Good Will in the Age of Crazy Men: the Obama Nomination

In one of the rare moments of human history, confused feelings united the people across the globe last Friday. Pleasantly unimpressed or unpleasantly surprised, however one may call it, was the feeling that ran through breakfast conversations in the New World, and afternoon chatters and late night reflections in the Old World, as the Nobel Committee’s decision for the Peace Prize was made public. This year’s winner, himself quite surprised and at unease, raised no serious objections based on his personal stature, but did he, in his capacity as statesman, really deserve to be crowned with one of the highest ethical and political achievements of the modern era? Or did the Committee use discretion to inspire the laureate himself for future work, and set limits on the belligerent ambitions of his friends and foes?

Whatever the particular reasons that the Nobel Committee employed, the selection of Barack Obama should be evaluated in the context of political possibilities for world peace today. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this ideal is as evasive as ever. It is not just that the number of transnational, international and domestic conflicts has reached depressing heights; the more problematic fact is that there is no viable institutional program, in fact not even a conception of history, realist or utopian, that discards bloody conflict as a historical necessity. Let me explain.

The end of Soviet-style communism and democratization in Central-Eastern Europe coincided with, and arguably influenced, a wave of democratic transitions across Asia, Latin America and Africa. The triumphalism of liberal democracy, therefore, easily replaced other conceptions of history and flattened the surface of the Earth, not only as the winning political option, but also as the only reasonable way of seeing and imagining the political. However, the promise of eternal peace had an early setback when Saddam Hussain’s troops invaded Kuwait. As the “crazy man” in Baghdad was subdued thanks to multilateral action, another story, this time of “crazy men”, came from the midst of Europe: the separation of Yugoslavia into independent republics led to bitter wars, culminating in serious human rights violations orchestrated by the Serbian leader Milosevic and the Bosnian-Serb community leaders. As the world watched the efforts to bring these “crazy men” to the dialogue table, news of genocide in Rwanda threatened to destroy the remaining optimism that the world could be a peaceful place. Meanwhile, another “crazy man” shattered the long sought-after peace in the Middle East with one bullet: Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination plunged the region into chaos, sinking the hopes that supposedly perennial conflicts could be resolved. Around the same time, more “crazy men” appeared on the streets of Kabul. The century of two world wars and unending optimism ended when the “crazy man” in Belgrade was forced to resign under NATO bombardment. The argument for liberal triumphalism depended on one’s optimism and parsimony in counting the number of “crazy men” around the world.

The “crazy men”, after all, seemed to grow on peculiar soil, and the lands on both sides of the north Atlantic could take solace in their immunity from domestic or imported villains – or so it seemed. One grim morning in September 2001 proved beyond doubt that there is no safe place in today’s world, and we as the world’s peoples should think of ourselves as one humanity capable of acting together. However, the response to transnational terrorism did not quite make sense: as the US and UK forces invaded Iraq, a country with no established links to the 9/11 attacks or no identified weapons of mass destruction, we already knew that any soil type was fertile for the growth of “crazy men.” While the much more justified and strategic war in Afghanistan was abandoned with a precocious sense of triumph, the “Coalition of the Willing” sank deeper and deeper in Iraq. Between the 2003 invasion and the reelection of Bush and the reelection of Blair and the economic crisis and the 2008 elections, the 21^st century gave birth to yet another unspeakable human tragedy: the genocide in Darfur. The “crazy men” could not be stopped.

I find the designation “crazy man/men” a quite appropriate tool to demonstrate the lack of historical depth in understanding conflict and violence today. As the Cold War came to an end, the grand narratives that explained political violence lost the remainder of their credibility to assume overarching explanatory power. The evils of totalitarianism and the machinations of imperialism, bureaucratic production of death and the lack of state capacity in the Third World, global inequalities under capitalism and slavery under socialism: these frameworks can explain some isolated events in today’s world, but they can hardly make sense of the larger picture. Consequently, brushing away the horrifying facts of war, massacre, genocide, torture, rape, and other serious human rights violations has become a mediatic historical genre in itself. In order for the liberal democratic triumphalism to make any sense, the ongoing bloodshed needs to be depicted as aberrations rather than matter of course in the post-1989 world. The assignation of “crazy man” status to some individuals satisfies the need to overcome cognitive dissonance, a function earlier fulfilled by ideologies and scientific explanatory frameworks. No matter where it comes from, violence and violation are immediately associated with individuals who are reduced to objects of hatred. How many movies were shot in which the villain looked exactly like Saddam? Is there anyone who cannot picture Osama bin Laden’s face with their eyes closed? How many millions of jokes have we heard about George W. Bush’s cognitive capacities or Dick Cheney’s satanic behind-the-scene plots? I am certainly not arguing that the authors of terrorist attacks, wars of aggression and grave human rights violations should be immune from criminal, political and moral responsibility. Far from it. However, their intrinsic evil, thirst for domination and stupidity should not replace the valuable – even if elusive – attempt to understand the underlying causes of political violence and imagine a peaceful world.

Going back to the Obama nomination: as the award was manifestly granted for what Obama hopes to achieve rather than what he already achieved, I believe it was yet another desperate attempt to think through the prospects for world peace in separation from a conceptual framework that seeks to understand violence and present programmatic solutions. The entire world celebrated the American nation for electing into office an honest, well-intentioned and smart individual who could effect real change and end the domination of “crazy men.” Again, I do not mean to play down the enormous potential of the United Nations peace-building and peace-keeping apparatus, the newly formed International Criminal Court, relentless activism by transitional peace and human rights networks, as well as regional cooperation mechanisms in making our world a safer place. However, the exuberance around the personality of Obama, juxtaposed to the parade of villains and evil men in the post-1989 world order, reveals that after decades of intellectual, institutional and legal-political developments, from Hans Kelsen to Habermas, the League of Nations to the United Nations, Nuremberg to the ICC, still too much depends on the good will of one individual. All one can hope for is that this individual can carry the almost divine mandate on his shoulders.

