|
The
way society is run
Review by Surjit Hans
Profit over
People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Pages 175. Rs 175.
Powers and
Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order.
Pages 244. Rs 250.
Both by Noam
Chomsky. Madhyam Books, Delhi.
CHOMSKYhomsky
is an anarchist. "According to anarcho-syndicalist vision,
any structure of hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden
of justification, whether it involves personal relations or a
larger social order. If it cannot bear that burden — sometimes
it can — it is illegitimate and should be dismantled. When
honestly posed and squarely faced, that challenge can rarely be
sustained. Genuine libertarians have their work cut out for
them."
Chomsky
subscribes to "the humanistic conception of economic
activity". According to American philosopher Dewey, the
ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but of
free human beings associated with one another on terms of
equality. For Russell, the goal of education is to give a sense
of the value of things other than domination, to help create
wise citizens of a free community in which both liberty and
individual creativeness flourish, and working people will be
masters of their fate, not tools of production.
Keeping in mind
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chomsky writes:"One of
these systems has fortunately collapsed, but the other is on a
march backwards to what could be a very ugly future."
In the 19th
century the new spirit of industrialisation was repugnant to an
astonishingly large section of the American people. The primary
reason was the decline of the industrial worker as a person, the
psychological change, the loss of dignity and independence,
democratic rights and freedoms,... imposed by state and private
power, by violence when necessary.
The
neo-liberals are stubbornly silent about a number of things.
Adam Smith, the father of liberalism, who wrote "the man
whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no
reason to exert his understanding and generally becomes as
stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to
be. In every improved and civilised society this is the state
into which the labouring poor fall unless the government takes
pains to prevent it."
In fairness it
must be conceded that neoliberalism harks back to Malthus and
Ricardo who demonstrated to the people with their new science
(economics) that they have no rights.
Contrary to
what they foolishly believe, they have a free choice: the labour
market, the work house prison, death, or go somewhere else made
possible by the extermination of indigenous populations not
exactly by market principles. Today the last option has been
ruled out.
Bakunin
predicted that the new class of intellectuals would follow one
of the two parallel paths.They might seek to lead popular
struggles to take state power into their own hands, becoming a
"Red bureaucracy" or offer themselves as the bought
priesthood of really existing capitalism, serving as managers or
apologists.
The ghost of
Chartist times is around to vex the masters of globalisation —
"we can deny them the right to live, but they can deny us
the right to rule."
Chomsky tears
the veil of "really existing democracy" when all it is
concerned with is "manufacture of consent". Hume was
intrigued by "the easiness with which the many are governed
by the few, the implicit submission with which men resign their
fate" to rulers. He found this surprising because
"force is always on the side of the governed".
That people
must submit is taken for granted pretty much across the
spectrum. In a democracy, the governed have a right to consent.
The populace may be "spectators" not
"participants". This is the political arena. The
general population must be excluded entirely from the economic
arena.
A famous
philosopher argued that the principle of consent is not violated
when the rulers impose plans that are rejected by the public, if
the masses later consent to what they have done in their name.
This is the principle of "consent without consent".
Later the principle was extended to the conquered countries.
The enormous
public relations industry, from its origins early in this
country, has been dedicated to the "control of the public
mind". The fact that it has roots and major centres in the
country that are "most free" is exactly what we should
expect.
Harold Lasswell,
one of the founders of modern political science, warned that the
intelligent few must recognise "the ignorance and stupidity
of the masses", and not succumb to "democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own
interests".
The US
Constitution was intrinsically designed to check the democratic
tendencies of the period, delivering power to the "better
sort" of people. Madison, one its architects and the fourth
President of America, declared that the primary responsibility
of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority".
An important
manual of the public relations industry opens by observing that
"the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element of a democratic society". The intelligent
minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and
systematically. Therefore, "our society has consented to
permit free competition to be organised by leadership and
propaganda", another case of "consent without
consent". Engineering consent is the very essence of the
democratic process.
The ruling
America talks of "the crisis of democracy" not when
more than 50 per cent of the electorate does not bother to cast
their votes but when normally passive and apathetic populations
become organised and seek to enter the political arena to pursue
their interests and demands, threatening stability and order
anywhere in the world.
Over 80 per
cent of Americans think that the government is run for the
benefit of the few; 80 per cent that the system is inherently
unfair; 95 per cent that corporations should sometimes sacrifice
some profit for the sake of workers and communities. Public
attitudes remain stubbornly social democratic in important
respects, yet the implementation of the business agenda over the
objections of the general public is with the consent of the
governed, a form of "consent without consent".
All this is
very natural in a society that is to an unusual degree
business-run with huge expenditure on marketing; $1 trillion a
year, one-sixth of the gross domestic product, much of it tax
deductible, so that people pay for the privilege of being
subjected to manipulation of their attitudes and their behaviour.
The "end of history" has been reached in a kind of
utopia of the masters.
The political
spectrum in the USA, always very narrow, has been reduced to
near invisibility. The 1996 campaign for the election of
President was one of "historic dullness". When more
than 80 per cent of the population feel that the democratic
system is a sham the "consent of the governed" is
going to be very shallow.
The media
arranged the devil’s litany of "consent without
consent". Media leaders have surely known all along about
the proposed Multilateral Investment Agreement and its broad
implications, as have public intellectuals and standard experts.
The business world was both aware and actively involved. But in
a most impressive show of self-discipline, with exceptions that
amount to a statistical error, the free press has succeeded in
keeping those who rely on it in the dark, no simple task in a
complicated world.
The public
hardly matters when the Congress does not. "How has this
agreement been under negotiation since May, 1995, without any
Congress consultation or oversight, especially given the
USCongress’s exclusive constitutional authority to regulate
international commerce?"
As guns fell
silent in the Gulf War, Bush returned to the earlier practice of
lending support to Saddam Hussein as he crushed the Shaite and
Kurdish uprisings under the eyes of the victorious allied
forces. The reason? Kurdish autonomy in Iraq would be a problem
for Turkey in its brutal repression of its own Kurdish
population. Israel feared that Kurdish autonomy might
"create a territorial, military, contiguity between Teheran
and Damascus", a potential danger for Israel. These facts
are unwelcome, hence consigned to their usual place in favour of
an audacious version. In the corridors of power, the basic ideas
are understood well enough, though it is not considered good
form to speak too frankly. These again are things "it
wouldn’t do" to say. Therefore, the whole story is rated
"X" — out of history.
The people in
the slums of Cairo or the villages of Lebanon and others like
them, have neither wealth nor power, hence no rights by simple
logic. Their concerns, too, are "incidental", not an
end.
As for
Palestinians, they not only lack rights but, worse, are a
nuisance. Their unhappy fate has been an irritant, with
disruptive effect on Arab popular opinion. Therefore, they have
negative rights; a fact that explains a lot: the meltdown of the
Osho accord. Israeli expansion at the expense of Palestinians is
traditional USpolicy, reaching new levels under Clinton. The
condition of Palestinians"would be the closest thing in our
time to slavery".
Of course,
Israel could never have achieved such goals on its own, and
probably would never have dared to pursue them. It could do so
only by becoming a client of the world ruler.
