Abhimanyu
Repeated
cases of gruesome physical attacks on women have send shock waves
across the whole of society and has elicited varied responses from
different spheres. The mass media, both print and visual, has been
working overtime to present 'facts, analysis and solutions'; they
have taken up the mantle of the mourners and the judges and are
telling the public, in a suggestive way of course, what is to be done
to arrest this rising trend of violence. Public figures and political
leaders are also doing their bit in terms of 'analysis and
solutions'. What I want to do here is something very old fashioned. I
want to take a look at some of these typical reactions from a 'class'
perspective and to see whether something is hidden inside this veil
of emotional outbursts and moral indignations; whether the various
'plans' put forward by public figures, intelligentsia and mass media,
beaming of good intent as they are, are as innocent as they want us
to believe they are. Any such effort should be backed by the study of
a broad spectrum of reactions to events which were highlighted by the
media and the silences which marked those which the mainstream media
deemed unimportant to follow consistently (This 'selective
highlighting' being in itself a political act). As a first step, let
me take three reactions, which I think are representative, and try to
uncover the class interests which they represent.
1
The first one is the reaction from the fundamental
religious elements [1] which is the most straight forward and sincere
among the three; in it there is no conscious effort to mask the real
interests behind the stand. It says as much as it means. The argument
here is simple. The blame is squarely on women who have dared to step
outside their 'given and proper' realm of action which is the dark
corridors of their home and on the liberal social environment which
make this 'sin' possible and desirable. The solution has a simplicity
which often characterises profoundly wrong stands. Women should go
back to their God given caves, should stop giving ears to all talks
of 'liberation' and such nonsense and should try to do well in their
'proper' job – to keep their husband (the religiously endorsed one)
happy, to bear and to rear his children. In trying to liberate
themselves and flaunting their body, they arouse the desire of men
which is the root cause of all the trouble. This has to be
accompanied by social changes aimed to restore the long forgotten
moral and ethical life, the basis of which is being destroyed
everyday. In spite of these changes, if any woman is still in any
danger of being ill-treated, she can give a live counselling session
to the men trying to do so about she being their
sister and can beg for mercy which will surely persuade them to drop
their vile plans. Thus shall the problem be solved. Our well bred
liberals and their friends in arms, the media pundits and the
columnist intellectuals, laugh at and ridicule these pronouncements
and rightly so. But they never analyse them because any worthy
analysis will instantly reveal truths which they will not enjoy,
namely, the striking similarity of it to their own pronouncements and
solutions once we strip away fancy words. We shall come to that
later.
This
reaction clearly identifies the central cause of all the trouble as
capitalism, with all the cultural and social changes that it brings
which breaks the 'calm, serene, self-dependent' nature of the
traditional life forms. But we have known right from 'Communist
Manifesto' itself that all that is anti-capitalist is not
progressive. This type of analysis and solutions come from the
adherents of a social phenomenon (institutionalised religion) which
has as its base patriarchy and feudalism. It is out and out
reactionary because of its affinity to feudalism and its refusal to
accept the revolutionary potential of bourgeoisie and in its attempt to reverse the march of history.
Marx and Engels talks about the reactionary nature of such feudalist
attacks on capitalism and the support afforded for this by religious
elements in the 'Manifesto':
“In
this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half
an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its
bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the
very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through
total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.....
In political practice,
therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working
class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they
stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry,
and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool,
beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits..... As the parson has ever gone
hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal
Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian
asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against
private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not
preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and
mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church?
Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat”.
The same reasons compel
our religious ideologists to campaign for feudal state of affairs and
'traditional' morality in family and society, to sound the war cry
against the culture of the bourgeoisie while at the same time to side
with capital in political and economic spheres for squashing
revolutionary activity [2]. Such
ultra conservative trends are easy to detect when they reveal
themselves as they did after the Delhi tragedy by blaming women and
their dressing. But there are more trickier versions of this movement
which are more subtle and veiled; the feudal nature of their
anti-capitalism is hidden behind a heavy layer of seemingly socialist
rhetoric which makes them very dangerous corruptors. All such attacks
against capitalism from the point of view of feudalism and with the
aim of reversing history has to be dismissed as utopian and
reactionary. Engels states this case very clearly in 'The Principles of Communism':
“(they
are) adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already
been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry
and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category
concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and
patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such
evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to
this end. This
category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming
partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the
proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the
communists..... As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and
communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colours by
immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the
proletarians”.
