Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We may be much more entertained by charity now. But on account of the Band Aid format, we are now arguably less knowledgeable about why some people suffer terribly around the world – and in no better a position to put an end to it. 

(The Conversation)

Today, political scientists and pollsters use ‘the working class’ to describe members of the work force who do not have a college degree. By that definition, the number of working-class Americans has been declining as the country has grown wealthier and more educated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 38 percent of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2022, up from just 17 percent in 1980. There’s a major exception to that common definition, however. Marxist scholars use “working class” quite differently—typically encompassing anyone who depends on wages to survive, regardless of their educational experience. 

(Reason)

In fact, the Democratic Party, the party of the slavocracy, of Jim Crow and of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, has never been a party of the working class. It has, and will always be, a capitalist party. Sanders’ political role…is to use his nominally ‘independent’ designation to provide the Democratic Party with a veneer of credibility in order to contain opposition to the whole capitalist system. 

(WSWS)

What happened during the pandemic especially, was a good tutorial about how to do things. First of all, what pandemic showed us was the Hollywood utopian, you know, imagination of the future of humanity is absolutely bullshit, because when crises happen, people tend to help each other and be in solidarity, and they become even more, even loving, you know, towards each other. So we have to imagine politics as a, you know, natural disaster or like a disaster, like a pandemic, and we have to act like that.

(New Internationalist)

Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. ‘We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place’, he says. ‘Our best days are in the future’. 

(Prospect)

A ‘very rare’ 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie. The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947.

(CNN)

Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to ‘true democracy’, aimed at realising ‘social justice’ after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers

(WSWS)

‘The Turkish police catch 100 to 150 migrants every night. They have no mercy on them. They break their arms and legs. 

(BBC)

I’m all for supporting a new and viable political group but let’s look at what we already have before trying to reinvent the wheel.

(Guardian)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Cooking the Books: Poor Woman’s banker (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Muhammad Yunus, an economics lecturer and banker from Bangladesh. The spread of “micro-banking”, which he thought up and put into practice, was judged to have contributed to world peace.

Leaving aside whether he should have got the Economics rather than the Peace prize, what is micro-banking? Actually, it is not all that different from ordinary banking in that it is still based on a bank lending out money that has been previously deposited with it. The difference lies in who the money is lent to. The Grameen bank, which Yunus set up in 1976, lends to poor self-employed people.

The established banks in Bangladesh had shunned such people because, being so poor, they had nothing to offer as collateral for any loan and so were not considered credit-worthy. In order to start up or keep themselves in activity, poor self-employed people had to resort to local money-lenders who charged usurious rates of interest. A typical example would be the woman in the story about how bank got set up:

“In the village of Jobra, Dr Yunus met a woman who made bamboo stools. Because she had no assets and was unable to borrow from conventional sources, she had to resort to the money lenders. For each stool, she borrowed the equivalent of 15p to buy the raw bamboo. After repaying at extortionate rates of interest she made barely 1p on each stool. This woman was hard-working and talented but was being held back by a lack of access to finance. Inspired by her story, Dr Yunus started a series of experiments and lent tiny sums of his own money to villagers. They used the money to set up small businesses such as basket weaving and raising chickens. He found that his borrowers — mainly women — repaid in full and on time” (Times, 1 September).

What Yunus had shown was that the poor self-employed can be credit-worthy. Banks based on his principles lend out very small sums for a year which have to be repaid, with interest (at just above the ordinary banks’ rate), from current sales. While a means of freeing the self-employed in countries like Bangladesh from the clutches of the money-lenders, micro-banking is not a solution to global poverty. Not only because not everybody in such countries could become a basket weaver or a chicken farmer or a maker of bamboo stools, but because those the bank lends to remain poor and dependant on the vagaries of the market.

Nor is there anything anti-capitalist about the scheme. The Times described Yunus in an editorial (14 October) as “the Adam Smith of the Poor” and their correspondent in Dhaka reported:

“Professor Yunus insisted that he was not against the free market, but that he wanted the market to be free for everyone. ‘I am a free-market guy and even the poor should be part of the free market’, he said. ‘Two thirds of the population of the world are not able to participate, so it is not free’”.

The way the Grameen bank works also confirms the Marxian view that banks cannot create credit out of nothing. Like other banks it can only lend what has been deposited with it. If certain banking theories were correct — that if you deposit £1 in a bank, it can then lend out £9 rather than only 90p — then Professor Yunus would have been able to help the poor self-employed of Bangladesh by a mere stroke of the pen. But if he had tried to run his bank on this theory it would have rapidly gone bankrupt, and the only prize he would have got would have been a booby prize for either stupidity or naivety.

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review November 1971

At Home

Emperor Hirohito of Japan has been in and out of favour with the British ruling class so much that his life has resembled that of the man and woman in the barometer. Before the last war he was awarded the Order of the Garter, which is supposed to be a recognition of a person’s “chivalry” but which is actually one of the gaudy medals our rulers exchange like little boys with cigarette cards. Then in 1941, as his country was fighting against the British ruling class, he was stripped of the order. In April he got it back—and the whole episode serves to underline the true purpose of these decorations and ceremonies which are thrown around and which the popular press make such a fuss about. Hirohito is now, of course, a friend of British capitalism, at any rate for the time being and his visit to this country was designed to ram the fact down the throats of the British workers. Some of them were unwise enough to protest, in memory of the atrocities which parts of the Japanese army were responsible for in the last war. Apart from the fact that these protests were not aimed at atrocities as such but only those committed by the enemy, there was also the fact that the protesters were acting in the customarily naive fashion of supporters of capitalism. The alliances of international capitalism change as the pattern of opposing interests change, so that yesterday’s enemy is the friend of today. It is not stretching matters too far to say that, had Hitler in some way survived the war and the trials which followed, he may have been paraded through the streets of London to display the new solidarity between the two capitalisms. For capitalism does not know principles other than its own sordid motives, which erect no obstacles in the way of one set of murdering bandits embracing another.

Abroad

A recent United Nations report has told us that unless a “mammoth” relief operation is mounted, there will be some 40 million starving in East Pakistan by Christmas. We have grown so familiar to this kind of warning that the report passed by almost unnoticed, as another example of the world’s inadequate resources or its inability to organise such an operation smoothly and in time. That has always been the official excuse, for tragedies such as in East Pakistan, or in natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, typhoons. Yet at the same time as the U.N. report came out, a comparatively short distance away from East Pakistan the evidence was accumulating, that the excuses for inaction are nothing more than lies. In the middle of a desert, among the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis, the Shah of Persia briefly held court to a gathering of the representatives of world capitalism in conditions of unprecedented luxury. The assembled dignitaries camped out in tents as sumptuous as a palace. They ate food exotic into the realms of fantasy. The whole show, which lasted only a couple of days, cost some £40 million. To get all that stuff out to the ruins in the desert, convoys of lorries rolled out from the Continent every day for months. And the object of it all was simply to show the world that, among the minor powers of international capitalism, Persia has a place. Whether or not that point was made, what was clear was that it is possible to move vast amounts of supplies into difficult places—but that capitalism does not care to do so. When the deaths are counted up in East Pakistan, or in any other similarly needy place, nobody who remembers the junketings at Persepolis should be content with the excuse that it is all an unavoidable accident.

