Why Teachers' Associations Need to be Militant fighters for Economic Demands

We are salaried . We are employed, to carry out policies mostly decided by bureaucrats and imposed on us. We need a trade union that will look after our interests. Our predecessors, in very difficult conditions, did build such a union. That was the WBCUTA, and later, at the all India level, the AIFUCTO. Locally in Jadavpur we have had the JUTA. But for these organisations, with all their flaws (discussed below, a few of those) we would be having neither any academic democracy, nor a decent living. My father, who was a WBCUTA leader, with no Ph D (though eventually 15 or so books and over a hundred papers) so I assume in the eyes of professors with foreign Ph Ds little better than a rabble rouser, always told me about the time the first demand on their charter read, A monthly Pay Packet. I never asked what he meant, for my childhood years are filled with memories of my father coming home with an armload of books and the comment, today I got my UGC. To me, UGC meant father getting a relatively good sum of money once in three or four months. They had the basic given by the college. They had the State DA. They had the UGC. No consolidated pay checheque at the beginning of each month. It was a long fight by WBCUTA that changed it, and I am glad WBCUTA did that by prioritising it over getting OPAC for the Libraries.

What does it mean, when the teachers associations are accused of being not interested in proper educational infrastructure? Is the trade union to worry its head off about the improvement of production? I suppose, in certain ways, we do need to. So let me remind people, that it was the teachers' movement that had fought for the democratisation of governing bodies and universities. The place where teachers can discuss such issues is when they get elected to University UG Councils, PG Councils, Faculty Councils if they are in unitary Universities like JU, ECs or Syndicates, etc. But to demand of professional associations that they discuss less of salaries and more of infrastructure is a dubious concept.

It is also interesting that this comment was made in a convention called precisely on education. Attacking teachers unions is dead easy. Ananda Bazar does it all the time. Anyone with rightwing politics, a term I use analytically, not in an abusive way, will do so. For them, building unions is per se harmful. When we do not get our salaries, when lakhs of rupees are robbed from each of West Bengal's college and university teachers, we are supposed to grin, shrug and say, well, we have better things to think about, like how to improve the college library.
We are not supposed to agitate for our basic demands. But we are to think about improved research and all that blarney. My father worked in a college all his working life. My wife has worked in two colleges over 27 years. My father never got a penny for all the research he did, except one book which the ICHR comissioned him to write. I remember him filming Langal and Ganabani (of course, early Commie papers so one wonders whether worth it) and the films were then put on a projector and put against our bedroom wall. My task was to crane my neck (the pictures had come out at 90 degree) and read them at dictation speed. Today, college teachers are asked to carry out research, submit annual reports, and have a 25 hour college week at a minimum, plus evaluate scrips,  in colleges where they do not have ten percent of the infrastructure a Professor in a leading University will get. And yet there are college teachers, who, without sabbaticals, without leave, manage to write several books and papers, try to teach decently, keep up to date by buying the books their libraries cannot buy. I can cite a good number of my former students who do all that.

I would not suggest that unions of teachers have no flaws. JUTA, to which I belong, is elitist, in the sense it is not open (or was not when I last checked some years back) to part time teachers and contract teachers. In earlier years we had evening courses in most Arts Faculty departments, we had a lot of PT teachers getting shit pay, and when JUTA called strikes they went along, yet they were never asked to become members. And I do agree that teachers' associations have often been gender insensitive, supporting teachers accused of sexual harassment. But again, to reiterate a point I made, it was much due to teachers' movement demands that we had democratisation, that we had rotten trust colleges taken over, that we had the College Service Commission and the Security of Services.
The elitist, or rightwing, or "better", if you do not share my perspective, model is of course to do away with democracy, to impose a bunch of mentors and nominated council members, wise men and women who will do the thinking for the bulk of students and teachers, and expect teachers to just carry out their duties as defined bureaucratically. That the bureaucrats might have Oxbridge or Ivy League degrees or job experiences do not make it less bureaucratic.

Of course, all that I say could be put down as sour grapes. I have a perfectly consistent "second rate" education -- B.A. M.A. and Ph D all from Jadavpur University. No Oxbridge, not even SOAS. So let me also put on my aca-bureaucratic hat and mention that while it is about a hundred miles from anything that will get me an Emeritus Prof, I do have 5 books, 9 edited books, international publications, and membership in various committees that have looked at how to improve academic performance. I was the HoD History when we had the first NAAC report prepared, and the Professor in charge of the NAAC report told me, over phone, that he found that History was one of the few departments to do the work exactly as he had asked. Also, that I have done my bits in trying to improve the quality of education, at least in the classroom.

