An interregnum of about 18 months, Seattle has been followed by Quebec. The pattern is almost identical. And Quebec has been followed on May Day by mini-uprisings in Berlin, Frankfurt, Basle, Zurich, London, Sydney, Melbourne. Young men and women, unemployed or university students, poets or journalists, black and non-black, congregated from all over, including the US. Agitators, individually and in groups, arrived in fact from different continents. None of them were organised specimens, certainly not organised on a countrywide or continental scale. Streams of young people rushed towards where the world’s capitalism had chosen as its citadel. They arrived in tandem, but despite the strides made by information technology, they remained disjointed clusters.

EPW
May 26, 2001

Calcutta Diary

AM

An interregnum of about 18 months, Seattle has been followed by Quebec. The pattern is almost identical. And Quebec has been followed on May Day by mini-uprisings in Berlin, Frankfurt, Basle, Zurich, London, Sydney, Melbourne. Young men and women, unemployed or university students, poets or journalists, black and non-black, congregated from all over, including the US. Agitators, individually and in groups, arrived in fact from different continents. None of them were organised specimens, certainly not organised on a countrywide or continental scale. Streams of young people rushed towards where the world’s capitalism had chosen as its citadel. They arrived in tandem, but despite the strides made by information technology, they remained disjointed clusters. Some of them might have carried on spasmodic correspondence via e-mail with one another. Take the events in Quebec for instance. Those assembled had little to show except their passion and will power, yet they did not at all hesitate to confront the combined might of almost all the countries in North and South Americas. Fidel Castro, as was only to be expected, contemptuously refused to attend the gala meet primarily intended to offer obeisance to the new US president. The rest of the heads of states, almost without exception, were there, including those from Mexico and Venezuela. For reasons of electoral expediency, the Mexican president has to wear his radicalism on his sleeves; but, let nobody forget, he was in the past a Coca Cola top executive. The Venezuelan president has other considerations in his mind, such as the gyrations in international oil prices. These reasons apart, geopolitical factors make it imperative for Latin American countries not to rub the US on the wrong side too often. Occasional expression of solidarity with Cuba is all right, but challenging the overall suzerainty of the superpower has to be ruled out.

In Quebec, the federal government of Canada behaved as if it were an extended limb of the US administration. Mobilisation of police, army and other security personnel was at the highest level. Successive perimeters of defence networks were set up. The Canadian constitution accords full freedom of political activities enshrined in the Charter of Rights. The security forces, the Charter says, must display the maximum of restraint and professionalism while tackling a crowd gathered in support of a political cause. On those April days, the Canadian administration had a ready answer for its deviation from the Charter. Once the Riot Act was applied, the Charter of Rights, it maintained, stood automatically superseded. That however was the interpretation of the government, not necessarily of the judiciary. The atmosphere was surcharged or, rather, appropriate measures had been taken to ensure that the atmosphere was surcharged. The judiciary too was caught in a cleft stick: it could not quite determine whether a grey area had been reached, and reached in such a way that the situation demanded the precedence of the Riot Act over the Charter of Rights, or whether it should still be the other way round.

The few days the heads of states congregating there pontificated vociferously over the nuances of freedom, including the freedom of global trade, the capital of Canada resembled the expanse of a concentration camp, breathing the very antithesis of freedom. Troops, paramilitary personnel and policemen guarded the streets and parks, reconnoitring helicopters buzzed over, public transport was guarded as much by driver-conductors as by plain clothes men. The latter infiltrated into the crowd of wandering students and other young people, frequently acting as agents provocateurs. They spied on the assembled groups and carried information back, post-haste, to the police command centre. Teargas-shells, water cannons and rubber bullets were the principal instruments deployed to enforce the reign of freedom and free trade. At the slightest provocation, limbs were broken, blood was spilled, and arrests took place indiscriminately. The arrested persons were carted away, put into overcrowded prison cells and supplied inedible food. The law of the land might be that those arrested are to be produced within 24 hours before a judge, who would not normally deny bail. This stipulation was unceremoniously infringed in several cases, confirming the arrival of a season when the accent was on lawlessness.

The episodes on May Day in countries wide apart would suggest that Quebec was only a dress rehearsal on the part of the capitalist system on how, and with what ferocity, to put down its perceived enemies. There was an eerie resemblance in the manner the security forces dealt with dissent in Labour Party-ruled Britain, social democratic Germany, gnome-dominated Switzerland and the darling land of the Conservatives, Australia: May Day or no May Day, trigger-happy international capitalism would brook no opposition to its holy resolve to keep in perpetual bondage the poorer people of this world and the conscientious ones who have the temerity to rise in support of the latter.