Politics

That strange, light headed feeling we always get at this time of year is relief at the end of the boredom of the party conferences. This year’s were splendid examples of the art of conference trickery. Labour desperately tried to paper over its splits, revealed briefly the flash of knives in the shadows and ended with a marvellously unrealistic list of industries to be nationalised by a future Labour government. Sometimes they mentioned the word Socialism but for all they understood it, or mentioned it in correct context, they might as well have said rhubarb.

The Tories were also in excellent form. This year, remember, they are in power, so the speeches have to be rather different in tone if not in basic content. When they were in opposition we were all being threatened with imminent disasters; now we are all being threatened with imminent prosperity. Barber and Heath both told us all about the golden future which is about to be served up to us and the Chancellor dug up an explanation for unemployment which has been out of use for long enough to sound really fresh. It was all, he said, due to wage demands. The Tories also had their customary hunt for the blood of the criminal, and of course the hats made a wonderful showing.

When capitalism is no more, there will be a good case for keeping these conferences going, for how else will we know what cynicism meant to the people it now deceives and suppresses?

Bird’s Eye View: Danger: Capitalism at work (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Danger: Capitalism at work

Writing about the factory regime in nineteenth-century England, Karl Marx observed: ‘But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. … All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour power that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility’ (Capital Vol. I, Chapter 10, 1867, tinyurl.com/9xzpn7p4 ).

The irony that Zero Hedge, a website home to howling mad libertarian supporters of capitalism (motto: on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero), reminded us on May Day this year of one tragic consequence of their social system of war and want at work cannot be overlooked: ‘It’s been 10 years since the Rana Plaza factory collapse in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, where more than 1,100 people died and over 2,600 were injured’ (tinyurl.com/y75u85t5 ).

Workers’ rights 1 (sporadic violations) – 5 (no guarantee)

Since Marx’s day, the werewolf can be heard baying for blood worldwide. The same Zero Hedge article informs us: ‘… 87 percent of countries having violated their workers’ right to strike in 2022, up from 63 percent in 2014. According to the report, trade unionists were murdered in 13 countries last year, with Colombia the deadliest nation. Last year, the Middle East and North Africa received the worst score of the regions on the Global Rights Index with an average of 4.53. It was followed by Asia-Pacific with 4.22, Africa with 3.76, the Americas with 3.52 and Europe with 2.49. The Asia-Pacific region saw its average rating worsen slightly in 2021 from 4.17 to 4.22 the following year. While the chart considers not only garment workers but all workers generally, ITUC [International Trade Union Confederation] analysts explain that in Bangladesh, the garment industry is one of the biggest sectors, employing more than 4.5 million people. The country received a score of 5, signifying that there is no guarantee of rights to workers. According to the report, workers experienced violence in 43 percent of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, up from 35 percent in 2021. In Bangladesh, workers strikes were met with brutality by the authorities, with at least five killed, while attempts at forming unions were shut down. India and Pakistan too saw police brutality against workers, while authorities in Hong Kong clamped down on trade unions and pro-democracy organizations and human rights abuses continued in Myanmar. In China, persecuted minorities were detained by the authorities and coerced into forced labor to fuel the garment industry.’

Never-ending struggle

‘Every year more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don’t die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents”. They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority’ (University and College Union, 5 May, tinyurl.com/594mtbk5 ).

International Workers Memorial Day (IWMD), 28 April, commemorates those workers. But Marx was right to conclude:’ Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system’ (XIV. The Struggle Between Capital and Labour and its Results, Value, Price and Profit, 1865, tinyurl.com/ye2aszp6 ).

China, Inc.

The China Global Television Network reminded us on May Day that the dictator Xi in his 2018 New Year Address stated: ‘Happiness is achieved through hard work’ (tinyurl.com/3jmzehu8 ). Another article dated 1 May and titled ‘One in 5 young people in Chinese cities is out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields’ goes on to inform us:

”’Chinese students, exhausted by pandemic lockdowns and concerned about China’s ever-evolving model of state capitalism, are beginning to realize that a degree may not improve their social position, nor result in some other guaranteed benefit,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (WENY News, tinyurl.com/2ya9wrjr).

There you have it in black and white: China as state capitalist. The hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are not hidden. Consider, China has the world’s highest number of billionaires, many of them in the rubber stamp parliament, with a combined wealth of US$4.5 trillion. They, like the 1 percent worldwide, have been doing very nicely thanks to us. China Labor Watch has issued many reports detailing workers’ countless hours of overtime, contact with dangerous chemicals and missing wages. Their review of ‘Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers’ is informative: ‘Well-documented in the media and by labor rights groups, those conditions include exhausting work, disciplinary management style, and increasing pressure to produce in short time frames, all for meagre wages’ (11 September 2020, tinyurl.com/3epk6nz3 ). Furthermore, China has more strikes per year than any other country, many thousands. These strikes are often unplanned, spontaneous, even chaotic, and the bosses stop at nothing to suppress them: they lie, cheat, call in the police, and hire gangsters to intimidate strikers or even beat them up.

The End of Bangla Desh (1971)

From the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Reddened with blood, bathed in tears, the crazy world was marking its course through splice with the groans of the sick, the hungry and injured.” (Andreyev)

East Pakistan, so recently shuddering from a gigantic cyclone, was then the scene of an appalling blood-bath. The government used tanks and air-power to massacre its own people. The official story is that the Bengali autonomists had been preparing a revolt for 26 March, a revolt which was wisely and firmly put down by the loyal armed forces.

But what is really behind it all? Why should a state — already $5,000m in the red — engage in a ruinous internal war? Why is it so vitally important for Yahya Khan to “preserve the unity and integrity” of Pakistan, when 98 per cent of the East Wing supports the Awami League autonomists? And why have the Bengalis of East Pakistan been so bitter and persistent in their opposition, for at least a decade, to the existing political set-up and so vehement in their demand for autonomy? And would autonomy do them any good if they got it?

To attempt an answer to these questions, we must first go back a bit in history. At the end of the independence struggle, the Muslims of India were demanding a separate homeland to be sited in areas where they formed a majority of the population. Hence, partition: a partition which resulted in a secular India, led by Nehru and the Congress Party, confronting a Muslim Pakistan made hostile by the savage inter-communal riots and massacres all over the sub-continent, which took place at the time of Independence.

Pakistan is in the North of India. East Pakistan, with about 56 per cent of the population, is in the northeast and is part of the old province of Bengal. Its language is Bengali, its main cereal crop rice, its main exports jute and tea; it has a predominantly agricultural economy with per capita income about 200 rupees, as compared with the average for Pakistan as a whole which is 418 rupees (about £30). The land is low-lying and subject to floods, tornadoes and cyclones. In the nine years from 1960-69, there were 15 “major natural calamities”—6 floods, 7 cyclones and 2 tornadoes; in only one of these years “no major calamity occurred” but in 1968 "all the 17 districts were affected” in a single flood. In this period more than 50,000 people died in these various calamities and in 1 cyclone alone in 1965 more than 20,000 died. (Pakistan Observer, 22 November 1970).

The West Wing of Pakistan comprises four provinces: Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. They speak Sindi, Punjabi and Pushtu, and together make up the remaining 44 per cent of the population. Its main cereal crop is wheat, it exports cotton and other manufactured goods— mainly to East Pakistan which is a protected market due to a tariff wall. Whilst the East Wing is adjacent to Burma and the sweaty jungles of the Far East, the West Wing is closer in character to the desert countries of the Middle East. The widely separated halves of Pakistan have nothing in common but their religion.