So, I not only disagree with the perspective that unions should not put so much stress on salaries etc, but positively condemn it, regardless of the eminence or otherwise of those who make those assertions. I do it all the more, because, hiding behind the Sukanto Chaudhuris are all the rascal aca-bureaucrats and politicians who have no compunction in getting improved perks themselves, plus ill gotten wealth, but who will reject our demands for more dignity (look at the re-employment situation), lawful promotions, or arrears.

Why I Oppose hanging Kasab

I am opposed to the death penalty. That makes me appear obnoxious to many, since the death penalty is often handed out to people who have committed serious crimes. I was opposed to the hanging of Dhananjay Chatterjee, not because I believed he was innocent, but because he was guilty, but death penalty is not a deterrent but an articulation of the eye-for-an-eye “principle”. In fact the one category of people who are hanged though innocent are the fighters on the class struggle front. When Kista Gour and Bhumaiah were hanged, or when, back in the 40s the Kayyur martyrs died, left wing activists knew that the crime involved was really a simple one – refusing to allow the ruling class to rule without putting up a resistance. Such people nether appeal for mercy, nor does one expect the state to show any mercy to them. Hanging them and calling someone like them for discussion and then killing that person (remember a man named Azad?) are all the same.

It is a more complicated case with Kasab. He was the representative of another state, or its covert arm, doing damage, killing innocent people. He was duly convicted by a court of law, and the death penalty was upheld by the Supreme Court. Absolutely correct. The problem lies in the argument that once the Supreme Court has upheld his conviction he has to be hanged and there should be no mercy. My point is, the question of mercy is only applicable to such cases. If he had not been found guilty by all the layers of judiciary, there would have been no death penalty to uphold and no mercy petition etc. If Kasab had been granted a mercy reprieve from hanging, he could still have been kept in jail for life. It is unlikely that he would have reformed (though strange things have very occasionally happened). But we would have been a more civilised society, not a blood thirsty one.

It has been argued that he was a criminal and therefore he deserved to die. In that case, so did Lyndon Johnson, who intensified the Vietnam War. So did Winston Churchill, who, on being told that there was a severe food shortage in Eastern India in 1943, asked why in that case Gandhi was still alive, and who refused to stop the moving out of food from that area. (This resulted in the Bengal Famine and the death of between one and three million people.) So do all leaders of Israel, who have been waging a murderous war against the Palestinians for decades. Are we going to demand the judicial killing of all these people (where still alive)?

Remembering Hiroshima, fight nuclear weapons, power and capitalism

Remembering Hiroshima, fight nuclear weapons, power and capitalism

Even if all the words about Hiroshima have been uttered, even if all the adjectives have been applied, it is not enough. For we have not yet removed the conditions that mak

e Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible, even likely. It is right to remember Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on the 9th. But it is also necessary to remember the brutality of the imperialist war of which this was the culmination. When we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we should also remember the Shoa, the death camps of Auschwitz and the rest. Even if we take the minimalist definition and split hairs between “Concentration Camps” and “Extermination Camps”, we get the following figures for the Nazis.
Camp                                        Estimated deaths
Auschwitz–Birkenau                    1,100,000
Bełżec                                          600,000
Chełmno                                      320,000
Majdanek                                     360,000
Maly Trostenets                              65,000
Sobibor                                        250,000
Treblinka                                   700,000–800,000

This however is not meant to relativize it and reduce its gravity. On that one day of bombing, the total destruction and suffering cost was so high that nothing we say about the bombing of Dresden or the sustained use of bombs and missiles on London can relativize that one day’s cost. But the reason I want to remind myself, and anyone else, of these other events, is that it is easy to slide into a form of pacifism that leaves untouched all the links between the Hiroshima incident and the violence of capitalist imperialism as a whole.
This is rather like the debate we had in India at the time of the Gujarat pogroms, only multiplied a thousandfold. Then too, the debate was whether the pogroms should be viewed as being in the continuity of past riots, or whether it was something new. Of course it was radically new, being an openly fascist expression. But of course it had its roots in Hindu communalism more generally.
One remembers 6 August 1998, when we organised a protest against the Indian (and the Pakistani) nuclear weapons. Ananda Bazar Patrika had been opposed to the nuclear tests, and had indeed allowed many of the anti-nuclear activists, such as Pradip Dutta, to write. But it was sharply critical of the demonstration itself, for our protests spilled over, quite easily, form anti-bomb or anti-nuclear to anti-war and anti-imperialist views and slogans and songs. It was really angry because protesters had sung Aaj Jato Yuddhabaaj (a militant anti-militarist song).
So even if it has been told many times, it should be told repeastedly, until there is no more reason to tell it, because the world has ended the nuclear weapons industry, the nuclear power industry which is inextricably linked to the weapons making, and capitalism and imperialism the progenitors of this monstrosity.

