On agriculture, opposition to land acquisition and the parliamentary elections

Agriculture has long been perceived as a way of life in human societies. It has been organizing the social existence of a very large part of humanity over thousands of years. Being a way of living, it is not a sum total of production, consumption and distribution but a qualitatively different entity which includes production, consumption, and distribution of what society materially needs. Also as a way of life, agriculture puts human need under the control of its social and earthly existence.
The agricultural social existence means a harmonious communal existence. The knowledge of living doesn’t transmit through books or videos or anything alike in these societies; rather it is passed to the next generation spontaneously, through actions of people. Thus human social interaction is the central theme of sustenance in this communal existence. Aged people are respected there, as embodiment of knowledge. This communal existence is natural, spontaneous, for the sake of survival, and not an act of conscience or external consciousness. The past is very much present in agricultural social existence, and the future also, for the very same logic. It can not live for the moment, for the day, for the year. It visualizes life beyond death. Thus sustainability used to be organically linked to traditional agriculture. It is slow, apparently confined into the geological space where it exists.
The vision of the individual man is often constrained by his own life. Mortal lifespan compels him to acquire speed. Constrain of mortality seemed to have cast a huge shadow on political economy, which was also a driving force of the introduction of machines instead of tools. Capital has long been within the human societies, and commodities also, but capitalism found solid base with the transition to machines from tools. Machines and triumphant capitalism have a symbiotic relationship.
Political economy is thus shortsighted from its inception. It extracted the production part of agriculture from its social existence, defined the standard: ‘productivity’; and measured ‘agriculture’, just to find it lagging behind industry in its myopic vision of human progress. Nonetheless, victors determined the dominant vision.
Opposition to land acquisition
There should be no doubt about that the opposition to land acquisition is the most prominent all India movement in last 3-4 years in our country. And now, when we are on the brink of a parliamentary election, we are not seeing any parliamentary party trying to bank on this country-wide movement or carry the interest of the movement along with it.
The opposition to land acquisition, the opposition to industrialization from above, opposition to the forceful destruction of agriculture could not make a political slogan fit for parliamentary politics. Understandably, negation barely makes a parliamentary slogan. Parliamentary politics is deeply rooted in doing something for the people. To be more precise, the main discourse of the parliamentary politics is centralized, state sponsored initiative for the welfare of the people. People are supposed to choose their representatives and these representatives will work for the people for next five years. This idea is further cut short by the Party system, where party manipulates the representation, and the whole parliamentary system assists Parties in this endeavor. Thus the theme of the parliamentary kind of politics is ‘how to govern the people’ and may read as ‘how to solve people’s problems (as perceived by us)’ if you look at the left corner of it. The left slogans may sound like `guarantee of 100 days work’ or may be `full employment’ if you hear the farthest left corner of it. Thus Parliamentary system is 1) detached from people, and it 2) provides prescription for the ‘greater common good’. It has a very little space for people’s negation.
The tale of crisis and beyond
Independence forced our country to a capitalist parliamentary prescription (of predominant mode of production): growth led by heavy industry and industrial agriculture. It was being practiced worldwide at that time, including in so called socialist USSR. A typical leftist ‘land to tiller’ kind of reform in land relation was also conceived as a supplement to this prescription. Employment had become the buzzword among laboring masses. Everybody was supposed to become a worker. This model of social engine lost its vigour as early as late sixties, worldwide. Industrial agriculture has also started to show crisis.
This structural crisis of capitalist system was perceived by the labouring masses (or, social labour, as an abstraction) as the ‘end of the dream of employment’. In fact, the so called third world was never apt in making the western prescription a reality, but a dream was there. Perhaps, the stormy seventies exhibited a frustration of ‘the end of dream’.
Marx argued in 1844 that when capitalist system was in crisis the labour ‘would die’. But social labour responded differently this time. It started to chalk out a survival strategy on its own. The rise of so called informal sectors (self employment, micro production and distribution unit and so on) was witnessed worldwide. In countries like ours, this rise has got two special characters:
a) rising confidence and thinking positively about this sector by social labour, as it was already there (but the number grown significantly in eighties and later);
b) this sector has a strong backward linkage with agriculture, sometimes, an extension to it. While talking with women in Nandigram, we were told that they had their own industry, of stitching, embroidery… A community garment industry is the dominant feature of Nandigram households. And they are peasants at the same time. In other areas also one could find peasant households engaged in other income generating activities but they don’t consider themselves workers. Thus the crisis ridden industrial agriculture has also been redefined by social labour. It ceases to be the mainframe in rural areas, the absolute means of livelihood. In fact the idea of something to be the `absolute means of livelihood’ is put under scanner. Almost all the peasant families in our state are engaged in other income generation activities at the same time (I cannot cite any statistics, but my experience tells this). But agriculture remains to be the absolutely necessary part of the survival strategy chalked out by our social labour. Moreover, the agriculture historically provided society with knowledge necessary for managing itself sustainably.