After Independence, the economy was deteriorating under a succession of incompetent and corrupt governments, until in 1958 General Ayub Khan, backed by the Army, seized power. By 1968, when threatened with civil war over his trial of the East Wing leader (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) he was forced to hand over power to General Yahya Kahn, corruption and graft had increased to remarkable proportions. Ayub’s own family had become one of the richest in the country and most of the economy was controlled and owned by a clique notorious as the "twenty families”—all closely connected with Ayub and his Punjabi generals.

It was during the ten years of Ayub’s rule that the nationalist Bengali movement for autonomy grew up. It fed greedily on such appalling statistics as the fact that defence expenditure rose in ten years from 30 per cent to about 60 per cent of total government spending; that in 1961 the East was receiving less than 15 per cent of the government’s revenue budget expenditure; that in 1959-60 the Capital Budget allocated the East Wing a little over naif what it allocated the West Wing; that more schools, hospitals, university institutions, irrigation works, plush government jobs and lush government contracts went to the Punjabis, who thanks to their control of the armed forces had got complete control of the whole administration.

Further, although East Pakistan every year had a good balance of payments—thanks to its jute and tea exports—most of the foreign exchange earned was used to finance the growing industries of the West, not to mention its soaring demand for imported cars, washing machines and fridges. The country now spends well over 50 per cent of the GNP on defence and has incurred foreign debts of over $5,000m., which use up 20 per cent of all Pakistan’s foreign exchange earnings for debt repayments. Add to all this the fact that there is an annual transfer of resources from East to West of around Rs.250m. and you can understand why the growing movement for autonomy so closely resembles that of a colony bidding for independence.

East Pakistan has 84 per cent illiteracy, 28 per cent unemployment, a population density of about 800 per sq. mile, and average peasant holdings of 3 acres with 3 head of cattle/buffaloes, 1 sheep/goat, 4 fowls and about 2.5 acres growing rice (Pakistan Observer, 25 November 1970). Its population is 40 per cent aged under 14 and has an infant and child mortality rate as high as its life expectancy is low.

When Yahya Khan came into power in 1968, there was a possibility of civil war due partly to the unrest in the East Wing which centred on the trial for “treason” of Mujibur Rahman and his associates. Yahya bowed to the storm, dropped the trials and made speeches about restoring a democratic framework, holding elections and establishing a Constitution. Political parties were allowed to form. In the West, Z. A. Bhutto—a former Cabinet Minister under Ayub—emerged as a front-runner with his People’s Democratic Party, while in the East Wing Mujibur Rahman’s nationalist Awami League (a city-based organisation with support from most moderate business and professional people) and Maulana Bashani’s (Maoist) Awami Party (supported by students and having a strong village grassroots-level support); both demanded autonomy. In the end the Awami Party much splintered by dissenting groups, decided to boycott the elections.

The first one-man, one-vote elections ever to be held in Pakistan were postponed last year from September to December, due to floods in the East Wing in the summer. Then, three weeks before the December date, the cyclone struck. No very accurate figure has emerged (or ever will now) of just how many lost their lives in and after that appalling night of 12 November. Probably more than 900,000 men, women and, above all, children will have died in the disaster area of only about 4 million people: this amounts to a casualty rate of nearly 23 per cent. (The worst ever recorded cyclones in Bengal, those of 1737 and 1876, only caused casualties of about 300,000 each).

After the cyclone, it became obvious, as miserable days and weeks dragged by, that the administration was not exactly exerting itself to get aid to the survivors. Even a fortnight after the disaster only one cargo aircraft and one helicopter were in action to drop supplies over a total land area of 9,300 square miles.

There is also considerable evidence that the Administration could have prevented many of the casualties by broadcasting an evacuation warning and by not concealing what it knew of. the size, speed and proximity of the impending cyclone. A fortnight before the disaster, meteorological warnings were reaching the (Punjabi) Governor of East Pakistan and continued in a crescendo until, 8 hours before the cyclone struck, the new radar station at Cox’s Bazar announced that the unprecedented pressure had burst its instruments. Yet no warning to evacuate went out on the radio and still the Governor did not take any steps to prepare for relief work. Probably only a quarter of the casualties were unavoidable, another quarter died as a result of the tardiness and ineffectiveness of the relief operation and 50 per cent of those who died perished within reach of shelters and safe places which would have protected them in the cyclone had they received a radio evacuation signal. The Met officers and Radio Pakistan could not broadcast a general evacuation order without sanction from the Govemor.

Yet the election was not postponed. Bengalis seething with bitterness backed the Awami League 98 per cent and thereby gave Mujib’s party a clear majority in the National Assembly to be held to create a constitution. The Assembly was not held. Yahya Kahn talked to Mujib, privately, for weeks while the Army prepared its plan and brought from the West Wing immense reinforcements, especially of tanks trucks and aircraft. Yahya also brought over Bhutto—a man much detested in the East—possibly in the hope of provoking riots, which the Army would then have to quell. Finally having completed his preparations, he broke off his talks with Mujib and flew back to Rawalpindi. The Army then moved in, massacring students, Awami Leaguers, Hindus, men, women and children—anything that moved. Bengalis in panic fled the city and with primitive Second War rifles and bamboo sticks fought the Army in pathetic local stands. Millions of refugees have crossed the border to the refugee camps of India. Paddy fields are not being planted out, the jute crop is a write-off, and jute-mills and tea-plantations have suffered badly. There is at present no prospect of things getting really back to normal and the armed forces are still being reinforced. For the Bengalis the prospect is one of a quick death by napalm or a slow one by starvation.

This war, if any, is one that is being fought over plunder. The power to grab the profits of the jute and tea trades, the power to use East Bengal as a captive market for the industries of West Pakistan, the power to import cheaply the agricultural produce of the East: these are the reasons why Yahya Kahn is determined to “preserve the unity and integrity of Pakistan”.

And for what would the Bengalis be fighting, if they are fighting indeed and not just dying? Why, for the ineffable right to be exploited by Mr. Big Business Bhuiya or Choudhury or Haque, instead of by General Khan or one of General Khan's many friends and relatives.

Charmian Skelton

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

The crisis in the shipyards of the Upper Clyde group showed capitalism, and its apologists, at their most typical. The crisis came not for any lack of skill or materials or need; it came simply because the yards cannot fulfill the basic capitalist requirement that they operate at a profit. In that situation UCS may well have to shut down, no matter how many ships may be sailing which for one reason or another should be replaced—and no matter how much waste of resources a closure might represent. The Labour Party may howl with rage at the shut down, as they often do when the principles of capitalism which they uphold when in office come into operation when they are in opposition. The Tories say they are applying their policy of making all undertakings stand on their own feet. But if this were to be generally applied, what panic there would be among the parasites of the ruling class !

Among, for example, the royal family who, if required to stand alone on their own feet would quickly collapse into a heap. They have just decided that they can no longer stagger along on the pittance of the few hundred thousands they get each year, even if this does supplement the income from their massive private wealth. Workers whose lives are given up to the toil which produces all this opulence by the side of indescribable misery should not be deceived into thinking that what the press called the royal “wage” claim makes the queen and her hangers-on anything other than the highest, the most publicised and among the richest, of the capitalist class.

