General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCapitalism: A Ghost Story - Arundhati Roy
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The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. Indias new mega-corporations Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. Its a dream come true for businessmento be able to sell what they dont have to buy.
The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt, local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and made over to private corporations for public interest for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had, is actually part of employment-generation. But by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of growth, 60% of Indias workforce is self-employed, 90% of Indias labor force works in the unorganized sector.
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The DMIC web site says that approximately 180 million people will be affected by the project. Exactly how, it doesnt say. It envisages the building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019. Thats in seven years time. When was the last time a State, despot ns of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?
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The Army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by Indias planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of usthe middle-class, white collar workers, intellectuals, opinion makersit has to be perception management. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
(more at link)
Oh my, so very hard to pick only four paragraphs. It is must-read stuff. Truly.
marmar
(77,088 posts)malaise
(269,157 posts)Thanks
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)of foundation capital in public affairs. Not to mention the cooptation of the liberal class and the "left" generally & the way that the NGO sector has helped split the working class through the transformation of a class-based/anti-capitalist discourse into an identity politics/rights discourse which offers no threat to capital:
Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights.
The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and Foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict... can both be admonished as Human Rights Violaters. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel, then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights dont matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in...
The Foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organizations like Steve Bikos Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated it. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africas first Black President, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANCs agenda. South Africas great peaceful transition, so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africas mines. Instead there was Privatization and Structural Adjustment. Mandela gave South Africas highest civilian awardthe Order of Good Hopeto his old friend and supporter, General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia. Today in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the myth of Black Liberation.
The rise of Black Power in the US was an inspirational moment for the rise of a radical, progressive Dalit movement in India, with organizations like the Dalit Panthers mirroring the militant politics of the Black Panthers. But Dalit Power too, in not exactly the same, but similar ways, has been fractured and defused and, with plenty of help from rightwing Hindu organizations and the Ford Foundation, is well on its way to transforming into Dalit Capitalism.
I also recommend this lecture on the same topics:
hunter
(38,325 posts)Bought.
Even Kermit:
redqueen
(115,103 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)alfredo
(60,075 posts)truedelphi
(32,324 posts)got root
(425 posts)grassroots organizations.
It really is like the matrix today.
psst... pass the word