On August 6, 1945, the United States used a massive atomic weapon against Hiroshima. This atomic bomb was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Some 80,000 people were killed instantly. The death swelled up to about 140,000+/- 10,000, of which around 20,000 were soldiers, by the end of December. There were 76,000 buildings in the city at the time and only 8% remained intact after the bomb explosion. The bomb affected an area of around 13 square kilometres and turned that into ruins. The important thing about this bomb was that not only did it carry a terrifying punch (20,000 tons of TNT) but also that it emitted neutron and gamma radiation, which covered a much larger area. All radiation, even low-level background radiation, can damage exposed parts of the human body. Scientists use the term "rem" to describe an amount of radiation to which a person is exposed. A millirem is 1/1000th of a rem. cases where the whole body is exposed to 100 rems at a very rapid rate, human cells might be damaged and lose the ability to function. At exposures greater than 100 rems, a person may suffer immediate radiation sickness. The symptoms are flu-like in nature: diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. At doses greater than 300 rems, the body's immune system could become permanently damaged. Fifty percent of the people exposed to doses greater than 400 rems at one time would die within 60 days if a doctor did not offer immediate treatment. A rem is one unit-measure of radiation to which a human body has been exposed. (Remember: rEm = radiation Exposed.) Rad (radiation absorbed dose) is the term used to describe the radiation that a body actually absorbs.
If people are impacted by 150 to 1100 rad, severe blood changes will be noted and symptoms will appear immediately. By two weeks, some of those exposed may die. At 300-500 rad, up to half the people exposed will die within 30 days without intensive medical attention, and that is today, when we know much more about the effects as well as treatment. At the upper end of the dose range, a bone marrow transplant may be required to produce new blood cells. At Hiroshima people nearly 925 metres away from the epicentre were exposed to 700 rad.

Those who survived the blasts described scenes of nearly unspeakable horror—civilians, mainly women and children, burnt so badly there could be no treatment; “walking dead” staggering through the streets in their last hours, their skin hanging like rags from their bodies; atomic shadows seared into the pavement where humans had stood. Tens of thousands more continued to die and suffer in the years and decades after the attacks. There was not even any semblance of effective medical attention, because over 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses in Hiroshima were killed or injured—most had been in the downtown area which received the greatest damage.
And US imperialism has gone on mouthing its arguments. You could replace one president by another and not even feel the difference. Truman said, in unctuous tones, after Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, that
I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb... It is an awful responsibility which has come to us... We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.
This could as well be George Bush in one of his wars.
The parallels are not drawn artificially. The Obama as qwell as the Bush administrations have fought aggressive imperialist wars. They have threatened both weak states and those stronger. In the case of Iran there have been repeated reports, beginning in 2006, that the US and Israel are contemplating the use of so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike against military targets. Late in 2008, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates—then still in the employ of the Bush administration—speaking before the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace formally advocated the use of pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
If the dead of Hiroshima do haunt our dreams, then we must not observe this day through token gestures, but by passing on the knowledge of the nuclear weapons and imperialism to the next generation, and by fighting against both.

“Tears for Our Brave Jawans” ?

Star Ananda, the television face of West Bengal’s most powerful bourgeois media group, had a panel discussion on the killing of Kishenji, the CPI (Maoist) leader. The intention was put CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta on the mat, for having dared to express some sympathy for the slain Kishenji.

