeper roots and greater resilience is still open.
Perhaps this can be said about the Manmohan Singh government, disappointing though it is on so many counts: real contradictions are visible again in the practice of government and politics, and this is for the better. As opposed to a Hindutva-managed coalition government whose right-wing reaction was uncomplicated and forceful, the political mobilizations and initiatives embodied in the decisions of the current government flow from divergent ideological streams, and are juxtaposed in uncomfortable relationships. We have an uneasy and hesitant articulation of mild social progressivism (protection for victims of domestic abuse), very minimal welfarism (the Employment Guarantee Act), continued economic neo-liberalism (the desperation to strike deals with the US, the commitment to whittling down public welfare and security in the pursuit of increased economic growth) and anti-communalism. To a limited extent, the state has emerged as a battleground of contending political interests and commitments, as a democratic state should. In the reign of the BJP, contrary to this, state, party, and government meshed in frightening ways – Gujarat exemplified this. I am uncomfortably reminded, as I write this, that this elision of the functions of different political apparatuses has achieved near-full form in West Bengal, where a government that describes itself as left-wing rules with an arbitrary, corrupt and reactionary politics. West Bengal will not witness Gujarat-like slaughter, because the CPM, at its worst, cannot compare with the RSS. That does not, however, make its rule defensible.
Labour politics seem to be headed in an uncertain upward trajectory for the moment in India, then, though this of course is part of a story of general decline and confusion. Whether or not unions and movements will devise more imaginative and far-sighted strategies is an open question. It’s a difficult job to accomplish.

Argentina: Factory occupations continue, well into their third year by now. Zanon factory seems to be doing well. Over 300 factories are under worker control. Will it spread, will it collapse under weight and inexperience, will it stay static? The future’s opened, just a crack, but it’s opened. Peronism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, workerism: strange bedfellows, but bedded together they seem to be, in this suddenly new world. The occupations are revolutionary by any standards, but they persistently explore the possibilities of the law and of democracy, turning these into positive, affirmative arrangements, pushing for recognition and stabilization through them – for instance, pressing successfully to get the law to recognize the legitimacy of expropriation of factories and the establishment of worker control.
Factory occupations: the strangest reversal of one of the most persistent logics of capital. Everything tamed and organized under the reign of capital repeats its own shape, but in radically bloated, disfigured forms, forms that can appear only as monsters to the interests of capital. The worker who is committed to his job, who under the scrutiny of manager and employer is the best kind of slave, picks up her tools and gets to work when employers no longer require her services, and are trying to dispense with them. And in the process, starts thinking about better ways of organizing work, more justice in the regimes that regulate her labour. Democratic voting. Equalized wages. Work safety. The abolition of private, personal profit. Accountable distributions of the wealth produced. The relations of production, to reverse the terms of an old Marxist speculation, can no longer be contained, in their trajectory, by the forces of production – employers, managers, assembly lines and workshops. Justice, in hesitant, half-articulated, but immense forms, creeps over day-to-day management, and there’s a darkness on the edge of capital’s horizon.
But, after all, only a small darkness, only a small blot. This must not be forgotten. This isn’t victory, even temporary, or anything like it. To repeat: the future’s opened, or at least a dream of it has. But dreams can disappear at a moment’s notice: the twentieth century demonstrated that with chilling effect. How can vigilance be maintained in the middle of a dream? By accepting the paradox, and by pushing it forward and onward.

2006-03-22T13:06:00.000Z

Here's a dead document. A murmur of the past, a disaffected ghost wandering in a dank and blind darkness.

To secure for all the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

This is as adeqate a definition of socialism as we have ever had. Marx certainly never came up with anything as adequate as this. And it was once the official line of a party. Stranger still, many of this party's leading figures, and thousands of its workers, actually believed it and worked to make it true. This was once clause 4 of the Labour Party's constitution, adopted in 1918, and axed seventy seven years later by Blairite New Labour. Of course, at one level this was only words. The Labour Party, such as it was, never really lived up to this clause. In practice it was often authoritarian, corrupt, venal and unprincipled. But words, before they're erased, can act as a bad conscience, and in this case the bad conscience of the Party was embodied in people who pushed, tirelessly, for the actualization of these words through lives committed to their organization. People who felt, and had reason to feel, that their party could be different, that it could be what it had promised to be. People who, before they left or were hounded out by Blair's masquerading corporate mafia, represented Left Labour, a fraction that no longer exists.

Labour's been funded now, as we all know, by some of the richest men in the country. The party that was created to represent and fight for an enormous and exploited working class is now run by the purse-strings of Lord Sainsbury. Secret meetings, clinking champagne glasses, deals that are eagerly grasped and signed, old school ties. This is the time for nightmares. Nightmares where the faces of the most powerful people in the world weld into a single face, into a single, grinning, triumphant muscular contortion. Blair. Bush. Berlusconi. Behind the spin doctors, behind the screaming headlines, the same monster of many faces. Blair. Bush. Berlusconi. And so many more.

Two of my closest friends in London spent years working for the Labour Party. Through its compromises and its rightward turns, they found it in themselves to believe that it was possible to make this a party of genuine democratic socialism, that it was worth fighting for, to use a cliched phrase, the soul of the party. And that it was possible to be in this organization while keeping one's principles, personal and political, intact. History was open. The future was open. Through Wilson and Callaghan, through the nightmare of Thatcherism, they worked to give democracy some meaning, to argue, with reason and patience, that being socialist could mean something inside this organization. There was, above all, there must have been, the sense of being within a movement, within something living and pregnant with possibility, despite all the abuses and betrayals and compromises that dogged its history. And there is no headiness to quite compare with that.

Needless to say, the time came when these hopes of the Party died. New Labour had no place for people like this. For visions like this are the most dangerous of all for a party that has decided to move to the Right. Preachy, bombastic, 'loony-left' manifestos can be endured. What cannot be endured by a party like this is people working, strategically and ethically, working responsibly towards a durable justice. There were hundreds, thousands of people in Britain who believed in this vision, who worked to give it flesh. They're gone too, and those that aren't will go. There has to come a point when staying will be impossible, when living with oneself in this organization, in this grotesque parody of social democracy, will be beyond endurance.

Something new will be born from this. Something that's already moving and murmuring, not sure of its shape or its size, its form or its meaning. Something that could be ugly, something that could be beautiful. Something growing from despair, something growing from hope. Something that may be defeated, something that may win. And both the defeats and the victories could end up being reversed. History doesn't die. No, not even when it's been murdered.