To the members of that class, problems like rising prices, for example, are seen as if through the other end of the telescope from the one to which workers’ eyes are glued. We do not need the Labour Party to remind us that the Tories promised to end this problem, as Labour themselves promised. Now, the election pledges are as usual being forgotten, if sometimes they are remembered when something happens like Minister of Agriculture Prior’s gaffe. Perhaps he was trying the unusual course of trying to be honest; or perhaps he is just a fool; or are the Tories playing the excessively simple game of admitting, quickly and in words which all can understand, that they cannot control capitalism? Whichever it is, the working class could do themselves a good turn by undestanding.

Politics

It seems that the government will not have an easy ride into the Common Market, whatever happens at the negotiations. In this country there is a strengthening lobby which is pledged to fight the British entry. One theme which this lobby is playing is the fact that the people have not been consulted on the issue. This is not, of course, entirely true; anyone who voted for either Labour or Tory in the last election thinking that he was opposing Britain joining the EEC must have a serious mental blockage. More to the point, when were the people ever consulted on this kind of issue? When was there a referendum on a declaration of war? When did we have the chance to vote on issues like racist immigration Bills? Anti-trade union laws? So why make an exception over the Common Market? Could it be that the Labour Party are seeing in the issue the chance to grab quite a few votes and know that a middle line policy will grab them all the more and all the quicker? It is not unknown for issues like the Common Market to be obscured by a propaganda smokescreen behind which a capitalist party makes its attack. And the talk about a referendum is no more than a smokescreen put out to hide the essential fact that worker have no interests in the issue; whether Britain goes in or not will have no fundamental effect on our standing as workers.

Abroad

How romantic, how thrilling, that the Russians have an orbiting space station where they can grow things and watch the weather and the vegetation and so on down on earth! What brave men are their astronauts, to whizz up into space and start crawling about from one ship to another just so that they can grow those things and watch all the others! What clever scientists, to think it all up and then design all the ships and the equipment! Perhaps there will still be some of the thrills and the romance left, when it becomes obvious that the stations (there will assuredly be more of them) are also being used, probably primarily, for purposes connected with the war machines of the space powers. The world was similarly thrilled when man first flew and we all know where that landed us. Space travel, and the courage and ability which goes into it, shows again what human beings could do to improve our environment —and how capitalism corrupts it all. 

What capitalism does is being witnessed in India and East Pakistan, where disease follows war follows flood and will probably be followed by yet more horrible disaster. It is now coming out, that places like East Pakistan have for a long time been in a turmoil of bloodshed, with political murders so frequent that they hardly make the news. Other murders, of course, are even less like to be noticed. Across the border in Calcutta there is a similar story. It is likely now that this already desperate situation will explode into something even more horrifying. The answer which capitalism has to this is to appeal for charity and to represent the affair as a regrettable accident. We should remember the original motives for conquering the Indian continent, and for keeping it in the economic state it was kept in for so long, and then for giving it its “independence” in the way it was. In this perspective the horror of East Pakistan becomes more logical—and even more horrible.

Review: January 1972 (1972)

The Review of the Month column from the February 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Home

The New Year came in to the ominous sound of politicians and economic experts assuring us that 1972 is going to be a boom time to remember. Ominous for those who recall, or who know about, all those other Januaries when the same forecasts from the same quarters turned sour. Most spectacularly, and most memorably, the year of the Great Crash—1929—was welcomed as a bumper year. There is plenty of evidence that the people who claim to control the economy of capitalism have no idea of what is happening but at times they make it too obvious.

Thus boom year 1972 opened with about one million out of work; what did they think, of the gay assurances on the city pages? of the reports of the bumper time many big investors had in 1971, and expect to better in 1972? It opened with the miners striking in a desperate attempt to hold the slide in their standard of living, with a strike. What sort of a boom is it, in the mining villages with only a ghost of a pit to remind them of the reality of capitalism’s economics—and its anarchy? When the experts tell us we are in for a good time, wise men take cover.

Some had to take cover literally, as the drums of poisonous chemicals from the sunken steamer came bobbing in on the tides along the beaches of southern England. This will not help the seaside landladies to get their share of boom time 1972. The incident sparked off, again, a great uproar about the environment and the way in which capitalism fouls the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat.

In some ways this is all to the good; after all, who chooses to take their holiday swim in a sea full of sodium cyanide? But it is fair to ask, where the environmentalists have been all this time, while socialists have been spelling out the facts on the pollution which capitalism has to cause. A clean world fit for humans to live in is an impossibility while society is organised on the basis of production for sale and profit. Capitalism pollutes and corrupts everything it touches, not simply our directly physical environment. We have been hammering home this lesson for over sixty years; and it still isn’t too late to do something about it.

Abroad

The freeing of Sheik Mujib Rahman gave the people of East Pakistan a new god to worship; presumably they now feel secure and certain in their future. Nobody should be misled into thinking that the scenes of massive, hysterical rapture which followed Mujib’s release could happen only in a country like Pakistan. The memory of Nazi Germany, and of the mass adulation given to Churchill, is too close for that. The mob emotion in Pakistan is a symptom of the political backwardness of its people; just like their counterparts in more “advanced” countries, they are sure to be disappointed when they find how frail, how humanly impotent against the demands of class society, their new god is.

Meanwhile, a few thousand miles across the world the first preparations for the election of a new god are under way. In America the Democratic Party are beginning to sort out the contenders for their nomination for the next presidential election. From now until August there will be a series of primary elections, which will be contested with an intensity of purpose so strong that it may disguise the true nature of the whole affair. The same old promises, dressed up in up-to-date terms, will be dragged out and offered. There will be the same old talk about qualities of leadership, as each candidate modestly puts himself forward as the new superman who can solve all the problems of the American workers simply by being in the White House. A great deal of money will be spent in the campaigns. And the end result will be another leader of capitalism.

Politics

For some time it has been muttered, that Heath was about to reshuffle his government (“reshuffle” is a good word — after it all we’ve still got the same old cards) and present us with a new set of political bosses. There was some surprise, that this had not happened immediately in the New Year — and probably some anguish from the hopefuls who were looking to take the first steps up the ladder of political ambition. To the workers of Britain it need not matter, who rules over the part of capitalism they happen to live in. Their resolution for 1972 should be to do something about getting rid of the system, with all its suppression, its poisons, its cynicism and despair.

50 Years Ago: Pakistani Punch-Up (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The violence which is an integral element of world capitalism has erupted yet again. In the Indian subcontinent the inevitable armed conflict between the two enemies has not been prevented by the United Nations, the international peace-keeping body.

Once again we see how capitalism cannot develop an effective means of preventing violence, whether on a local or international level. Only Utopians could expect the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Warsaw Pact or the Commonwealth to work wonders. Violence is a necessary part of capitalism.

To get down to cases: Just now we described the Indo-Pakistan armed conflict as “inevitable”. There are several reasons for this — some complex, some simple, some ancient and others more immediate.

Most people point to the partitioning of India at the time of Independence — nearly 25 years ago — as a significant point in history. The demand of the Muslims for their own state resulted in India losing five Muslim-majority areas to Pakistan. These areas were: North-West Frontier Province, Sind, Baluchistan and half of the Punjab in the west, and in the east the Eastern half of Bengal. The new state of Pakistan was thus a split personality: its capital, its business and military centres were developed in the West wing while the East wing, more populous and economically more promising, was treated as a colony.

During the sixties, under Ayub Khan’s corrupt dictatorship, Bengali demands for autonomy grew more emphatic, backed by civil and industrial unrest. Ayub’s successor, Yahya Khan, tried to placate these forces but finally, last March, resorted to military methods.

