>>Translation: The effort it takes to reclaim what the working class
>>have lost and the effort it takes to obtain what we should have is
>>negligible.
>
>Now I *really* don't understand you folks! The effort to reclaim
>what the working class has lost is negligible???
Sorry, the sentence was fucked up. The difference between the effort it takes to reclaim what the working class have lost and the effort it takes to obtain what we should have is negligible.
Doug asked:
>>What does it all mean for the working class of the world? Recent
>>electoral victories of centrist neoliberals in Spain, France, and
>>India -- riding a wave of discontents about war and economy --
>>suggest that the ruling class may be once again betting on socially
>>liberal faces to pacify the left and rein in wage demands to
>>prevent any potential wage-push profit squeeze from arising to
>>aggravate the cost-push inflation.
>
>Does the ruling class fully determine how people vote?
How people vote and how elected politicians translate voter sentiments into their power and work out their policy agenda aren't the same thing. The ruling class have more impacts on the latter than the former, in places where elections are relatively free such as Spain, France, and India. After all, the ruling class need only to control the latter.
As for how Indian voters voted:
* "About two-thirds of incumbent legislators were shown the door. The exceptions were those constituencies where dynasties are well entrenched, and they have looked after the people, or they rule by money and muscle power" (K Gajendra Singh, "In India, Weapons of Mass Rejection," May 18, 2004, Asia Times, <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FE18Df03.html>).
* They [the B.J.P.] boasted of sending four million e-mail messages to voters and transmitting an automated voice greeting from the popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to 10 million land and mobile phones
But the hype over the high-tech campaign obscured these statistics: In a country of 180 million households, only about 45 million have telephone lines. Among India's 1.05 billion people, only 26.1 million have mobile phones. And while around 300 million Indians still live on less than $1 a day, only an estimated 659,000 households have computers.
The message that the Hindu-nationalist-led government had delivered the country to a new era of prosperity was belied by the limited reach of the media to deliver it.
That gap -- the coexistence of a growing middle class with the growing frustration of those excluded from it -- helps explain why Mr. Vajpayee's government has been turned out of office in the biggest upset since 1977, when Indira Gandhi lost after imposing a state of emergency. . . .
The notion of a class-based backlash may surprise Americans lately inundated with news of jobs migrating to India and a growth rate expected to reach 8 percent this year.
This still developing nation is indeed being transformed in many ways, but the transformation has yet to reach most of the population. The entire information technology industry here still employs fewer than one million people, compared with 40 million registered unemployed.
Growth in the preceding five years has averaged only about 5 percent, nowhere near enough to lift hundreds of millions from poverty. And the policy reforms, like privatizing state-owned industries or allowing more foreign investment, that have helped unleash the economy have yet to help an increasingly struggling agricultural sector, which supports some two-thirds of the population.
The B.J.P. and its allies fared poorly in all of the major metropolises, winning a total of only three seats in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta. But heavily rural states were their undoing, particularly in the south, which has decided the national government for the past 14 years. . . .
Not only the B.J.P. suffered for this: in Karnataka, home to Bangalore, the center of India's tech industry, voters turned out the Congress-run state government.
They did the same in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, a B.J.P. ally, had turned Hyderabad, the state capital, into "Cyderabad" by luring Bill Gates and others and trumpeting the ability of reforms and technology to transform the state.
But because of drought and his own failure to invest more in irrigation or other infrastructure that could have eased it, Mr. Naidu's government lost this week as farmers turned on him en masse.
That defeat was not hard to predict on a recent trip to the state, and in particular the rural district of Warangal, about two and a half hours from Hyderabad. Close to 300 indebted farmers have committed suicide since 1997, according to government officials. Statewide, nearly 3,000 farmers have killed themselves.
Hundreds more have taken their lives in other drought-afflicted southern states like Karnataka and Kerala. The suicides have become a potent national symbol of economic angst, and in some states, including Andhra Pradesh, they became an election issue as well.
With less than 40 percent of the state irrigated, and with an erratic power supply only 10 hours a day, farmers had no bulwark against the drought that devastated the state over much of the past decade.
The suicides have not been the only symptom of economic distress. The district also has been at the heart of a Marxist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is active in 15 or 16 Indian states. Drought, poverty and unemployment have fed young people's turn to extremism, officials said.
Now those same factors appear to have fed the defeat of Mr. Naidu and the B.J.P. and its allies as well. . . . (Amy Waldman, "What India's Upset Vote Reveals: The High Tech Is Skin Deep," New York Times, May 15, 2004, <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/international/asia/15indi.html>)
* "[I]f the Left only offers support from the outside, as it did, to start with, to the United Front government in 1996 . . . the Left will remain ideology-driven at the Centre even while it becomes more and more pragmatic in Bengal and Kerala" (JHA Prem Shankar Jha, "No Left Off Centre," OutLookIndia.com, May 24, 2004, <http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20040524&fname=Cover+Story+(F)&sid=20>).
Doug asked:
>Can there be no popular victories short of total revolution?
"Realism and pragmatism were the other two _isms_ that guided his actions as [Amilcar Cabral] he struggled tirelessly to not only understand the reality of Guinea but as he put it, to "transform it towards progress and justice. In the pursuit of such objective, he underscored the importance of being honest and transparent with the people, and strongly urged his comrades to: 'Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies wherever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories'28 [Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, p.72]" (Peter Karibe Mendy, "Amilcar Cabral in Colonial Guinea-Bissau: Context, Challenges and Conquests," July 6, 2002, <http://www.rihphc.state.ri.us/heritage/cv/amilcarcabral&guineabissaux.pdf>). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>