The State of the World and other ruminations

I believe that organizing mass action along the lines of religious and national identity is fundamentally and unequivocally bad. I make no distinction between the different religions and nationalities invoked for this purpose. From what I’ve seen, read and know – gaining a sense of collectivity based on religious and national labels always results in the assumption of authority by a few to manipulate, judge and mobilize the many.

Take Gujarat. The unrelenting assault against trade unions (textile industry particularly) over the past 30 years broke down a sense of unity that working class people of all religions shared. The population of unemployed, frustrated people grew, and contract labour, which makes one live in perpetual uncertainty, made workers fearful of other workers, competitive with other workers, willing to gain protection (in return for certain “services”) from religious groups whose interest was not in the welfare of their “flock” but in recruiting them as footsoldiers in their drive for numbers and armies. The worker became the goon – the only productive capacity that mattered was the ability to wreak violence at the beck and call of the leader. Anyone who believed in the benefits of the free market, aggressively called for that move, has blood on their hands, worldwide. By supporting the forces who decimated anti-capitalist movements, these people are responsible for the burgeoning of fanaticism, for the birth of the mob.

Security in religious and national identity is a chimera. It requires the deployment of violence, always. Building borders against them, accumulating weapons against them, accumulating numbers by any means necessary, playing games with names. It requires the suppression and erasure of local difference, internal inequalities, internal dissent. People are told to acquiesce in their own exploitation, not air dirty laundry, for the sake of some larger entity. The women told to take the beating and not disgrace the family to the outside world. The people told to take their disenfranchisement just a little longer, for the sake of the battle. Dissenters called unpatriotic, ungodly, hounded for their traitorous statements at a time when the enemy is out there, watching.

These are the wonderful benefits that mobilizing around religious and national identity brings us. India? US? Pakistan? Bangladesh? Sri Lanka? The accusation fits any and all of them. When all the violence is done, people will realize you cannot eat weapons and pride in religion and nationality can only stave off hunger and death for a little while.

The world today is so militarized, so mean, aggressive, duplicitous and warlike that fear has become a condition of life. Standing for an ethical principle is widely believed to be suicidal stupidity. What if they attack? Yet acquiescing to the way things are is murderous. Something has to give. People get angry and defensive when it is pointed out that the devastations visited on much of the global south, and on the third world within the first world, are the result of unthinking acquiescence to a profoundly unjust and unsustainable economic order.

Charitable donations aren’t going to do it. They still make the other exist only at our mercy. The assumption of power is tremendous. Our spatial existence is so organized that we cannot in many cases see the abject outer edges, the human cost of the lifestyle and modes of organization we insist on having. We cannot see the connection between this and that. Racist and religious stereotypes help us well in this regard. They allow the erasure of history, the comfortable assumption that it must be their own fault, something primordial about this or that racial or national or religious group.

For all the mutual name-calling, many who live in the first world, and in the first world that’s in the third world, have an abiding belief in the wonders of the free market, and often imagine that the poster-boy of capitalism, the US, is a model of democracy, opportunity and fairness.

This is the attitude that is literally killing people worldwide. Iraq was a dramatic instance but much of Latin America, Africa and Asia have been slowly dying under the hegemonic imperative to “liberalize” their markets via forced indebtedness, giving corporate interests, via the World Bank, ownership of the world’s resources. Greedy elites who see the opportunity for a big cut, brainwashed upper-middle class people who long for the kitschy lifestyle that will signal coolness, use their power to sign away the lives of millions.

And we bask in the glow of our world-class Indianness, the Aishwarya Rais, Bollywood everywhere, a hundred different varieties of moldy cheeses on our supermarket shelves – freedom is here, we too can be a superpower! The death and destruction is minimised – it must be because the system isn’t working well enough – it’s a glitch and not a structural flaw, maybe more privatization will solve everything.

Hasn’t the world since the 19th century shown us that these are capitalism’s structural flaws? All it takes is a global rather than a national view of the world. Things may look dandy in the US and Europe, but the cost of that is devastation elsewhere, and even in the heart of the US, the ghetto, the prison, the POW camp, nuclear waste on Native American reservations. Entire continents pay the price for this illusion of success.

Every now and then something like Gujarat happens and there’s much pious hand-wringing (by those with some iota of a conscience – not counting the fascists here) – but no questioning of when and how such violence became thinkable, possible – who these people are, what is it about the way things are organized that makes this possible. Why didn’t Kerala and West Bengal have communal violence when socialism held sway there? Why is it that the minute privatization comes in, these places one imagined as enlightened havens become communal?

Its no use pointing to Mao and Stalin – forget it. This allows the easy luxury of dismissing valid and important questions without having to put our education and passion to work in avoiding those particular mistakes. As if a concern for economic justice necessarily leads to a Mao or Stalin – what could be a more foolish line of reasoning?

Why forget Cuba and what Kerala used to be? The Zapatistas in Mexico, Rigoberta Menchu, the women of Plachimada – these people know all there is to know about democratic organizing – they understand what the stakes are and how to do it.

The tragedy is that we sit around mouthing inanities about smiling at people from other religions instead of learning from and joining these people who have managed to organize across religious lines against corporate hegemony.

We frown upon them as pinko commies who need to first be educated into the virtues of the free-market, disposessed and poisoned, made to feel murderous hate based on some chimera of identity, and then, finally, sit with us and chat about secularism in the free market.