We may ask: why was he so determined to retain East Pakistan at such appalling cost? The reason is the usual sordid one of capitalist economics. East Pakistan had a profitable export trade, mainly in jute and tea, and the West wing needed foreign currency badly, both for maintenance of the Army and for development of new industries; and besides East Pakistan provided a captive market for West Pakistan’s growing industry.

That is what Pakistan stands to lose by this war.

(From the Socialist Standard, January 1972)

Material World: Climate Refugees (2021)

The Material World Column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Climate change is reshaping our planet. Coastlines are encroaching further inland, deserts are expanding, the range of plant and animal species are declining. The climatic change that is making parts of the world unliveable is another example of people in poorer parts of the world paying the price for capitalism.

Scientists forewarned that the effects of global warming would result in massive migrations of peoples. No nation is immune from the consequences of climate change but it is the poorest and most vulnerable communities – those least culpable for the environmental crisis – who are being the hardest hit. We are already witnessing the number of climate refugees rise.

Being a migrant involves risks and costs yet the media’s attention is centred upon the effects upon the host nation rather than the harrowing experiences of the migrants themselves and, worryingly, because of the absence of focus upon the reasons families uproot themselves from familiar surroundings, sympathy and understanding is lacking. Instead of welcoming the opportunity to help fellow human beings, hostility is shown towards newcomers, particularly if they are of a different colour or religion. The World Socialist Movement explains that we are one planet, one people, a human family, and as brothers and sisters we must look out for one another.

In 2014, there was a rise in migration from Central America due to drought and the spread of crop disease. The mass exodus has continued unabated with the USA militarising its southern border to halt the desperate fleeing the intensification of climate change upon what is termed the ‘Dry Corridor.’ In Africa there has been an escalating conflict between the contending cultures of herders and farmers as they competed for dwindling resources.

The problem has become worse as drought conditions persisted and many of the Sahel nations are now engaged in civil wars.

If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be rising sea levels.

In Bangladesh, we have seen frequent typhoons and flooding of the country’s low-lying coastal districts. National Geographic describes the reason for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi from their homes to the cities as driven by climate change and experts expect that figure to rise to millions as water levels rise (on.natgeo.com/2Q3p5hy).

Likewise, high tides will submerge much of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people, by the latter half of the century.

The climate refugee emergency is here and capitalism’s system of nation-states is incapable of addressing the crisis of climate refugees, sadly a status not legally acknowledged by governments or the UN, preferring to describe those fleeing the impact of environmental destruction as economic migrants.

Accepting that models of future migration are based upon educated guesswork and informed assumptions, full of possible pitfalls, the only way to efficiently mitigate the detrimental effects of mass migration is to prepare for the worst.

Breaches of their national borders may be what the developed countries fear the most, requiring them to fortify their frontiers, but the problem begins when people abandon their farms for the city. Most people don’t want to leave their homes so initially they relocate to larger towns and cities. Mega-cities are multiplying in number and urban services have broken down. When that strategy fails, they then take hazardous journeys to re-settle in a foreign land where they are treated as economic parasites and pariahs by the locals.

In 2018, the World Bank estimated that three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-east Asia) will generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. A worst-case scenario by the Institute for Economics and Peace thinktank suggests that perhaps a billion people by 2050 will be subjected to the pressure of global warming to relocate even if not all will act upon it. The pessimistic predictions of some scientists predict that heatwaves and humidity will become so extreme in various parts of the world that people without air conditioning will simply die.

A report based on interviews with senior US military experts concludes that climate change will create far more refugees than have fled the Syrian civil war.

‘What we are talking about here is an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term,’ Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney observed. ‘In the short term, it carries all sorts of risks as well and it requires a human response on a scale that has never been achieved before. If Europe thinks they have a problem with migration today, wait 20 years and see what happens when climate change drives people out of Africa – the Sahel especially’ (bit.ly/3heX3uF).

The need for socialist ideas is greater than ever, and we can only urge people to look deeply into the problems of capitalist society, deeper than the slogans on their banners. Socialists combine two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own world, in the interest of all humanity. Peoples’ histories may be different but we all share our future in common.

ALJO

The Pieces Together: All Right For Some (2010)

The Pieces Together column from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Right For Some

“The Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim Helu has been named the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $53.5 billion (£36 billion), the first time since 1994 that the top spot has been held by a non-American. The annual billionaires list published by Forbes magazine shows that the number of billionaires increased from 793 to 1,011.” (Times, 11 March)

The Income Gulf

“The President of Azerbaijan suffered embarrassment yesterday when it was reported that nine luxury mansions in Dubai worth millions of pounds had been bought in the name of his 11-year-old son. … The Washington Post newspaper reported that they were bought in a two-week shopping spree last year for about $44 million (£29 million) -10,000 times the average annual salary in Azerbaijan.” (Times, 6 March)

Conspicuous Consumption

“One of the many stresses of being a billionaire is the difficulty in choosing between purchasing a yacht or an island. Happily, designers this week unveiled plans for a ‘moving island’ that renders the conundrum redundant. Designs for WHY 58×38 were unveiled at the Abu Dhabi yacht show this week. … The motor yacht is, as the name suggests, 58 metres long and 38 metres wide, providing a total guest area of 3,400 square metres, and weighs in at 2,400 tonnes. It boasts a maximum speed of 14 knots, and a price tag, when built, of $160 million.” (Guardian, 3 March)

The Price of Garments

“Several hundred people protested in Dhaka and Gazipur yesterday after locked gates were blamed for the death of 21 people in a fire at a Bangladeshi factory that made sweaters for H and M. Most of the victims of the blaze were women who suffocated on the top floor of the seven-storey Garib and Garib factory. The nephew of one of the victims said that the gates had been locked, trapping them. The National Garment Workers’ Federation said: ‘These workers were killed by the factory’s blatant disregard for worker safety’.” (Times, 27 February)

Double Exploitation

“More workers are taking on a second job to make ends meet. A survey for the law firm Peninsula suggested that the proportion having two jobs had risen from 26 to 28 per cent in the past year.” (Times, 1 March)

A century of progress? (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers are still being killed in fires in garment factories because of locked doors.

March 25th will be the centenary of the greatest workplace disaster, prior to 9/11, in America’s history – the infamous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York. Because of a locked door, 146 people died, most of whom jumped to their deaths on the street nine storeys below, obviously preferring a quick and painless end over being burned to death.

The Triangle Company occupied the top three floors of the ten-storey Asch building at the intersection of Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. Architect Joseph Asch had boasted his building was fire-proof, which structurally it was. This didn’t mean everything in it was.

No one knows exactly what started the fire, but the most likely explanation was a cigarette end that had not been extinguished, was thrown into a barrel of unused clothing material. Smoking was prohibited for the obvious reason that the materials were flammable. Some of the cutters constantly defied this ban, believing themselves to be a cut above the other employees (no pun intended) and as such, thought the law didn’t apply to them. Workplace snobbery being another of the many ways capitalism divides worker against worker.

The fire began around 4:45 p.m. which was quitting time for the near 500 employees. Factory manager, Sam Bernstein, the brother-in-law of one of the owners, Max Blanck, attempted to douse the flames rather than sound the alarm, an action that cost many lives.

The fire, which began on the eighth floor, sped rapidly to the ninth and tenth, cotton being very flammable. Many did escape, some in the elevators (a few even threw themselves on top of it) and some made it to the roof. Ladders were extended from a nearby building to the roof.

Among those who scaled them were the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, (betcha couldn’t see that one coming.)

