[The "response" below refers to the article, 'Moonwalking with the Comrades' by Anirban Gupta Nigam, at the same website.]
http://kafila.org/2010/03/23/moonwalking-with-the-comrades/#comments <http://kafila.org/2010/03/23/moonwalking-with-the-comrades/#comments>March 25, 2010 at 4:50 AM Dear Anirban, Many thanks for your guest post on Kafila. I found it very fruitful to read and think with. As also, the debate that has persisted on the list since it has been posted. Which, when it does not stoop to defend or attack Arundhati Roy’s person, does leave us with things to think about. I have many mixed feelings about Arundhati Roy’s essay on Outlook, as in some ways I have about the Maoists themselves (though not about Maoism). And what I write here is not necessarily thought our systematically or cogently, but more thought out aloud. As a set of first responses. As a clearing of the throat if you like. I hope you will forgive the rambling nature of my response. On the one hand, I think some of Roy’s account is riveting, and I have no doubt that her essay makes it clear that there is a degree of unprecedented and genuine mass support that the Maoists do command (and for good reason, regardless of whether or not we choose to endorse it) in the forest belt of Central India. I think she also reveals the bitter extent of the state’s assault on the indigenous peoples in India in order to unleash a particularly vile form of crony-capitalism. All that is well taken. I say this even as I admit that I am disturbed by Roy’s stomach-churning peans to beauty as a substitute for political sense, which in agreement with you, Anirban, I think, can only lead us down a slippery slope to an ‘aestheticization’ of politics that opens a door to something quite dark. I have personally seen some – ‘beautiful’ – cadre in the RSS, in the travesty that is the CPI(M), and have been moved by their dedication and their transparent sincerity, by the shine in their eyes and the power of their dreams (which remain my nightmares). A state fashioned on Maoist lines in India would be as much of a nightmare as a society that danced to the tune of the hard-right. Both would be authoritarian, militarized, intolerant of dissent. I would want neither. Nor can I tolerate the state that we have at present. But I refuse to be boxed into a situation where the rejection of one option is the automatic endorsement of another. An intellectual’s final responsibility lies in choosing the discomfort of refusing to see solutions when there is none available. Reticence can also be revolutionary at times. I wish sometimes, that Arundhati Roy chose reticence over the hurry to be seen with the camp that made an effective noise. A good writer’s silence can be occasionally more powerful than a good writer’s slips of tongue. Many amongst those who join the far right do so because they are fed up of the predatory nature of the society they live in at the moment. Their motivations can be as worthy of respect as that of any naxal. It is the ends that both seek that I have reservations about. I do not disrespect Naxals or hold them in contempt. I would, like Roy, defend the genuineness that they might embody anyday. But I have no illusion about the fact that by doing so, I am making any worthwhile political point. However, I also cannot help thinking that the Maoists do perform the function of sending a token shiver of fear down the spine of our ruling classes (and I am not unhappy to get an occasional glimpse of that shiver in the smooth steel frames of our Minister of Home Affairs and his erstwhile clients in the Mining business ). On the other hand, I am deeply disturbed by some of the things that Roy writes in this essay. Here i have to say that her up-front honesty in the episode of a Maoist combatant admitting to liking ‘ambush videos’ is not amongst them. It need not necessarily be taken as the writer’s automatic endorsement of the aesthetic pleasure to be had from watching mutilation, it could just be (though I am not necessarily saying it is) an attempt to come to terms with a fractured moral universe, even amongst those one supports, and, consider this, – a lesser writer might simply have airbrushed away such a discomfiting detail. I have to admit that I have a profound revulsion against Maoism, as I would have against any form of third-worldist nationalism (what else is Maoism?) that aims to seize the state to make it a ‘better’ state, especially through the force of arms. To the extent that Roy chooses to evade the authoritarian legacies of Maoism (her caveats about Mao and Charu Mazumdar, and her not-insincere gesture in the direction of the horrors of the Gulag, the Khmer Rouge and the genocidial policies of Mao Ze Dong in China, not withstanding)I think she writes a-politically. She has a sharply political critique of capitalism, and its operations in India, (we could quibble over details, but not over the thrust of her argument against the state and capital) but at the same time, she exhibits a profoundly a-political understanding of Maoism. This is the opposition that is never going to be the opposition, because it is wedded to as harsh a vision of state power as that which it claims to combat. Roy either does not