2006-03-19T03:26:00.000Z

Has any rock musician invoked the powers of lament as powerfully as Bruce Springsteen? I was listening, just now, to 'Something in the Night', a track from Darkness on the Edge of Town. There's this terrifying wail that begins the song, a long, many-toned howl of lamentation that flattens my veins and freezes my blood. And punctuates the song, again and again. Then there are these words:

When we found the things we'd loved

They were crushed and dying in the dirt.

We tried to pick up the pieces

And get away without getting hurt.

'Factory', another song from the same album, vocalizes another sense of loss, another source of mourning.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain

I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain.

Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,

The working, the working, just the working life.

Lament. Lament gives Springsteen his force: the force of mourning, and also, peculiarly, the redemptive anger and energy that bleeds out of it. The Ghost of Tom Joad (his best album, I think) is a lament for the American working class and its lives and deaths. Its most moving moments, though, come in invocations of landscapes of sky and wind and forests and springs, of friendship and love that lie 'where pain and memory have been stilled / There across the border.' A lament which seeks to regenerate. A voice and music which, for this very reason, will never deny or understate loss.

Lament as regeneration, and as force. The young man who feels 'so weak I just want to explode / Explode and tear this town apart / Take a knife and cut out this pain from my heart' decides, when the moment of decision arrives, to do something else. Weld his losses together and do something unexpected. Something new.

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain't got the faith to stand its ground.

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing

but lost and brokenhearted.

He strides off into the storm, looking for his promised land.

And all of this comes from sadness, from loss, from mourning. From lament.

2006-03-15T03:26:00.000Z

How is power legitimated? How are the most brutal, routinized acts of mass repression normalized and naturalized? It never ceases to amaze me that a state which has over a half-century practised torture and genocide in the pursuit of imperial goals and profits, a state in which racial segregation was institutionalized till into the second half of the century, where there has been a history of witch-hunts, where elections have been rigged and most of the lower-income population votes with its feet, can be held up as an exemplar of democracy. How does this work?

This is not to claim any status of particular evil for the United States, just to point to the constitutive violations of democracy and human rights that its statecraft and politics, national and international, are composed of. Of course brutal regimes cannot be compared easily on a scale of ten. The postwar and post-colonial world teems with examples: Iran of the Ayatollahs, Pinochet's Chile, Fujimori's Peru, the Taliban's Afghanistan, apartheid South Africa, Suharto's Indonesia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. But the point is that if anyone were to get up and systematically argue that Pol Pot or Pinochet were benvolent democratic heads of state, they'd be hooted out of the hall. The same doesn't happen when Condoleeza Rice or Rumsfeld make speeches about the United States' role in making this a freer world. Or, to take another pertinent case, it doesn't happen when someone defends Israel's apartheid wall.

How does this really work? The crude answer is that power justifies all, but that still begs the question - how? 'Hegemony', in the Gramscian sense, describes the situation well, but there are micro-strategies still to be explained.

Take popular cinema. Take an example of a film that's actually much more sensitive and intelligent than one would have expected, Spielberg's Munich. The film is a tortured condemnation of Israel, a state with which Spielberg has often claimed solidarity. The Mossad agents who set out to avenge Munich and track down Palestinian terrorists are, most of them, men with a conscience, capable of moral complexity and self-doubt, and this comes through even as Spielberg peels away the layers behind which their pathologies, and their state's pathology, rest. The film ends with the central protagonist, used by his state to commit murders his conscience cannot rest with, refusing Israel, refusing to commit himself to it any more. It ends with the moving invocation of an alternative, cosmopolitan, hospitable Jewishness against the hardness and closure of Zionism. And none of this can be faulted - the fact that the Mossad agents are men with consciences and not depraved monsters only enriches the film and makes it more complex. (Though the idea of Mossad agents risking their security and agenda in a desperate rush to save a little Palestinian girl from dying accidentally in one of their assassination attempts is, frankly, laughable.) Spielberg, to his credit, tries not to demonize the Palestinian terrorists he shows either. But they are, clearly, fanatics and nothing more. Their grievances are real, their longing for a home movingly portrayed. But they are walk-ons, cardboard figures, they are not people with children and fears and self-doubt and psychological complexities. They want their justice, and nothing will deter them. They are single-minded, they suffer from none of the weaknesses the Mossad agents do. And so, despite Spielberg's major advance upon the simple Manicheanisms of Hollywood, and his attempts to pierce the human truths of the Israel-Palestine predicament, he cannot. The adversaries are not made of the same human flesh and hearts, though the discourse of much of the film tries to affirm that they are.

Constantly, in media much cruder than Hollywood, which on the whole is far more sophisticated than Fox News, the same discursive trajectory emerges. Who are the people you will allow doubt, guilt, self-revulsion, self-questioning, the richness and openness of divided selves? Which side are they on? And who will emerge, on the other side, as Manichean-minded, ruthless, single-minded, the embodiments of the simplicity and horror of undivided selves? The CIA agent can be a man with kids and mortgages and fear and guilt, he can be a victim too. Not so the suicide bomber, who must only be a suicide bomber and nothing beyond, who must be reduced to the one function that defines and delimits his humanity. Why is Vietnam, the one imperial war which can be subjected to any kind of generally acceptable internal critique in mainstream American media, the subject of a 'debate', while 9/11 is the act that defies understanding, the act that can justify the substitution of war for debate and argument? It's the same logic at work.

Which is why George Clooney's new film, Syriana, is such a welcome step. Within the giant web of the military-state-corporate entanglements that structure the politics of the Middle East and tie these to America, the film delves into four situations, in both the United States and the Middle East, and describes the ways in which these work themselves out both through the articulation of political power on a giant scale, and in the micro-physics of real people's lives and experiences. Clooney as the CIA assassin who emerges as a tragic figure dying in a failed attempt at self-redemption, is particularly striking, and unusual. The Pakistani migrant labourer who is sucked into the world of suicide terrorists is potentially the richest character in the film, though it's true to Hollywood in the sense that this is the most imperfectly realized of the four converging plot-lines. But he is a young migrant labourer with a fresh face whose father loves him dearly, who's been made redundant by a corporate oil merger affecting jobs in both the Middle East and the United States, and who fears his death. The kind of figure it is risky to flesh out in Hollywood in these terms. If Clooney is returning mainstream Hollywood to the possibilities of a progressive left-liberal politics that McCarthyism first, and the Reaganite 1980s second, had all but eroded, this is something to be excited about. I haven't seen Good Night and Good Luck yet, but from all accounts it works fantastically well. These are minor blows against the edifice of self-legitimation that American mainstream political culture is built on. But they do good and not harm, and in Bush and Haliburton's America, that's reason enough for celebration.