Twenty four died on the fire escape, which did not extend to the ground and was too flimsy to hold that much weight and collapsed.

Though the fire department was called and arrived quickly and extinguished the blaze in thirty minutes, their ladders could only reach as high as the sixth floor. Those who died did so because the door on the Washington Place side of the ninth floor was locked. Controversy raged between whether it was locked to prevent people leaving early or to make them leave by the Greene Street door, then enveloped in flames. The usual procedure was, when they left by the Greene Street door, they would have their handbags checked to see they were not taking home products they had made. In other words, the company had to protect their legal theft as opposed to illegal theft. Whatever the reason for the locked door it made no difference to the deceased. Their choice was death by fire, or jumping.

Most of them were young immigrant women from Italy and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Though no one knows what their thoughts were, it’s possible that Jewish girls, having seen in the pogroms, what fire could do to their bodies, jumped so they would be identifiable. Those who remained in the building were identified by a shoe or a lock of hair, or jewellery; six were never identified.

Nothing should have been surprising about the fire which was a tragedy waiting to happen, especially at a time where there was so little workplace safety legislation in effect in America.

In the early 20th century, approximately 40,000 people lost their lives every year to workplace injuries: in mines, foundries, factories and on railroads. What made the Triangle fire sensational is the fact that so many died so quickly, so horrifically and in America’s most populated city.

For three months officialdom did nothing about it except point fingers. State governor, John Dix, said he was “powerless”, an amazing comment, which was interpreted as, “I don’t care.” Mayor, Bill Gaynor, told his secretary to deal with it, who then referred the matter to the Fire Chief, Ted Croker. This worthy had risen to power by the patronage of his uncle, Richard Croker, once head of Tammany Hall, the most powerful political organisation in America. Croker blamed the Building Department, who blamed the Fire Department.

State Labour Commissioner, John Williams, said it didn’t come under his jurisdiction and building owner, Joseph Asch, said he had fulfilled all his obligations. Harris and Blanck said the doors were never locked during working hours. The head of the reformist Socialist Party of America, Meyer London, sneered that, whilst safety reform should be enacted, it probably wouldn’t be, and that nothing would be done about the tragedy.

The press understandably demanded that someone be held accountable. William Randolph Hearst, even created his own panel of experts in engineering, real estate and fire prevention to suggest new laws for safer workplaces for his paper, American, to advocate.

For a time, it looked like London would be proved right, but a young man, ambitious for political office, District Attorney, Charles Whitman, persevered in his attempts to prosecute the owners.

Whitman interviewed survivors and hired a detective to go to the ninth floor and find the lock of the door that opened onto the Washington Place stairs. This lock showed it had not been opened, whereupon the detective, Barry Flood, secured an indictment against Blanck and Harris, whom he arrested.

The defendants obtained the services of Manhattan’s most successful attorney, Max Steur, who had himself once been a garment worker.

Steur, knowing he couldn’t prove the door was unlocked, resorted to cheap tricks like examining the handbags of survivors to see how many garments they could possibly have smuggled out. This was done in attempt to create sympathy among the jurors and to show the reasoning for keeping it locked.

Blanck and Harris, naturally enough, said they weren’t aware of any doors being locked during working hours. Steur emphasised it would be ridiculous if they were locked, considering the constant coming and goings of delivery people, errand boys and salesmen etc. All this was ludicrous when one considers that, when a fire prevention expert inspected the premises in 1909, he noticed the door on the Washington Place side was locked during working hours. Survivors, themselves, had said Harris was constantly checking to see the door was locked.

Judge Thomas Grain, charged the jury to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether or not the defendants were aware the door was locked during working hours. The jury concluded they were not aware of it, so they were acquitted.

The “innocent” partners successfully filed insurance claims that worked out to about $400.00 for every dead worker.

Civil lawsuits were brought against the owners by the relatives of the deceased, but since Steur again defended them, nobody got a penny. Instead, twenty three relatives managed to get the princely sum of $75.00 each from an insurance company.

It is of small, if any, consolation to the relatives of the victims that the fortunes of the Triangle Company gradually declined, and by 1918 had ceased to exist. By 1920, Harris and Blanck split up, neither being prosperous after.

A person who took a great deal of interest was Frances Perkins, herself an eyewitness to the fire. Fifty years later she unveiled a memorial plaque to the victims, at the sight of the tragedy. Perkins became America’s first female cabinet minister, when President Roosevelt appointed her Minister of Labor in his New Deal government. This proved women could run capitalism just as incapably as men.

During the century since the fire, laws concerning workplace safely have been passed and enforced, till by 2006, (the last year this author could get figures for), only two percent of all deaths by accidents in the US were workplace related. As necessary as such legislation is, it is nevertheless merely an improvement within capitalism. But, as long as capitalism lasts, such events will occur. The fact they occur less frequently is no reason to defend capitalism

Obviously, they will happen more in countries where safety laws either don’t exist or are not enforced. In Bangkok in 1993, nearly 200 workers died in a toy factory, where the doors had been locked by their bosses to prevent them from taking toys home. There are other examples, especially from Bangladesh (see boxes).

Despite the tremendous technological advances we’ve seen, life hasn’t changed much under capitalism. Nor, can it be argued, such events are history in capitalism’s greatest power. In 1991, in Hamlet, North Carolina, 25 people died in a fire at a poultry plant, also because of locked doors.

With the profit motive being the main determining factor in production, it would be naive and idealistic to expect capitalists and politicians, who attempt to administrate capitalism, to care. Perhaps, nobody said it better than software capitalist and investor, Kevin O’Leary, who expressed his feelings on altruism by saying, “The emotional tie that I have at the end of the month is when I count the cash.” He also told a prospective business partner, “There’s something nasty about you and I like it.”

Socialists cannot say with any degree of certainty that there will be no workplace deaths in a socialist society. The exact nature of work and the workplace will be determined by the needs of society and the technology available. What socialists can say, is that with the abolition of money and therefore the profit motive, the very death blood of capitalism, priority will be given to workplace health in general and safety in particular. Events like the Triangle Fire will never occur again.

Steve Shannon

See Also:

June 2013 Socialist Standard, Capitalism Kills: The Bangladeshi Garment Factory Disaster

The craziest border in the world? (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

All borders are mad – it goes with the territory – but perhaps the world’s craziest border is that between India and Bangladesh.

The very existence of the border is itself an act of madness, even in nationalist terms. This can best be seen on the western section of the border. On the Bangladeshi side of the border, Bengali speaking farmers tend their crops. Whilst on the Indian side of the border Bengali speaking farmers tend their crops! Linguistically, ethnically and culturally the people of Indian West Bengal and Bangladeshi East Bengal are identical, differing only in religion. The Islamic religion forms the sole basis of Bangladeshi nationalism, the state’s only reason for existence, the only reason for the existence of the border. Nationalism based on religion is a lie compounded by falsehood: the lie of the mythical nation overriding all real class interests; the childish falsehood of the big man in the sky. In any case, neither Bangladesh nor India are religiously homogenous – around one fifth of the population of Bangladesh are Hindu, despite years of oppression, and a similar proportion of Indians are Muslim – making India the world’s third largest Islamic country.

The line of division between India and Bangladesh has its origins in the 1947 carve up of Imperial India. East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was known until 1971, was constructed in great haste from the districts of the Province of Bengal with a Muslim majority. Whilst West Pakistan (current Pakistan) had a reasonably coherent frontier – deserts, rivers and mountains – East Pakistan was an amorphous blob with no clear geographical divide. The border line is, to say the least, wiggly.