The Marxist lesson of the
revolutionary nature of capitalism has to be fully assimilated to
defend these types of movements; capitalism has helped man outgrow
feudalism and its state form, the monarchy, and has released the
productive capacities of humans and in the process have given rise to
its own nemesis – the proletariat. It has also shattered the
conditions which fostered patriarchy and has released women from
their home bound misery. In depicting this release and the freedom
that it gave women as the reason for the current problem, the
feudalists are trying vainly to pull back time and to mystify the
whole issue. The root cause of this issue is, of course, to be sort in
the interstices of capitalist decay; but it can be uncovered only by
a proletarian critique using revolutionary Marxism.
2
Another typical reaction
is that of the media, both print and visual; not the opinions voiced
by others through media, but its official reaction given through
editorials or editorial programmes. As an example, a representative
one I think, we shall look at the Mathrubhumi
editorial
on the attack on the malayali medical student in Mangalore. The
highlights of this editorial are:
- that this is an administrative/policing issue. A lion share of the article talks about the insufficiency of the efforts of the administration and the police in providing adequate security to women, about the need to catch the culprits and to make sure they get maximum sentence, the need not only for reforms in law but also improvements in the performance of the police and the prosecutors to make sure that new laws are utilised. It declares that such heinous acts will be eliminated 'to an extent' if it turns out that these crimes shall invite severe punishments. So, the essential point that the editorial wants to make is that this is primarily a policing/ law and order issue which can be reduced and eliminated by planned and severe policing measures and humane treatment towards victims.
- Apart from the role of the police and the law, the edit also wants to highlight the role that 'women liberation groups and other social movements' can play in this. It also puts forward the 'revolutionary' idea that active social intervention is needed to force those in power to give prominent importance to womens' security and well being and remind us that it was strong public pressure that forced the government into action following the Delhi episode.
- Then it fires a salvo at the type of reactions emanating from the groups mentioned in 1 above by saying that the attitude of some sections of Indian society are actually dangerous and social movements should be on their guard against them.
Is
there anything wrong with these points?, can any sane person be
against the measures that they propose?, isn't it important to make
the policing more efficient, to beef up security and to make the law
more stringent?. Shouldn't there be social intervention?, shouldn't the chauvinistic reactions be exposed and dismissed?. The answer for all
these questions is YES; the problem is not in saying that all these
things should be
done, but in maintaining that only these need
to be done. The official media reaction is that these deeds are done
by 'bad' men which essentially makes this a policing issue which can
be tackled by ensuring strict rule of the law, tightening security and
vigilance from social movements. In doing so they consciously blot
out the social, political and economic aspects of this worrying
trend. They do not want us to look at this issue in its totality;
they would like us to divorce these crimes from its social and
economic context and to view them just as particular 'events' brought
about by the madness of 'vile men'. It is not surprising that the
media is advertising such a course of analysis and these type of
editorials give us clear indications of the class affiliations of
modern media. The dread of totality and the enthusiasm shown to break
down reality into small chunks before analysing each chunk as if they
had nothing to do with the rest is the speciality of a class: the
bourgeoisie. It has nothing to do with the lack of ability of the
individual bourgeois to comprehend totality; it springs from the fact
that such radical analysis will unravel truths which will put the
existence of this class itself in jeopardy. Any analysis based on
totality will have to, sooner or later, consider the fact that we are
living in a capitalist society and will have to pose the question
whether these trends points towards structural flaws in capitalist
edifice. Even such a question about the structural basis of
capitalism is in itself anathema to the bourgeoisie.
But
objection may be raised against my contention that the unwillingness
shown by the media to place these atrocities in their social context
and to analyse it in its totality lays bare the crass bourgeois
affiliation of the media contrary to their 'democratic' and 'for the
common man' rhetoric. One may pose the question whether it is 'really
necessary' to invoke complicated concepts like 'totality' to analyse
such 'straight forward and evident' things like attack on women,
whether this will not 'complicate' matters and make decisive action
impossible, maybe the media think tank views an analysis based on
capitalist totality to be unnecessary here. Let me deal with the 'totality-as-unnecessary' view
first before going on.