2006-03-01T23:25:00.000Z

Cromer Street. Again. Late afternoon. Quieter today, no racist tramps outside the church, people about their business, walking through the streets, running their shops, kids stalking past in bad imitations of hoods. Before the road ends, a huge scaffolding locked into a tall building. There's work happening here, something's being built. The usual notices are up. SCAFFOLDING ALARMED - I always have a good laugh at that. CAUTION - MEN AT WORK OVERHEAD. That's another one. Something's coming up here, and a closer glance at the billboards tells me what it is. It's a 'creative arts centre', advertising ACTIVITY FOR HEALTH. It's called COSMUR, and the words explore inspire create are emblazoned in a melange of colours - yellow, green, red, orange - on a large piece of cloth pressed tight to the scaffolding.

Down on the street, someone's taking COSMUR's exhortations to heart. Carrying them out.

By the foot of the giant scaffolding is a giant yellow garbage carrier, an ugly barrow heaped with refuse. Bottles, wrappers, half-eaten food, used toilet cleaning fluid containers, discarded clothes - all signatures of the roads walked and trails left by people in the neighbourhood. And here's someone burrowing in their trails, hungrily, eagerly, big-eyed with hope. An old man, in his sixties but older. Short, wheezy, stumping around on rocky legs. A face a few days short of a shave, lips moving to no particular tune, eyes gleaming to no particular light. Black coat spattered with dust, old white shirt open at the neck. A weatherbeaten bicycle leans against the bin, his means of escape. He's licking his lips, peering around the street with hurried breaths as he goes about his work, to make sure no one's checking on him. I, on the other hand, stare rigidly ahead, and steal glances at him whenever I think he's not looking. A strange game of street etiquette we play, he and I.

He's scrabbling around in the bin, sniffing and feeling his way through the garbage. I don't know how good his eyes are, for his hands move over the same objects two or three times. After a while, there's a stifled exclamation of triumph, and he pulls out an old, torn sweater, black and striped with red, I think but can't quite remember. He casts a quick, wheedling glance of triumph at the street, makes sure no one's looking (I turn my back, for that second. Voyeur that I am, I turn back the instant I think I can). He scuttles to his bicycle, mounts it, and totters off back Cromer Street. I turn back, and follow him slowly. The old man, his trophy slung across his hunched shoulders, sways and wheezes his way down the empty street. He passes the church. Passes its big wooden doors. Passes the statue of the crucifix by its side. And moves on. The crucifix remains where it is, locked to its prisoner with his tortured body, his upturned face, and his mangled flesh, silhouetted against the fading light. My co-observer of today's human comedy. Of the entrepreneurship of the very poor. The sign explore create inspire, COSMUR's banner, flutters and cackles in the wind that has suddenly turned fierce, crackles and spits in the day that has suddenly turned very, very cold.

Sweet Jesus, see to it that nothing happens to him on his way back. See to it that he gets home safe. That his rag keeps him warm, unhurt, and alive.

2006-02-28T02:47:00.000Z

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. While winding down for the night, I came across a rediffmail article on Bush's visit to India.

While American staff must be lauded for the perfect manner in which they handle the President's security, it has petrified those who will be involved in India.

I bet it has. If the President has a cold while he's swapping rugby jokes with ministers and senior bureaucrats, will we be the next Global Terrorists, the new Threats to World Security?

Staff at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi, where Bush will stay, are completely overawed. They are not allowed to speak with the media and do not even whisper about the possible schedule of Bush and his wife, Laura.

'They seek him here, they seek him there....' Bush the phantom wraith slipping into and out of five-star hotels like a ghost....Bush as Clark Kent who has a Secret (who has a WMD)...watch out, you never know...he might be standing behind you. BOO! There, scared you, didn't I?

An unconfirmed report claims that American security officials wanted to handle Air Traffic Control themselves when Air Force One, the Presidential aircraft, arrives in New Delhi. Indian engineers, they've been told, are capable of handling the situation but it would not be surprising if American officials are allowed to be around.

No? Seriously? It would not be surprising? Go on, then, surprise me, do. And Jai Mata Di, while we're about it. Brave, patriotic Indian engineers, risking their all to prove the nation's collective manhood...we can handle our own Air Traffic Control ourselves, thank you very much! Huh! Who do these Americans think they are?? Remember the National Movement....jokes apart, though, it is brave, isn't it? Suppose Dubya trips on the red carpet? Jobs for the chop then, boys, surely? (It reminds me, not entirely coincidentally, of the red carpet that the Germans try to roll out for Mussolini in The Great Dictator).

Weapons, gadgets, helicopters and personnel are accompanying Tarzan as he swings from tree to tree in New Delhi. It is being said that 700 Indian and American policemen will cordon off the route from the airport to Maurya Sheraton.

Indeed. What fun. Santa Bush is coming to town...and not just Bush, but a vast, expanding mobile foliage too. With the best weapons discreet arms deals can make.

It all makes me a little sad. Visiting English cricketers used to get stomach flu when they came here, and whinged about it no end. Hell, even I got stomach flu, once in a while. Couldn't something like that be gently arranged? We are a hospitable people, it's often said, isn't it? It wouldn't end the War on The World's Biggest Abstract Noun, but it might, just might, weaken Bush's famous Resolve for a moment. Think about it....the President's Resolve has Loose Motions!

It does no harm to fantasize. Just a bit. Couldn't they cook him something spicy at the Maurya Sheraton?

Chefs of the Maurya, unite! The balance of the world hangs in your hands!

2006-02-28T01:46:00.000Z

Cromer Street is a narrow road that I use to get from where I live to SOAS, or to the Senate House Library. As you walk down it towards London University, on the left there's an old church, and on the right a row of small shops - eateries, groceries, clothing shops - run chiefly by Bangladeshis. Today, as I was walking by, things seemed tense, though there weren't many people on the street. It was beginning to get dark, around the time that you remember friends telling you that King's Cross is a 'dodgy area'. Facing me, in the middle of the road, was a black man who looked absolutely livid - it took some time to realize it wasn't me he was glaring at, just staring inarticulately into space, tuning in to something I hadn't picked up yet. Two South Asian women hurried by, looking straight ahead of them, looking scared. And then I heard the voice.