We observe
clearly the principles of the world order: world affairs are
governed by the rule of force, while intellectuals are counted
upon to disguise realities to serve the needs of power.
Indonesia
occupied East Timor in 1975. International human rights monitors
estimate the death toll at more than a quarter of the population
and half the remnants of the population driven by 1979 into
closed camps where it suffered famine conditions. Washington
furnished the decisive military and diplomatic support for the
worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust.
Prior to the
Indonesian invasion, coverage of East Timor was quite high in
the press because the fate of the Portuguese empire was causing
concern. Media coverage reached flat zero in 1978 (as it did in
Canada) when the Indonesian assault reached its peak. President
Carter — of human rights fame — sent new deliveries of arms
to expedite the slaughter.
In 1979
Australia gave de jure recognition to the Indonesian occupations
of East Tumor. The treaty with Indonesia to rob East Tumor’s
oil was signed in 1989.
In the year
2000 Australia and Clinton are the champions of the Timorese and
the press is taking suitable interest.
"By 1792
Madison warned that the rising capitalist developmental state
was substituting the motive of private interest in place of
public duty, leading to a real domination of the few under an
apparent liberty of the many. He deplored the daring depravity
of the times as private powers become the praetorian band of the
government — at once its tools and its tyrant, bribed by its
largesses, and overawing it by its clamours and
combinations." The 18th century American experience is
inscribed in blood on the globe.
India can certainly do with its
own Chomsky along with our Nayyars and Sachars. It is a matter
of joy that new publishing houses like Madhyam Books are joining
the business to help radical politics.
|
|
Women’s
tales
by a woman, men
can read too
Review by
Deepika Gurdev
By the
Sabarmati — Stories by Esther David. Pages 188. Rs 200.
Rediscovering
Dharavi — Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum by Kalpana
Sharma. Pages 209. Rs 200.
Both by
Penguin Books, New Delhi.
WHEN
I think of Gujarat I think of a lot of things: colour,
humility, safety... above all these, I think of women. Strong
women who have emerged in their own right from Bhavnagar to
Bhuj, from Ahmedabad to Surat, from Rajkot to Bhavnagar.
Whether it is established women like Mrinalini or Malika
Sarabhai, Kumudini or Meera Lakhiya, Ela or Sheela Bhatt or
the more ordinary mortals like Lakshmiben, one of the women
carriers of the coolie tradition at the Bhavnagar railway
station, the images that spring to mind are those of women —
strong, independent and always on the go.
Having
written about them during my five-year stint as a journalist
based in Gujarat, I am inevitably drawn to Esther David’s
second book "By the Sabarmati", a collection of 22
stories from the lives of women which all of us would have
known in or out of Gujarat. These are young women and old,
struggling against disappointment, failed love and death of
their loved ones.
If you are
looking for whole and well-rounded stories, you are bound to
be disappointed for Esther with her clever pen and equally
adept brush strokes sketches out the sharp, jagged, tip of the
iceberg variety kind of stories which challenge you and probe
you to ask questions. Most of the stories are disturbing just
like life itself, but they are a remarkable testament to
heroic and moving endeavours of women to rise above the
ordinary.
Most of the
dramatis personae in the book like Sunil’s mother in
"Homecoming", Manjari in "A bed of roses"
or Ruchi in "Nobody will know in Ahmedabad" or Maya
Desai in "Maya Desai" leave a lot of lingering
questions in the reader’s mind. Why did Sunil’s mother
have to put herself to the grind and continue playing the
forgiving mother, why didn’t Manjari walk out of a
non-existent marriage earlier, why did Ruchi bother about her
parents when they had shown very little love for her in the
first place and Maya Desai, oh, heartbreakingly painful
"Maya Desai", why didn’t she just get going rather
than wait for the end?
But then
posing questions that are meaningful to the writer and the
reader is definitely more challenging than just offering the
expected answers. Esther’s writing has its roots in real
life, inevitably all the stories are imbued with a deep sense
of realism. Some stories begin with an idea, some with an
image but the message in each one of them is clear: "That
when women hold hands, they experience strength, a feeling of
well-being and togetherness which help them fight their
battles. I have, therefore, placed myself in the circle of
their experience, which I have tried to understand in the
first person, like a first story, my story — your
story."
While images
of Gujarat reverberate in each story, the message in each of
the stories is universal. Yes, there are the pols, the
Guptanagar slums but the victories and defeats of the women in
the pols speak louder than the local context in which
they are represented.
There are
strong metaphors, chilling endings but each of the stories
keeps you asking for more. The one that has stayed in my mind
is the very first story "Father" which is the story
of Maghi’s marriage to Mulji. Her marriage moves her to a
much warmer and more liveable place than the open ground next
to Anjali cinema. That night as she lies in marital bliss,
happens to be the coldest night of the year in Ahmedabad.
"Many people died that night," and Maghi’s father
Deva was one of them.
As I
mentioned earlier, this is not a book with expected or
expectable endings. So if you are in a mood for more tales of
the unexpected, "By The Sabarmati", is well worth
it.
«««
WHAT
attracted me to this book was the enticing smile of the lovely
little girl who appears disarmingly on the cover and seems to
say: "Read this book to know more about people like me,
the people of Dharavi."
The blurb
promised this and more. "Written with rare sensitivity
and empathy, ‘Rediscovering Dharavi’ is a riveting account
of the triumph of the human spirit over poverty and
want." It was to tell the spellbinding stories of Haji
Shamsuddin, Ramjibhai Patel, Khatija and Amina.
Well, it does
tell their stories but not in the heartwarming manner that has
been promised in the blurb and not in the manner it would have
been expected from a book that wants to dispel a lot of myths
and "cold statistics" about Asia’s largest slum,
Dharavi. Just when Ramjibhai’s stories appears to be warming
up and you want to find out more about his life, the
journalistic streak in Sharma takes over the story teller’s
and you get a factual drone about what it takes for the
survival of the fittest in an explosive, yet changing
landscape.
There is no
denying the fact that this is a professionally written and
well-researched book but the fact that there is no excess of
any kind makes it the kind of book that will not make you sit
up all night to find out what truly makes Dharavi.
It would have
been better if the author or the editors of the book had
segregated the book into parts, one that tells you about the
history, the composition and all the other clinical facts
about Dharavi. The other that unravels the story of all the
feisty people who live there. Then "Allah ka gaon",
"Turning scrap into gold", and "A house for
Khatija" would have made more sense and the stories of
the people would have definitely lingered in the reader’s
mind.
Right now, unfortunately,
this book just happens to be neither here nor there.
|
|
Made
in Paris: brand new ideas
Review by Shelley Walia
The Word
From Paris: Essay on Modern French Thinkers and Writers by John
Sturrock. Verso, London. Pages 206. £ 18.
THOUGH
Francophobes represent the temperamental tension between the
British and the French, it cannot be denied that it is exactly
this love-hate relationship that has been the mainspring behind
the cross-fertilisation of a significant body of intellectual
discourse that has occupied the academic world on both sides of
the English Channel and the Atlantic.