Vulnerable Expectations

It’s been an especially hard summer for immigrants in Europe, and not only because of the deep recession which has eliminated both job opportunities and some of the admittedly scant and ever-diminishing tolerance for “foreigners” on the continent. In the month of July alone, there was the bulldozing of a makeshift immigrant camp, supervised by riot police in the “cradle of Western democracy”; the call, by a newly elected member of the European Parliament from the country that gave the world the Magna Charta, “to get very tough with those coming over”, more specifically by sinking boats coming from Africa; and the most headline-grabbing of all – the passing by the lower house of parliament in one of the founding members of the EU of a law criminalizing illegal immigration as well as various everyday acts of that country’s citizens’ knowing interaction with an immigrant (e.g., renting an apartment to one), but legitimating vigilante “citizens’ patrols”.*
To read about such developments is to immediately and viscerally understand what vulnerability is about. The political vulnerability of unfortunate people perceived as “aliens” from foreign lands, seems self-evident in these stories.  In general, we think we know who is vulnerable in society. On a global scale, it is those who, through little fault of their own, find their lives turned upside down by violence (the majority of the residents of the flattened cardboard camp in Greece were Afghans), those who have not the most basic resources for sustaining themselves and their families , those whose countries’ governments, often nominal, do not manage, know how or even care to support in the pursuit of their most basic human needs (as Italian economists show in a recent paper using data collected by the Immigration and Border Police Service of the Italian Ministry of Interior, it is the so-called “push factor”, or economic and political crises in countries of origin, that dramatically drive illegal immigration, and not so much the perceived economic pull of the advanced economies).
In the societies where those who participate in the blogosphere tend to live, it’s – somewhat similarly – the people who sleep on the streets, have some difference (“alienness”) which remains a feature the law of the land deems to be unacceptable, or who – literally or metaphorically – don’t speak the official language with which the most rudimentary access to power and protection channels is achieved.
With the effects of globalization, often there is a great intersection of the sets of vulnerable humans on both these levels. The individuals in whom the categories of vulnerability on the domestic level in developed countries overlap most tragically, tend to come from the failed places described above.
But this is just the conventional understanding of what vulnerability is all about. When we speak of political vulnerability, there is an even more critical and less obvious characteristic to consider: what increases a person’s or a group’s vulnerability is the belief, the hope, the expectation – especially when mistaken – that a center of power will protect when in fact it repeatedly/consistently fails to, whether through omission or commission.  You might be extremely poor or struggling with disease, but as long as you do not expect the state in which you live to provide the protection (an expectation considered to be the very source of its legitimization) you need, your misfortune has not reached the extremes of political vulnerability.
Taken further, such a claim might explain the reason why revolutionaries of any sort (from the peaceful protesters of raj-time India and pre-1989 eastern Europe to the terrorism-utilizing Hamas of today) are not traditionally seen as vulnerable, but in fact as muscular champions of the downtrodden.
The problem of this invisible layer of vulnerability is particularly grave in democratic states which by definition are presumed to actually care about their capacity to provide basic security, human, civil and often even social rights – both for their intrinsic worth and as the source of the legitimacy of the states in question. Even more so then, for the democracies which have the additional layer of liberal domestic and collective self-perception associated with their EU membership.
Their residents rather unreflectively expect all these sorts of protection. In fact, because EU states are thought to be guarantors of those rights, both as a matter of tradition and law – these are all countries signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, and the International Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights/Civil and Political Rights, parts of which demand protection against arbitrary expulsion, against advocacy of racial or religious hatred, and special protections for children –  lately they have been turning into places where, paradoxically, the conditions for political vulnerability of the more implicit sort have been strengthening.
The problem is not only that events like the ones we saw this past July have been happening with what seems to be a greater frequency. The greater outrage is the hypocritical insistence of these very same governments and parts of their populations to be regarded as paragons of democratic virtue, and a measure for any society which wants to deserve the legal label “European” (in the case of aspiring members) or at least “modern/civilized” (the most any state outside the geographical confines of the continent might aim for). No one can deny that in relative terms they are ahead of most of the rest of the world on many dimensions of respect and protection for individuals and their rights. Yet the unreflective stance about what such measures mean for the very essence of the European self-image, spells much more trouble ahead for the whole integration project which presumably revolves not merely, or not any more, around economic maximizing of mutually achieved benefits, but also around a normative revision and socialization around a shared democratic culture rooted in respect for fundamental human dignity.
As a consequence, a scholar of international human rights law has argued, “Europe may be in the process of creating a form of cultural relativism in reverse – not in the sense of the rejection of universal values that do not conform to cultural particularities, which is the discourse of some third world states, but in the implicit denial of the application of universal values to certain third-state nationals seeking entry.”
But if the officials representing these “cultured” societies themselves feel that this rejection of universal values is expected of them by their constituent publics, or even by the demands of leadership, two pieces of advice might be in order. Any vulnerable person, who might actually try to access these societies with the (apparently mistaken) belief that they if not always active protectors, they are at the very least reluctant violators of human rights, should lose his or her illusions. And Europe itself should lose its illusions about the example that it is for the rest of the world, starting with its intellectuals.
Some of them might say that for now there is some hope, that it’s still a question of “if” and not necessarily “when” the above prescriptions might hold true.  In the case of the Greek camp demolition, for example, the ugliness of the reasoning behind the demand for it (apparently it was seen as an “eyesore” by locals who worried that tourists might see it this way), is maybe partially ameliorated by the fact that the tents which housed an improvised “hospital” and “mosque” were spared. But it might be just cynicism.  After all, Greece actually has had on the books for some time now a pretty harsh law against undocumented immigrants staying on its territory and the recent event might just herald an era of its actual implementation.
In Italy, high-profile Catholic figures have come out with vocal criticism of the new law (which was forced through the lower house in the guise of a confidence vote, presumably because no support could be achieved via a regular voting procedure). They decry the complete lack of integration attempts to supplement if not supplant the proposed hard-line law-enforcement.  Yet there is no official objection by the Vatican’s offices (which, whether we like it or not, holds sway in the politics and public opinion both of Italy and of the EU). There is no caritas-inspired public recognition that the law will indirectly harm immigrants, by forcing them to avoid interactions with any authorities, from medical to religious, and thus make them easier victims of organized crime.
Admirably, but also to some extent succumbing to the very same vulnerability-inducing naivety argued against here, a group of prominent intellectuals have started a petition to stop the final approval of what they have termed “the Security Decree”, justifying  their objections against the discriminatory nature of the law by saying that “Not even Fascism had gone that far!” [concerning especially the provision that children born to undocumented immigrant mothers cannot be recognized by them and “by virtue of a political decision by a temporary majority, shall be for their entire lives the children of unknown parents”]. This is a pretty damning rejection indeed, yet one wonders whether even this is sufficient to balance the dissonance between the very values that these intellectuals espouse – and that reside at the very heart of the European liberal collective identity (continually pursuing the strengthening of the rule of law, democracy and human rights within that collective) – and the progressively and less and less abashedly fortifying of its external boundaries and internal politics.
And to those who might say that a law breaker is a law breaker and should be punished – now is the time to pay attention to how new categories of “law-breakers” are created both swiftly and rather arbitrarily, “by a temporary majority”. One needs to  recognize the historical context and processes that lead to certain laws and to be reminded of a basic principle in democratic legislating – consulting in some form with the potential objects of a law (the “affected interests” principle).
There is little one can say to conclude such an exploration of a question with dire moral and constitutional implications hanging in the air over European countries this summer. Maybe the most we can do at this stage is to remember Max Frisch’s injunction that in the post-WWII years, the European states had “asked for workers, but human beings came”. Today, even when some in European states are not asking for anybody in particular (though it should be mentioned businesses as a rule will continue to need  workers), it is again HUMANS that come across the border. In regulating their migratory flow as if that detail could be ignored, Europe’s liberal states are forfeiting their commitment to observing the rights of individuals (sometimes re-defined as “rights across borders” or even “universal personhood”), and making their own legitimacy and raison d’etre vulnerable.

========================================

* And while it will not be discussed in detail here, the killing of an innocent Egyptian woman in Germany (by the man whom she was suing for an earlier offense of hate speech against her) and the shooting by the police of her husband who tried to physically defend her (the combination of being trigger-happy and even implicit racism would make anyone lethal), it bears mentioning – for the twisted way in which the events entail at least three different hate crimes.