'....fucking coming here with your filth. Coming to our land, with your shit and your filth.' It didn't take long to figure this out. Across the road was a man, a tramp, dressed in a thick white jacket which was probably all the clothing he'd been able to afford in all of last month, not shouting precisely but speaking in a very, very loud voice. 'I fucking wish you'd all fucking die. Go back to where you came from. I can smell you - from a mile off, you fucking filth. Coming here and destroying our land.' I walked by, darting a glance at him every two seconds despite myself. He didn't seem to notice me. I don't think he noticed anyone. There were three or four brown and black faces on the road - but to him we were a tidal wave, a plague of conquerors, a machine gun roaring away at his land, taking away his home, his happiness, his job. (Should I have shouted 'Maggie took your job, not me' at him? Trite as it might sound, it wouldn't have been untrue. But I walked by.) 'I KNOW you. ALL of you.' No, you don't. You never did and you never will. And that's not your fault. But it's not mine either. 'Go...awaaay. Fucking filth. Our land...' The voice trailed off. Speakers on Hyde Park Corner must often feel the same way, when they lose their audience. And they're often saying the same things. It was frightening, it was also pathetic. He didn't have enough strength on those bones to hurt a child. But there were children looking at him with scared, wounded eyes on the street. And I felt like them. That wasn't difficult. I wonder what it's like, though, to feel like him.

2006-02-25T01:16:00.000Z

I like convalescing. Four days of bad bad flu, then I pick up the debris, start recovering, aided by Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic. (there are some things I'm a complete sucker for, and Pratchett's one of them. My first in ages, by the way. Last year I read about twenty one after the other when I should have been finishing a dissertation...but that's another story.)

Post-convalescence, with ginger steps, is a nicer feeling still. Today, mid-afternoon, Covent Garden. Lunch with an old college friend I hadn't met in ages. And then, out in a very fragile London sunshine, threatened by clouds from all sides but holding strong. In front of Covent Garden station, crowds milling past busily, people mostly like my friend, with work and offices to go to once lunch hour's past. The usual bunch of tourists too - many nationalities, many chattering tongues, many footsteps clattering on the cobbled stones, many cameras clacking. Many faces, disappearing into the distance.

And in the middle of all this, a bearded busker in a blue cap, picking out the most exquisite notes on an old acoustic guitar. First a typical delta blues, could have been anything really, and probably was too. Then, nearly without a break, pirouettes into the first solo guitar rendition of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's 'Take Five' that I've ever heard. A man, a woman and a pram (I wasn't near enough to see if it was occupied, but I suppose it was..) stop for a while, gaze wonderingly at him as he plays, clap their hands, and move on. He looks up briefly, grins and winks at them, then at me (who is this bugger anyway? he's been here half a bloody hour!) and carries on playing. Nearby, a youngish man in a much-worn and tattered black jacket, I think a tramp, is sitting on a bench eating the remains of a sandwich. Also listening. The liquid notes weave a blue line between us. Kids rattle across the cobbles, casting curious glances at the man with the guitar. There was something sad about it, yes. There always is about buskers, about anyone who needs to bust a gut to have someone toss 20p into his empty guitar case. When I tossed in a coin, I saw he'd made very little indeed today. But what he was doing, right then and there, was about more than that - the music was about more than that. It was sad, yes. It was also the most beautiful thing in the world.

The sun was up. For a while. Holding its own.

2006-02-11T04:39:00.000Z

Why, oh why, is sleep so difficult? I spent much of the last year trying to prove that body clocks don't exist, I'm paying the price now, as reality kicks in like the worst of black coffees.

And tonight - or today - is not the best of times to go through another fit of insomnia. Tomorrow Jose Pununari, from the occupied Zanon factory in Argentina, speaks at SOAS, and I want to be there and I want to be awake. The factory takeovers by workers in Argentina have, for me, been the most exciting thing to have happened since the millennium began. Will they lead anywhere? One doesn't dare hope too much, of course, given the history of our hopes on the Left, and all our idols and movements with their tragedies and defeats and feet of clay...but yet...but yet.
Right. I thought I might have something clever/profound/witty to say. Surely there's some compensation for not being able to sleep? But it turns out I don't. I shall continue to listen to Jerry Garcia cover Dylan's music and fight the good fight against the demon of wakefulness. U. has promised to deliver a wake-up call at 8.30 in the morning...bless her, but I have a feeling it'll be to no avail. And in the meantime, anyone in London whose hearts are set a-beating at the idea of a workplace without bosses, please do turn up at SOAS tomorrow. Two in the afternoon. There - I've done my bit for the revolution. Now good night.

2006-02-07T01:09:00.000Z

Martin Scorsese's monumental enterprise, the six-volume film compilation The Blues, begins with a moving elegy by Scorsese himself, a film named 'Feel Like Going Home', which traces, a la John and Alan Lomax, the beginnings of the story of the blues, back in the Mississippi delta, and makes imaginative connections between the musical past and present of the land of the blues. Midway through the film, Willie Dixon, playing in a run-down bar, breaks into a song I haven't ever heard before. Dixon turns out to be an old man with two surviving teeth - as 'classically 'typical' a purveyor of the blues as ever lived! I don't know what I expected the man who wrote 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Spoonful' to look like - I guess surprise was unavoidable. But here are lines from the song he sang - another touch of the uncanny, another song which seems to have been written for the world we live in right now, though it wasn't.

now you talk about terror
what about poor me
i been terrorized
all my days
couldn't walk down the road
without somebody gonna stop by
want to pick on poor me

'You talk about terror'. You do, indeed. And poor Willie, who's probably been singing that song decades before you decided to bomb terror out of this world, knows you've been lying all along. In a sense the only genuine 'war on terror' the USA's ever seen, or probably is ever going to see, was the Civil Rights Movement. And this song speaks the terror that was confronted, and partly beaten back, by that.

2006-02-02T02:10:00.000Z

Late night, early morning really. London at its coldest. Nerves jangling to music. A DVD version of Baez singing ‘Love is just a four letter word’…and there’s the ghost of old man Dylan, rather young man, or better still boy Dylan, floating menacingly above the tragi-melody of her rendition. At a cleverly chosen juncture, a passable imitation of the great man’s voice rings through her, before she bends back into her own tones…enough said. I know you hang over this song, I know it can never be fully mine without summoning you from our past, our shared history, as you were and as you never were…but this is not a reproach, not now, let this be a shared joke between us, though I alone will laugh at it.

