India: The Growing Revolution

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This is Siegfried and you’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve discussed the overall state of the world at the beginning of 2021 and the empty promises of the Biden Administration.  To further elaborate on the latter subject, it’s worth pointing out that his latest executive order, this time concerning the withdrawal of the federal government from dealings with the private prison industry, excludes the privately run ICE facilities where migrant kids are being detained in horrible conditions.  In other words, like so much that Biden has done thus far, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. 

Another depressing subject that we’ll touch on before getting into the good stuff is the utter failure of the Canadian government and Justin Trudeau in particular when it comes to handling the COVID pandemic.  A recent article in McLean’s points out the truth that Canada’s performance is among the worst in the industrialized world, with COVID deaths nearly doubling in the past two months to just under 20,000, while the response has been hopelessly disorganized and fragmented along regional lines.  As of January 31^st, there are 770,427 cases of COVID in Canada and 19,659 deaths.

I’ve already gone through the details of the failed policies of the Canadian provincial governments in recent episodes, most notably the failure to close down non-essential workplaces and engage in mass testing.  There appears to be zero will on the part of the federal government to take charge of the situation and to impose a centralized response aimed at reducing the number of infections to zero – the kind of response that has proven so effective in countries like China, Vietnam, Cuba and New Zealand.  Trudeau doesn’t have the spine to pay the political price and impose a solution on the provinces through the use of emergency powers.  Of course, his lack of action will almost certainly kill his political career.  But I guess he wants to go out with the reputation of being a “nice guy” or something.  With being “nice” being defined in this case as throwing a ton of mainly racialized and working-class people to the wolves instead of challenging established power structures…when has that ever happened in history, right? Trudeau certainly didn’t let his “nice guy” image get in the way when he was buying up pipelines and suppressing indigenous land defenders, but forcing the likes of Doug Ford to adopt a sane strategy of disease control would be too “authoritarian”.  So, there is no effective response, the capitalist state continues to impose “business as usual” and workers keep dying as a result.  The union demand for paid sick days for all workers is not enough at this point, the virus has spread too much and the situation is out of control. 

The overall picture is one of criminal negligence and brutal exploitation; putting profit before peoples lives.  Capitalist society downloads risk onto the individual worker and consumer.  Now they’re telling you to wear two masks against the new and fast-spreading strains of the virus and to take personal responsibility for your own health while the government takes no meaningful action, doing nothing that could potentially threaten the profitability of business interests.  They’re telling you that you must risk your life for the economy.  It’s absolutely sickening.

But I don’t want to continually focus on the nonsense that gets spewed out by a dying capitalist world order.  I also want to draw your attention, comrades and friends, to the signs of a new world being born.  I’ve already talked a lot about the potential that can be seen in socialist countries like China, Vietnam and Cuba, but today I want to zero in on what’s been going on in India.  India, of course, is not a socialist country, it’s ruled by the BJP, a hyper-capitalist party run by religious fascists, but any socialist who looks closely will see that India has as much revolutionary potential today as Tsarist Russia did at the beginning of the 20^th Century. 

The parallels in terms of deep inequality, religious persecution, blatant and horrific levels of state violence, sweeping economic change and the rise of new class formations are just impossible to ignore.  Like Tsarist Russia, modern India is headed for a reckoning and the combination of the pandemic and brutal neoliberal economics has really pushed matters to a head.

I briefly mentioned the massive wave of strikes in India that started in November 2020 and involved more than 250 million workers mobilizing together.  That’s a significant increase from the 200 million workers who took part in the all-India general strike in January 2019, the 180 million who came out in a general strike in September 2016 and the 150 million who took part in a similar general strike in 2015.  This is a level of labor struggle far beyond anything you see in Europe or North America.  The workers involved in these strikes were organized, they were militant, they were part of unions, popular organizations and, very notably, millions of them were affiliated with communist parties or socialist groups. 

The same goes for the hundreds of thousands of farmers and agricultural laborers taking part in the current uprising against the Indian state over its attempts to completely privatize Indian agriculture and put farmers at the mercy of capitalist agribusiness conglomerates.  For two months now they have been occupying parts of the capital New Delhi and provincial centers around the country, fighting off attacks by the security forces and fascist thugs alike, as they press home their demands for a complete repeal of the new farm laws. 

