India – Page 2 – Beyond Capital

Earlier, when a migrant came to a metro, earned money as a labourer, went back to his village and bought land there, he was assumed to be a pauperised peasant with a nostalgic urge. Some took him to be insufficiently proletarianised, not fully attuned to the urban life, and also living in illusions – fighting his present to remain in the past. I always had my doubts. My experience of working with many such migrants, both in Delhi and Odisha, shows that this tendency of investing back is actually an existential mentality of any normal individual worker with or without a regular employment. It is a way to invest their savings smartly. For precarious labourers, it is a way of surviving or reproducing themselves and their families in the absence of social security and regular employment.

It is the peasant/petty bourgeois mentality of the left leadership and intellectuals that does not allow them to see such a simple fact. However, I will refrain from saying that they are under any illusion. It is their class outlook that really determines the conclusions that they make.

An interesting and controversial fact-sheet on the present state of the Anti-Posco struggle composed by a comrade (himself a prominent civil liberties activist) was earlier circulated on Countercurrents, New Socialist Initiative’s website etc and later apparently taken down. It has definitely disturbed the ‘radical’ civil libertarians in Delhi. The text tends to muddy the pristine domain of civil liberties and rights discourse by talking politics (whatever be its level). My criticism of the article is that ‘this’ politics is not enough.

http://stormingthewinterpalace.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-posco-issue-where-do-we-stand.html

In fact, what is happening with all major struggles in India is that various class and political currents in them are being ‘subalternised’, and their sanitised (of politics) translation done by the civil libertarians are publicised everywhere. It is high time we understand the pitfalls of putting civil liberties/rights discourse above politics. This discourse has radical possibilities only when they are under the command of revolutionary politics. What has actually happened is the opposite – ‘civil libertisation’ (ngoisation) of radical (armed/unarmed) politics, thus reducing the latter to militant reformism.