For young
scholars and radical philosophers of last century, for
serious-minded semiologists wanting to deconstruct areas as
incongruous as Keats and Bob Dylan, Batman comics and
Shakespeare, detective fiction and the Latin American novel, and
for fans of Proust, the father of the formal novel, France has
remained the source of stimulation and radical ideas so
passionately brought to the shores of the Anglo-Saxon world.
These Francophiles have brought the word of an extraordinary
sequence of intellectual and artistic developments taking place
in Paris, the centre of avant garde movements and
uninhibited artistic innovations.
John Sturrock
is one such Francophile who has occupied a special place in
Anglo-French intellectual interchange. He represents the radical
philosophers of the 1960s searching out intellectual
enlightenment in Left Bank cafes and book shops. He has written
for many years about French literature and thought and here
represents a wonderfully accessible account of the various
movements which have dominated the French intellectual scene —
existentialism, the nouveau roman, structuralism, the OuLipo.
He illustrates
how their proponents inspire and excite. How Jean-Paul Sartre,
originally an author of little known fiction, fused politics and
philosophy to become one of the best-known intellectuals of the
century; how Jacques Lacan’s flamboyantly expressed ideas made
him a cult figure among professors of literature while offending
many of his fellow psychoanalysts; and how Boris Vian, who
trained as an engineer, celebrated in his writing much of what
was enjoyable to the French about American jazz music, a
mysterious criminal underworld, an irrevocable youthfulness.
Indeed,
"The Word From Paris" is a remarkable portrait of
French metropolitan culture, raising a number of central issues
of politics of literature and culture.
Adopting a
"mid-channel" stance, Sturrock has, with elegance and
utmost empathy, presented Parisian metropolitan culture, all the
time acting as a mediator who tries to bridge two opposing
cultures in a love-hate relationship. Being a literary
journalist, his style is a blend of the journalistic and the
academic, the literary and the theoretical, a kind of an
unexpected alliance between Francophile and the Francophobe
which tempers his enthusiasm with critical detachment.
He, therefore,
comes across as a modest, generous man totally wrapped up in his
writing that indicates his transparent devotion and the English
brand of the human that underlies his collection of essays,
especially the one on novelist Raymond Queneau, a contemporary
of Sartre, who answered the same question which Sartre had
asked: "What is literature?" Whereas Sartre answered
by declaring the literature is "in a word ... in its
essence, the subjectivity of a society in a state of permanent
revolution", Queneau said in three lines of fauxnaif verse
that it is, "A simple game/that I made up/in the
dark."
The style of
these lines is hardly Sartrian, yet the implicit philosophy is.
His philosophy is existentialism with a human face and like
Sartre, he is aware that we must all of us live, metaphysically
speaking, in the "dark" as "transients of scant
significance in a cosmos seeming to possess a degree of rhyme
but absolutely no reason".
But from here
they part company: whereas Sartre contrives to "raise our
dereliction into a perverse source of grandeur on the Romantic
assumption that we deserve better of the universe in which we
find ourselves adrift", Queneau remains wryly
down-to-earth, unwilling to see either his humble self or any of
those around him in the exalted guise of an existential hero.
For Queneau
there were no utopian answers. He modestly kept a sense of
proportion about the importance of a writer in the scheme of
things, but immodestly showed his appetite for books reading
"thirty three books in thirty one days". In his
journals published in 1996, 200 pages were taken up by the list
of books he had read. Probably for this reason he was made the
presiding editor of Encyclopedie de la Pleiade.
Sturrock’s
first essay "Intellectuals since 1945" brings out the
fusion of politics and philosophy, an event that marked the
emergence of intellectuals as a political force and first seen
in Emile Zola’s "J’Accuse" which is a defence of
Alfred Dreyfus. This commitment which was later advanced by
Sartre shows the notion of the public intellectual intervention
constituted with exacting intellectual response and heartfelt
social demands. As Sartre would argue, "the intellectual is
someone who brings the competence-cum-notoriety earned in a
specific context to bear on a wider public issue".
Such thinkers,
especially from the Left, actively participate in the whole
enterprise of historical production of genuine social change
"directing the thoughts of their fellow citizens".
This legacy of the "intellocrats" that had a
far-reaching impact on the cultural terrain of post-war France
is seen in essays on Barbusse, Proust, Celine and Roussel but
with an underlying regret that the breed of intellectuals like
Sartre and Andre Malraux is now extinct.
Interestingly
the material bankruptcy of France during the war was compensated
by the spurt of creative energy seen in the works of Pablo
Picasso, Sartre, Albert Camus, Claude Levi-Strauss and Georges
Braque. Paris itself became the cultural capital of the world
with a boldness that left its artists free to express in ways
that were unconscious and with no reflex to look over your
shoulder in a self conscious complex that goes with any new
movement or creation.
The two essays
on Sartre and Camus indicate the notions of freedom and
authenticity so dear to the people of the occupied France. The
two finally went on their own individual trajectories, Sartre
getting aligned with the French Communist Party, utterly
Stalinist in complexion and ideology, and Camus bravely standing
alone, a dissident voice in a Communist-dominated Paris.
Moving from
these philosopher-giants to "theorocrats" like Theodor
Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan and Paul de Man, Sturrock
endeavours to simplify these rather opaque writers, thus giving
a wider exposure to them as well as making them accessible and
interesting to the readers of the Parisian theory.
In this brief
review article I shall not go into explaining the extensive
influence of the French school on the Anglo-Saxon world as well
as the Third World because of the constraints of space, but one
essay that is remarkable for revealing certain facts about Louis
Althusser’s life I cannot help but mention. His murdering his
wife and its links with his intellectual pursuits is a rather
interesting subject. Althusser’s "L’Avenir dure
longtemps" (The future lasts forever) is an adroit attempt
at the manipulative product of a theoretical intelligence
"turned narcistically on itself, and a pre-emptive exercise
in the discourse on, not of, madness."
It is rather a
grievance against medical and legal rules in France that gag an
accused from speaking out. The most innovative Marxist thinker
of the post-war period becomes the star of his own story,
compelling the wife he killed also to serve his rhetorical and
apologetic ends, an exculpation of himself.
The strangling
of his wife is merely an "irruption", a term that in
his writings stands for "disaffiliation" of particular
structures — the capitalist mode of production, the Freudian
unconscious — that we are not to believe are simply derivative
from the structures which preceded them. His bourgeois family,
on the other hand, becomes for him the "ideological state
apparatus", an exploitative and violent institution of
insidious dominance. The unmasking of his parents becomes the
domestic version of the larger theory of history and ideology.
In another
essay on the dissident Nietzchian intelligence of Faucault,
Sturrock skilfully demonstrates the connection between Foucault’s
free and audacious life with the published oeuvre, thus making
his life into an aesthetically satisfying whole. But in spite of
this, there are no easy connections especially when Faucault,
like Roland Barthes, offer a structuralist view, whereby authors
are responsible for the disposition of their discourse and of
the various meanings it contains, but are neither the
originators nor the owners of those meanings. The so-called
death of the author thus becomes problematical.