The significance of what is happening in the world nevertheless lies elsewhere. Forget for a moment Seattle and Quebec. Much more relevant is the ferment at work, either openly, or, in many places, subterraneously. It is at work amongst North American and West European youth much more than, strangely, amongst the young multitude in East Europe, Asia and Africa. The impact of global economic exploitation is unquestionably much the more severe in the Asian and African continents. The Russian youth too have been led up the garden path in the course of the past dozen years or thereabouts. Iron, however, has seemingly entered the soul of all young people, barring those resident in rampantly capitalist-dominated lands. Perhaps this conclusion has no hard factual basis and is an optical illusion. Is it still not odd that while the victims of applied free-market philosophy are overwhelmingly in the underdeveloped parts of the world, whatever resistance, token or otherwise, offered against it is taking place in streets and university campuses in North America and West Europe?

The World Trade Organisation may be poised to snuff out the life and living of their men and women, but the places which in the past were marked out as natural habitat for revolution and insurrection remain quiescent. Even in cities such as Calcutta, with a long tradition of emotional outburst at the drop of a hat, never mind the cause, the students continue to be, by and large, extraordinarily well-behaved and chary to apply their minds to the short- and long-term implications of the doings of the international financial institutions, the WTO, the transnational corporations and the domestic compradors. The working class in these countries is no less dormant. The bargaining power of the trade unions has slumped even as plants and factories have shut one after another and workers mercilessly ejected from their work places. Those occupying space in the lower echelons of the services sector are somewhat better equipped to combat the imminent threat to their livelihood; perhaps they have a reservoir of strength which enables them to try to thwart activities intended to turn into insignificance the resources they still have. They are a thinning minority. In quite a number of states in India, governments that are enamoured of revolutionary polemics are in situ. Similar state governments happen to exist in Brazil too. The behaviour pattern of these provincial administrations is strikingly different though. A Left-minded governor in the Southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul does not mind setting aside a part of his government’s limited funds to invite comrades from all over the world to assemble at Porto Alegro to join the people there in a tremendous show of united resistance to the machinations of the WTO. In contrast, state governments in India with similar ideological belief are displaying listlessness of a queer kind. Is it a lack of courage of conviction, is it inferiority complex, or is it that their supposedly revolutionary ardour is nothing much beyond oral eroticism? They have evidently other priorities. Some would go farther and attribute the sloth to a backward sloping supply curve of endeavour; the growing immiserisation of the people does not induce determined action, it instead creates the urge to explore a niche of passivism.

That apart, do we at all know what the young people in China are thinking or aspiring for at this particular moment? That country is currently enjoying the highest rate of growth in the world, and the highest rate of export growth as well. China’s youth, immaculately attired in western apparel, must be beneficiaries of both these developments. From this distance of non-communication, it is not possible to know whether socialism, any branch of it, is still a compulsory text in the Chinese educational system, or whether Marx-Engels-Leninism or Mao’s Ten Contributions are at all studied with awed reverence. Or take the plight of the Russian youth. In this the first decade of the 21st century, in case they are taken aside and told that only about two decades ago their nation was regarded as the beacon for the underdeveloped world, it was the second mightiest power in the world, causing sleeplessness to capitalists here, there, everywhere, while today they are a non-entity despite their fearsome nuclear capability, what would be their response? In both Russia and China, ideology, one suspects, has for the present been thrown out of the window as garbage. The great socialist thinkers in the 19th century, or in the first half of the 20th century, including Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin, Trotsky, Mao Ze Dong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, are perhaps judged to be contextually irrelevant in these two huge land masses. The young people there are being raised on what in the jargon is known as pragmatism; ideology is being denied space. And yet it is the base of ideology which ensured for Russia unprecedented economic and military advance; China is in the process of going through the same experience.

The irony of it, at the other end, western liberalism since Adam Smith has but a handful of towering figures it can boast of. David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stewart Mill et al have at most defined economics as the subject that searches for the greatest good of the greatest number; nothing earthshaking there. Max Weber is the poor man’s anti-Marx, John Maynard Keynes confessed that unrestricted competition does not solve the problems of capitalist crisis and it is necessary to have state intervention; which is to say, he, in effect, betrayed the cause of freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre really belongs to the other camp. All you are left with then is the species of John Rawls and Kenneth Arrow, some of whom prove with great mathematical elegance that they have not a clue as to where social welfare lies. Karl Popper and Milton Friedman are consolation prizes of a much lesser worth.

But maybe here is actually the answer to the riddle. The youth in the western world are left with empty ideological boxes and equally vacuous websites. They are sick of both, they are tired as much of information technology as of purposeless accumulation of wealth. They therefore read socialist tracts, conceivably they do not even read them, they arrive at the state they have arrived at almost instinctively, after mulling over in their minds the factors underlying global inequalities, pervasive in which is capitalism’s exploitative role.

Did not a sage once offer the prognostication: the road to world revolution will be routed through Calcutta and Shanghai? Should the two place names be substituted, for example, by Quebec and Frankfurt?