On India’s Republic Day on January 26 these farmers drove their tractors en masse into the capital’s streets, again defying the system that has been systemically smashing their livelihoods over the past thirty years, driving literally hundreds of thousands of peasants to take their own lives in the face of crippling debt payments and other financial and legal burdens.  These three new farming laws passed by the Indian government last September essentially take away the little state support that remained for peasant farmers, who must now compete directly with the big companies and landowners with no protection from market fluctuations.  But this is just the tail end of a long process of rural dispossession that has forced millions of farmers off their land and into urban slums.  The destruction of the Indian peasantry by capitalist agribusiness has parallels with the destruction of the peasant commune as an institution and the consolidation of farmland under wealthy landowners that took place across Russia in the late 19^th Century, fueling the explosive growth of the Russian proletariat. 

Just as Russia was a world power in 1900 with a huge military and rapid industrial expansion, modern India has nuclear weapons, a space program, multiplying billionaires and an expanding tech sector.  It also has some of the worst childhood malnutrition rates in the world.  Hundreds of thousands of people die of malnutrition in India every year under normal conditions, very similar to the situation in Russia before the 1917 revolution.

So, the present storm in India has been brewing for a long time.  Just as the storm that broke over Russia in 1905 was years in the making.  In that year, Russian workers and peasants rose up in what was then the biggest general strike in history, but they had already been struggling for decades against landlords, factory owners, horrendous living and working conditions, repeated and lethal instances of famine, state repression and crippling debts. 

In 1905 it was Russia’s costly and losing war against Japan that caused everything to explode.  In 2021 it was an out-of-control pandemic, economic collapse and the callous disregard by the Indian government for the people’s wellbeing. 

More than 154,000 people have died of COVID in India, whose government was among those that did not heed that warnings until it was too late. 

Even when it finally did impose lockdowns in March 2020, the Indian state did so in a brutally anti-worker manner; forcibly expelling millions of migrant workers from the cities and telling them to literally walk back to their home villages without transport, food or income support. 

The only Indian region that took effective precautions against the pandemic in January of 2020 was the state of Kerala, which was governed by a communist-led coalition.  In Kerala the medical preparations and science-based response quickly brought the pandemic under control and really exposed the failure of central government, whose long-standing neoliberal policies and privatizations prevented any effective response. 

Again, it was the socialists and communists who showed the way and saved lives.  India is second only to China with regard to the size of its communist movement.  That movement is growing and it’s really been the only serious opposition force against the fascist BJP government and its leader Prime Minister Modi.  The BJP has become the party of Indian capital, supplanting the old Indian National Congress and condemning it to irrelevancy.  The various communist parties like the CPI (Marxist), trade union alliances, working class and peasant organizations and indigenous peoples’ organizations are now the true opposition and they number in the hundreds of millions.  These are the people fighting for life amidst a capitalist culture of death.  250 million people participating in a general strike is one-fifth of the total Indian population.  Imagine if one-fifth of Canadians came out in a general strike against austerity.  Most of those 250 million people on strike last November belong to the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), imagine that level of union struggle taking place in Canada.

In the general strike of January 2019 general secretary Tapan San of CITU warned the Modi government and the capitalist state that it can “neglect the huge anger of the people against its policies of the selling people’s and the nation’s interests to the corporations, domestic and foreign, at its own peril…the toiling people are rising and they won’t rest till they achieve their demands.”

A revolution is building in India, comrades and friends, and few people on the Western left have been paying attention.  It’s time that they did.  Because history is beginning to move very fast and they are in danger of being left behind.  The people of India are ready to move mountains.

Biden: The Masquerade

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This is Back in the USSR, I am Siegfried, and welcome to the “new era” my friends.  Trump is gone, the “adults” are back in the room, “sanity” has won through and everything is good…right? Well no.  But there are plenty of powerful interests that want you to believe that right now and the PR blitz is nothing short of breathtaking.