With Jaques
Derrida and Paul de Man, the prophets of deconstruction with a
strong reaction against the "metaphysics of presence",
become a new idiom, a literary and critical vocabulary that was
to completely set the Anglo-Saxon world into a turmoil unheard
of before. But it cannot be denied that the difficulty of
demystifying and simplifying these philosophers remained
somewhat of a dream.
Compared to the
first section, the second section is less heavy reading and
begins with a wonderful account of Proust, the prodigious letter
writer with a Tartuffian fervour for friendship though deeply
sceptical about it. His letters are mannerly and smack of an
urban tactician of the drawing room, not the "serpentine
and malicious deviant". For him the social and the creative
self can never come together; the person you dined and talked
with in the cafe was not the same person who went home and wrote
his masterpiece. There is a surface self that operates in
company and the deep one that writes and creates when he is
alone.
No wonder,
after Proust the possibility of writing a Balzacian novel
completely disappeared, as is argued by Nathalie Sarraute whose
first book, "Tropismes" (1939) marked the start of the
nouveau roman. Nothing really happens in her novels
except "the troubling things that are felt but do not get
spoken". Perhaps her plays bring out her subtle
intelligence and "the power-play that underlies human
relationships".
The trouble
with these writers along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, the high
priest of the nouveau roman, and Claude Simon is that
they remain as opaque as the theorists. The only accessible
books by Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet are their autobiographies
"Enfance" and "Le Miroir qui Revient". On
the other hand, the only really appealing and accessible
novelists are Queneau or Perc with their light humour at once
anarchic and concealing the tragic.
In the context
of the theory wars that rage across the English Channel and the
Atlantic, and in which the rabid nativists have now pitched
their tent, vehemently castigating the teaching and
"injecting" of French theory and jargon into the
so-called "innocent" minds of the students, all the
time forgetting that indigenous poetics can equal the West in a
bout of critical jargon, this book is an objective account of
French theory and culture as well as a critique of the
supposedly invincible nature of critical paradigms originating
in the West.
The present is
the scene of innumerable theories and discourses jostling and
confronting one another. The future for theory lies in taking a
stand against the unidirectional flow of discursive power that
tends to silence the other by damaging the variant modes of
social formation, dismantling economic systems, and causing
material destruction.
These questions are not
altogether new, but culture here is taken as the locus of
influence, a site for intervention, dislocation and struggle;
and theory, not as a metahistorical formation, but a significant
metaphor for subtle relationships between power and knowledge,
and between culture and control.
|
|
The
Diana industry grinds on
Review by Peter Conrad
Shadows of a
Princess: Diana, Princess of Wales 1987-1996 by P.D. Jephson.
Harper Collins, London.
YOU
already know the story of the princess and the pea. This book is
the story of the princess and the penile substitute. Or rather
— for fear I might have made you want to read it — one
paragraph tells that short, sadly pointless story. The rest is
about the princess and a pea-brained employee who fawned on her,
forgave her trespasses, cried for her and now seeks to profit
from defaming her.
Back, however,
to the dildo. Diana, Jephson breathlessly confides, returned
from Paris in 1992 sporting a souvenir — "a large, pink,
battery-powered vibrator". By now she knew she’d never
get her hands on the orb or sceptre: this plastic knob would
have to do. It had "the aim", Jephson notes with
courtly tact, "of raising royal morale at critical
moments". But he denies that it was actually aimed at the
critical royal part, and insists it was "never used for its
designed purpose". Eventually Dodi assumed the role of
royal morale-booster, which made the cheeky pink chap redundant.
Meanwhile, it
is curious that Diana should have felt she needed this bulbous,
buzzing personal attendant. After all, she already had Jephson,
who was her private secretary during the decade covered by his
book, and he saw himself as a dildo in a pin-stripe suit. When
he took the job, a courtier, seasoned in sycophancy, warned him:
"To these people you’re just a toy. They’ll wind you up
and watch you whiz all over the place, then they’ll throw you
away and get another one."
Jephson prided
himself for a while on being Diana’s "current favourite
toy", and even aspired to function as a marital aid —
rather than a bureaucratic aide — for the estranged Waleses. A
few days after Diana acquired the dildo, Jephson smarmed into
Charles’s office to remind him: "I joined this household
to serve both Your Royal Highnesses."
But Charles had
mentally metamorphosed himself into a snuggly sanitary pad, and
Jephson’s ministrations could hardly be counted on since his
batteries were starting to go flat. He resigned in 1996,
petulant about Diana’s secret Panorama interview. That, at
least, is how he tells it.
In fact, Diana
executed him electronically by sending him a malevolent
anonymous message on his pager. Jephson could no longer claim to
be her best-beloved toy, her faithful and indefatigable
stand-by. She had reduced him to the size of the transistorised
gadget which stirred to life in his trouser pocket. Life, alas,
would never be quite so vibrant again.
Jephson piously
professes to regard Diana as "a global force for
good", though his account of her kills the poor woman all
over again. The charities she adopted, he makes clear, were
excuses for foreign junkets; she used public money to subsidise
her career as an "independent celebrity". Her temper
was vile, her humour crude, and her laugh asinine. Jephson,
impeccably proper, winces when her braying reaches "the
delicate ears of outsiders such as Queen’s flight crews".
Despite her
global frolics, Diana had not the foggiest idea about the
destinations to which her private planes — jet-propelled
vibrators, if you come to think of it — were headed. At the
White House just before the Gulf War, George Bush asked her
about the invasion of Kuwait. The opinion she vouchsafed was a
meditative "um". Jephson rejoices in her
embarrassment, but reserves his haughtiest outrage for a more
clandestine vice, her addiction to chocolate. "I frequently
watched her eat a whole bar of fruit-and-nut between
engagements," he reveals, and pauses to listen to us gasp.
He is slavishly
discreet, by contrast, about the elder Windsors, who are alive
and liable to sue. Reneging on his contract to supply
title-tattle, he opaquely paraphrases their dialogue. Charles,
infuriated by Diana’s refusal to spend a weekend at
Sandringham, expressed his annoyance — Jephson informs us —
"in blunt and peremptory tones". We are left to
imagine the four-letter words the heir to the throne actually
used. The evasion is characteristic of this cowardly book, too
hyprocritically high-minded to get down to its job of
scandal-mongering.
Though he
disdains his mistress, Jephson has a lofty opinion of himself.
Describing how he supported Diana against her detractors at St
James’s Palace, he positively glows as the memory of his
chivalry: "If all this sounds rather overprincipled, then
it probably was." He admires the Queen’s stoic immunity
to emotion, and boasts of sharing it: between them, they uphold
"so many of the great British strengths which had withstood
all the tests that Empire and war could bring".
He is also
deeply, nauseatingly religious. When Diana jabs him with that
message on his pager, he "told nobody of my agonised
thoughts except God. He had heard most of it before". Now,
thanks to Jephson’s book, God generously shares this
privileged information with everyone who reads a tabloid.
Unplugged by
the princess, Jephson apparently "decided to take up
writing". He had served his apprenticeship ghosting
thank-you notes for Diana, so he is proficient at ornately
arranging cliches. She and Charles exchanging insults remind him
of pots and kettles. She wants to have her cake and eat it,
while sipping from a poisoned chalice.