know this, or chooses to ignore it, or chooses to underestimate its similarity to the contours of the state we are familiar with, and by doing so, betrays an a-political sense of what this so-called opposition is. I can understand the rage and the anger that drives people, especially the dispossessed, to Maoism in India. But I mourn the fact that the only thing that it drives them to today is Maoism. And so, I try and make a distinction (albeit not always successfully) between Maoists, and Maoism. While I can appreciate the fact that many, perhaps a majority of those, especially tribals, especially women, who join Maoist, or Maoist affiliated militias and the PLGA do so because they feel a measure of respect and dignity in being part of a resistance against a regime that is truly disgusting and rapacious, I also feel that this alone cannot redeem an authoritarian and statist ideology that acts exactly like a state (with its organs of formal armed power) whenever and wherever it takes power. My general response to the essay is one of mourning. I mourn the fact that we are in a situation where Maoism, especially of the variety that inhabits the forests of Central India, can appear as a genuinely revolutionary current to some of the best and brightest amongst us, and also, the fact that the strategy of ‘protracted peoples war’ is one of the options that seems valid to some of the most oppressed and marginalized people in our social environment. To me, these two realities (the attraction that Maoism holds out to a very wide spectrum of people) represent the failure, and I underscore, our failure, the failure of all those who locate themselves on the left outside Maoism today to propose, or to be seen as proposing, a cogent revolutionary alternative to global capitalism. For me, this is the most important point. The fact that we have not yet been able to forge a living politics on the left that while rejecting parliamentrary cretinism, makes the fetishization of guns, the cult of an authoritarian party structure (that cannot but be an inevitable consequence of the militarization of resistance) and the pointlessness of standing armies (the pointlessness being an old Marxist idea) and a protracted war un-necessary. The Maoists are not fighting a revolutionary battle, but they are successful in producing an image, or mirage, of revolutionary practice. At best, they are fighting to save a dying world (a struggle that I have sympathy for, because to not have sympathy for the resistance of the most oppressed against a predatory captialism would be unthinkable) but they are not fighting to usher in any fundamental transformation of class relations. The Janatana Sarkar’s, no matter how much water harvesting they do, no matter how much organic agricultural production they undertake, are not fundamental organs of revolutionary power. At best, they are defences against a currently predatory state. At worst, they anticipate the production of another predatory structure. They do not usher in a new language of politics, they just speak an old language of politics, on ‘behalf of the people’. Take them out of the forests, take them into the industrial rust belt, take them into factories and cities, and they will wither like anthills under a bulldozer. They are a holding operation. Maneouvres that keep at bay, for the moment, in some places, in the forests the guns of the state and the power of the corporations. At the same time, they are invitations to the guns of the state to enter, and they are dependent on the same corporations (through a people’s ‘levy’) that they claim to combat. They do not represent an alternative. They never have. The issue for me, is not violence and non-violence. It is the form that resistance takes. It is about asking whether resistance is condemned to repeat the tragedies of the decadence of the left in the twentieth century, or whether it is possible to another language of politics. Arundhati Roy asks us to consider whether or not rebels have the time to think about the form that the state can take. Whether the urgencies of the struggle have a greater claim to attention than the messy and boring and unglamourous questions of thinking about what the history of the world working class movement has to offer. The leadership of the Maoist party claims that all the answers to the world’s problems lie in what they call ‘M-L-M’ or Marxism-Leninism-Mao Ze Dong thought. This is the stock answer to the impatience of rebellion. Rebel now, do not think, the answers are available. That is enough to make me climb up the wall. Anyone, who, when sober, can say that Mao, who coolly contemplated, and even welcomed the possibility of a nuclear holocaust (because he had a confidence in numbers, the numbers of the Chinese people) has the answers, cannot be trusted to even repair a small neighbourhood’s sanitation infrastructure, let alone be entrusted with the responsibility of thinking about the world’s problems, or the possible alternatives to Capitalism. To endorse Mao Ze Dong thought or the genocidial record of Stalin, or the venality of regimes like Cuba or North Korea is to endorse the worst and most pathetic form of state capitalism, one that dresses up in fancy rebel