Coup in Honduras: limits of democratic deepening and regional cooperation in Latin America

The long shadow of the history of military interventions loomed once again over the Western Hemisphere, as the awkward coup in Honduras turned the world public’s attention to this small Central American nation of approximately 7.5 million citizens during the short interval between the fraudulent elections in Iran and the ethnic riot/massacre in the autonomous province of Xinxiang, China. The Americas take pride in the coup-free record of the last two decades (at least since 1992, when Alberto Fujimori dissolved democratic institutions in a self-coup), even though coup attempts or clear coup threats still abounded. Augusto Pinochet as the leader of the Chilean Armed Forces cleared himself and his family of corruption charges in 1993 by commanding elite troops to maneuver in front of the presidential palace (know as the boinazo); Hugo Chavez initiated his first mediatic campaign with a failed left-wing coup attempt in 1992 (a move somewhat imitated at a smaller scale in 2005 by Antauro Humala, the brother of the presidential candidate Ollanta Humala of Peru); and in turn the Venezuelan Right infamously supported a short-lived coup against Chavez in 2002. None of these attempts enjoyed the “success” of the Honduran coup, insofar as the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted from power, and quickly replaced by the then-President of the Congress, Roberto Micheletti. What followed were alarm and urgency (coups can and do happen here!) that united all governments of the American continent, regardless of political ideology or intensity of diplomatic ties with Honduras, behind the ousted president.

The increasingly isolated coup coalition bases its argument on the fears that the Chavez brand of “21^st century socialism” is a continent-wide leftist hegemony project that seeks to overthrow democratic governments in favor of populist dictatorships. Manuel Zelaya’s intentions to hold a non-binding referendum to ask the population if they are in favor of a national constituent assembly provoked such accusations by the military, the Supreme Court, and even members of his party. Had they chosen a more convincing pretext to undermine a democratically elected government than the extremely shallow reasoning they employ today, perhaps the constellation of forces behind Micheletti would have found a wider base for support among the right-wing governments of Latin America.  After all, Micheletti’s rhetoric resonates with the fear-mongering of ruling classes all across the region: countries are under siege by an international conspiracy carried out by local Chavismos. One only needs to remember that, in the last five years, political personalities as diverse as Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Ollanta Humala of Peru, and Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico have been stigmatized as Chavistas by their electoral rivals. Just last month, the Peruvian President Alan Garcia argued without hesitation that the indigenous protests in the Peruvian Amazon were orchestrated by the continent-wide conspiracy. The fear-mongering aside, there is a structural pattern that explains the fragile political environment that generates serious political tensions in Latin America, and explains the onset of the Honduran coup.

I am referring to the deep socioeconomic and political divisions across Latin America that play out in the process of democratic institution-building. Democratic government is based on decision-making procedures (rules of the game) that ought to be accepted unconditionally by all major political actors. The fundamental problem facing Latin America today is that the meta-political decisions for establishing democratic procedures take place in deeply polarized societies. Constitutional change, presidential term limits, the nature of the relationship between state powers, decentralization, state management of economy, etc. generate fierce debates and mutual accusations because Latin American societies are playing the democratic game while establishing its rules. One should keep in mind that few Latin American nations have written and ratified constitutions through democratic constitutional assemblies accompanied by free and fair referendum procedures. Some of the constitutions in effect are leftovers of dictatorship and authoritarianism, like the 1980 Constitution of Chile drafted under military rule, and the 1993 Constitution of Peru prepared soon after Fujimori’s self-coup. Some others enjoyed procedural legitimacy, while reinforcing ethnic/linguistic discrimination and marginalization, such as the newly replaced 1967 Constitution of Bolivia enacted by the Parliament “without the participation of a single indigenous person.” To the extent that existing constitutions reflect the consensus of an earlier political, economic and cultural elite, democratically elected governments representing a new ruling coalition find it necessary to create constituent assemblies in line with their long-term political vision. Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have recently ratified new constitutions through constituent assemblies.

However, the constitutional projects blur the distinction between the political and meta-political; self-interest and public good; daily political concerns and long-term projects. Furthermore, the constitutional debates are too often tied up with the question of presidential term limits, a condition that one can rightfully call the “Chavez legacy”, which raises fears that new constitutional projects, far from deepening institutionalization, actually promote personalistic quasi-democracies (for an account of the dilemmas of Latin American democratization and the question of re-election, see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8159932.stm). In short, the imagination of a perfect “constitutional moment”, a pouvoir constituent that precedes and frames political life, cannot find home in today’s Latin America.

The energetic condemnation of the Honduras coup by the Organization of American States (OAS) and individual governments raised hopes that international cooperation could defend procedural democracy in the Americas, at least as a conflict-resolution mechanism in moments of rupture. Clearly, a regional constitutional project following the European Union model is out of question today. Judging from the serious setbacks of the European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, it seems unlikely that American or African regional cooperation organizations would promote continent-wide constitutionalism. A narrower option consists of promoting democratic stability through international sanctioning mechanisms, which is precisely what the OAS sought to do in the early days of the Honduran crisis. The unanimous decision to expel Honduras from the Organization, first such decision since the expulsion of Cuba in 1962, failed to bring the de facto government to its knees, but at least it marked very clearly its illegitimacy in the eyes of the international community. The expulsion, combined with the recent decision to reintegrate Cuba, performatively redefined the OAS itself: protection against communism as the raison d’être of the Organization was overcome in the course of the historical trajectory by a principled defense of democratic governance.

The long shadow of history cannot be emphasized more in understanding the reformulation of the OAS as a regional actor. The Americas lived through decades of dictatorship, repression and foreign interventionism (mainly by the USA) in the alleged war against communism and left-wing terrorism. Anything was possible, including the destruction of democracy and gross human rights violations, as long as the political priorities of the domestic political-economic-military elites converged with those of their US counterparts. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the consequent guerilla movements – most of which also ignored the question of institutionalizing democratic government – furthered the tendency to define regional politics as a battleground between international communism and the “free world”. The recent wave of democratization in the last twenty years was the culmination of a long struggle against illegitimate governments taking advantage of this regional context. Therefore, emerging political actors ideally rejected dictatorship, military tutelage, human rights violations, political violence, and foreign interventionism under any pretext. The OAS decision to expel Honduras puts this ideal into practice.

I am using the word ideally precisely because the shadow of history is long enough to shape the present, and even when self-reflection and the lessons learned have led many actors to defend democracy unconditionally, the institutions and mentalities of the Cold War somehow survived in the context of contemporary conflicts. Fujimori ruled Peru with dictatorial powers for eight years (1992-2000) under the pretext of fighting terrorism; Colombia still suffers from terrorism exacerbated by the preponderance of paramilitaries in government; Mexico was plunged into crisis when the results of the second fair election ever (2006) were essentially ratified by the outgoing President Fox and the Supreme Court that refused a recount of the close vote; the role of the American Embassy in the regime crisis of 2008 is still a matter of great controversy in Bolivia; free and fair elections in Cuba still sound like a fantasy; the School of the Americas is still in operation, albeit with a different name; and the end of dictatorships has not necessarily brought the end of human rights violations in much of the Americas.

The question remains: can the OAS (or other instances of regional cooperation in the Americas) contain the ambitions of domestic and foreign actors who would not stop short of destroying democracy? I am quite skeptical, not only because the anti-democratic forces still hold ground, as explained in the paragraph above, but also because the principle of promoting democracy is kept in check by another entrenched principle with strong historical roots in the OAS system. I am referring to non-intervention, crystallized in the Articles 19 and 21 of the OAS Charter. On the one hand, humanitarian intervention emerges as a viable possibility in the face of serious human rights violations (even if not in the face of forced regime change); on the other hand, the Western Hemisphere, having experienced the consequences of US domination, hosts fears that opening doors to foreign intervention could easily result in imperialist brutality. If leftist governments fear CIA-backed coups and conspiracies fabricated in the respective American Embassies, the right-wing rulers of the region get increasingly anxious about the regional ambitions of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Therefore, it is unlikely that the OAS will include military intervention to its repertoire of sanctioning mechanisms against illegitimate governments.