An enclave is a fragment of one country entirely enclosed by another. Approximately 80 percent of the world’s enclaves can be found along the northern stretch of the India-Bangladesh border. There are 92 Bangladeshi enclaves in India, 21 of which are counter-enclaves (i.e. Bangladeshi enclaves located in an India enclave within Bangladesh). India has 106 enclaves in Bangladesh including three counter-enclaves, and the world’s only counter-counter-enclave. The latter, an enclave within an enclave within an enclave, is a jute field near the village of Dahala-Khagrabari. The enclaves range in size from 26 km2 to a mere 53 square metres (Upan Chowki Bhaini, the smallest international enclave in the world).

Within the enclaves, known locally as Chitmahals, life is not pleasant. With the exception of one or two of the larger territories which have always been reasonably well organised, the fragments are outside the state system, their 70,000 inhabitants, known as the Nowhere People, effectively abandoned. Censuses are not taken, electoral rolls not made up and taxes not collected. There are no proper roads, no hospitals, schools and police force. The enclaves are hives of ignorance, poverty and lawlessness, their inhabitants robbed, raped and murdered with impunity, a poor life experience even in terms of the rural subcontinent. Without a visa inhabitants cannot legally cross the border to go to school, hospital or market. However since they cannot obtain a visa without visiting the ‘mainland’, residents are effectively prisoners within their tiny fragments of land. The Latin root of the word enclave, inclavatus, meaning shut in or locked up, is indeed appropriate.

An additional 50,000 former inhabitants of the Indian Chitmahals are resident in India proper. Some left during or immediately after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, but most have fled during the last decade as community relations have deteriorated. These individuals are in a particularly poor plight, being recognised neither as Indian citizens nor as refugees and thus not being entitled to national benefits, such as they are, or international relief efforts.

The enclaves date back to a treaty of 1713 between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Mughal Empire (the latter was taken over by the British in 1765 but Cooch Behar endured until 1949, one of the last princely states to cede to India). In Raj days, the existence of the enclaves was a mere matter of land ownership since there were no trade barriers and the enclaves were economically self-sufficient in any case. Only with the post-colonial carve up, did the Cooch Behar enclaves become at all significant. A territorial exchange was first proposed in 1958, and agreed by a 1974 treaty between India and Bangladesh however this was not ratified by India, which had most to lose and was hobbled by an unstable political situation. Recently the position of the largest enclave, Dahagram-Angarpota, has been improved by the creation of the Teen Bigha corridor, a neck of land transferred from India to Bangladesh in 1992. Access however is only permitted during daylight hours.

Economically the effect of the division has been devastating. The border cut the great metropolis of Calcutta from its eastern hinterland, no mean factor in that city’s decline, and elevated the minor provincial town of Dacca to capital status. India’s highly productive north east was left isolated from the rest of the state – the rail link between Calcutta and Assam was severed in four places and not restored until a quarter of a century later. Particularly affected by the dislocation has been the area on the eastern section currently known as Tripura. Tripura has a 856 km border with Bangladesh but is linked to the Indian mainland only by a neck of land which narrows down to a mere 60 km wide. Illegal trade in this area alone amounts to some $1.5 billion per annum – a tidy sum of duty lost to the governments concerned. Across the whole border around 100 people per year lose their lives mostly due to anti-smuggling actions – the Indian Border Security Force in particular has a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

In the last ten years, the Indian government has been erecting a fence along the border. The chain link construction topped with barbed wire stands 3.6 metres high and, with 3406 km authorised, will be by far the longest enclosed border in the world. This is a mighty construction task running from the mangrove swamps of the south, through rich farming land to the forests and mountains of the north. Approximately 50,000 people have been made homeless by the erection of the fence. Although the suppression of terrorism is a stated aim (United Liberation Front of Assam rebels and various Islamist groups use Bangladesh and India respectively as safe havens), smuggling is a more important motive.

Immigration too is a factor in the erection of the fence. Poverty stricken Bangladeshis are migrating in droves to the newly developing lands of northeast India – it is estimated that there are around 20 million Bangladeshis illegally resident in India. Goaded by aspiring political leaders, the Assamese are particularly wary of being ‘swamped’ by migrant Banglas and have exerted considerable pressure to ‘stem the tide’.

The erection of the barrier has not been unchallenged. In places, the construction runs close to or on the border, contrary to a 1974 treaty between Bangladesh and India which banned building in the proximity of the border. This has led to clashes between the Bangladesh Rifles and India’s Border Security Force with casualties inflicted on both sides.

A subcontinental Common Market between India and Bangladesh has been proposed and this would indeed make a certain degree of sense. However the degree of political ill-will makes an end to the division unlikely in the near future. Socialists are often reviled for their unrealistic utopianism in opposing ‘natural’ national divisions. Only by individual case studies can we find out how unnatural and insane such national divisions really are.

Kaz.

Pakistani Punch-Up (1972)

 

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The violence which is an integral element of world capitalism has erupted yet again. In the Indian subcontinent the inevitable armed conflict between the two enemies has not been prevented by the United Nations, the international peace-keeping body.

Once again we see how capitalism cannot develop an effective means of preventing violence, whether on a local or international level. Only Utopians could expect the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Warsaw Pact or the Commonwealth to work wonders. Violence is a necessary part of capitalism.

To get down to cases: Just now we described the Indo-Pakistan armed conflict as “inevitable”. There are several reasons for this — some complex, some simple, some ancient and others more immediate.

Most people point to the partitioning of India at the time of Independence — nearly 25 years ago — as a significant point in history. The demand of the Muslims for their own state resulted in India losing five Muslim-majority areas to Pakistan. These areas were: North-West Frontier Province, Sind, Baluchistan and half of the Punjab in the west, and in the east the Eastern half of Bengal. The new state of Pakistan was thus a split personality: its capital, its business and military centres were developed in the West wing while the East wing, more populous and economically more promising, was treated as a colony.

During the sixties, under Ayub Khan’s corrupt dictatorship, Bengali demands for autonomy grew more emphatic, backed by civil and industrial unrest. Ayub’s successor, Yahya Khan, tried to placate these forces but finally, last March, resorted to military methods.

We may ask: why was he so determined to retain East Pakistan at such appalling cost? The reason is the usual sordid one of capitalist economics. East Pakistan had a profitable export trade, mainly in jute and tea, and the West wing needed foreign currency badly, both for maintenance of the Army and for development of new industries; and besides East Pakistan provided a captive market for West Pakistan’s growing industry.

That is what Pakistan stands to lose by this war. Against this loss, Yahya Khan would be fairly happy if he could grab Kashmir. This beautiful and fairly prosperous state, bordering West Pakistan, is a Muslim- majority area but was ceded to India by its Hindu ruler and has ever since been a bone of contention.

As for India, Mrs. Gandhi has her own reasons for war: if one counts the refugees, she has more than ten million reasons. Since Partition, India is naturally in a competitive position as against Pakistan. To take only two examples: their textile exports compete for foreign markets and so do their jute exports. At the time of Partition, West Bengal had more than 100 jute mills, which were separated at a stroke from the better jute producing areas of East Bengal. The mills had to be run down, as the small West Bengal crop of low-grade jute could not keep them going profitably.

