Launching into a Self-destructive Path: West Bengal Government’s Blinkers and Perverse Logic

Marxists did—and to some extent in certain respects, could, reasonably—boast of advanced thinking, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today’s “Marxists” have become so myopic as to be devoid of the perspective of equitable and sustainable development even in commonplace terms. The context of “global warming” is beyond their ken even though its shadow is lengthening all over the world, West Bengal not excluded.

On the question of equity, the Communists have been in the past most vociferous. In the case of Singur, their behaviour shows stone blindness and arrogance of power. (I am not referring to their illegal act in paying, on Tata Motors’ behalf, a large sum of compensation money from the public treasury. Others will certainly fight it out in the courts.) Even a non-political person like Debi Prasad Tewatia, a former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, writing in The Tribune on November 7, has pointed out that 90 per cent of our farmers are not equipped to do anything but till the land. Which implies that when they are deprived of land, they spend the compensation money soon enough and become destitutes for the rest of their lives. He, moreover, points out that land is (generally) acquired on ridiculously low amounts of compensation… If the land is acquired for industrial concern, then at least one person from the family of the farmer should be given employment as per his or her qualification.

Since not many may be found qualified,
arrangements to impart training to the ward of the farmer, to enable him or her to acquire skills and competence for more lucrative jobs must be made.
The Tatas have made no promise of giving such training to the farmers. Though Justice Tewatia has not said it explicitly, the spirit of his statement conveys that the farmers should include the bargadars (share-croppers).
The supposedly “pro-poor” Communist leaders of West Bengal have lacked this perception and have remained insensitive.

Now, let us come to the much-vaunted need for industrialisation. The myth that industrialisation—by which they evidently mean establishment of large industries—is a necessary condition for prosperity is being propagated by the West Bengal Government, though Karl Marx did not say this. Marx, in analysing the genesis of West European capitalism, had said that factory production there had broken the stranglehold of feudalism and released enormous productive forces, and that with their social appropriation, the stage will be set for a higher social order (socialism). This has got stuck in the “Marxist” mind that this pattern of industrialisation is a welcome step in itself and that it is an inevitable step in the march towards a higher social order everywhere.

Little notice has been given to Marx’s other statement that grave maladies are inherent in large industries. Accepting Adam Smith’s and also A. Ferguson’s pointer that the division of labour in the factory—as distinct from the division of labour in simple cooperation—dooms the individual worker to lifelong performance of only some parts of a chain of processes and disables him from understanding the whole scenario: this makes man an “automatic motor of a fractional operation” and “cripples his body and mind”. This “crippling monstrosity” is the “fragmentation of man”. Approvingly, he quoted D. Urquhat’s statement that “the sub-division of labour (in factory production ) is the assassination of a people” (Vide Capital volume 1, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954 edition, page 360).

Herein lies a big gap in Marx’s thought. He gave no thought to explaining how factory production, which is inherently so malevolent, can become benign on a change of ownership, by the society’s takeover. This contrariety in Marx has made the Marxists, too, partners in the debasement of man.
Since West Europe’s pattern of industrialisation led to proletarianisation of peasants, the question came up in Marx’s lifetime: should such industrialisation be the path of development for all countries? Marx did not give an in-depth analytical-cum-logical answer to this question. What he said, however, is significant:

He (that is, Marx’s critic) insists on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historical-philosophy of development prescribed by fate to all nations, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves…….

This is a disclaimer by Marx himself pointing out that the West European type of industrialisation is not a necessary condition for building up a better social order. Marx had, however, in the last part of the Communist Manifesto come to the conclusion that the union of agriculture and industry (would have) to work hand in hand, in such a way as, by degrees, obliterate the distinction between town and countryside.

At another place he said that the union of agriculture and industry can take place on the basis of their “more perfected forms”. In the light of the latest sciences, it can be firmly said that this is possible by making both agriculture and industry ecologically sound.

If the CPI-M leaders’ firmly-held belief is that large industries are needed for people’s prosperity and employment generation, they must first publish a White Paper on how much prosperity and how much net employment have been generated by the Haldia industrial complex. Side by side it must also state how many acreages have gone out of cultivation and become barren, to what extent the aquatic productivity has gone down in the river, canals and ponds in the neighbourhood, and to what extent the foliage around has been destroyed by the emission of toxic gases, the industrial effluent, and the sewerage from the industrial township. Public hearings on the White Paper’s data will give the final answer to this question. ¨Our “Marxists” have not given much attention to a major complaint of Marx and Engles that in the West European pattern, the “bourgeoisie subjected the countryside to the rule of the town”. In our search for a non-predatory type of development—for a happy blending of agriculture and industry—we need to recognise the special features of India’s ancient communities which had attracted Marx’s attention. Referring to these, Marx said:

These small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, when a new community is started, as a plan and scheme cut and dried. Each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the products is destined for direct use of the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of …… the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity……spinning and weaving are carried out in each family as subsidiary industries. This simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and the same name-this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of the Asiatic Societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with constant dissolution and refunding of the Asiatic States and then ever-ceasing changes of dynasty.
Since socialism is defined as “planned production for use”, this system met the essence of socialism. It did harmonise agriculture and industry. Its only aberration was that some self-seeking people, at some stage introduced caste hierarchy in the simple division of labour. It is possible to eradicate this evil and build on the traditional society a better social order.