The Honduran crisis will probably occupy the international agenda in the coming weeks, as the talks mediated by the Costa Rican President Oscar Arias have come to a halt. Even the mere fact that the Secretary-General of the OAS did not take up the role of the chief mediator shows that the international organization cannot do much more than what it has already done to restore legitimate government in Honduras. OAS deserves admiration for its good will to defend democracy, but it lacks the sanctioning capacity, let alone coercive power, to enforce the democratic ideal.

A Society’s Progress Does Not Begin With Its Own Suicide: Rereading Marx after Nandigram

After 32 years of winning elections in West Bengal the Communist Part of India (Marxist), or CPM now looks to be suddenly imploding. While there may be deeper reasons for this (see, Partha Chatterjee, “The Coming Crisis in West Bengal,” Economic and Political Weekly, 2009; 44 (9)) – after all, absolute power corrupts absolutely and Communists are no different in this regard. But specifically, in the last two years, its demise has been brought about by its aggressive policies of land acquisition for private industry which have put it at odds with its peasant base and upset its influential intellectual camp.

Why would a savvy party machine such as the CPM bite the hand that has fed it for three decades? Why does a party risk alienating its support base for a project which will not expand its patronage network? If this is the price of industrialization, why is industrialization politically necessary?

Curiously, the arguments against Special Economic Zones, or SEZs, which raged in Bengal both before and after Nandigram never questioned the necessity of industrialization. Opponents argued against taking useful agricultural lands, arguing fallow lands should be taken instead. Other demanded better rehabilitation packages for landless sharecroppers and day laborers. More radical groups rejected the SEZ model of industrialization, preferring older modes of land acquisition where private capital bought land on its own, or the state acquired land for state industries. But all comments were inevitably prefaced by ‘No one is against industrialization, per se.’ The question is Why Not?

West Bengal is an overwhelmingly rural and agrarian state. Across India, the vast majority of citizens live are tied to agriculture and live in villages. So why should industrialization be unanimously accepted across the political spectrum?

A basic reason for this is that the most theoretically sound critiques of SEZs have come from ideological Marxists, who see in the CPM’s adoption of SEZs a betrayal of the spirit of revolutionary Marxism. For Marxists, history happens in stages, with agriculture giving way to capitalist industrialization, and then capitalism giving over to industrial communism. The dilemma of the Indian Marxist has always been that India is several steps behind the West in this teleological view of society, and therefore must use short cuts – such as state-run development planning, and now SEZs – to catch up.

But must history happen in stages? And that too in stages where Indians are always three of four steps behind the West? According to this view, 21^st century India resembles England 200 years ago. One billion people must go suffer through the 19^th century British history of land expropriation, large-scale dislocation, and displacement, then the rise of factories, harsh working conditions, child labor, dirty slums, unemployment, and a lifestyle which kills workers before age 40 – all so that they can one day be delivered unto the Communist utopia.

In the age of cell phones, call centers and 24-hour cable news, why is it still fated that a peasant in Nandigram must become a factory worker? This raises a series of related questions: What is wrong with being a farmer? What will happen to all those who are already unemployed, much less the legions of those who will become jobless and homeless as a result of rural mass displacement from SEZs? What kind of development does a poor society want? For whom?

Karl Marx and Vera Zasulich

Ironically, many of these questions were foreclosed by Marx’s infamous essay on Imperialism in India, in which he praised British colonialism for accelerating the rate of India’s development from its static, primitive socio-economic structures to its future as a Communist society. Colonialism was desirable, Marx infamously wrote, because for all its ills, from Oriental statis, it got the process of modernization started, which would in a few decades or centuries ultimately lead to the Communist eden.

Yet, the matter does not end there. In 1881, a Russian Marxist Vera Zasulich wrote the German theorist a letter where she placed many of the same questions in the Russian context which have been placed above.

Russia was then largely an agrarian country where most people lived on communes. The socialists in Russia, having read Marx, were doing calculations on how soon the primitive commune had to perish, “how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe”, ie ideal conditions for the communist revolution to take place.

Meanwhile the socialists would mobilize among workers in the cities – who they believed to be the vanguard of the revolution – “while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass, which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on to the streets of the large towns in search of a wage.” In the face of such impending mass dislocation, Zasulich asked whether “it is historically necessary for every country in the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production.”

Marx’s response is short, but it includes two crucial points: 1. The issue of ‘historical inevitability’ is expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. 2. The analysis in Capital provides no reason either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune.

His own further study, he writes, reveals that the commune is “the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia.” “The harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.” In short, there is no teleology. Not only is the commune not doomed; given the particularity of Russian conditions it must be allowed to flourish. These points are striking enough, but Marx wrote four drafts before his final brief reply to Zasulich, and these are even more revealing.

In the second draft Marx elaborates why the evolution of society in Western Europe would not be replayed, with a time delay, in Russia. First, the commune today is not analogous to the primitive commune of medieval Western Europe. Second, even if it were, the process from primitive communism to late capitalism took centuries and a long series of evolutions in Western Europe. Were Russia isolated from the world, perhaps “it would have to develop on its own account,” and thus take centuries too. But “Russia exists in a modern historical context: it is contemporaneous with a higher culture and it is linked to a world market in which capitalist production is predominant.” Russia is not Europe’s past. Rather, as common sense tells us, it is a vast agrarian country in the same time frame as modern industrial Europe. Therefore, argues Marx, it can adopt the various new technologies that evolved over centuries in Europe, in a very short time.

Furthermore it can use these new technologies “to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it.” In other words, the rural commune should prosper, not despite the rise of industrialization, but because of it. Precisely because it has capitalist production next door, he argues, the commune may appropriate all its positive achievements “without undergoing its terrible frightful vicissitudes.”

“If the admirers of the capitalist system in Russia deny that such a combination is possible,” Marx adds, “let them explain to me how they managed, in just a few days as it were, to introduce the machinery of exchange (banks, credit companies, etc) which was the work of centuries in the West.” In the 21^st century case, Marx’s would surely have used the example of the mobile phone. Until two decades ago, most poor countries had limited telephone connectivity even in cities. Much of the countryside in India and China had no phone lines at all.

According to the teleological view of progress, increases in income and urbanization would enable more Third World urbanites to buy phones, while more lines built into the countryside would take phones to villages. This was how telephone communication had spread in the West. It would have taken decades to repeat the process in the Third World. Then the technology changed.

Enter the mobile phone. In the First World the mobile was initially adopted by sophisticates, many of whom already owned multiple land lines. The mobile was the next stage in their technological advancement. But in the Third World, mobiles were adapted for in an entirely different way, and for different reasons. The technology was significantly cheaper than land lines, because the infrastructure of cell towers was far cheaper for the service provider than drawing cables to remote regions. For most people, the mobile was the first and only phone they ever owned.

The fishmonger who hawks hilsas on the pavement in my neighborhood in Calcutta owns a mobile. He has no land in the city, much less a land line. He lack the political connections required to get a landline without a waiting period. And he does not have the cash to pay a $15 flat fee each month.

A mobile hidden in his lungi (an Indian sarong) is cheap, because he can fill up an account according to his own finances and needs. It requires no money to receive calls so there is no fixed cost. Moreover it is useful. Even if he could acquire such a landline, he would have no use for such a device attached to a wire in his house. The mobile stays with him at all times, which means he has it at his place of business. Since his location happens to be a pavement, no landline would ever reach there.

