> Victory can't always be quantified. For most working
> people, just surviving another day in this hellish system
> is a victory.
Yes, except that it's not. As you know, I am a firm advocate of stopping the worst abuses of the system, but where I think people like Roy go off the tracks is in their elevation of "resistance" into the highest form of political activity. We SHOULD be aiming to actually win, to affirmatively change the world for the better, not just fight off a few demons in the breach. You get a very clear sense in reading both The God of Small Things and many of her essays that Roy puts a premium on the "resistance" of the truly MARGINALIZED, not so much in addition to as at the expense of MASS politics. This is not at all to say that struggles like that of the adivasi communities along the Narmada River against the dams are somehow unimportant. It is to say that even those struggles will achieve only temporary victories unless there's also an effort to shift power permanently, to remove imperialism and its local agents from power.
In Roy there's a hint of that "small is beautiful" temptation that Bro. Henwood among others has taken pains to critique in the past.
Thomas Seay:
> I think it is a bit arrogant to dismiss her as just being
> enthralled with "fashionable anticommunism".
First off, I'm not dismissing her; I think she's talented, and I think the article from the eXile that Chris Doss referenced was smug and annoying. However, when I referred to anticommunism, what I meant was the fear of exercising power as such; whether Roy intended it or not, her writings can be used for the most boring liberal purposes by people who think it's cute (and it is the conventional wisdom these days, really) to draw an equivalence between using power to change the world and using power to maintain the status quo. Look, no one serious these days is going to claim that a revival of the one-party state is the way to go, that it's possible to simply "seize" or "smash" state power and then implement socialism through fiat from above, that all social movements need to be subsumed under the "iron discipline" of some one-true revolutionary party, or what-have-you. But chucking out all previous attempts to alleviate the human condition wholesale; claiming that any kind of overarching political strategy is impossible, or that it's futile to make broad demands on the state; ridiculing with smug self-satisfaction the efforts (however clumsy and inadequate at times) of people who actually have to deal with the concrete problems of real-life struggle -- this is the kind of thing which I cannot abide. And it's not that Roy is always like that, but you're not reading her carefully if you don't notice when she indulges in it from time to time.
In The God of Small Things, there's the specific question of her treatment of the CPI(M). I am no expert on this, but even while it may be true that the communist parties in India were inadequate in their approach to the caste question, is Roy's specific portrayal really fair? The fictional "Comrade Pillai" is not only a coward, but gives his seal of approval to the betrayal of a *comrade* -- not just anyone, but a well-respected party militant and comrade -- to the police because he is a dalit. I have not read the novel recently enough to remember if EMS Namboodiripad is directly implicated in this fictional event, but remember that Namboodiripad was a real person, the only communist leader in the book who is not fictional. Some of his personal resentment over the novel was that he was falsely portrayed as the owner of a hotel where other communists were his servants -- this was a dumb and unfair move on Roy's part, I think, though it seems to me to be less significant than the central political event of the book, where the sexy leading man/hapless and naive dalit and party militant is sacrificed by his own party.
Would the party really have been responsible for something this egregious? And in the event that the answer is yes, isn't there still something to the charge by people like Ahmad and (more crudely, because he was no literary critic) Namboodiripad himself that Roy's novel had so much appeal abroad precisely because it confirmed the anticommunist pieties of its middlebrow audience in the Commonwealth and the US? The kind of person whose material circumstances tell them that social change is not all that important can take comfort from this book in finding political struggle futile and even counterproductive because "all power corrupts," "you have to watch or else you'll become what you hate," and other sophomoric bromides. Doesn't anyone else but me find this kind of thing annoying? As capitalism is responsible for an ever-widening maelstrom of death and atrocities, isn't it a little obscene to flay the people who are trying to change that picture on the grounds that they are "power-hungry" or somesuch nonsense?
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!