clothes while it builds furnaces on the backs of starving millions. Even if, and especially if, one has a sense of solidarity for the rank and file that joins the Maoist movement, out of rage or desparation, or for the sake of a dream of a better world, then, one cannot but realize the utter delusion or cynicism of a leadership that steers that rank and file as if it continues to take Mao Ze Dong thought seriously. If they really do not take Mao’s wild bourgeouis nationalist fantasies of ’state building’ and ‘people moulding’ seriously, then one fails to see why they dissimulate, and if they do take them seriously, they are delusional. If they persist with Mao, and Stalin, and their pronouncements, not as actual guides to action and policy, but as fetishes, then I fail to see how they are any different from any authoritarian millenerian religious cullt. Either way, the rank and file are nothing but tools in the hands of the Maoist leadership. The politically astute thing to do would be to engage with the rank and file, and engage with them critically, constantly exposing the hollowness of their leadership’s understanding of the world, and the disastrous consequences of that understanding. Constantly doing what any Marxist should do to any soldier in any war. Ask the soldiers to disobey their commanders. Revolutionary defeatism, even in a so called revolutionary war. By being in the war, the PLGA gives more power to the Indian state’s military machines. The only way, in the long run, to disarm the state is to totally reject the logic of war. Any war. That Arundhati Roy should even take the people who take Mao seriously, seriously, is cause for alarm. It means that sometimes, even the sharpest of the minds amongst us, is carried away by rage into the arms of a counter-revolution that masquerades (perhaps unbeknownst to most of its cadres) in revolutionary fancy dress. In this instance, I am with Marx, who wanted revolutionaries to wait so that he had more time to think. And I say this, not facetiously, as a Zizek, on occasion, might, but with a great urgency, because a militancy of thought, the attempt to make ideas walk the good walk, the hard walk, is sometimes more important than the trek with guns in the jungle. Ideas that can withstand the rigour of history, that can make people disobey orders, rather than listen to commands, are sharper weapons than IEDs and AKs. I wish that the women who held the guns that Roy rhapsodizes were part of a movement that sharpened and polished its ideas, its politics, and its arguments more than its ordnance. I am afraid, Arundhati Roy, despite her intellectual integrity and her courage, and the unquestioning, unwavering commitment that she has to forge a critique of capital and the state, is in this instance, misled, and appears at least, to be willing to be misled. I say this in solidarity and friendship with her, and others like her, because I know that each one of us, regardless of whether or not we have her courage, and the intensity of her anger, walks that wire that hangs over an abyss of illusions and misplaced enthusiasms. Any one of us could fall, any time. We must be prepared to at least spread a net below that wire. A net made, not of our schaudenfraude at each other’s (or Roy’s descent) but of a long overdue attempt to forge a general practice of revolutionary politics that is open, transparent and not hidden in the forests, not backed by armies, not empowered by summary capital punishment, not dreaming of prison camps even as it sings rousing revolutionary songs. This must mean that we have to reject the ‘peoples war-parliamentary democracy’ binary or even the ‘violence-non-violence’ binary, and think more creatively, more urgently. To forsake the sham of bourgeoise democracy cannot mean that we have to adopt the bourgeoisie’s greatest invention – the standing army and the firing squad. We want a revolution that can shake our cities, that can disarm the army (all armies) and the apparatus of repression, that can make capital capitulate by the power of the working people’s general refusal of labour and that can make the prison house of the nation state crumble. That kind of politics requires just as much, if not much more, militancy and audacity, than the ‘dadas’ in the forests have put in. It requires the longest of marches, experiments with all forms of political organization, and a willingness to countenance at all times, the demise of the state the criterion of organizing human life Let us ensure that the one good thing that the Maoists and those who have spoken for them might do – is to force us out of our slumber and our dejection, to re-imagine what a revolutionary left that is out, open, industrial, international, urban and rural and sharp and pleasurable, can be. I hope Kafila can be a place where some of that can happen. Then, perhaps, Arundhati Roy, (or those who take her stance as passionately, as courageously and as genuinely as she does) will not have to hide away in forests to walk with the comrades. We would welcome her (and anyone like her) beside us, in the streets of our cities. best, Shuddha -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. 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