Yet the mobile becomes crucial to developing his existing economic position. With a phone, the wholeseller can inform him about his supply of the day’s catch, and customers can contact him with their demands. The mobile alters his sidewalk business in ways that have neither precedent nor parallel in the First World.

To have a mobile, you do not need to first own a landline, or even have a fixed home or place of work. You can live in a shanty, and work as a day laborer and carry a mobile in your pocket. It is cheap and it enables connectivity to a vast echelon of the Third World poor. It is no wonder that after ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan, First-World companies began plopping down cell phone towers and largely abandoned the landline fledgling infrastructure altogether. In Bangladesh, Grameen Bank has expanded its micro-lending empire to include Grameen Village Phone, which has been building towers across the flood-prone delta. Grameen Village Phone also grants loans to village women to buy cell phones and operate businesses where locals use the phone for a fee. The mobile connects farmers and fishers to markets in unprecedented ways.

The case of the mobile phone illustrates Marx’s point about how being contemporaneous with a technologically-innovative space can help ‘primitive’ spaces prosper. There is no logical reason why these farmers and firshers should have to become factory workers, or be discharged upon cities to join the vast lumpenproletariat in the name of progress.

To return to Russian commune, Marx’s primary concern is with its survival. “Life is the first requirement for development,” Marx writes, and thus the first concern is to rescue the “the life of the rural commune (that) is in peril.” The capitalist evolution of Russia, which would begin with the expropriation of peasant land, would prepare the masses for a catastrophe. The evolution toward socialism in Russia, he memorably writes, should ensure that it “does not begin with its own suicide”.

Writing to Zasulich, Marx even reevaluates his earlier view of colonialism in India. There is nothing to suggest that communal ownership should lead to private ownership anywhere outside Western Europe. In India, he says, “the suppression of communal land ownership was nothing but an act of English vandalism which drove the indigenous population backward rather than forward.” The colonial attempts to create English-style capitalist farming in India “only managed to spoil indigenous agriculture and to swell the number and intensity of famines.”

“What threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability nor a theory,” Marx concludes in his Second Draft, “it is state oppression and exploitation by capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants’ expense.” Those words have a particular resonance following the events in Nandigram.

If nation-states are in a race to the bottom in a bid to attract multinational capital, states within nation-states like India are also in a race between themselves. In order to attract investment away from other Indian states, the West Bengal government – like any government – had to provide incentives that would outweigh the advantages that Tata would enjoy in a state with fewer political and legal obstacles to doing business. The premise behind this is twofold, one that all states are engaged in the same neoliberal developmental model, that we are indeed at the end of history where all other possibilities are foreclosed. Second, even within that paradigm it assumes what Adam Smith would not have done, which is that states do not enjoy a comparative advantage in certain sectors over others. In other words, if A has a better educated workforce and higher wages, it can still compete with B which has cheap unschooled workers by attracting, say, white collar jobs, against B’s blue collar industries.

In today’s paradigm where states must industrialize at all costs – even states which have effectively deindustrialized like Bengal – to oppose such unimaginative policies is to be against progress, and thus against the assumed greater interests of society as a whole. In the last 30 years, in city and countryside, the CPM built its power base by championing the rights of informal groups – refugees, slum dwellers, squatters, day laborers, sharecroppers – by formalizing their status, in turn, making them party loyalists. Today, SEZs symbolize a broader shift in the CPM’s betrayal of those groups whose status is now threatened. The party which empowered peasants against landlords is displacing them on behalf of corporations. It is the totalizing logic of industrial progress which creates politics where a state squanders public funds to subsidize corporate interests, and a party alienates its own voters, for the promise of jobs which have not been created. Yet as Marx wrote to Vera Zasulich, the development of any society cannot begin with its own suicide.

The First Draft of Marx’s Letter to Vera Zasulich is available at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm

Teodor Shanin, ed. Late Marx and the Russian road : Marx and “the peripheries of capitalism”, London: Routledge, 1983, pp 98-99.

Ibid, pp. 123-124.

Third Draft, Ibid, p. 106

Ibid p.103.

http://www.grameenfoundation.org/what_we_do/technology_programs/village_phone/

Ibid p.114

Ibid p. 112

Ibid. p 119

Ibid. p.121

Ibid, pp. 104-105.

Chinese Policies Versus Indian Voters: Communist Rule in West Bengal

The Indian state of West Bengal has the longest elected Communist rule anywhere in the world. For the last 32 years, the state has been governed by a Left-Front government headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. The CPM is unique in being a ruling Communist Party that contests not only elections (unlike Castro or Kim Jong Il), but despite all the defeats of Communists abroad since the fall of the Berlin wall, its dominance at the polls has been unaffected.

By most accounts, West Bengal is a model for the empowerment of sharecroppers and middle peasants. After coming to power in 1977, CPM was at the forefront of registering sharecroppers on government rolls, enforcing national laws regarding the limits on land holdings, the redistribution of fallow land, the limits on the share of a yield which would go to landlords, and the tenancy rights of the landless tillers. It has also devolved power to the local village councils (panchayats) as a conduit for funding social programs more than any other Indian state. In the last three decades, the CPM has thus built a massive patronage system among sharecroppers and middle peasants in rural Bengal. Its organized and disciplined rural party machinery has delivered the party handsome victories in consecutive elections making West Bengal, as the media often has dubbed it, an impregnable Red Fortress.

The cities, particularly urban industry, has suffered in these same years. Prior to CPM rule, West Bengal was the most industrialized state in the India. In the past three decades, industries have shut down and shipped out, leaving a veritable rust belt on the Ganges. There are several structural reasons for the industrial decline, but the Communists are generally held responsible for the decline by promoting militant trade-unionism, increasing bureaucratic red tape and generally being hostile to capital.

In place of an urban industrial working class, the CPM’s strategy in the cities has been to build a patronage base through expanding government employment and provide security through the local party organization to those without legal protection in the vast informal sector. In fact, much of its labor organizing has focused on (blue and white collar) government employees, and unionizing informal sectors such as rickshaw drivers and slum tenants.

In the late 1990s, with no more USSR, and India’s central government no longer running a mixed, partly command economy, the CPM began looking to China for inspiration. A New Communism was introduced – a Chinese-style blend of neoliberal policies and Marxist rhetoric – aimed at attracting capital and building up industry. In a liberalized India with a rising middle class floating in a sea of new consumer goods, the prospect of large capital inflows into Bengal made the ruling party popular among its traditional foes, the urban bourgeoisie.

China’s SEZs

In the late 1970s as China liberalized aspects of its command economy in order to speed up modernization, it also initiated a model of concessions called Special Economic Zones (SEZ). A Special Economic Zone is an area where legal regulations and taxation on industries are suspended in the interest of promoting industrial growth. In the Chinese model, these zones were a way to contain the Communist state’s experiment with private capital spatially so it would not contaminate the state’s command economy. SEZs originally emerged at the local and provincial levels in southeastern China, as local officials tried to work out how to govern (or not govern) areas owned and operated by export-oriented firms aimed at the (then foreign) Hong Kong market. An arrangement of exceptions evolved into policy at the central government level, and was embraced by the reformist premier, Deng Xiaoping. Deng introduced SEZs as zones with large territories and populations governed by their own set of laws and authority, to be specifically geared toward attracting foreign investment in a variety of industrial sectors.