Last week, in my first show of the new year, I went into the details of the present situation and the literal catastrophe that capitalism has unleashed on America and many other countries that fundamentally failed to come to grips with the pandemic.  And the reason is because these countries, Canada included, placed profits before people.  This fundamental fact isn’t going to change, regardless of how many times Biden repeats that he is going to act “according to the science”. 

Let’s unpack that for a moment.  Biden just promised to vaccinate 100 million people by the end of his first hundred days in office.  And no doubt that’s some impressive rhetoric after all the nonsense Trump was spewing over the course of last year.  But it is equally nonsensical.  The United States doesn’t have a functioning healthcare system right now.  There is no mass testing, no targeted quarantines, no effective effort to stop the virus at its source, no shutting down of non-essential workplaces, no adequate income support for workers, and no debt relief.  Beyond a slight expansion of the food stamp program and an extension on the repayment of student loans, there might, and I stress MIGHT, be a $1400 federal cheque for each person rolling out sometime in the first half of 2021 IF Biden’s stimulus bill is passed unaltered, which is unlikely given that he’s committed himself to working with the Republicans and Wall Street Democrats.  In this environment, even if 100 million vaccines could be distributed to the public, which, once again, seems to be to be administratively impossible given the state of American healthcare, it wouldn’t stop the pandemic.  For it to end the pandemic, the virus would have already have had to be contained before the vaccination campaign began.  China is in a position to do this, but America is not.  Vaccination is only the last step of containing the virus, not the first.

Biden’s “health strategy” is basically too little, too late.  And the same could be said for virtually every single one of the fifteen executive orders that he signed on his first day in office and which some people have been hailing as great progressive victories.  As I mentioned earlier, he extended the already existing freeze on student loan repayments until September.  That’s not debt relief, that’s just delaying the inevitable.  The same goes for his extending the moratorium on evictions until March.  Rent and student debt are both deep points of crisis in America, amounting to trillions of dollars, and neither of these executive orders will do anything to solve them.  And the fact that one of the laws that Biden championed in his recent legislative career was a federal bankruptcy law that denied people the ability to file for bankruptcy because of student debt says it all.  That law is still on the books.  Too little, too late.

You might say the same thing about Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.  I’ve seen certain activists almost reduced to tears of thankfulness over this one.  And while it does open up a certain avenue to put pressure on Canadian politicians, who continue to press for the construction of pipelines on stolen indigenous land, it’s hardly a radical decision and in many ways serves to mask a much deeper problem.  Keystone XL was already dead in the water by 2021.  It had been held up by judicial orders, administrative red-tape, public pressure, indigenous resistance, and the loss of prominent investors.  I think even the Koch brothers finally abandoned it as a dead-end.  Jason Kenney and his goon squad in Alberta were about the only ones still holding out hope that it would be finished.  So, this is an easy move for Biden to make in order to give him environmental street cred, and it’s the same thing with re-joining the Paris Climate Accords.  It doesn’t mean that he has to do much or make greater commitments.  You’ll notice that the Dakota Access Pipeline, resistance to which led to the Standing Rock protests and a massive crackdown on indigenous land defenders, isn’t touched in this executive order.

Tar-sands oil was never all that profitable, let’s face it.  Fracked natural gas on the other hand is very, very profitable and America has been going crazy with it.  It’s highly unlikely that Biden is going to move against this industry, critical if America is going to do anything to cut greenhouse gases substantially, and threaten the profits of his Wall Street backers.  Especially when he said he was going to ban fracking during the primaries and then completely reversed his position when it came to the actual presidential election.  But it doesn’t take much to appear environmentally conscious after Trump. 

As I said last week, China already has 3.5 times more installed renewable energy capacity than the United States does, possesses the majority of the world’s green transit systems, and has made firm commitments to go carbon neutral by mid-century.  A country that is addicted to fracking and beholden to the demands of Wall Street for short-term profitability isn’t likely to make much of a dent in its carbon emissions unless revolutionary change occurs. 

Biden’s act of simply rejoining the Paris Climate Accords is window dressing, especially seeing that the UN and leading scientists are all saying that the goals of those accords are far from enough.  And it doesn’t inspire confidence that, in a list of American politicians who received money from the fossil fuels industry, Biden was second only to Trump in the amount that he got.  That means some folks in expensive suits are going to be calling in favors pretty soon.