Jephson adds a
pinch of salt when she gossips about her adulterous in-laws. For
a while, she rides the crest of a wave, though a straw finally
breaks the camel’s back.
Sometimes,
Jephson makes his catchphrases copulate. Thus the last meeting
between the separate staffs of the Waleses is "the merest
fig leaf, the fag end of a process". Just try to picture
that: a fag posing as a fig.
The vibrator
rears its pert head on page 267. Otherwise, there is no reason
at all to read this empty, imperceptive and crassly
opportunistic book.
Courtesy: The Observer, London
|
|
Assam:
a Hindu militant stir
Review by Padam Ahlawat
The Periphery
Strikes Back — Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and
Nagaland by Udayon Misra. Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
Shimla. Pages 276. Rs 400.
UDAYON
MISRA has had long association with the region called the
North-East. Having been brought up and taught at the Dibrugarh
University, he is no stranger to the social and political
reality in the region.
Out of the
seven states, the writer, it seems has chosen Assam and
Nagaland after careful cerebration. If Nagaland was reluctant
to join the Indian Union prior to independence, Assam had a
history of Congress-led freedom fighters who played a role in
consonance with the national struggle. The insurgency in Assam
is a later development, the result of legal and illegal
migration of Bengali Hindus and Bangladeshi Muslims. This gave
rise to the Assamese fear of being swamped by Bengali culture.
If Nagaland
was populated by tribals professing the Christian faith, Assam
was populated by an overwhelming majority of Hindus and a
large minority of Muslims.
Those who
held the view that insurgency in the entire North-East was
being fomented by Christianity were in for a rude shock when
insurgency spread to Assam, a land of Hindu majority.
India being a
young nation-state is very apprehensive of insurgency in any
part of the country. It has led us to believe that conceding
to any demands would be a beginning of the end of the
nation-state. Insurgency in the North-East and Jammu and
Kashmir has undermined our conviction in Indian nationalism.
The conviction is that barring these two regions, nationalism
has very deep roots and all regions are willing constituents
of the nation. The greatest threat to Indian nationalism or
the nation-state arises because of the inability to resolve
regional issues. It is very essential that these are sorted
out to the satisfaction of the people. Prolonging the
insurgency would not only sap our strength but also sap the
faith in Indian nationalism. Separatism can spread to new
areas not because a solution was found in the North-East and
J&K, but because the problem was allowed to linger on.
Udayon Misra
takes a look at the insurgency in Nagaland and Assam. Very
little is known about the early history of the states of
Nagaland, Arunchal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur and
Meghalaya. Among these Meghalaya comprising Khasi and Jaintia
hills had a developed agriculture and trade. The tribes spoke
Tibeto-Burmese group of languages which had no script. The
Khasis speak a language belonging to the Austro-Asiatic group,
while the Jaintias of Meghalaya are the only ones to be
Aryanised. These tribals followed their own rituals and
traditions and belonged to the Tibeto-Burmese group.
The Naga
tribes had lived in isolation for centuries until they came in
contact with the Ahom kings in the 13th century. The Ahoms
came into conflict with the Naga tribes in the 14th and 15th
centuries but they never extended their rule to the Naga
hills.
The British
acquired Assam and its dependencies from King Ava of Burma by
the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826. British rule defused tribal
wars, economy was partially monetised and traders and
businessmen emerged. The greatest impact was in the field of
education and spread of Christianity.
As the
freedom struggle gained ground in the rest of the country, the
Nagas submitted a demand to the Simon Commission in 1929 to
exclude the Nagas from the proposed constitutional changes and
be directly administered by the British. Consequently, the
Naga Hills District Council was established in 1945 and this
gave rise to the Naga National Council and the consolidation
of the Naga tribes.
Being a very
small minority, the Nagas were apprehensive of coming under
Indian rule fearing the new rulers would erode their cultural
identity. The Naga Council talked of regional autonomy to
protect its rights. However, a section of the Naga Council
also demanded an independent Naga homeland. Extremists gained
an upper hand and Phizo declared independence of Nagaland on
August 15, 1947.
Insurgency by
one group or the other has been endemic in Nagaland ever
since. It has been fuelled by the village regrouping scheme.
The formation of a separate state of Nagaland with the Union
pumping in money has not placated the Nagas to give up
insurgency or the demand for independence. The NSCN has been
spearheading the Naga struggle, trying to unite different
tribes to demand a greater Nagaland. This demand is looked
upon with suspicion by other North-Eastern states. At present
a precarious ceasefire exists in Nagaland, which could erupt
into insurgency if talks do not make headway.
Assam, or the
Brahmaputra valley, was open to influence from the east and
west. From the east came the Mongoloid people and their tribal
ways. From the west came Hindu religion and language
(Assamese). They also brought in iron, cattle, wet rice and
the plough. The 13th (1228) century saw the coming of the
Ahoms, a northern Tai or Shan tribe of Burma. By the 16th
century the tribals of Assam, Bodos Kacharis and the Ahoms had
embraced Hinduism.
The last
decade of the 18th century saw the disintegration of Ahom
rule. The Moamaria revolt began in 1769 and continued
intermittently till 1805. The civil war upset the
administration and social structure. The Darrang Raja too
revolted. The Ahom rule was saved when the British responded
to the call for help in 1792. On an appeal for help from the
Ahom ruler, the Burmese invaded the province in 1817 and again
in 1819. But they refused to go back and established their
rule.
The British
saw Burmese rule in Assam as a threat to theirs. They defeated
the Burmese in 1825 and secured Assam by the Treaty of Yandabo
in 1826. Once the Khasis were subjugated in 1832 the British
annexed Cachhar, Jaintia, Lushai hills, Gari hills and the
Naga hills.
The forested
Assam hills were an invitation to the burgeoning Bengali
Muslims who were encouraged to migrate by immigrant leaders
like Maulana Bhasani and later by the Muslim government of
Bengal. C.S. Mullan in the 1931 census highlighted the threat
posed by the immigrant Muslim Bengalis during the two
preceding decades to the culture and identity of the Assemese
people. The Assamese people had backed the Congress during the
freedom struggle, hoping that their interest was safer with
India.
After
independence a Hindu migration followed, drowning all hope for
the Assamese. Assam Congress leaders were coerced by the
central leadership to accept refugees. Migration from East
Pakistan continued and the number of Bengali Hindu refugees
increased from about three lakhs in 1951 to over six lakhs by
1961. But, over the next decade Muslims from Bangladesh
continued to trickle in. In 1971, some ten million refugees
poured into Assam, of which one million stayed back.
Added to the
Assamese woes was its sense of being economically exploited of
its coal, oil, tea and wood reserves. Since the tea industry
had its head offices in Calcutta, Assam received very little
by way of sales tax. The state received very little royalty
for oil, while forests were cut down and the beneficiaries
were non-Assamese businessmen and transporters. By then Assam
had been restricted to the Barak and Brahmaputra vallies.
Exhausted and defeated, the old leaders yielded to the
students of Assam, who led the statewide agitation in 1974.
This gave way to the Assam movement of 1979-85, demanding all
illegal immigrants be identified and sent back. The stage was
gradually being prepared for the emergence of an extremist
group that would eventually demand a separate sovereign Assam.