In 1980, Deng Xiaoping introduced two SEZs, Shenzhen near Hong Kong and Zhuhai near Macao. Since then a handful of new SEZs have been started, but Shenzhen remains the most successful, the flagship of the Chinese experiment in capitalism by quarantine. In 1980, Shenzhen was a town reliant on fishing and farming. For Deng it was a blank slate, blessed with a geographical proximity to Hong Kong’s fortunes. Uncontaminated by an urban or politicized past, Shenzhen would serve as a Petri dish for capitalism in the Communist state. Deng’s approach was simple: build infrastructure, attract foreign investment and lure migrant labor. In two and a half decades, the region has grown from a scattered population of 300,000 to a fenced city of 10 million. The G.D.P of the S.E.Z has grown at 30 percent a year. In that time, the S.E.Z has indeed been a Petri dish where the Chinese have tested various policy reforms, of which over 200 have been adopted in the mainland.

Shenzhen is separated from the rest of China by a chain-link fence, ten feet high, and 67 miles long. In order to enter Shenzhen Chinese citizens have to carry a work permit, a temporary resident pass, and a border pass with the approval of their home province. Shenzhen represents unprecedented opportunities to provincial Chinese youth – most of the workers are women and the average age is 29 – but the suspension of many modes of law and bureaucracy that makes it so dynamic also makes the city dangerous. Unions do not operate; labor and industrial safety regulations do not apply. The police and legal system are almost nonexistent. Workers are basically at the mercy of their bosses who are generally Taiwanese or Hong Kong industrialists. As one worker said, “Here it is not the government but the bosses who control everything. Perhaps it is the same thing.”

China today is not a country of two systems (the motto of its reunification with Hong Kong) but many. The political landscape, writes Aihwa Ong, is one of “graduated sovereignty,” with sovereign powers varying from zone to zone. S.E.Zs are only the most extreme version of zones of exception that exist in the People’s Republic. Macau and Hong Kong are designated Special Administrative Regions, while Shenzhen and four other cities are S.E.Zs. Other distinct zones include the 14 Open Coastal Cities, 5 Open Coastal Belts, as well as nearly 100 smaller technology and tourist zones in the hinterland. Ong argues that China represents only the most audacious version of a new form of sovereignty in strong states – irrespective of whether they have democratic or authoritarian governments – found all over East and South-east Asia. These states remain strong in that they have active bureaucracies that retain control over territory and populations. But in order to accommodate global capital, their “developmental decisions favor the fragmentation of the national space into various noncontiguous zones,” writes Ong, “and promote the differential regulation of populations who can be connected to, or disconnected from global circuits of capital.”

This fragmentation of national space and national population means that laws and governmental authority are exercised differently in different spaces. Groups within different zones enjoy divergent forms of legal protections and governmental interventions and are thus exposed to divergent forms of risk. In aspiring to pool the risks of the nation, the developmental bureaucratic state viewed the national economy as the target for state action. Its ‘post-developmental’ avatar has a dispersed strategy that does not treat the national population as the object of uniform protection from risks; it also no longer views its national territory as the object of uniform political control.

Much of the economic growth in China in the last two decades has been spurred by its SEZs, and copied in poor countries throughout South-east Asia, the former U.S.S.R, and parts of Latin America. In 2005, India, which fancies itself as China’s rival for Asian superpower status, initiated its own program of SEZs. From the 1960s, India had experimented with such enclaves in the form of what were called “Export Processing Zones” (or E.P.Zs). However, these zones, located far from business centers (with the idea of developing backward regions) failed to attract significant investment. In 2005 the Indian government passed the S.E.Z Act, authorizing states to set aside space for private companies to build factories, mines, luxury housing and sports complexes. Over 500 SEZs have been approved by the central government. They are scattered across most of India’s 29 states, totaling nearly 62,590 hectares (or 625 sq. km). 250 SEZs have already begun to set up operations.

An Indian SEZ is a territorial enclave which is treated like a foreign territory as regards trade relations. Industries there are exempt from any Central Act, environmental regimes, state regulatory commissions, or customs checks for imports and exports. S.E.Z industries pay no income tax, sales tax, service tax, or excise or customs duties for imports and exports. Workers do have the right to unionize (unlike in Chinese SEZs) but the range of labor protections offered is more limited than in India’s formal industrial sector. Employers in S.E.Zs are also free to rely on short-term workers, sub-contract labor, and can ‘hire and fire’ at will. The Indian Finance Minister, P Chidambaran, who opposes SEZs for fiscal reasons, estimates that Rs 1000 billion (or over $200 billion) will be lost over the next four years due to tax and duty exemptions. Moreover, in the process of setting up S.E.Zs, the state uses its powers of eminent domain to seize land at market rates, and then sells that land to private companies at a reduced cost. Therefore the exchequer loses funds by buying land at market rates and selling it at below-market rates.

The policy’s proponents in the Indian state believe it will spur job growth (an estimated three million, according to the Commerce Department), raise the GDP growth rate to double digits by 2010 and increase exports five-fold (to $515 billion) by 2015. In the race to be Asia’s superpower, S.E.Zs will be India’s ticket to catch up to China.

The most questionable of these projections concerns employment. The government has no criteria for judging how much increased employment S.E.Zs will generate. According to Walter Fernandes, an expert on displacement by development projects, S.E.Zs will create 500,000 jobs and will take away work from 800,000 people. The jobs which will be created will cost the Indian state Rs 1000 billion, or over Rs 2 million per job.

Moreover, of the 250 S.E.Zs already underway, more than half are in the information technology (IT) sector, which largely employs high-skill workers. For semi-skilled and unskilled labor, the promise of S.E.Zs is largely through a multiplier effect. In other words, a heavily mechanized computer manufacturer may only employ a small number of people, but S.E.Zs are expected to generate many more jobs, both farther down the supply chain, and among services which will be required to support the industrial sector. In other words, while a factory may only hire 500 workers, another 500 will find jobs to supply its raw material, or run tea stalls for its workers. While the suppliers may operate in the formal sector, many of the service jobs which are expected to be generated will expand India’s dominant informal sector. In essence the multiplier effect, if it comes to pass, will rest on the expansion of a quasi-urban informal sector around an S.E.Z.

Meanwhile millions of Indians will be displaced from their homes and/or lose their livelihoods as a result of S.E.Zs. “This is liable to be one of the largest land grabs in modern Indian history,” writes the historian Sumit Sarkar, “India has never before witnessed the transfer of hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land to private industry. Nor probably has any other developing country.”

Since 2006, the move to grab land for S.E.Zs has been punctuated by state violence. On January 2, 2006, 16 tribal protesters were killed by a special police force deployed to fence and protect land acquired by the state of Orissa for Tata Steel. In July 2006, farmers in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh (located 40 km from the capital, New Delhi) clashed with police over a 2,500 acre S.E.Z to be handed over to the Indian conglomerate, Reliance.

SEZs in West Bengal

In mid-2006, the C.P.M signed a deal with the Indonesian multinational Salim Group to hand over 10,000 acres to establish a chemical hub in Nandigram, a stronghold of the CPM and its ruling ally, the Communist Party of India (C.P.I), about 45 miles south-west of Calcutta. The party had encountered challenges from the nominal opposition party, the Trinamul Congress, when it took land for an auto plant by the Indian conglomerate Tata, in Singur earlier that year.