At best, what you’ve got here in a long list of half-measures.  Biden just raised the federal minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, but that’s largely a symbolic gesture given that there’s nothing to prevent employers from cutting back on their staff or limiting the number of hours they work.  Nor will the majority of workers be affected by the change and it certainly won’t have the effect of reversing the wave of poverty that we’re seeing in America today.  Nor is there anything in the list addressing mass incarceration or the prison-industrial complex that Biden did so much to expand through his crime bill in the 1990s.  Are prison laborers going to get a fifteen-dollar minimum wage in federal penitentiaries? I don’t think so.

Getting into foreign policy.  One of the things Biden was hailed for is reversing the racist Trump-era travel ban on seven Muslim majority countries.  Except he didn’t reverse the December 2015 Visa Waiver Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act signed by Barack Obama, that designated Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia as “areas of concern” and heavily restricted travel to and from these countries on the basis of racially profiling Muslims as “terrorists”.  Trump’s total ban on travel from these countries was based on this law and it looks like it isn’t going anywhere.  Like everything on this list of executive orders, the promise falls apart when you dig a little deeper.

For example, merely ending Trump’s border wall won’t get those kids out of those cages in the ICE concentration camps and re-unite them with their families.  This is the most powerful man in the world, and he could free those kids at the snap of a finger.  Just like he could snap his finger and cancel student debt or ensure adequate healthcare.  But he won’t.  And remember that the Obama/Biden administration was responsible for more deportations that any other US administration, including Trump’s.  It’s a whitewash.

And where is the firm commitment from Biden to end the war in Yemen that he helped to start in 2015? Where is the firm commitment to end the crippling sanctions against the Syrian, Iranian and Venezuelan peoples? Where is the commitment to pull occupying US troops out of the sovereign countries of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria? Where is the commitment to end military brinkmanship with China and military provocations in the South China Sea? Where is the commitment for a constructive dialogue with China and Russia? I haven’t seen anything and I think all the nonsense around Russiagate, a fraudulent and utterly futile attempt to bring down Trump by attacking him from the right, will seriously undermine the prospects for world peace, not to mention the utterly racist demonization of China in US politics and media.

The most that the guardian of the capitalist system will give to workers and the oppressed are crumbs, half-measures and empty promises.  It’s a masquerade.  The president serves Wall Street and the Fortune 500, not the people and Biden’s already promised his real constituents that nothing would fundamentally change after his election.  He’s leaving neoliberalism and hypercapitalism fully intact and only rolling back some of the things that Trump did that the capitalist state considers superfluous.  And they want you to drop your guard and shut up.  Don’t fall for it.  This is the equivalent of giving a galley slave a little vinegar to revive him just enough to keep rowing his master’s ship.  That’s “stimulus” for you.

            It comes down to this, I will not apologize for this new emperor of the American Empire.  I will not blindly accept him as “better than Trump” or be thankful for “the lesser of two evils”.  I fight for a world without emperors or empires.  Without exploitation and systemic oppression.  I am a communist and I do not support these blatant attempts by the new administration to whitewash a fundamentally monstrous system.  It’s the same old carrot and stick approach that the capitalist class has always used to maintain its power and hegemony over everyone else.  Trump was not an “anomaly” or a “mistake”.  He was the product of an evil system, the same system that Biden is trying to normalize and rehabilitate in the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis brought about by the profit motive’s unsustainable drive for expansion.  And this is after he stole the primaries and stomped all over Bernie Sanders and his supporters, blocking any meaningful attempts at reform. 

Joe Biden promised to be an effective chief salesman of capitalism.  And the last thing the world needs is another champion of neoliberalism who sells exploitation with a smile the way Obama did.  The only silver-lining is that Biden is unlikely to be able to convince a majority of Black people in America to support imperialist war in the way Obama did.

What I’m seeing in Joe Biden’s election and replacement of Donald Trump at the head of the American Empire is continuity rather than change.  Speaking as a non-American, I hope that America remains mired in domestic disputes and infighting for a long time to come.  A strong America is not in the interests of working class and oppressed people both internally and internationally.  A disunited America in disarray means more peace for the rest of the world and more space for alternative systems to grow.