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 31st, 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 20th 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 19th 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.
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