November 2006: The Left Front partners won a landslide 235 of the 294 seats in the West Bengal state Assembly, with the CPM alone taking 176 seats. The Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya declared soon after the win: “This victory is a clear mandate of our move to industrialize West Bengal. Industrialization is not my own policy. It is the policy of my party and the Left Front government as a whole.” The whitewash in the November elections emboldened the CPM. On its home turf in Nandigram, its Party cadres would enforce the writ of their Chief Minister through a mix of fear and persuasion.

November 30, 2006: As the Singur case garnered national attention, the West Bengal government established “Section 144”, a statute that forbids the assembly of 5 persons or more, thus making political assemblies illegal. Unable to hold rallies in Singur, Mamata Banerjee – the populist leader of the nominal opposition party, the Trinamul Congress – went on a hunger strike. She refused to eat until the project was abandoned. Ultimately, the strike was called off at the request of the President of India.

December 2, 2006: A night of violence broke out as police clashed with Committee activists in an attempt to take over the land for SEZ use. The clashes were televised by some of the 24-hour Bengali news channels. By morning, the land was taken and fenced by police while several hundred locals, mostly members of the CPM machinery were hired as private security to guard the property.

December 18, 2006: 16 year old Tapasi Malik, the daughter of an anti-SEZ activist was dragged into the fenced off area, and burned to death.

January 21, 2007: Despite more protests and clashes between police and local activists, Tata ceremonially initiated work on its newly acquired Singur site.

January, 2007: As Tata was moving in to Singur, a resistance committee in Nandigram – the Bhumi Ucched Protirodh Committtee (Committee to Protest Eviction from the Land) – had not only cast out local CPM cadre from several villages, but also dug up roads and bridges to prevent police and civil administration from entry. The Committee had political backing from Trinamul, the Maoists and various smaller parties. In Bengal, where all conflicts are cast in terms of opposing electoral parties, the existence of an umbrella group with such disparate loyalties was politically unprecedented. Unlike in Singur, the Nandigram activists were not primarily political opponents of the CPM. Rather, as small farmers and sharecroppers, most had until recently been supporters of the CPM or its Left Front allies, the CPI. Unlike Singur, Nandigram had both the local elected representatives to the state assembly and the national Parliament who belonged to the Communist Party of India (CPI), a Left Front partner.

Buddha expressed confidence that his blend of deliberate democracy and party discipline would bring the peasants of Nandigram to realize that being displaced by a chemical plant was in their best interest. But the SEZ issue had forced Nandigram’s voters to choose between their livelihoods and homes on one hand, and the party that protected them for three decades on the other. What united the activists was not political affiliation or ideology but a fight for their lives. “We will give up our lives but not our land”, ran the slogan.

For two months, the siege continued. with police and armed Party cadres on one side, and the Committee on the other. Less than 50 miles from the provincial capital, in the Committee-run villages of Nandigram the state had ceased to exist. The CPM’s famed powers to discipline and punish its members no longer worked.

March 14, 2006: The peasants of Nandigram fought the attempt by the state to sell off sovereignty to Salim by declaring their own sovereignty. This could only end one way: state violence. On March 14, police fired on unarmed peasants in Nandigram as they forced their way into the villages wrested from state control. Police were brought in from neighboring districts and precincts – thousands descended upon Nandigram this morning. They were accompanied by armed CPM cadre, some of them in dressed police uniform. First the police used megaphones to announce their intent and tried to march in. Then they fired tear gas which blew back toward the officers. Then they shot straight at the crowd. Official figures place the number of dead at 14, another 100 injured.

24 hour Bengali news channels repeated endless footage of the massacre, and the victims in the hospital. Images of such naked state violence were unprecedented. They shocked even the urban middle class and brought out its influential largely, Leftist intellectual class to the streets. For the first time in decades, it emboldened a partisan opposition too. In the following months, as the low-level violence and reprisals continued in Nandigram, the nominal opposition party, the Trinamul Congress, was able to reopen the Singur issue where the Tata auto factory was already being built. Faced with rising opposition, the Tatas decided to abandon Singur, and relocate to the western Indian state of Gujarat, where the world’s cheapest car, the “Nano,” is rolling off the assembly line this fall.

May 2009: The Parliamentary elections to elect the national government took place this summer. There are 42 MPs from West Bengal. In the last election in 2004, Trinamul had won only one seat against the CPM’s 26. The rest were mostly won by Left Front allies. This time, the entire election pivoted on Singur and Nandigram. Trinamul won 19 seats, the CPM only 9. In a huge upset, the CPM won fewer seats than it ever had in its history. The state elections are only two years away, but after 32 years in power, the Communists suddenly looks like lame ducks.

In the last 30 years, in city and countryside, the CPM built its power base by championing the rights of informal groups – refugees, slum dwellers, squatters, day laborers, sharecroppers. By formalizing their status, the party made them party loyalists. Today, SEZs symbolize the party’s abandonment of those groups, leaving them exposed to the risks posed by both the state’s legal regimes and the dominance of organized capital. Sharecroppers in Bengal, for instance, have voted reliably for the ruling party in exchange for formalized tenancy rights. Now the party which protected peasants against landlords is displacing them on behalf of corporations.

S.E.Zs represent a breakdown of patronage democracy, specifically the breakdown of the grassroots, cadre-based protection societies which provide security and dispense street justice at the local level. Once the market is imposed, and laws are created to legitimize the market (backed by the guns of the state), then patronage-style democracy cannot be sustained. Political parties can no longer provide a safety net in exchange for votes. The failure to protect large parts of the electorate from risks posed by state power and private capital not only renders masses of citizens superfluous. In West Bengal, unlike Deng’s China, rulers are elected and voters are politically mobilized. Breaking the moral economy of patronage profoundly delegitimizes political patrons whose power derives from the polls.

See Y.C. Jao and C.K. Leung eds., China’s Special Economic Zones (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985).

An excellent account of life in Shenzhen, see Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).

Hessler, Oracle Bones, 94.

Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 77.

Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry, “Background Note, Special Economic Zones in India.” http://sezindia.nic.in/HTMLS/about.htm

Lola Nayar, “Treasure Islands?,” Outlook, February 12, 2007.

Walter Fernandes, “Not a People’s State, West Bengal’s Poor Rehabilitation Record,” Times of India, December 13, 2006.

Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Special Economic Zones in India, http://sezindia.nic.in/HTMLS/SEZs_notified_under_SEZ_Act_2005.pdf

Quoted in Praful Bidwai, “India: Special Economic Zones, Path to Massive Land Grab,” Inter Press Agency. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34732

Politics-as-Crisis-Management: Violence in the Peruvian Amazon

“Vulnerability” refers to the lack of defenses against attacks or threats. In a political sense, vulnerability is counterpoised to the mechanisms of  – physical, social and economic – security provision by the state. The exclusion of violence as a means of conflict resolution, the system of fundamental human rights accompanied by civil-political liberties, and the creation of a social security system serve to protect citizens and communities from lethal conflict, arbitrary intrusions by public officials to individual and social life, the unpredictable shocks of the market, and the like. Vulnerability as such is not a pre- or un-political susceptibility to violence or material deprivation; rather, criteria of inclusion/exclusion, societal differentiation and stratification, order and conflict, are determined through political mechanisms that generate, legitimize and reproduce power relations in every society. Exclusion from legal-political status, i.e. citizenship, for instance, has led to the most troubling vulnerability of modern times – what Hannah Arendt calls the “right to have rights”. Arendt’s reading of the Interwar era as a precursor of the Holocaust demonstrates that revoking the right to participate in a political community (Rights of Citizen) nullifies even the most basic defenses of universal and inalienable human rights (Rights of Man).