Let
us look at a hypothetical situation: let us for a moment assume that
what is now happening in our country, repeated attacks on women in
public places, alarmingly rising cases of sexual violence on even
small girls, daily occurrence of sexual scandals of one form or the
other, a situation of sexual paranoia in general, occurs in a
communist country like the erstwhile Soviet Union or Cuba or North
Korea or in an Islamic country like Iran, the corporate media would
be the first to proclaim that this rising trend has definite roots in
the nature of the society. They would surely run a series of articles
'studying' the causes of this trend and would link it to the various
types of 'draconian repressions' that the ruling regime is following
without any consideration to 'human rights' and the emotional needs
of the population. They would proclaim that these attacks are the
reactions of a repressed population and the only way out will be for
the ruling ideology to be replaced. Whenever such things happen in
societies which are ruled by ideologically motivated movements,
either conservative or revolutionary, the bourgeoisie is always eager
to connect particular instances to the social totality and to try and
expose the systemic problems, but when the bourgeoisie is the one who
rules, this is never done. They would like us to believe that the bourgeois rule is not 'ideologically' motivated nor is it
'repressive'; it is based on total freedom and healthy competition.
This myth of 'freedom' that the capitalist ideological apparatus
creates and propagates gives them the luxury of passing off worrying
trends in the society as mere particular instances and to create a
sensation of 'non-necessity' of seeing them in their totality. So, it
is evident that, the dread of an analysis leading to the systemic
roots of the matter which is so evident in the editorial quoted above
comes from the fear that it will unearth the contradictions of
capitalism and threaten the bourgeois rule and not from any naive
sense of 'simplicity' of the issue. The corporate media is being true
to its class origins here by adhering to the 'isolating' and
'fragmenting' method in the guise of neutrality which is the essence
of every bourgeois and revisionist analysis. Revolutionary Marxism's
primary duty is to counter this vulgarity with a proper dialectical
analysis based on totality.
3
Now, lets take a look at the article written by N.
E. Sudheer in Mathrubhumi. The title of the article is promising
as it seems to acknowledge the role of social reality in explaining
and curbing these attacks and thus to go beyond the bourgeois
paradigms set by the corporate media. He begins by asserting that in spite of the fact that repeated attacks against women in public
spaces have initiated discussions and investigations on various
dimensions of this problem and have gained huge media coverage, there
seems to be no visible lull in this worrying trend. And this is
because these investigations have not been able to 'go to the root of
the matter', according to Sudheer. Very promising indeed; the author
seems to be following Marx himself who asserted that “To be a
radical is to go to the root of the matter....”. Let us proceed to
see how he intend to go to the 'root' of this matter. The first step
in this is, according to Sudheer, to understand the social reality in
which we are living which is characterised by gross inequalities in
distribution of wealth and opportunities. He bemoans the state of
affairs which produces the Ambanis and the slum dwellers and the gulf
that separates them; the very fact that they live in the same city in
plain view of each other produces anger and frustration among the
poor. The situation is worsened with the growth of a corporate
culture based on sexual anarchy which is accessible to the rich and
to a certain extent to the middle class too; the poor majority is
left out here too and is forced to be mere onlookers. A culture of
'animal desire' that corporate capitalism fosters and which
perforates every pore of modern cities produces immense sexual
desires in an average Indian which he/she finds non-realisable due to
their economic condition. It is this culture of sexual anarchy and
unrealised desires that is the prime cause for the worrying situation
now, according to Sudheer, and this is why the perpetrators of such
crimes are almost always the urban poor. He reminds us that the real
accused in all these crimes is the society itself which carries
within it such colossal inequalities.
It
seems that Sudheer is indeed leading us to the 'root of the matter'.
He has completely demolished the corporate bourgeois myth that this
is a mere policing issue which can be solved by strict rule of the
law and with some assistance from NGO counsellors. He has located
'social reality' as the prime cause with its inequalities and its
culture of desire inaugurated by the capitalist mode of growth. A
good start indeed, let us hope he will take us further down the
interstices of the capitalist edifice to try and locate the root of
the problem in the capitalist mode of production. Let us also hope
that he will, based on his 'root' analysis, put forward a
revolutionary solution. But no, his analysis suddenly breaks off at
this point and he abruptly closes the article with his
'revolutionary' solution in three sentences which runs as follows. As
we know from our analysis that it is the society which produces the
prey and the predator in this issue, we should be careful in avoiding
these pitfalls and should guard against them. Parents should bring up
their children 'properly' so that they are shielded from such
effects; they should see to it that they don't turn into either preys
or predators. We have to first understand, with our 'eyes, ears and
brains' the peculiarities of the society in which we live and have to
organise our lives accordingly. And then comes the closing salvo :
“Nilavilulla samoohathil jeevikkanayi nammude kuttikale
paakappeduthanam. Ee shikshanatheyanu rakshakarthruthvam ennathu
kondu udheshikkunnathu” (we have to train our children to live in
the social reality that we have today, this is the real meaning of
parenting). So that is the 'revolutionary' solution given by his
'root of the matter' analysis; train your children to adapt and live
safely in whatever society they find themselves in; the world shall
be saved by “Proper Parenting”.