The United Liberation Front
of Assam (ULFA) grew in strength, creating a popular base by
targeting bootleggers, profiteers and anti-socials. By 1985,
insurgents had arrived in Assam and they took advantage of
their links with the All Assam Students Union leaders, now the
Asom Gana Parishad, to spread its influence. Despite the AGP
government again coming to power in 1996, the immigrant issue
remains unresolved and the identification of illegal
immigrants remains equally controversial.
|
|
Write
view
Sardar Patel and his today’s clone
Review by Randeep Wadehra
Titans of
Indian Politics by A.B. Kohli. Reliance Publishing House,New
Delhi. Pages x+221. Rs 295.
IT
was not such a long time ago that Indian politics was
synonymous with the Indian National Congress. Like a colossus,
this party overshadowed all others in the pre-partition
subcontinent and the post-partition India. Today it is a pale
shadow of its vibrant self. Often an organisation is more than
the sum total of its members, emphasising the adage that no
individual is greater than the party. Yet such were the
stalwarts who bestrode its political firmament that the party
reached dizzy heights in public esteem, giving the impression
of being invincible for ever.
The
Manchester Guardian once wrote about Vallabhbhai Patel,
"Without Patel, Gandhi’s idea would have had less
practical influence and Nehru’s idealism less scope. Patel
was not only the organiser of the fight for freedom but also
the architect of the new state when the flight was over. The
same man is seldom successful as a rebel and a statesman.
Sardar Patel was an exception."
Born in a
lower middle class agricultural family, he was proud of the
fact that his father had participated in the sepoy mutiny
against the British and was captured by Malharrao Holkar.
Strong willed, he bore personal calamities with fortitude.
A brilliant
lawyer, he secured the first position in the bar-at-law
examination. With such credentials, it goes without saying
that Patel was a man of action, and complemented the
Gandhi-Nehru duo by giving practical shape to their vision of
a free and strong India.
Beginning his
political career with the Kheda satyagraha, Sardar Patel went
on to earn accolades for his unique traits during the Borsad
and the Bardoli satyagrahas of 1923 and 1928 respectively. In
fact he earned the sobriquet "sardar" after the
Bardoli agitation. This iron man of India remained with Gandhi
through thick and thin, even when the Mahatma ignored his
claims to be the first Prime Minister of India.
It is also
well known how he hammered the disparate princely states into
one solid Republic of India through sheer will power. If today
India is able to withstand the various fissiparous forces, the
credit should go largely to Patel’s foresight. He was truly
the titan of Indian politics. If only he had lived longer!
Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan was another titan. He rose from the ashes of
penury to become President of India and the most respected
Indian philosopher-statesman the world over. Even today he is
a role model for many idealist youth. Jawaharlal Nehru,
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi
are the other leaders who left an indelible mark on India’s
political scene.
However,
Kohli’s enthusiasm for the Congress seems to have got the
better of him. Otherwise how does one explain the presence of
Desai, V.V. Giri, Sanjiva Reddy et al in his list of
titans? Though all these were men of substance and had
qualities of head and heart that marked them out as leaders of
men, titans they certainly were not.
Here is
something to chew: were there no political giants among other
parties? How could we forget MA Jinnah, for instance?
«««
Milestone 50:
Stories from India’s Freedom Struggle by RK Murthi. Vikas
Publishing, New Delhi. Pages 126. Rs 135.
"Quit
India" in English. "Bharat chodo" in Hindi,
"Vellaiyane veliyeru" in Tamil and their equivalent
slogans in other Indian languages merged into a freedom song
that sent shivers down the spine of the colonialists.
Thanks to the
inspirational role played by several freedom fighters, the
desire for an independent India began to gather strength with
the passage of time. People from all walks of life started to
reclaim their self-respect. Consequently, defiance started
proliferating even in day-to-day interaction with the colonial
rulers and their minions. This book is a collection of stories
that illustrate how a spirit of independence came to grip the
people of the British-ruled India.
Take the very
first story that narrates how when Sir Ashutosh Mookherjee was
travelling by train in a first class compartment his British
co-passenger threw Ashutosh’s chappals out of the train’s
window. In return Ashutosh threw his tormentor’s coat and
tie out to "fetch his chappals". Tit for the tat
indeed!
Or, the case
of Usha Mehta whose father was a judge on the brink of
retirement. While studying at Wilson College, Bombay she was
inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s "Quit India" call and
decided to join the freedom movement. Usha’s father pleaded
with her, "Think of me. I am a government official. I am
at the fag end of my career. Your action may earn me the wrath
of the regime."
Usha
responded with a written note declaring that she alone was
responsible for her actions and gave it to her father saying,
"Keep this, father. Now you won’t run into any
trouble."
When the old
man pointed out that she too could run into trouble, her
response was typical of the patriots of her generation.
"I know that, but this is not the time to brood over
dangers. Now is the time to act."
With an
attitude like this, no wonder the British found it
increasingly difficult to keep the jewel in their crown.
Then there is
the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose hoodwinked the police
guarding him at his Elgin Road residence. He made good his
escape in the garb of a maulvi.
Another story
narrates how, as a child, Indira Gandhi identified herself
with Joan of Arc, and how she assembled her Monkey Brigade (Vanar
Sena). There is also the anecdote of Janaki Das’s
interaction with Mahatma Gandhi. If you do not know who Janaki
Das was, probably you never read The Tribune or watch old
Hindi movies. The tale of Vir Savarkar is also told, as also
of Chandra Shekhar Azad, the Bombay Chronicle’s editor
Horniman, Bhagat Singh and many others.
This volume
is invaluable. Not only does it tell us of those freedom
fighters who have become household names, but also of those
whose contribution to the patriotic cause was great but
somehow could not get the popular adulation they deserved.
«««
Managing
People in Organisations: The Challenges of Change by B.R.
Virmani. Response Books, New Delhi. Pages 237. Rs 395.
With each
passing day the market place is becoming increasingly
competitive. Thanks to globalisation, it is no more possible
for inefficient units to survive in any part of the world,
especially in emerging buyers markets like India. New
technologies and techniques — in production, distribution
and management — are being rapidly devised to retain the
cutting edge of one’s enterprise. No wonder, the accent is
shifting perceptibly from the legal and welfare approach to
treating the human resource function as a tool for the
development of an organisation.
Therefore
human resource management (HRM) and human resource development
(HRD) are the time-tested instruments for running any business
or industrial set-up. Virmani has elucidated these two
concepts in this volume, keeping the Indian perspective in
mind.
We all know
that HRD enables a worker to upgrade his skills at regular
intervals through reorientation and refresher courses designed
by his employers, so that he may realise his full productive
potential. The HRMis basically a management tool that aims at
using the available human resources to the optimum level to
achieve the corporate goal.
Virmani,
while dwelling on two HRM related themes, explains the
macro-level antecedents of HRMin India and western countries
and its transplantation in other economies with special
emphasis on India, where recently there has been an animated
HRM debate. Virmani points out that there are many unresolved
questions regarding the HRMmodel that would be most suitable
to India — namely, what sort of HRMexample are we setting?