While legal-political inclusion in a political community is indispensable to overcoming vulnerabilities, mere citizenship is by no means sufficient when individuals and communities lack meaningful access to their – legally recognized – rights, and political participation in conflict-resolution mechanisms. What the Amazonic peoples of Peru face today are precisely such a plurality of vulnerabilities in which the historic facts of socioeconomic deprivation, lack of effective access to national political processes and racist exclusion are combined with a new type of market-based defenselessness due to the extraction of natural resources by state-run and multinational companies – an increasing trend not only in Peru, but in the entire Western Amazon. (link to a topographic study of the oil and gas projects in the vast region) While this novel constellation of conflict dates back to 2004, when the-then President Alejandro Toledo decided to open indigenous lands of the Peruvian Amazon to oil/gas exploration and extraction, and logging. The following government of Alan Garcia adopted a more aggressive posture to carry out neoliberal policies, which met resistance by the native populations of the selva. The 57-day process of road blockades and strikes, accompanied by the government’s reluctance to initiate formal dialogue, resulted in violent clashes on June 5 and 6 in the community of Bagua, with cycles of attacks and counterattacks between the National Police and armed natives, which left a balance sheet of at least 22 policemen and many natives dead, and hundreds more injured, and claims of forced disappearances by security forces. Actual facts of violence are still hotly debated, as the official version does not match testimonial evidence and fotographic documentation collected by native groups, as well as by national and international NGOs and press. (For an excellent compilation of alternative versions of the incidents: a Spanish-language blog) In response, the government derogated the law proposals to ease the tension.

As the commentator Mirko Lauer notes, the latest violent incident attests to the failure of a conflict management strategy that the Peruvian state has long subscribed to: ignoring popular demands unless national and international media pay attention, and if they do (which almost always requires sensational spectacles of violence and interruption of economic activity), “satisficing” demands in lengthy processes of negotiation and concession. In fact, there is no justifiable explanation for why the state chose not to initiate dialogue with the Amazon peoples for two months – by the way, consulting indigenous populations over the use of their lands is not a mere practical requirement, but a right safeguarded by international agreements ratified by the Peruvian state. It seems that the government was expecting to end the social protest with police action, but the native people proved much better organized and armed than expected – which explains the high number of police casualties. While the violence deserves absolute moral and legal condemnation, from a political perspective, however, the question remains: why was the State unable to resolve the conflict for two months (if not many years) before the violent turn of events?

The discourse before, during and after the Bagua violence sheds light into the nature of exclusion suffered by the native communities. The classic racist discourse pictures these people as “savages” with no appreciation of economic development, a disposition for violence and an unpatriotic land-ownership discourse at the expense of the rest of Peru.

"Development"

While the “historical exclusion” leg of the vulnerability is constituted through racism, the natives face a second form of exclusion, one whose origins lie in the Cold War national security doctrines and whose contemporary form was shaped by post-9/11 trends: the protesters constitute a threat to national security. The criminalization of social protest goes hand-in-hand with the de-legitimizing of natives as agents of subversive foreign interests – not surprisingly, Venezuela and Bolivia are the privileged objects of demonization. The natives are savage enemies of technology, yet they use the most advanced communications technologies to humiliate Peru before the international public; they are remote, self-isolated pre-Hispanic cultures, yet they collaborate with Chavez and Morales in an international conspiracy; they have a primitive way of understanding economic development, yet they have the capacity to obstruct economic activity in the fastest-growing Latin American nation in the last fifteen years. The simultaneous adoption of centuries-old fears and the modern national security discourse seeks to achieve discursive exclusion by hegemonizing the entire ideological universe of meanings available to the national public.

Exclusion requires much more than discursive tools, of course. Laws, despite their capacity to resolve conflicts in other settings, have served as a weapon of vulnerability against vast sectors of the Peruvian population. The criminalization of social protest is achieved through laws sanctioning terrorism and sedition. The political economy of exclusion is likewise the consequence of legal developments: the Constitution of 1993, prepared and ratified during the first year of the Fujimori dictatorship, removes the inalienability of the Peruvian soil. The Free Trade Agreements between Peru and other states (chiefly the USA) generates pressures for the adoption of laws and regulations that facilitate the commercialization of land, while the Peruvian state has been unable to liberalize its land regime, mostly due to the resistance of the Amazonic communities and their national and international allies. The Garcia administration failed to pass two land liberalization laws in 2008, which led to the current (again failed) attempts to pass similar legislation. (For a legal analysis of the ongoing crisis over the Amazon lands, see the study by Instituto de Defensa Legal, in Spanish)

The ensuing political stalemate can be understood as two simultaneous paradoxes:

(1) the particular interests of a local, criollo economic/political elite, combined with the interests of multinationals, are presented as the universal interests of the entire Peruvian society. National security and economic developmentalism, two pillars of national legal normativity and media discourse, conceal the naked profit motive devoid of social responsibility, the erasure of regional or national boundaries, and the distributive limitations of neoliberal economic growth.

(2) The absence of legality, or even sheer police control, in vast areas of the Peruvian selva, generates a new regime of sovereignty in which politics is understood as a series of crisis management techniques rather than a territorial legal order aimed at justice, freedom and security. The state finds legitimation in no longer invoking its traditional source of legitimacy. Ensuring economic activity at an acceptable social cost is the test for ensuring popular consent. While the continued economic growth seems to support this model of politics-as-crisis-management, the “social cost” in Bagua – in the form of countless dead, disappeared and injured – will definitely challenge the current administration, if not the legitimation model as such.

The neoliberal model of politics-as-crisis-management by no means excludes violence as an abnormality, aberration or externality in a political society; violence is internalized as a social cost. Since sociohistorical discriminatory exclusion denies any meaningful access to political claim-making, social protest in the periphery of the nation has effectively no outlet but sensational, scandalizing displays of violence, until the disturbances threaten economic activity and the image of the government to the point that the imperatives of crisis-management necessitate a temporary and limited instance of dialogue between protesters and government. Then, there shall be no violence until the next wave of violence!

To finish, I believe that the defense of people’s rights should discard violence as a political means, and should focus on creating networks across local, national and transnational actors to ensure access to national and international judicial remedies. I fear that the depiction of native peoples as freedom-fighters with a spirit of “fierce independence”, however benevolent it may be, reproduces racial stereotypes, fails to appreciate the complexity of contemporary social protest, facilitates the criminalization of legitimate demands, and provokes the death of innocents – civilians and security forces alike. As for indigenous lands, there is an emerging normative framework: several domestic laws and regulations, such as the Regulation of Citizen Participation for the Realization of Hydrocarbon Activities (2008), the  ILO Convention (No. 169) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (1989),, Article 10 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and Interamerican Court of Human Rights decisions establish beyond doubt that there is a process of norm-creation that will establish the “informed consent” of indigenous populations as the precondition of economic activity on indigenous land. Environmental protection, another emerging legal field, has already resulted in a major lawsuit, when the representatives of Peru’s Achuar people sued the California-based Occidental Petroleum for violation of industrial standards and contamination of waters in a US court – the latest available online news shows that the lawsuit is undergoing a process of appeal, following an early dismissal. In countries like Peru, where a certain percentage of the population even lacks an ID card, activists and politicians should focus on inclusion, that is to say, encouraging the “right to have rights”, and meaningful access to legal mechanisms to stop violence, seek justice and resolve conflicts.