Now let us apply this revolutionary solution to the to the 'root of
the problem' that Sudheer himself presented in the article by
forgetting, for the moment, the glaring deficiencies of his analysis
and see whether his 'proper parenting' solution can solve the
problem. Let us test it on the predators as he prescribes 'parenting'
as the solution to eliminate predators and preys. Sudheer himself
tells us, as we have seen, that the predators are drawn from the poor
and impoverished sections of the society rotting in slums and it is
economic and sexual inequality that is the main cause. So does
Sudheer have in mind a solution where men and women working for close
to 20 hours a day to earn their livelihood counsels their children to
'understand the society' and to 'respect the barriers' and gives them
moral lessons about the inappropriateness of trying to satisfy their
sexual urge by force? Even if some parent in the slums hears
Sudheer's great ideas and tries to follow them, will the young boys
and girls rotting in the slums hear them and decide to cast off all
their personal frustrations and rage to become 'model' citizens? The
author who began his article with hyperbolic claims about identifying
the root of the problem and proposing a solution has come up with one
which will make even the manorama weekly authors cringe with shame.
What prevents this 'root of the matter' analyst from coming up with
the obvious solution; if the problem lies in inequality in various
forms, lets eliminate inequality. Instead of this obvious and humane
solution, he comes up with an idea to preserve these inequalities and
to ensure that our children are not effected by it. So, should we
dismiss the solution as ridiculous and close the matter, no. We shall
investigate the class affiliation behind this article which begins to
unravel the social dimension behind the problem, touches on the
periphery and suddenly closes it with an ad-hoc solution giving us the
impression that it is afraid to go deeper. This is not a bourgeois
reaction as it acknowledges the need for an analysis based on total
social structure but is not proletarian either since it restricts
such an analysis to the periphery and draws the worst possible
reactionary lessons from them. This is a near perfect example of
petty bourgeois reaction.
We shall again refer back to the 'Manifesto' to make sense of this
interesting reaction.
“This
school of Socialism [the
petty bourgeois]
dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions
of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of
economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of
machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and
land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the
inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the
proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in
the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination
between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old
family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of
Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and
of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old
society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of
exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have
been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case,
it is both reactionary and Utopian.”
Now, we are in a position
to see through Sudheer's reaction. Petty bourgeois criticism is
capable of pointing out the systemic deficiencies and contradictions
inherent in the capitalist edifice (even though in a peripheral manner
when compared to the Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of
production) but draws reactionary and utopian conclusions from it. It
aims at the restoration of the 'good old times'. Sudheer shows us his
petty bourgeois affiliations when he presents the problem in terms of
social reality and as a by-product of capitalist excesses and then by
asserting that the solution is to equip our children to adapt rather
than to find ways of changing that reality. And in this context it is
very important to note than his solution encapsulates a return to the
family. This is not a coincidence as the 'Manifesto' so clearly
notes:
“Its [petty bourgeoisie's] last
words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in
agriculture.”
To the petty bourgeoisie, patriarchal family relations are sacred and a return to them is one
of its main aims. There are other places in the article where the
author laments the role of capitalist culture of desires in making
cracks in the Indian family structure. So Sudheer wants to smuggle in
the idea of patriarchal family which he expertly hides inside high
sounding phrases and moral indignations on inequality, capitalist
production of desires and the like. Such petty bourgeois reactions
are more dangerous than the other two mentioned above as it comes
fully covered in peripheral anti-capitalist rhetoric. Revolutionary
Marxists and proletarians should be on their guard, armed with
Marxian theory, to spot, attack and dismiss such reactionary trends
and analysis.