The DVD – Scorsese’s marvelous if somewhat hagiographic documentary – moves on to Dylan himself, barely more than a child, a rebellious adolescent with a voice and a vocabulary none had possessed yet, or has since. He sings, in front of a visibly gloomy Donovan, a haunting early version of ‘love minus zero’, in that voice, world-weary but angrily young, bitter yet joyously high-spirited, wary but knowing, hard yet tender. I haven’t heard it sung better – compassion, sweetness and brittle danger resonate with one another in that voice. In that music. We move, instantly, into that maddened Newcastle performance of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, when a junked-out Dylan cups his hands, and blazes into the mike like lava, ‘you’re invisible, you got no secrets…to conceaaaaaal’…blotting out in that scream and in that gesture the history that gave him his power, the political world he fed off, and the doomed, failed escape from it which nonetheless succeeded, producing the greatest writing rock music will ever know. The crowd is edgy, stunned, shocked…Dylan feeds off that shock, ripping at it with his teeth, his eyes, and his breath.

And I wonder, watching all of this at a distance of four decades, about the nature of that peculiar intensity that binds me to this re-re-reproduction, through digital technology, of that moment in time and in music, about my investment in what haunts me. The nervous drive that fuses my body and mind with that moment, dimly imagined and dimly represented in the shaking motions of the camera, the machinic pulsation between us, this radiation and interlocution of distant presents and disentangling histories. How can this be named? Awe, rapture, resonance…all true, but all inadequate. Perhaps the only word that can catch it is love, at its richest and in its most ambivalent manifestations. Tenderness and desire, devotion and obsession, longing and, above all, excitement.

And it holds, though with a greater melodic softness, into the music I play next, the dancing, shimmering guitar-work of Jerry Garcia. His music moves me like the music of none I’ve heard…each note plucks out unexpected juxtapositions of sweetness, mystery, mourning and ecstasy. Garcia died horribly, but I like to think of his life as happy. The live recordings of his performances convey this to me somehow. The earlier days: the poet in a community of poets, the purveyor of lyric, the gentle, already slightly burly bearded guitarist weaving his magic with an almost diffident grace. The later days: an older, more twinkling magician, more a touch of the professional performer, perhaps, but also a more meditative wisdom at work, reflective as his earlier work was exploratory, interpretive as his earlier work was innovative. After the watershed with the Dead in the early and mid 1970s, his best work came well into his forties, from the early 1980s. There’s more mastery in the construction, the finesse that comes of re-tuning and reworking the same sets for decades. The best work comes live, there are few outstanding studio recordings in the decade before his death. Psychedelia, hippie freedom, country and bluegrass renewals…these cannot generate a new music in the 1980s, but remain Garcia’s musical referents. So he begins to re-interpret the music that swayed the Dead in the 70s. And operatic crescendos, darkly beautiful narratives are produced, and leap out from the guitar and voice at screaming audiences…there’s not just commerce, but mischief in how he plays with them. A wise ageing man, looking older than he is, a Father Christmas figure, with a big round belly and a sweet smile and a white beard…avuncular to the core. But something hides and dances beneath that, to the last days before the drug overdose that killed him. An elvish magic, to tiredly evoke tolkien, an elvish and impish and druidical magic, obvious yet hidden, dark but kind.

Nostalgia's a strange thing. How is it possible to feel nostalgic for a time and place you'd never known? But I do.

2006-01-28T01:27:00.000Z

The tube, racing through central London. Leicester Square - a beggar steps on. A hard-luck story. He lost his wallet, needs some change to get back home. Perhaps an elaborate fiction, with its own codes; perhaps the truth. The horror of it - I'll never know. But fiction or truth, it doesn't matter - none of that changes the fact of his need.

Faces turned away, eyes averted. Embarrassed silences. People trying to hold on tight to the myth of normality, at the very moment that the horror of this world bursts into vision. Whatever you do, don't allow this to mean anything. It must mean nothing.

And there are also other faces. Stony, disgusted. Contemptuous eyes and wrinkled noses. They want something for nothing, the bastards. They abuse the system. Fuck them. Useless bloody cunts. And they smell too. These faces disappear, as fast as they can, behind the pages of the newspaper they happen to be holding - the Times, the Daily Mail, and yes, even the Guardian are quickly deployed to wrap their faces up in another world, protect their eyes from what is offensive and dirty and scheming and asking them for 50p. Fuck them.

That was there, on the tube. Here, in our own comfortable domestic spaces and social gathering-points, murmurs of the same: 'Real men wouldn't refuse to do a hard day's work.' 'I know them, they lie. I've seen it so many times.' 'All that is OK, but can't they wash?' Some phrases are spoken, some resonate on faces, on the way that the lips are drawn in a thin line of disgust, the eyes narrowed in loathing and, yes, fear.

And here, in the heart of a rich metropolis, a sudden sense of the uncanny, another time and place brushing against the one you inhabit now. I've been here before. The faces and the voices of the Delhi rich - the same expressions, the same tones, the same hatred for the kid on the road, tugging at your shirt, who doesn't even have the decency to be a cripple.

So much for the myth of the Three Worlds.

2006-01-28T00:01:00.000Z

Went to the Steedman talk at the Institute of Historical Research a couple of days back. Absorbing, quirky. About a late-eighteenth century poet named Elizabeth Hands, a domestic servant who published a volume of verse in 1789 that was very, very widely read, and written - Steedman argued - with subversive and parodic intent, taking apart the cultural pretensions of the provincial gentry and bourgeoisie of Warwickshire. Steedman used Hands' poetry (I still can't get over the name. A domestic servant named Hands? And a poet, to boot? The possibilities that conjures up...) to open out wider questions of working-class poetry, the question of why poetry and not prose, the importance of the kitchen as a space from and in which writing could emerge....and other issues.

One of the themes that appears from her new work - and explicitly so from her talk - is a concern with the comic. She described her trajectory over the last twenty years as a move from a 'melodramatic' form of historical writing to a 'comic' form. It's an intriguing thought. One moment during the talk stood out. She was reading out Hands' poetry to us, then she paused, looked around at the audience, and said, 'I'm worried that none of you are laughing.'

I've discovered a fellow Steedman admirer, Rob, on the blogosphere - hurray! - and he thinks this might be a new way of dealing with questions of suffering and injustice - in a mode that chooses to optimistically celebrate the capacities of everyday resistance (he thinks this connects with Certeau's claims), rather than underscore the measure of pain and loss that was experienced.

I think Rob's right, and I think this connects with a tension that has been threading through the writing of radical social history ever since Thompson. Is the recovery of the 'experience' of the oppressed and suffering a means of articulating the ways in which they suffered, or the ways in which they resisted, in so many ways, their exploitation? I don't personally see that there should be a contradiction, but yes, different choices of emphasis do end up framing the same histories differently. I do think this ethical tension marks Steedman's work, and the intensities of affect that shape her prose. To recover the work of a servant woman who mocked the pretensions of her social superiors, and did so in a poetic form that was considered their property, is something that is evidently a historical joke Steedman revels in - which doesn't make her project any less serious or committed.