Can it be transferred from one economy to another? Are its
policies and practices internationally applicable? And, do
these contribute to strategic management?
The second
theme relates to the organisational context in which the HRM
has emerged and now operates. This is a complex process that
helps us understand the nature of organisational life and the
role of human resources in meeting strategic challenges.
Virmani also
deals with the nature of management issues, especially those
related to HRM, in the Indian context, cross-cultural issues,
the conflict with foreign management concepts — eventually
analysing the key areas of HRM and HRD in order to trigger off
an informed as well as informative discussion on the issues
affecting the management of people in the contemporary
competitive situation.
Rapid
technological changes and economic liberalisation have made it
imperative for the Indian government as well as the various
business enterprises to improve their competitive
capabilities. To fully avail of the emerging business
opportunities and for staying in the highly competitive
environment, a greater degree of responsibility and innovative
spirit is required.
In order to
bring about a professional attitude among our entrepreneurs,
they should be enabled to understand the strategic dimension
of various policies and practices that have a bearing on human
resource planning, development and management.
Since most of
the HRMpractices in India are borrowed from the West, these
often clash with our traditional values and environment.
Contrarily, attempts to arrive at a workable solution run into
conflict with the western management precepts. Since the
indigenous education system could not or would not be
developed, we have to depend on the western model. Now that we
are caught in the vortex of intense international competition,
we feel impelled to rapidly industrialise and compete in a
global environment based primarily on the western model.
The support
facilities created to train and develop management personnel
too are based on borrowed concepts. Consequently, a hiatus has
developed between the westernised manager and his subordinate
personnel who are substantially imbued with the Indian ethos.
This leads to conflicts, frustrations and compromises.
Quantitative as well as qualitative production goals remain
elusive. All planning goes haywire.
The sad
scenario is reinforced when foreign companies set up shop in
India believing that their managers would be able to establish
instant rapport with the Indian workers just because our
education system is based on the western model. Often they
realise their blunder, and it is too late. Eventually, the
peculiar Indian socio-cultural environment moulds the
personality of the management practitioners and influences
management practice that turn out be very different from the
professed principles. The first chapter of this book tries to
solve this riddle of the incompatible avowed principles and
actual practices.
Chapter two
deals with the question of how to plan for the HRD in order to
upgrade the employees skills and knowledge. It also discusses
various issues connected with the development and redeployment
strategies required because of the technological changes.
Chapter three
highlights the methodology to be adopted by organisations in
order to link their corporate strategy with the nurturing of
human resources, while chapters four and five deal with the
evaluation model to make training and development more
effective.
Other
important chapters are technology transfer, assimilation and
human resource development, redefining industrial relations
and Indian initiatives in organisational change through
networking, and the case of the oil sector.
Overall, an excellent
reference book for students of management as well as for
professionals and academics.
|
|
Weaving
a brand new
fabric
Review by
M.L. Sharma
Evolution
of Modern Textiles by J.N. Vohra. Originals, New Delhi. Pages
128. Rs 220.
"EVOLUTION
of Modern Textiles" recounts the developments in the
manufacturing technology of textiles from early times when the
operations were manual to the modern age of automation. A
great deal of automation has already come into operation in
the developed countries. Marketing of textiles to the
consumers and retailing have undergone changes along with
advancement in information technology. But the Indian textile
industry has yet to catch up with these changing trends in the
development fields. It is to this that the book draws
attention.
Vohra, who
holds a post-graduate degree in textile technology and is an
expert in the field, has underscored the relevance of emerging
technologies and the work paradigm with particular reference
to the Indian textile industry. He presages hard times of
tough competition for the Indian textiles industry after the
opening up of global markets. "We have seen in the past
that textile companies, which failed to upgrade with the
latest technologies, lost their competitiveness or withered
away. The future poses even grater challenges than the
past."
The ground
rules in the manufacturing area have considerably changed and
the prosperity or the boom, which some Indian textile mills
enjoyed during the past 50 years, may no longer ensure future
competitiveness in the global markets. He favours the view
that manufacturing companies must now be able to speedily
produce large or even small quantities of world class
products, which are economically viable, in response to the
demand in the export market.
He sees a
pivotal role for the information technology in ushering in a
new work culture. The textile industry, like other industries,
is fast becoming knowledge-oriented. In order to face the
emerging challenges of the millennium, the textile industry
has to get out of the morass of traditional work culture. The
industry, which is out of pace now, is in dire need of trained
and information-equipped manpower.
Atmosphere
pollution is now a major problem facing all countries of the
world although for a long time the developed countries were
known for energy and pollution-intensive industries. Now
textile processing and synthetic fibre manufacturing
industries are growing twice as fast in the developing
countries, a pollution-free production system is most vital
and the need for this cannot be set aside. "Textile
industry should take the environmental issue seriously and
gear up to meet the impending challenges." He suggests a
"cleaner production paradigm" instead of
"end-of-pipe treatments" of textile effluents, for
which alternative technologies in textile processing should be
developed and adopted. It calls for a transition from the past
systems to a "more agile manufacturing paradigm of the
future".
With the
advent of computersation the administrative, financial and
marketing operations of several other companies are undergoing
revolutionary changes. Unfortunately the textile industry,
catering to the most important needs of human beings, is
lagging far behind and is under stress for changes. It is
imperative, Vohra says, that all companies operating in the
field of textiles should be highly skilled and proficient in
manpower, which is in tune with the present-day needs in
global perspective.
Spread in 26
chapters, the book touches topics like "Changing scenario
of textile mills", "Garment technology beyond
2000", "Cotton ginning", ‘‘Plant fibers; an
ecological necessity’’, "Wool marketing
mechanism" and "The traditional silk industry".
The chapter
"Revamping Textile Education", provides useful
guidance to the students anxious to join textile courses. But
the author laments that a large number of institutions that
are just "teaching shops" for fashion and textile
designing, mushrooming these days, are hardly equipped with
the basic facilities, equipment and trained faculty essential
for conducting these courses. The chapter, "Modern
Management Methods in Textile Industry", sheds light on
several management techniques like total quality management (TQM),
leading edge technologies, and human resource management.
In
"Handloom, the Heritage Industry", the author points
to the hiatus between production and marketing of the produce.
This issue has become problematical. He says, "Unless
some concerted efforts are made on national level and some
export avenues are explored, the distortions in the production
and marketing may well usher in an era of handloom crises
leading to large scale unemployment".
The 14-page
glossary of the terms is very useful for students as well as
laymen. These words with clear-cut definition, are other than
the textile terms used in the book.
The book will be highly
useful for the textile teaching faculty, students,
entrepreneurs and researchers.
|
|
BOOK
EXTRACT
New reality, new
meanings, new dangers
This article,
written by Peter Marcuse, is extracted from Monthly Review.
THE
language of globalisation deserves some explicit attention. To
begin with, the word globalisation itself is a nonconcept
in most uses: a simple catalogue of everything that seems
different since, say, 1970, whether advances in information
technology, widespread use of air freight, speculation in
currencies, increased capital flows across borders,
Disneyfication of culture, mass marketing, global warming,
genetic engineering, multinational corporate power, new
international division of labour, international mobility of
labour, reduced power of nation-states, post-modernism, or post-Fordism.