For this reason — and others not connected with Partition — West Bengal is now in serious economic trouble. There is an extremely high rate of unemployment, and political and industrial unrest have led to indiscriminate murders and terrorism, with gangs of goondas roaming the city slums and terrorising the villages (If all this does not fit your stereotype of peaceable, poetic Bengali people, just remember that two Bengali words we all know are "thug” and “cosh”, and that in 1947 the bloodbath of Partition was worst in the Punjab and Bengal.)

Mrs. Gandhi has every reason to swim with the tide of Bengali nationalism and, posing as an altruistic benefactor, rescue Bangla Desh from the tyranny of the Pak Army. In doing so she will divert attention from her domestic difficulties and outflank the left wing parties. The majority party of West Bengal supports Moscow, so it will have to endorse her action. She may also have her eye on East Bengal’s potential as a cheap food-growing area, as a captive market for Indian manufactures and as a help in restoring West Bengali jute mills.

Finally we see a cynical line-up of angels backing this war — a war which is bringing starvation, disease and destitution to tens of millions of helpless men, women and children; which destroys the crops, the homes and the land they depend on; which has already pauperised 10 million refugees and is daily killing scores of others.

This war is hacked by so-called Communists in the Kremlin, supporting the same Mrs. Gandhi who refuses to allow their comrade Jyoti Basu to hold office in West Bengal. In backing India, the Russians are opposing, not only “imperialist” America, not only the corrupt, religion-based authoritarian regime of Pakistan, but also their own comrades in Peking. What an Unholy Alliance is this new Holy Trinity: Pakistan, America — and Peking! And what a piece of blatant humbug is Russia’s support for India and the “right of self-determination” for Bangla Desh!

None of these principalities and powers, these international Al Capones, has any concern for ordinary people. Famine, cholera, typhus and acres of refugee camps are a price they are only too happy to see others pay, as they fight it out, by proxy, in the plains of Bengal and the Punjab or the mountains of Kashmir.

This war, like other capitalist adventures, is one from which the working class can hope for no gain and which they should denounce from all angles. War, after all, is only the method by which the capitalist class redistributes its loot. When wealth is socially owned, this will be seen as the strangest and most self-destructive exercise possible.

Charmian Skelton

Background to the conflict (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the very beginning of recorded history, Bengal has passed through turmoil. It has hardly known any peace in its long history. With the advent of Aryan civilisation most of the Indian sub-continent became comparatively peaceful, except Bengal, which was still infected with various groups of outlaws. It was not until 1203 that Bengal came in contact with Islamic culture. Towards the end of the Sena rule in Gauda, the Khalji chief Muhammed bin Bakhtyar invaded Laksmana Sena’s kingdom and by 1206 Khalji’s armies had brought a vast part of it under their control. Successive Afghan, Pathan and Mogul rulers eventually brought most of Bengal under their control.

By the later part of the 17th century the Portuguese established themselves in India. They indulged in a reign of terror on the coastal cities and towns of the Bay of Bengal and Ganges delta. Their main occupation was piracy and slave trade. They ravaged innumerable coastal cities, towns and villages and captured young men and women for their slave trade. Some of the slave traders even experimented with cross-breeding with various groups to produce able-bodied slaves. The then Mogul Emperor made some feeble attempt to stop this outrage in Bengal, but it was all in vain. The slave trade flourished until the later part of the 18th century. From the beginning of the 18th century, Dutch, French and English traders arrived in Bengal in search of fortune. They all plundered the land without any compassion for the native populace. The merciless acts of British indigo cultivators towards the natives of Bengal are well known. They all came with Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.

The British left India, in August, 1947, divided on the basis of religion. The present conflict is a continuation of the one which began with that division. Any serious student of politics could have visualised then that a divided India would never live in peace. A united two-part Pakistan was doomed geographically from the very beginning. When the novelty of independence died down, the East Bengalis realised that they had dislodged British rulers, only to replace them with West Pakistan rulers. Soon they found that their civil service, commerce and landed properties had been taken over by the West Pakistanis who became their new oppressors. Although East Pakistan produced more than half the national revenue the people of East Pakistan starved and suffered from other discomforts like unemployment, bad housing, lack of transport. The intellectual elites of East Pakistan resented West Pakistani rule from the very beginning. Fazlul Haq and Maulana Vasani formed their separate political parties as far back in 1948/49. The present leader of the Awami League, Sheikh Majibur Rahman was then a right hand-man of Fazlul Haq. As the years went by these two parties gathered momentum and brought the great majority of East Bengalis into their fold. The West Pakistani rulers never paid any heed to their grievances.

When Sheikh Majibur Rahman organised several demonstrations in protest in East Pakistan in 1969, the then ruler Ayub Khan, put the Sheikh in prison for a long period without trial and eventually when he was tried he was found not guilty of any crime. Soon after this trial Ayub Khan was thrown out by Yahya Khan who formed a military government after giving the pledge that he would soon bring the country to democratic rule. Accordingly a general election was held in December, 1970 and Sheikh Majibur Rahman and his party captured most of the seats. The East Bengalis were jubilant with the result. They thought that they were going to be their own masters, but they failed to take account of the West Pakistani reaction towards the election result. How could anyone think that the West Pakistan rulers would submit to a Bengali governing party? The first barrage of shells were fired by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto. He refused to have anything to do with the Sheikh and termed him as a traitor to Pakistan. Yahya Khan from the very beginning, on the advice of his army generals and other West Pakistani leaders, had no intention of handing over power to a Bengal political leader. If he had allowed a Bengali party to take over effective power, these West Pakistanis would never have taken it gracefully. They would have stirred up a violent reaction in West Pakistan. So he started stalling the whole issue. This action just about tried the limit of patience of the East Bengalis and by the end of January, 1971 East Pakistan burst into violent demonstrations of protest against West Pakistani rule, and the people of East Bengal with their leader Sheikh Majib demanded autonomy in East Pakistan. But in those days they never thought of seeking help from India.

As time went by East Pakistan was reduced to a state of anarchy. Eventually, Yahya then decided to talk with Sheikh Majib in Dacca on 22 March, 1971. Bhutto, on the request of Yahya, then followed. It now appears that the whole thing was sham and show. On the fateful night of 25 March, 1971, Yahya Khan ordered his army in the name of “peace and democracy” to suppress the revolt in East Bengal. The unsuspecting Bengalis were not prepared for this ruthless action. Their leader, Sheikh Majib, was arrested and thousands of East Bengalis were massacred. The reign of terror continued with the result that over 10 million East Bengalis crossed the border into India. The Indian government had no means to tackle this problem by itself. It appealed to the world powers, but the response was almost nil. This was the excuse for the Indian government to help the Bangla Desh Mukti Bahini and if necessary to enter into a war with Pakistan.

The world powers stood by and watched these two countries head towards war. Both India and Pakistan pursue the old policy of “we fight a war to establish peace and in peace we prepare for a war”. At the beginning of December the Pakistan Air Force bombed several Indian Air Force bases and Indian tanks rolled into the lush green plain of East Bengal with the object of expelling the West Pakistani army and handing over the power to a dependent Bangla Desh government.

If the Indian government achieves its objective, this will not be the end of confrontation. When the dust of the present conflict settles down, both countries will start replenishing their arsenals for the next war. This will drain much of their national resources, with the result that the big powers which sell them arms — namely America, Britain, China, France and Russia — will benefit. Of course, the world powers at the same time as they rearm both countries, will talk hypocritically in the United Nations about the folly of armed conflict. Soon the world will forget all about this conflict and the poor will go on suffering as before.

T. Ray