But the comic form is important to her also, I think, because it allows her to make connections that a historical reconstruction based on more orthodox narrative causalities wouldn't. 'The joke' of Archive Fever, in her description of it, is something that clearly preoccupies her. She is able to make, through pretty sound historical connections, claims that appear absurd, but do a lot of the work in her argument. For instance - Michelet breathed the dust of the archives. This killed him. Michelet was killed by History, by the Archive. These are poetic connections, these are also, in their own way, comic - or maybe tragicomic - connections. Dust is a book that is anchored in, moves along the rails of, connections of this sort. And compels us to ask questions about the limits we sometimes place on historical analysis when we refuse recourse to the non-literal causality, the analogical connection, the strange and uncanny resonances and hidden threads that draw apparently unconnected things together.

The comic, actually, is something I've been thinking about lately, though - thankfully - in less academic terms. I've been watching so much excellent comedy, made across generations - the Marx brothers, Spike Milligan, Blackadder, Goodness Gracious Me, and above all, of course, Monty Python. And lately, Eddie Izzard. And it's struck me, lately, what a demanding form the comic is. Naturally, it isn't just about being funny. Nor, necessarily, is comedy 'light' - I feel more bruised, often, after a series of Python sketches than I do after a film by Bergman. To work, it seems to me, comedy has to respect absolutely nothing - no sentiments, no sacred cows, no communities, no individuals. Everything has to be, in some form, a source of laughter. (which doesn't, of course, make all kinds of laughter equally acceptable ethically). This is what makes it such a great form - what I love about Goodness Gracious Me, for instance, is that in its observation of the hypocrisies and absurdities by which many sorts of white Britishers and British South Asians shape themselves, it refuses to spare or respect anybody - Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, reactionaries, radicals, men, women, children. I really think it makes it the most democratic of forms - if only we could substitute 'everybody deserves to be laughed at' for 'everybody deserves respect', we might have a less dull and saccharine version of multiculturalism. But it's also such an incredibly demanding job. The minute you let the piss-taking stop, the minute you display an attitude that's less than irreverent, less than offensive to any pieties, the comic effect fails. (Ever wondered why each scene in a Marx brothers movies that doesn't feature the three clowns fails so miserably? It isn't just that they're great actors...the point is that things begin appearing less absurd at those moments, which is why they fail.) Tragedy, by contrast, can be relieved of its mission at so many points - it's a much more relenting form, it's able to slacken tension without necessarily losing the point. Comedy can't do that.

History, too, fails if it chooses to 'respect' anything or anyone. Of course historians have their heroes and admirations and faiths, even - but in its own way, it's a discipline that crumbles when you make the demand that it should respect 'sentiments' or 'cultures'. It's a vexed issue in India - we had, in Maharashtra, a ban imposed on a book that was accused of not sufficiently respecting Shivaji, and the Hindutva rewriting of school textbooks when the BJP was in power was based on the rhetoric that the older textbooks were 'disrespectful' of certain sacred cows (including, quite literally, sacred cows!). If you make that demand of history, you kill it. Perhaps this is the commitment that binds, by analogy, both history and the comic? And perhaps this is why we can try and create moments, through the writing of history, when absurdities and ironies are made visible?

2006-01-26T13:13:00.000Z

So Hamas seems to have won the Palestinian polls. This is grim, as grim as it gets. Fatah has only itself to blame, of course, for having turned into the corrupt, opportunistic, unrepresentative organization that it now largely is. Much of the blame must, of course, be laid at the door of the Palestinian Authority, or, more accurately, the Repress-Palestinians Authority. Does this mean that the character of a largely secular resistance movement, one with much to its credit, is now going to change beyond recall? Or is it more a symbolic change, given how fucked up things seem to be in Gaza and the West Bank? Does this also mean a breakdown of that myth they call 'the peace process'? More land grabs? More desperate, savage suicide bombings? More Israeli troops rolling into Palestinian territories with shoot-at-sight orders and impulses? Things don't look good, and won't look good for some time to come, either for Israelis who've been living with the daily fear of violent death for several years now, or for Palestinians who've had to live with the same fear every minute of their lives so long it doesn't bear thinking about, and who've had to face the daily humiliations, micro-tortures, and insults dished out by the Israeli regime. A regime whose prime accomplishment is to have extended, in so many ways, the meaning of the words 'apartheid' and 'colonialism'.

2006-01-25T01:48:00.000Z

The RSS General Secretary, Mohan Bhagwat, declared a couple of days ago that 'everything is changeable about the Sangh' and that its volunteers are free to join any political party. This is a very interesting statement, and I'm still not quite sure how to decipher it.
It's possible, of course, that these are the flailing words of an organization still short on ideas after the shock of the 2004 elections. It's possible that these are off-the-cuff remarks to a journalist who's asked an unexpected question. But somehow I doubt that.
My immediate reaction is that the long honeymoon's finally over. So many of us in India were sent into whoops of triumph when the 2004 elections happened, when it became clear that the admixture of Hindutva murderousness, as exemplified by Gujarat, and brutal economic neo-liberalism, as exemplified by the India Shining campaign, had not worked. We felt, and rightly, that this was the most important general election since 1977. We felt that, for all the compromises and unacceptable politics one could expect from a Congress-led government, there was a real opportunity here to frame new terms of political discourse, to put issues of poverty and vulnerability on the political agenda again. And to an extent that happened - the EGA's an instance of that. The trajectory of Indian economic and social policy remained depressing, but at least this was contested ground again, and it seemed, for a while, that the subsumption of all other political questions within the framework of right-wing identity politics had been halted. Some were so optimistic as to proclaim the death of the Sangh Parivar, and we constantly told each other congratulatory stories about the vibrancy of Indian democracy, we told each other that Hindutva could never succeed in a country like this.
We were confirmed in this by the incredible dithering of the BJP in opposition. The party that had been so powerful and vocal in parliamentary opposition at the time of the Congress and UF governments of 1991-98 seemed to have lost its nerve, to have degenerated into what the Congress was not so long ago, a pack of opportunistic climbers who made themselves ridiculous through their internal squabbles. The campaign against Sonia after the election bombed when she stepped down at the Congress party meet, a brilliant manoeuvre that took the wind out of the Sangh's sails. From then till now, despite a discernible recovery in electoral politics (Bihar, and now possibly Karnataka) the Parivar has seemed in crisis.
But political movements don't die this easily, do they? And this is the most important, most dynamic political movement of post-independence India. Out of state power, it orchestrated a massive popular mobilization to destroy a 500 year old mosque, and that was successful. Holding state power in Gujarat, it planned, managed, and successfully executed a genocidal campaign against Muslims, and realized its dream, to establish Hindu Rashtra there. A right-wing political movement with this force and energy doesn't die because it suffers an electoral reverse, however traumatic. In the oldest traditions of the Sangh, crisis, we could have expected, would bring out all its strength and resilience, see it regroup, re-strategize, and launch new campaigns.