The issue is more than one of
careless use of words: intellectually, such muddy use of the term fogs any
effort to separate cause from effect, to analyse what is being done, by whom, to
whom, for what, and with what effect. Politically, leaving the term vague and
ghostly permits its conversion to something with a life of its own, making it a
force, fetishising it as something that has an existence independent of the will
of human beings, inevitable and irresistible.
This lack of clarity in usage
afflicts other elements of the discussion of globalisation as well, with both
analytical and political consequences. Let me outline some problem areas, and
suggest some important differentiations.
First, the concept of
globalisation itself. It hardly needs reiteration that globalisation is not
something new under the sun, but is a particular form of capitalism, an
expansion of capitalist relationships both in breadth (geographically) and in
depth (penetrating ever-increasing aspects of human life). But there are two
distinct aspects to the development of capitalist relations since 1970 that are
often lumped together under the rubric of globalisation: developments in
technology and developments in the concentration of power. Separating advances
in technology from the global concentration of economic power, and
seeing how their combination has changed class relations is critical both
for analysis and for political strategy.
The link between advances in
technology and the concentration of economic power is not an inevitable one.
Computerisation, the speed of communications made possible by advances in
information technology, the ability to expand the span of control from one
centre across continents, the increased speed and efficiency of transportation
(both for people and for goods), facilitating the flexibilisation of production,
and the automation of routine tasks are all indeed essential for the substantial
increase in the concentration of economic power we are witnessing.
These advances in technology,
however, could be used in quite different ways (although it may be that, if
their intended use were different, they would in fact be quite different).
Advances in technology could mean either that the same quantity of useful goods
and services could be produced with less effort or that, with the same effort,
more could be produced. Either way, everyone would be better off, either working
less or having more.
That is not the way things are
going, not because technology could not go that way, but because it is directed
and harnessed by the power-holders to increase and concentrate their power. It
has been used to change the balance of power between classes. Attention needs to
be focused on this, not on the technology itself.
The distinction between technological
globalisation and the globalisation of power is critical — not only
analytically but also politically. It raises the question, "What might the
other possibilities be if the two were separated?" We should speak of the
existing combination of technological globalisation and the globalisation of
power as really existing globalisation; that would highlight the
possibilities of an alternative globalisation. Opponents of the damaging
consequences of really existing globalisation, from Left as well as from liberal
perspectives, are divided on the appropriate response to it.
The slogan from Seattle in
regard to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — "fix it or nix it"
— and the equivalent suggested in the Washington demonstrations in April as to
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) —"shrink it or sink
it" — and the related questions about whether we want a seat at the table
or a different table or no table at all show an ambivalence about goals.
The issues are difficult
indeed. But the realisation that an alternative globalisation can at least be
conceived of should be an important part of the debate on goals; speaking of
what we now have as really existing globalisation may help to keep the broader
possibilities open.
By the same token, frequent
references to the diminished or vanished power of nation-states to control
globalisation need some conceptual and linguistic clarity. The myth of the
powerless state is a concept that clouds an intelligent analysis of what is
actually going on. The importance of state action in enabling the capitalist
system of the industrialised world to function is increased, not reduced, as
that system spreads internationally. If states do not control the movement of
capital or of goods, it is not because they cannot but because they will not —
it is an abdication of state power, not a lack of that power. The very
importance attached by international business interests to the WTO, tariff
agreements, the government enforcement of contractual rights and the protection
of intellectual property interests attest to the continuing, if not growing,
importance of nation-state.
Furthermore, a strong element
of fetishisation often creeps into the very use of the term "state",
with a very distinct political bias. It might be called the fallacy of the
homogenous state and it appears in such formulations as those that speak of
"the competitive state" (or, the constant call for the
"competitiveness of cities") or of benefits or harms to the
"states" of the North or of the South.
States and cities are
internally divided; what is good for one group, class, or other interest within
a state or city may have very different consequences for others. Governments
indeed have a certain autonomy and, in this limited sense, one may speak of
states or cities as actors with interests of their own, meaning their specific
political leaders and bureaucracies — or, more broadly, the regime in power;
but it is even more true that governments are responsive to multiple interests
and that particular interests regularly dominate the actions of most. To speak
of a "national interest" usually conceals some very particular
interests; to speak of states as if they represented all those living within
them obscures reality.
In that sense, to speak of
"US" domination of international affairs — important in one sense
— requires a clear distinction between those who, in turn, dominate US policy
and those who are excluded from its formation. The same is true of other
countries, as was clear in some of the discussions in Seattle, in which
individuals from countries of the South took positions strongly divergent from
those of their governments.
If this distinction between a
state and its people is important in terms of the political and formal actions
of the state, it is even more important in terms of economic representation.
Those who represent states in international economic negotiations are not
representing any homogenous set of national economic interests; the homogeneity
may be better considered a characteristic of the interests at the bargaining
table — that is to say, clusters of businesses and financial interests perhaps
diverging on a sectoral basis but similar in their class character.
The key divisions are not among
states, but among classes; the homogeneity is not within states but within
classes.
Other language in discussions
of globalisation, while emanating from its proponents, frequently slips into use
by its critics and obscures what is actually happening. "Human
capital", for instance, is a twisting of meanings: calling it "labour
skills" puts it in its proper context. "Governance" is a
euphemism for diminished government and should be recognised as such.
"Investment" may mean an expansion of productive capacity, or it may
be pure speculation.
"Free" markets are
hardly costless, as in free public education; the true term is "private
markets", and they limit, rather than expand, most notions of human
freedom. "Reform", of course, means privatisation in its media use.
"Producer services", indiscriminately used, strips the term
"producer" of its social meaning. Printing stock reports should not be
called "producer services": printers are workers who operate machines,
not "service providers", and stockbrokers should not be called
producers if the word is to retain any real content.
These issues are not merely
issues of terminology. No clear consensus has yet emerged among the various
groups attempting to confront the ills produced by really existing globalisation.
The most moderate goals simply call for participation and transparency; the
stronger liberal view asks for restructuring of the system of global
institutions and regulations; radical views include both calls for eliminating
global institutions entirely or replacing them with a completely different
system of relations, both economic and political, within nation-states and among
them.
Discussions after Seattle have
not yet widely coalesced around specific programmatic demands at the national
level, such as actions demanded of the US Congress, the US Trade Representative,
its United Nations delegate, or its representatives on various international
agencies and bodies.
A number of groups and many
individuals are wrestling with the difficult problems of formulating goals,
platforms, and specific demands for action. Demands consistent with one view are
not necessarily inconsistent with other views; both commonalities of goals and
differences among them, and both strategy and tactics, need further thought and
clarification.
Fuzziness of
language may facilitate coalition formation in the short run,
but more solid and long-term alliances are based on full mutual
understanding. Being careful about the difference between
technological globalisation and the globalisation of power,
keeping the concept of alternative globalisation on the table,
dispensing with the myth of the powerless state and avoiding the
fallacy of the homogenous state, and watching the traps of the
Orwellian language of globalisation, may all help in coming to a
common agreement as to both long-term goals and next steps.
|
|
|
|