A rather technical objection may be raised at this point. In the first two cases, we knew the author(s) of the reactions that we were considering and had clear indications about their material interests which made the location of their class affiliations easier. But in this case, the present author does not know N. E. Sudheer; he may be a feudal sympathiser or an out and out bourgeoisie or even a worker or an office holder of a worker's organisation. In that case, is it legitimate to arrive at the conclusion that he is petty bourgeois based on the article alone and without any further knowledge about the man? First, let me state that my contention is that the article is a petty bourgeois reaction as it puts forward a petty bourgeois ideology. Regarding the need to know the background of the author, let me quote Marx himself, this time from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”:
“Just as little must
one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all
shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to
their education and their individual position they may be as far
apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the
petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get
beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that
they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and
solutions to which material interest and social position drive the
latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the
political and literary representatives of a class and the class they
represent”.
This, I think, explains
the idea clear enough. It has great practical relevance at certain
real political situations a demonstration of which can be found in
Lenin's “Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic
revolution”.
4
We have seen the reactions of the feudal sympathisers, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie with regard to the problem
under consideration. So now the question is: what should be the
proletarian reaction?, what should be the reaction of a vanguard
party based on Marxism-Leninism? It is an important Leninist idea
that the vanguard party and its propaganda should trace back the
local manifestations of capitalism's failures to the systemic
contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production [3].
This is the only way to bring to the fore, in the eyes of the
proletarians, the inhumane nature of the bourgeois rule and to
augment their class consciousness. From the previous discussions, it
is very clear that these repeated attacks on women are not just a
policing issue, it has its roots on the very structure of
capitalistic growth model. It has also to be stressed that the way
out is not to go back to feudal antiquity or to accept the bourgeois
rule and to train our children to live in it. The prime duty of a
revolutionary Marxist or a vanguard party now is to make this
analysis which traces back the culture of sadistic attacks to the
roots of capitalist mode of production more deeper and concrete.
Millions of men and women around the country have come forward
spontaneously to express their rage over these attacks and the ruling
class' indifference towards them. Even when these protests poured out into the streets, the corporate media kept celebrating them as they knew that these naive and emotional outbursts never pose any challenge to the corporate bourgeois rule. They can be 'accommodated' easily within the liberal framework so much so that even Bollywood idiots found it safe to shout some slogans. Revolutionary Marxian analysis should be used to impress upon this spontaneous and naive mob
the fact that these attacks are the consequence of the excesses and
inequalities which capitalism breeds within it and the bourgeois
rulers, whoever they are and however sincere they are, are incapable
of solving this problem because they refuse to step out of the
coordinates of capitalist economy. The fact that Marxists and the
vanguard party are involved in bourgeois politics including the
liberal parliamentary apparatus should not deter us from exposing the
real face of liberal democracy which is only the logical political
expression of corporate capitalism [4]. The only permanent solution
for this problem and many like it is, to quote Lenin, “to smash the
capitalist state apparatus”. Marxist revolutionaries and the
vanguard party propaganda should bring this point home to the people,
especially the proletarians, and harness the revolutionary potential
of the spontaneous and pointless anger among the population.
Notes:
[1]
This expression has always stricken me as queer. It is misleading to
talk about religious fundamentalism as a special case; religion is
structurally fundamental, there can be no 'liberal' or 'progressive'
religion. If there are religious groups and movements posing to be
so, it is just a camouflage. The situation is
similar to Antonio Negri's take of there being no idealism other than the one
prone to mysticism.
[2] It is clear why they
want to politically align with the bourgeoisie, they see the
proletariat as a much more dangerous enemy; one which they are
powerless to fight against alone. But it is interesting why the
bourgeoisie is willing to accommodate these elements in spite of their
differing class affinities. Is it just to bolster their numbers? No.
There is a very clever tactic at work here, the bourgeoisie's
reluctance to take the democratic revolution to its conclusion. It
would be interesting to study the bourgeois-feudal alliance in the
Indian context now following Marx's and Lenin's leads.
[3] In doing this we
should always bear in mind Engels' warning: “According to the
materialist conception of history, the ultimately
determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.
Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element
is the only determining one, he transforms that
proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The
economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its
results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class
after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the
reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the
participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious
views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also
exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles
and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.....
We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very
definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones
are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed
even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part,
although not the decisive one”. (Engels'
Letter to J. Bloch, September 21, 1890).
[4] An excellent and
crucially important work in this regard is Lenin's “Two
Tactics...”. It details the mode of operation of a revolutionary
party in a bourgeois democracy and demonstrates how even the bourgeois representative institutions can be used to stress the point
that we have to go beyond the liberal façade of democracy to solve
the problems emanating from capitalism's inherent flaws.