I reacted euphorically when it seemed, for a while, as though this wasn't happening. Almost two years of UPA power now, fumbling and unsatisfactory but still incomparably better on every level than the six-year nightmare that had preceded it, and the RSS seemed to have been unable to come up with any kind of strategy to combat this. But now I'm worried. Mohan Bhagwat's statement, tucked away in the margins of the news, may - just may - indicate the unfolding of a new political logic, however unstable and tentative at first. Does this statement mean that RSS volunteers are to enter and destabilize other political parties? Does it mean that corrupt, opportunistic hangers-on are to be weeded out of the Sangh, reclaiming thereby that savage purity of purpose that has historically been its landmark? Is this perhaps an attempt to break and reconstitute the Sangh, perhaps to move beyond the BJP towards a new political formation, in the long-term? For this is the one political movement in India that genuinely thinks in the long-term, that has been able to strategize micropolitically on a national scale, to enter the circuits of education, temple networks, voluntary organizations, and local welfare, and work its ideological mission through these channels. We needn't be surprised if the RSS plays a waiting game, it's done this for decades. It's a tragic commentary on Indian politics that the one formation with an intelligent, clear-cut and patient strategy, the only grouping that genuinely has political vision, should be a savage, bloodthirsty, and fascistic movement, whose clarity lies in its total, incorruptible commitment to subordinate all minority communities to majoritarian rule. The RSS has finally spoken, it has finally delivered a statement that may suggest a real strategy, a real vision, once again.

This may all be paranoid, and I hope, I deeply hope that it is. But I'm worried. I'm also worried by the complacency of a secular government that has taken little note yet of what the Sangh is doing in the states in which it's in power - anticonversion laws in Gujarat and M.P., absolutely unjustifiable in any state that claims democratic credentials, have barely been commented upon, let alone politically contested. I'm also worried by the past. There was a time, not so long ago, when people one spoke to would confidently say, 'Ah, now that the BJP's in power, it's nothing more than an ordinary centre-right party, it's eschewed Hindutva.' Sometimes they'd go on to tell you what a wonderful, patriotic gesture the nuclear tests in 1998 were, and how wonderful it was that India was shining, it had to be true, didn't it, if the papers and advertisements told you so surely India was shining? Even if they didn't, and sometimes even when they shared your politics, they'd tell you there was nothing to worry about, we were simply stabilizing, in the natural course of things, into a two-party system.
We never did transmute into a two-party system, thank the Lord or whoever (better the Laloos of the world than the sterility of American politics!). There is, on the whole, no 'natural course of things'. Except, as activists had tirelessly pointed out for over a decade, in the politics of the Sangh. Events did take their natural course there. The BJP controlled India, the Sangh controlled Gujarat. The 2002 massacres happened. It was brutal, it was clinical, it was pre-planned, and efficiently carried out. It was also utterly and completely predictable - Communalism Combat had predicted it for months before it happened. In the life of the Sangh, it was in the natural course of things, it was the growth from adolescence into maturity of their political vision, the first total accomplishment of a goal, with practically no hitches.

If the same complacency reappears, the complacency that mistakes a temporary lull for a change of heart, a temporary wavering for a political decline, then we're all in deep trouble in the not-so-long run. And there's reason to worry.

I'm worried, and I hope I'm wrong. I'm worried because I refuse to believe Gujarat cannot happen again.

2006-01-17T13:55:00.000Z

listening to van morrison sing 't.b sheets'. it's a tortured song about a man who's trying to leave his sick and dying girlfriend, and desperately looking for excuses to get out of the room. tortured, and unmerciless. van sniggers nervously, mumbles fake consolations, promises to 'send somebody around later....with a bottle of wine for you, baby / but i gotta go'. pleads, with a break in his voice, 'open up the windows...and let me breathe'. the fear resonates: 'as the sunlight shines through the crack in the window pane...numbs my brain'. 'the cool room', he almost weeps, 'is a fool's room.' guilt, cowardice, claustrophobia, all haunted by the memories of love.
how dramatically rock music changed in the first decade and a half of its journey. and what a long, long journey it is from 'let me be your teddy bear' to this song. such a short time, and such a long distance travelled...from the energies of a new kind of dance music to the unprecedented lyrical dignity and depth that the best music of the mid-to-late sixties managed to achieve. dylan, with his 'historic break' with folk music, had something to do with this, certainly. but what else was changing, what made songs like this possible? no answers here and now, if ever. to quote van, 'i got to go.'

2006-01-17T03:55:00.000Z

lahore: pakistan 679/7, and india, unbelievably, 403 without loss! sehwag 247, dravid 128. what on earth is happening to subcontinental cricket? i wish i could have watched it...sehwag and dravid making 403 in 75 overs is a thought that sets the mouth watering, and i really wish i could have watched the artist formerly known as yousuf youhana, who made 173. i'm glad to say that as far as cricket goes i'm slowly shedding any vestiges of patriotism (though not, i have to confess, a certain third-worldism), and i'm thoroughly hedonistic, just want my favourite batsmen to make lots of runs. which they did, inzy apart. but who the hell prepares pitches like this??? part of me wants the last day to be full of runs, and another part of me desperately wishes for the return of doctored pitches so that we can have a result. most of me, however, has given in to base commodity fetishism, and wishes i had a tv to watch and wag fingers at and reprimand when the game gets dull. on that note, good night.

2006-01-15T19:06:00.000Z

oh. i've just figured out what this blog is going to be. obsessive.

2006-01-15T17:47:00.000Z

Finshed Steedman a little while ago, and what a book it is. There's a lightness of touch about it that isn't really commonplace among social historians - Thompson was also a great writer, but more in an angry, sometimes Swiftian and sometimes Dickensian mode, sprawling and resonant, though there was amazing elegance there too. But Steedman really reads like poetry at times - I found myself reading sections aloud. Here's another beautiful passage, one of the best in the book. She's writing about the practice of radical social history, the tradition she works within:

This is what we do, or what we believe we do: we make the dead speak, we rescue the handloom-weavers of Tipton and Freshitt from the enormous indifference of the present. We have always, then, written in the mode of magical realism. In strictly formal and stylistic terms, a text of social history is very closely connected to those novels in which a girl flies, a mountain moves, the clocks run backwards, and where (this is our particular contribution) the dead walk among the living. If the Archive is a place of dreams, it permits this one, above all others, the one that Michelet dreamed first, of making the dead walk and talk.