The unchangeableness which Marx referred to was the recognition of its durability and its inherent vatiality. Marx’s description of stable Indian village communities gave no impression of a regime of slavery, which was pronounced in the West European pre-industrial feudal system. (In other countries of Asia, of course, slavery did exist.)

True, “British steam and sciences uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.” It is also true, as Marx pointed out in the same article, “England broke down the entire framework of Indian society”. In the post-independence period, again, thanks to the development of market economy, selfish acquisitionism, too, is spreading fast in India. Despite all these, the spirit of community sharing is still alive in the Indian villages, particularly among the poorer people and the tribals. It is possible to reinvigorate it. And it is certainly desirable and possible to skip both capitalism and industrialism (whose other name is industry for industry for yet other industries) and build up, on the remains of India’s traditional communities, a civilised, highly satisfying and lasting communitarian system based on agriculture-industry-ecosystemic integration. This would, of course, depend on a clearer concept of a satisfying life-style and the imperatives of living in an age of “global warming”. This communitarianism would be the meeting ground of Marx, Mao and Gandhi. The core principle of communitarianism is that the “individual cares most for the community and the community cares for the rights, liberties, livelihood and allround welfare of every individual”.

This discourse is important in this context because behind the given scheme of industry-building at Singur, the CPI-M leadership of West Bengal, evidently, has a perspective that is no different from the globally dominant pattern of industrialisation which is causing mass pauperisation in the tropical countries and also inviting “global warming”. It must be persuaded to think that there is another course of development which makes possible the union of agriculture and industry without victimising the farmers, without polluting the air, water and soil, and at the same time ensures the highest sustainable productivity in all fields of economic activities and universal sharing in that prosperity.

The features of Indian traditional communities were very special because they were founded on holistic thinking and conformed to ecological principles. Improved ecological understanding of today blend admirably with India’s tradition of agriculture, irrigation, and industry and promise a communitarian system of much higher productivity. By obeying Nature’s biogeochemical cycles and by applying Nature’s cardinal principles of symbiosis, antibiosis, and diversity, the highest and sustainable productivity can be attained. And by distributed industrial production, by recovery of wastes for productive use, by observing the principle of “cogeneration” for fullest use of resources (which is possible only through small units), ecologically sound industrial development coalescing with the agriculturist is eminently feasible.

Global warming will force the fossil-fuel-gussling greenhouse gas-spouting industries to shut down everywhere, including the USA. Corporate tycoons will not be able to resist it. The Tatas’ cars, too, will prove a liability.
In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the entropic effects of nature-conquering technology-based, concentrated-energy-fired transport systems and industries were not manifest. Now, in this age of “global warming”, when greenhouse gases are extinguishing many plant and animal species, severe droughts and floods are alternately ravaging human habitats, hurricanes are regularly visiting with increasing ferocity, glaciers are not only melting but also tending to disappear for good, sea levels are rising and threatening to engulf cities like Kolkata, London, Venice and all coastal centres of centuries-old civilisations, when newer and newer forms of parasites and viruses are proliferating, the production of more automobiles which will increase the consumption of petroleum products and spew out greenhouse gas is a crime against Life on this planet. Have the CPI-M leaders in West Bengal become so power-mad as not to understand this?

Once they had built up a mass base in the rural areas of West Bengal by progressive land reforms and entitlement of sharecroppers. They are now in peril of dissipating the former’s goodwill by their obduracy in Singur.

Let us hope and pray that in their new bigotry stemming from their recent discipleship of Deng Xiao Piang and Margaret Thatcher, they do not spill more blood of the people. And let not the Tatas, who had, in the past, blased a trail of glorious anti-colonialism, start new automobile factories to receive condemnation at the bar of history—unless they do it on non-arable land and design their products to be propelled by biodiesel or electricity from renewable resources. nEpilogue

After the OPEC shock therapy which quadrupled crude oil price in 1973, the Government of India, foolishly, sanctioned automobile factories for “small cars”, which would consume less petroleum per car—forgetting that in the overall, the country’s total consumption would be far more. This resulted in long-term foreign exchange crisis, the country’s dependence on external supplies and increased air pollution. More cars mean not merely more economic crisis but also ecological crisis. Today, it means invitation to ecological holocaust.

Our shortsighted politicians are creating grave crises for the nation. The Planning Commission, like the modern Dhritarashtra, is turning a blind eye to these schemes. Like the West Bengal Government, the Maharashtra Government has decided on “small car” manufacture and concluded an agreement with Volkswagen. They may get small cars but will invite the drowning of Mumbai under sea water. To imagine that such apocalypse is far off is to live in a fool’s paradise.