Guruas Dasgupta’s stance is not new. Within reformist politics, he has always shown exemplary courage. Back in the 1970s, when he was a CPI youth leader, he was well-known as one of the people defending tortured Naxalites during the notorious Sidhhartha Sankar Ray regime. But back then, even Indira Gandhi was hiding her politics under the mask of socialism. Today, when unabashed nationalism and economic liberalism rule, when India is seeking to position itself as not merely a regional power but as an emerging global powerhouse, Dasgupta, who also happens to be a leading trade unionist, the General Secretary of the AITUC, and an MP from Ghatal, is the most important mainstream left leader to have questioned the entire story behind Kishenji’s death. Like Varvara Rao, he has questioned whether there was truly an encounter or whether Kishenji had been arrested and then killed in cold blood.

Among the various modes of attack on Dasgupta, one came from police and ex-army people, including the left’s one time darling, General Shankar Roychowdhury. The point was, people shed copious tears when someone like Kishenji is killed, but when our brave jawans lay down their lives, whether in Kargil or elsewhere, whether they are soldiers, the paramilitary if the police, people ignore their heroic deaths in defence of the country.

We should consider a few brief points here, which can be developed at later times, but which do need at least a summary articulation.

First, what is or should be the revolutionary attitude to the armed forces, to the police, etc? Is it not obvious, someone might ask, that even if a revolution does take place, for law and order maintenance, for peace-keeping, for myriad reasons we will continue to need the police? And is it not even more obvious that as long as we have threats from across the border we must have an alert army? And finally, even today, whatever your criticism of governments, should you not salute the heroic jawans for doing their duty?

Any revolutionary, who answers these simply by quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, or from any other chosen canonical figure, is engaging in sterile politics. If we arrive at conclusions similar to what thy said, it has to be on the basis of our reflections on the current reality.

Why will we need the army, and why do we need it now? The Indian army is not a merely silent actor carrying out the will of the people expressed through their elected members of parliament wehose majority determines the composition of the government and the shape of policy, as official theory would have us believe. As the recent debate over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act showed, the army is an active and vocal shaper of policies. The chief Minister of a province, an elected representative, wanted the AFSPA lifted from some parts of the province. The army replied that this was not acceptable to it. Any talk of modifications of the AFSPA has been met with strident opposition from the army. It is therefore necessary to mention briefly what the AFSPA is about. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) is one of the more draconian legislations that the Indian Parliament has passed. Under this Act, all security forces are given unrestricted and unaccounted power to carry out their operations, once an area is declared disturbed. Even a non-commissioned officer is granted the right to shoot to kill based on mere suspicion that it is necessary to do so in order to "maintain the public order". It was first applied to the North Eastern states of Assam and Manipur and was amended in 1972 to extend to all the seven states in the north- eastern region of India. They are Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, also known as the "seven sisters". The enforcement of the AFSPA has resulted in innumerable incidents of arbitrary detention, torture, rape, and looting by security personnel. This legislation is sought to be justified by the Government of India, on the plea that it is required to stop the North East states from seceeding from the Indian Union. The 1972 amendments to the AFSPA extended the power to declare an area disturbed to the Central Government. In the 1958 version of the AFSPA only the state governments had this power. In the 1972 Lok Sabha debates it was argued that extending this power to the Central Government would take away the State's authority. In the 1958 debates the authority and power of the states in applying the AFSPA was a key issue. The Home Minister had argued that the AFSPA broadened states' power because they could call in the military whenever they chose. The 1972 amendment shows that the Central Government is no longer concerned with the state's power. Rather, the Central Government now has the ability to overrule the opinion of a state governor and declare an area disturbed. The army can shoot to kill, under the powers of section 4(a), for the commission or suspicion of the commission of the following offenses: acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons, carrying weapons, or carrying anything which is capable of being used as a fire-arm or ammunition. To justify the invocation of this provision, the officer need only be "of the opinion that it is necessary to do so for the maintenance of public order" and only give "such due warning as he may consider necessary".

The army can arrest anyone without a warrant under section 4(c) who has committed, is suspected of having committed or of being about to commit, a cognisable offense and use any amount of force "necessary to effect the arrest".

Section 5 says that the army has to hand over arrested persons to the police with the "least possible delay". There is no definition in the act of what constitutes the least possible delay. As a result, arbitrary arrests are regular.

Section 6 gives full immunity to the army for any action, since no legal proceeding can be brought against any member of the armed forces acting under the AFSPA, without the permission of the Central Government.

According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, some 8000 persons who have “disappeared” cannot be traced because of laws like the AFSPA which frees the Indian army from any accountability in Kashmir. Our brave jawans, in other words, are busier killing Kashmiri youth than in fighting in Kargil.