However, the rise of this survival strategy didn’t go unnoticed by capital. It didn’t waste any time worldwide to grab this self managed social space created by social labour [i]. It jumped to capitalize it, destroy it. All the capitalist industries started informalization, contractual system of work. Globalization is arguably a politico-economic process of capitalization (commercialization, standardization, and even destruction if it doesn’t accept) of the social space created by social labour, a bid to restructure itself for going out of crisis. Land acquisition is part of this capitalist endeavor.
If viewed from this perspective, the great all-India resistance to land acquisition is the manifestation of fierce opposition of the changed face of social labour (one must note the demise of once glorious workers movement, especially in factories). It is not a peasant movement, but derives knowledge from it (as the survival strategy derives knowledge from agricultural traditions).
Some notable characteristics of the resistance movement by social labour
a) First of all it rejected the holistic view of development. Peasants were not in a position to lose their fortunes for the benefit of the projected majority (a literally false, treacherous projection), or the so called development of the country. They refused to put the `national interest’ above their own interest. Thus parties that sell nationalism couldn’t penetrate into the movement. (Actually selling nationalism makes it a commodity. You can only sell it or consume, being a Congress Party Boss or an alienated India-Pak Cricket Match hungry fellow. Peasants calculated selfishly, and totally abstained.)
b) They rejected the leftist version of development also. “Development” has been canvassed by the leftists as an employment generator, a material gain. But the peasantry didn’t go by this theory though it appeals to their materialistic self. Rather they went by the direct experience they had from the past decades, where big industry didn’t provide them a sustainable way of life, in terms of earning, as well as in terms of consumption. They noticed that non-efficient labour which they can provide in big industry was vulnerable, and there was no guarantee of that job. Also, they can not live a life around an industrial zone with dignity. They would be banished. So the selfish peasantry again acted.
c) The movement is over once the discontent is spectacularly exhibited. This is another characteristic of this movement. Thus it refused the revolutionary forces also, who wish to build organization depending on the popular outbreak. The ideal example may be the case of Nandigram, where the peasantry reacted in a most radical manner, virtually cutting out the specified zone of acquisition by digging trenches across the roads, thereby preventing the state machinery as well as ruling party cadres to enter into the villages. But it didn’t help the revolutionary forces to build organizations there. Peasantry simply refused to follow the traditional organizational forms for struggle. The occupational tendency was seen not only in Nandigram, but in Orissa (Posco case), Raigad and partly in Singur also, which also exhibited the aspiration to safeguard the self-created and managed survival strategies. Revolutionary politics majorly overlooked the recomposition of social labour and its new subjectivity and failed to become a part of it, and perished. In case of Nandigram at least, people were more radical than revolutionaries for the first couple of weeks in January 2007, both in terms of form and content of resistance.
But the movements created an atmosphere of protest all over society. Any injustice would not be spared — the mood was set. Any kind of developmental work involving land acquisition was virtually stopped. It created an ambience of hope, a confidence for themselves among laboring masses. Social labour, already engaged in chalking out the survival strategy for itself on its own, seems to have reckoned itself politically. However, any further articulation, depending on the ideological extension, be it a revolution, or a movement against globalization, or a `neo-fascist’ flavour, have been rejected. Nobody could win this movement till now.
Parliamentary Democracy
The parliamentary democracy, the basic and classical political unit responsible for recursive estrangement of social labour and thereby the most prominent agent of social reproduction of capital relation, is watching the resistance too. It must co-opt the resistance within its own framework. It must gallop the vitalities of laboring masses, in order to restructure itself, as well as to ossify the labouring people’s political reckoning and initiative, to vent away the anger. It must respond to what the Corporates call geopolitical reality. Parliamentary restructuring is their obligation
The peasants put any top to bottom initiative at stake. They have shown that without a theory from above, successful resistance to capital is possible. They made it clear that the articulation of anti capitalism and mass resistance to capital are two separate things today. Anti capitalism failed to deliver its unity initiative with the resistance to capital. It is time ripe for the anti capitalist and the socialist movements to look at themselves. The organic knowledge and the existence of non-capitalist space among the laboring masses and their rebuttal to obey capitalist order may be studied closely in order to reshape the full course of socialism. The historical knowledge of surviving a sustained capitalist crisis is with the social labor, not only some strategies of resistance. And let us not forget that socialism has irreversibly been linked, over the course of time, with the survival strategy of mankind.