I was thinking about it, and I've concluded that this is the first book of its kind. Not the first to reflect critically on the ways in which history is known and produced, though perhaps the most original in that mode. But the form the book takes tells us a story. It begins with a laughing but serious passage through Derrida's Archive Fever, and takes, irreverently, his musings on the archive as a starting-point for her own, which are very different. It moves deftly into an examination of industrial disease and the literal, historical meanings of 'dust' and 'archive fever', connects these up - amazing sleight-of-hand here - with Michelet and his invocation of the oppressed of the past who now lie dead. One of the more startling operations in the book is the one where she makes the deliberately metaphorical argument that Michelet breathed the dust of the dead in the archives, and as they spoke through him, they took his life. Obviously not a literal argument, but it rings true still. In between two sections on Michelet, she inserts a chapter which seems to be from her ongoing research on domestic labour, and considers the way in which the eighteenth-century English legal system, the personal testimony, and the making of historical narration were connected. We move on: a consideration of George Eliot, and a reflection on the way the structure of historical time animates Middlemarch. Then to an absolutely marvellous chapter, entitled 'What a Rag Rug Means', about the poetics of working-class space, extending and refining Bachelard in the process, and doing more - considering the way working-class domestic interiors and objects become invested with meaning. In a characteristic textual swerve, she moves from a conceptually rich and loaded examination of the poetics of space to a very concrete set of observations about the social history of these objects that animates their capacity to hold meaning further. She then works her way through an extraordinary consideration of the relation between narrative and history, from which the quote above comes, and ends with another reflection on the actual and imagined meanings of dust, the dust of the archives, dust not as rubbish but as the inextinguishable surplus left over from past times, and dust as disease.

None of this does justice to the book, nor is it meant to. What I describe here are only bookmarks, signposts along what is a very winding and twisting journey along dusty roads (pun intended). This is a book that pretends to wind cautiously, but actually dances along those roads, taking turns that seem arbitrary but produce new and rich landscapes along the path, all of which add up to - well, add up to a very fine book. (you can deal in metaphors only so long!). That the book dances is one of the first things you notice - because works of history, even when written by great prose artists, are not supposed to dance. One imagines a slow, steady clump, one can go so far as to picture a nervous, brittle series of jumps, but the flowing, dance-like intensities of Steedman's book are something that's rare. Derrida's conclusions about the archive are refused ('Archive Fever? I can tell you all about Archive Fever!', she mock-expostulates at the beginning of the book, and then goes on to do precisely that) but in a sense the book takes Derrida's invitations to playfulness more seriously than Derrida himself ever did. Because this is a book that is both very serious and very playful.

Critical theory, in various broadly post-structuralist guises, and history have been confronting each other for a while now. Theory has berated history for its 'positivism', for its 'naive' belief in the efficacy of positive truth-telling about the past. History has accused theory of not understanding the constraints of the archive, of not comprehending what it is that historians actually do. I've seen many convincing rebuttals of strong constructivist arguments by historians, but these come, overwhelmingly, as missiles in a war.

Steedman breaks out of that trap. Here is a book that does not seek to defend or recover ground, does not protect territory. The challenge of theory is taken on, but not for the purposes of rebuttal; rather, as a provocation that is both exasperating and thrilling. And then the book dances dangerously between the archival-historical and the 'theoretical', tweaking the beard of both. The passage I cited is an instance of this. What Steedman probably has in mind when she writes, laconically and startlingly, 'We have always, then, written in the mode of magical realism' is the work of Hayden White, who tried to reduce historical writing to a set of literary tropes grounded in the nineteenth century. Steedman does not react to this with outrage as so many have done, instead, she points out, calmly, that indeed historians work with tropes and genres, and these are richer and more varied - in literary terms - than White would allow. Modernist, magical-realist, surrealist - a whole new field of literary referents for history opens up. The twentieth century, in brief, opens up. And yet, through all of this, through a series of apparent concessions to Theory about the constructedness and fictive dimensions of history, Steedman manages to affirm, time and again, the irreducibility of the archival trace, and the dust that will not go away. There is no embrace of theory, there is no surrender to theory, there is no refusal of theory. It would be good if more historians wrote like this. Till they do, this book will stand alone.

2006-01-15T06:16:00.000Z

sleep won't come. it's past six in the morning and i haven't been able to sleep at all. my body clock's beginning to worry me. insomnia's not a pretty thing to catch if you're meant to be hitting the british library and various stacks of archival files once the weekend's over.
on the subject of archives and history, here's carolyn steedman, my favourite living historian, writing about them in her new book, dust:

There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has landed up in the office you are at work at. Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and your competence in that was established long ago. Your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic. It's about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, and which you will never get through tomorrow.

This is very precise, and very accurate, and of course it's a delight to read. what she writes is the product of years of grubbing in archives, (literally) getting your hands dirty with the muck of the past, and i'm only at the beginning of my research - still, these lines do describe something of what i feel when confronted with a bound volume of delicate, brown, crumbly nineteenth-century manuscript paper that demands that i read it and do it justice, while time demands that i leave it aside and move on to something else. I felt this way in bombay all the time while looking through the archives - that there just wasn't enough time. So much of what historians do, which enters the world of monograph publication looking assured and finished and commanding, is actually insufferably messy, loose ends flapping like crows, mysteries left unexplored, tales untold - incompletion is pretty much history's condition of existence. Which is, of course, what can also make it such a thrill. (not all the time by any means, about half the time you find yourself fighting a losing battle with boredom. but comes a moment when things begin to fall in place, and then....)
all posts won't be this narcissistic. actually, what the hell...how does it matter if they are?? they will be! and good for them if that's the case!
eventful first morning of blogging....all mornings won't be this way. and that i can say with more certainty.

2006-01-15T04:23:00.000Z

blogging is frustrating and confusing....am trying to figure it out with the patient and amused help of a friend (yes, LM, thanks....). lord i hate cybercomplications....

beginnings...

2006-01-15T02:24:00.001Z

against my better judgment and purely on impulse, i've started a blog. hmm so what's it going to be about? who knows...i have a fair guess, though - music, literature, history, politics, the daily accidents that make up life (big, pretentious phrases!), random reflections...and so on. whatever that last might be. i do know this is going to be fairly random and sporadic, flurries of postings followed by indefinite silences. that's all i can manage by way of introduction at 2.30 a.m!