This raises another, even more basic question – what is the Indian army doing in Kashmir? Answer – trying to hold on to valuable real estate. If Kashmir is an integral part of India, why does India spend so much time killing civilians of that part of India? Why does the army and the paramilitary forces beat up journalists for covering incidents of protest in Kashmir, to say nothing of the Kashmiris who are routinely killed, tortured, sexually assaulted? Despite all media hype to the contrary, when has anyone proved in a court of law that Maoists assaulted or raped women the way the army and the paramilitary do with impunity in Kashmir, in Manipur, and anywhere else?

There is another important difference that one feels should be highlighted. It is true, that of late, surrendered Maoists (or are they captured Maoists or locals cxompelled to play roles taught by the state?) have said things about how the CPI (Maoist) tortures people, and forces them to do certain things. It is also known that if you hold so-called courts where armed guerrillas are all over the place, verdicts contrary to the ones sought by the guerrillas might not be delivered. Nevertheless, the bulk of people joining the CPI (Maoists) have done so out of certain ideological-political commitments. One can debate the precise nature of that ideology, as we in Radical socialist have repeatedly done. For that, the present author was once attacked as a degenerate by a Maoist supporter. But one has to make a distinction between an institution like the state, which prints Gandhi all voer the place, including in every note, which claims it is there to upholds the constitution, and then uses massive violence. The “brave jawans” are cannon fodder of the state. At the same time, in order to make them feel important, in order to keep them happy while they do the dirty work of the state, the state has various sops – ranging from alcohol at low rates to, in “disturbed areas”, the right to rape and kill with impunity.

It is true, that deaths of young men, even in uniform, are sad losses to the country and to their families most certainly. But these deaths are very often unnecessary deaths, created by contending states and their struggles for power and their conflicting ambitions. When we re asled why we do not shed tears for jawans who died fighting the Maoists, we need to ask, exactly why are those jawans being sent to fight? In vast tracts of India, tribals are repressed. Had the state spent half the money it does for Green Hunt and similar operations, on real development for the people, supplying them with education, health care, providing them with opportunities to earn more , would the CPI(Maoist) have found such strong support in those areas? But the state cannot do it. The Indian elite can enrich itself, can amass vast amount of capital, by superexploiting adivasis, by repeatedly evicting them whenever mineral wealth is to be extracted, and so forth. So the jawans who are dying in Green Hunt or in Manipur or in Kashmir, even if they have been led to believe, through repeated propaganda drives that they are serving the country, are in precise fact serving the country’s rulers.

Before shedding tears for them, will General Roychowdjhury shed tears for the unnamed and unnumbered adivasis who across india lose land, way of life, and are tortured for ever standing up and protesting (I am leaving aside those killed, for of course, General Roychowdhury and all his cothinkers will yell that everyone killed must be a Maoist)?

West Bengal: The Class Struggle is Not Over

For a long time, the CPI(M) had been mistakenly identified with class struggle. As a result, there was much elation on the Right after 13 May 2011, when it was evident that Mamata Banerjee would head a rightwing government in the province of West Bengal, earlier ruled for 34 years by the CPI(M). A totally stunned CPI(M) has been in no position to wage any kind of struggle, since this party and its cadres all the way to the village panchayat level had become accustomed to police protection and government support whenever it wanted to wage a “struggle”.

But the working class found new channels to express itself. Unorganised sector workers have sarted organizing themselves. An 'Asangothito Khetra Sramik Sangrami Mancha' (Militant Forum of Unorganised Sector Workers) was formed by June 2011. For three months, the organizers campaigned among different sections of the unorganized workers. An early deputation to the new government, which had promised Parivartan (change) had elicited a simple response: we have just now come to power, so we need some time. Incidentally, the labour minister in the new government is a renegade ex-Naxalite.

From 6^th to 8^th September, for three days, close to 11,000 workers gathered at the Metro Channel, Calcutta’s usual place for open air meetings and gatherings. The principal demands were:

# Recognition and issuing of identity cards to all unorganised sector workers (including sex workers) ;

# Fixation of minimum wage for all unorganised sector workers as per the norms of the 15th Indian Labour Conference , along with strict implementation of the Minimum Wages Act;

# Provision of cheap food for all, starting with 7 kgs of rice per adult at Rs. 2 per kg;

# Strict implementation of all provisions, especially 100 days of work, in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, with expansion to a guarantee of 270 days of work for all rural and urban workers;

#Inclusion of all unorganised sector workers, including workers of closed factories, as priority group or BPL in the 2011 Socioeconomic Survey

# Effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act (Scheduled Tribes and Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act);

#Permanent status for all contract workers employed in perennial jobs in the organised sector;

#Recognition and extension of facilities available to all socially backward castes and tribes.

