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From International Socialism, No.48, June/July 1971, pp.9-10.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
South Asia is one of the most sensitive seismic zones of the world economy. When there is generalised pressure in the system as a whole, it bursts out with explosive force and the regimes round the Indian Ocean into the South China Sea shake and tumble.
The effects of stagnation in the world economy at large are exaggerated in Asia by the emerging structure of imperialism. This more and more inhibits the possibilities of capital accumulation and economic development. The level of capital required to launch an economy into sustained growth has risen far beyond the reach of the most backward countries. The poverty of the mass of their populations makes it impossible to raise the rate of accumulation by a significant increase in exploitation. The capital goods needed for industrialisation are more and more expensive, while the market for goods they produce is dammed and restricted by the domination of the advanced capitalist powers. Each backward country finds itself in an external vice which makes it impossible to accumulate capital at a rate sufficient to change the balance of power between that country and the world.
The crisis is a developing one. There are ups and downs, temporary boosts and periodic slumps, but overall the gap between the advanced and the backward is growing wider.
Each ruling class in the underdeveloped world responds to this external vice by imposing the same repressive system upon the local population. Capital in Karachi, for instance has mirrored its own external situation by imposing its own form of colonial oppression upon the Bengalis.
But this solves none of the problems. Each state has to increase its military preparations so as to keep its exploited population in check, as well as to guard itself against predatory neighbours (and all neighbours in this world are predatory). Military expenditure in southern Asia has risen from half a billion dollars to two billion dollars (in constant prices) since 1949. But the more resources are diverted into arms, the less there remains for capital accumulation to offset the growing level of unemployment. The internal threat to the state from the unemployed, under-employed and miserably low-paid increases, and with it the need to divert even greater resources into military channels. At the end of all this, the military regime can scarcely keep the national wreck afloat.
This spring it looked for a moment as though the whole status quo in south Asia might be thrown into the melting pot. In Bengal and Ceylon the vision of a free people very briefly flashed across the minds of thousands. It was the first rush of hope in the lives of people who for so many years had been faced with such an appalling prospect of misery.
The challenge of the rebels in Ceylon and Bengal is explosive precisely because they can no longer be fobbed off with claptrap about nationalising the banks and insurance, measures that in no way shift the balance of class forces, let alone ameliorate the terrible poverty of the masses. The explosion in Bengal threatened the ruling class not just of Pakistan, but even more important, of India. Once the Indian house of cards begins to slide, there is hope for all the other movements, whether in Pakistan, Ceylon or elsewhere. Otherwise the Indian government will use all means available to stifle revolution on its borders. It is now backing the Awami League in East Pakistan precisely in order to destroy the possibility of a ‘workers and peasants socialist republic of Bengal’.
However, it is also clear from their failure that the movements in both Ceylon and Bengal, have been desperately weak in political perspectives. The domination of revolutionaries in south Asia by a loose Maoist-Populist-Anarchist attitude, as with the Naxalites in India, is disastrous in terms of programme, activity and organisation. The movements still have the target of isolated, national state-capitalist development. This prevents them from seeing the relationship between the local and the struggle or from locating the class capable of decisive internal transformation. An internationalist perspective would have meant that the first priority of the militants in Bangla Desh would have been to elicit support from the workers of Karachi. As it is the people of East and West Pakistan will be hanged separately by the military.
Again, the vague populism of the movements has meant that they have been mainly based upon the youth of urban middle class families. Yet a proletarian emphasis in Ceylon would have prompted the revolutionaries to seek support from the Columbo workers, support which would have made it impossible for Mrs Bandaranaike’s thugs to beat up the revolutionaries in a corner without a protest.
The external lessons are easier to draw than the internal. The role of China and the Soviet Union has been revealed in the least complimentary light. It is only possible to believe that either of these powers plays some ‘progressive’ role in the world by deliberately ignoring what has happened.
Indian chauvinism has received a great boost from supporting Bangla Desh, even though the demand for national independence would be furiously rejected within India by the same people. The Bangla Desh movement will have to be very careful in its attitude to India. Already the Awami League ‘provisional government’, sitting in Calcutta at government of India expense, has effectively become a puppet of Delhi. Marwari capital from Calcutta would be happy to fill the place vacated by Karachi capital. The Bengalis cannot resist this kind of subversion without a perspective which sees Bangla Desh as the beginning of the Indian revolution, and the Indian revolution as the precondition for a real Bangla Desh.
The struggle goes on. The survivors in Bengal and in Ceylon will regroup and take up the fight once more. For some of the Bengalis, those here in Britain, the Bangla Desh movement is already a consuming passion. And those, whatever they are in Bengal, are workers here. The development of their consciousness on the issue of Bengal will have its effects on their attitude as workers in Britain, on their attitude to immigrant organisation and politics, to the Immigration Bill, and to the industrial struggle in Britain. The fight there and the fight here are the results of a more generalised stagnation in the world economy. And the Bengalis here are the living link between those two struggles.
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