On the 8^th, a deputation went to meet ministers. The response was blunt b—the government has a shortage of funds, so nothing can be done now. Few things have revealed the class character of the government so clearly. The workers too have thrown down the gauntlet, telling the government that unless their demands are met they will step up the level of agitation.

In India, at the moment, 37 per cent of the people have a body-mass index of less than 18.5, indicating they are suffering from malnutrition. The demand for making the PDS a stronger one is a rock-bottom minimum. The callous reaction of the government to this, while it discusses means of keeping the middle class and upper class voters happy, is something that will have more repercussions in days to come.

As callous as the government have been the major media. The Bengal Post alone carried a positive news. On the 9^th, The Telegraph printed a photo with a caption that said it all:

Return of rally raj

- CITY CENTRE CHOKES, citizens suffer

And:

Processions by two unorganised workers' associations converge on Metro Channel on Thursday and (above) traffic stalls on the Park Street flyover.

What better a way of telling the working class that they are not citizens? Their sufferings merit at best an end of year tax savings donation to a charity. Unless they mobilize and fight, the working class will have no alternative. And the struggle has been joined, under new leaderships.

http://www.radicalsocialist.in/articles/statement-radical-socialist/news/409-west-bengal-the-class-struggle-is-not-over

From

A Moment of Silence, Before I Start this Poem

[Written 2002]

Before I start this poem,
I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence
in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence
for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces
over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation
as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.
Before I begin this poem: two months of silence
for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
where homeland security made them aliens
in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
where death rained down and peeled back
every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
and the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam -
a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two
about the scent of burning fuel,
their relatives' bones buried in it,
their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos,
victims of a secret war ... ssssshhhhh .... Say nothing ...
we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
whose names, like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off our tongues.
Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador ... An afternoon
of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos ... None of whom
ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans
who found their graves far deeper in the ocean
than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung
from the heights of sycamore trees
in the south, the north, the east, and the west...
100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of
right here, Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous
magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been
Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written And if
this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New
York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek
ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.
And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem
We could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of
Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and
the Playboys. If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt
fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.


Emmanuel Ortiz, 9.11.02

Radical Socialist - Trotsky's Struggle to Build the Fourth International

Radical Socialist - Trotsky's Struggle to Build the Fourth International

Radical Socialist - Maoism, Green Hunt and Democratic Rights

Radical Socialist - Maoism, Green Hunt and Democratic Rights

When The Telegraph invites CPI(M) to be moderate, it is time to beware

The Telegraph has an editorial in its edition of 15 May. It points to the coalition government between the Tory Party and the Liberal-Democrats in Britain, and contrasts this with the attitude of the left in India. The left is evidently too unbending, too stuck in its old ideas, and does not recognize the need to give up pigheadedness in the greater national interest.

The point is made with reference to the first UPA. As a revolutionary Marxist, my criticism is normally in the opposite direction. The Left, i.e., the parliamentary cretinist left, yielded far too much. It argued that there was a need to fight fascism, i.e., the BJP. From this it concluded that there was a need to support a Congress-led government at the centre, even though that government was following an aggressively neo-liberal policy. (For details, any interested reader can look up the article written at that time by Soma Marik and myself). It allowed the government to push forward with its neo-liberal agenda, with only very limited resistance. But yes, it did present some resistance. As a Social Democratic force (the biggest components being Social Democrats of Stalinist origin and Stalinist organizational practice) the parliamentarist left cannot entirely ignore its basic constituencies. All too often, the far left mistakenly sees the actions of the Left Front government in West Bengal and assumes that that is the entirety of the parliamentary left’s outlook. But it is not so simple. Outside West Bengal, the CITU remains a major component of militant trade unionism. It is not possible to think of any serious all-India struggle while entirely ignoring this left. And that is exactly where The Telegraph has its objections. It wants the Left to give up all ties with the workers and peasants and become, not a social democratic party but a bourgeois party plain and simple. Without having any illusions about the CPI(M) as a revolutionary party, or even as a left reformist party, in this debate, I would support Prakash Karat against Aveek Sarkar’s editorial writer.