-Ravi Sinha
Recently,
the Indian Prime Minister had occasion to report to the Japanese on his
genealogy and haematic chemistry. Addressing a house-full of corporate honchos
in Tokyo he declared, “I am a Gujarati, money is in my blood”. One does not
know what percentage of Gujaratis would feel insulted by such a description. It
can be asked, perhaps more meaningfully, if great civilizations are created by money-in-the-blood
types and one may wonder if Gujarati greats such as Narsi Mehta, Narmad,
Govardhan Ram or Gandhi, too, had money flowing in their blood.
There
is also some irony in the situation – prime minister of a country with the
largest number of world’s poor boasting about ‘money in the blood’ to the
richest men of a country that has, in the post-war decades, made more money per
capita than any other on the planet. This prime minister can be accused of many
things but not of lacking in hubris unencumbered by learning and cultivation.
One
may wonder about something else too. The Indians may deserve their new prime
minister and all his speeches – on the Independence Day, the Teacher’s Day and
on all the other days. After all, they have elected him. But what have the Japanese
done to deserve this? What forces them, despite the depth and dignity of their
civilization, to lap up such crassness and banality?
The
answer can be given in one word – money.
Japan would invest ¥ 3.5 trillion ($35 billion) in India in the next five
years. Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, broke protocols to put on
display his unhesitating respect for the man he had courted through the years
when the West was reluctant to be seen in the latter’s company. Now was the
time for the Japanese to reap the reward and the opportunity could not have
arrived at a better time. Their economy has been in a prolonged slump and a
large part of their formidable wealth is invested in China – increasingly an
insurmountable adversary. Money is a strange bird. It goes into the enemy’s house
if that is where it can lay eggs. But a friend’s house is always the preferred
choice. It matters little if the friend is not exactly an epitome of culture
and civilization.
The
same phenomenon has been on a more naked display back home. The uncouth brigands
from the badlands of upstart capital, whether from Gujarat or from elsewhere, are
not the only ones who decided early to clear the path to power for the new
prime minister. Vintage industrialists known for reputable lineage and high
culture – with original Picasso and Raza hanging on their walls and with
butlers and cooks trained in Paris and Rome – also joined the bandwagon. Not
only did they buy or pay news channels for manufacturing opinion, for creating frenzy
favourable to the new messiah, for building up the image of the man and for destroying
that of the competitors. They also came out in person to sing his praises – painting
his ruthlessness as much-needed virtue of decisiveness and his schemes of state-sponsored
accumulation of private wealth as the only road to development and prosperity
of a nation. Even the most cultivated among the capitalists must focus
primarily on the murky business of accumulating wealth even if it requires presenting
diabolical demagogues as visionary statesmen. If money keeps coming, Picasso
and Raza can always be acquired and culture can always be had. Such is the
relationship between capitalism and civilization.
A
fuller answer to the question – why, under capitalism, do the sophisticates
court the brutes – would perhaps require two words – blood and money. Of
course, blood is to be talked about
largely in a metaphorical sense, as in sweating
or sucking it or as in having money in one’s blood, but a literal
sense is not entirely absent, such as in spilling
it. In fact, sucking blood on a sustained basis is not possible without
occasionally, if not often, spilling it. Not everyone, however, who prospers by
sucking blood, has the stomach to spill it. This is where a division of labour
arises, especially under capitalism, between the sophisticates and the brutes,
and this is why the former court the latter.
Money, too, is being
used here in a special sense. In its everyday meaning it is needed and used by
everyone including those whose blood is sucked or spilt. In this sense money is
not an invention of capitalism. But, there is another, rather special, sense which
has become the core meaning and the ruling concept under capitalism. In this
meaning money exists solely for the purpose of making more money. It may not be
very wise or liberating to be caught in a blindly rising spiral, but this kind
of money, otherwise known as capital, is not as foolish as it appears. It has
harnessed entire humanity into a juggernaut from which it appears impossible to
disengage, especially for those who are more likely to be crushed under its
weight. The wag in the famous Jewish play, Fiddler
on the Roof, says, “If the rich could hire the poor to die in their place,
we the poor would make a good living.” The humour in the witticism is darker
under capitalism precisely because it is that much closer to reality.
Capital
has been able to make the world go round for nearly half a millennium not
because people are addicted to being exploited and violated. There is no
natural propensity to make them toil hard to enrich the sophisticates and fall
on their knees to bow to the brutes. The march of capitalism has been
unstoppable, at least so far, primarily because capital has been successful in
unleashing the productive forces and the creative powers of humanity like no
previous system in history. Of course this success is soiled with injustice and
brutality. Unprecedented prosperity has been created during recent centuries,
but it belongs to a small minority. A vast majority reels under poverty and
degradation. It cannot be said, however, that this majority, exploited and
oppressed as it is, would like to go back to the life of a bygone era. Life may
be hard but, on the average, is better than before. That is what makes it
difficult to wean people away from capitalism. It is easy to fight its injustice,
but difficult to outdo its success, especially when those subjected to the
injustice are the ones whose life depends more desperately on ensuring this
success.
It
would be wrong to think, however, that capitalism succeeds solely by the
economic logic of capital. It needs for its survival the gargantuan edifice it
has erected spanning the political, social, technological and military domains.
Economics and politics are entwined root and branch; wealth and power feed on
each other; conditions of profit are protected and expanded by violence. Not
everyone may have money flowing in the veins, but blood and money, under
capitalism, are inseparable nevertheless. Not every diamond coming out of Africa
may be a blood-diamond, but every kind of money that takes the form of capital
turns into blood-money, directly or
indirectly.
Joseph
Schumpeter is credited with popularizing the term, creative destruction. It shakes the capitalist system periodically
much like a gale helping trees shed dead leaves. He argued that something good
can be discerned in the downswing of a business cycle that helps throw away the
inefficient and spur innovation paving the way for the next upswing.
Capitalism, however, is too rough a beast to follow the instructions of a
refined professor. For it, destruction per se is good; destructive destruction is even better. Mountains of money are made
in the act of destroying and even bigger mountains are made through the
reconstruction that follows. Much of the prosperity of the West, particularly
of the Americans, originated in the destruction of Europe and Japan during the Second
World War and in the reconstruction of the same Europe and Japan in its
aftermath.
More
recent times have witnessed a prolonged and lucrative destruction in a vast
stretch of the planet covering countries from Pakistan in the east to Libya in
the west – tragic and disastrous for the people in the region and elsewhere, but
lucrative for the American capital and for the global capital in general. This
long episode began with the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War in which
Americans were egging on and supporting Saddam Hussein, and the no holds barred
western efforts to dislodge the Soviets from Afghanistan. The story has come a
long way since then with many twists and turns. Assad of Syria and the new
Caliphate of the ISIS are now the twin targets and the newest excuse. (As one
American ‘security expert’ said on a television channel – we must have a Shia
target too if we have to target the Sunni ISIS.) Who can, in all honesty, say that all this is
genuinely a clash of civilizations and has nothing to do with blood-money?
Hollywood
action thrillers revolving around conscience-stricken rogue CIA operatives are
a curious genre. They make surprisingly candid statements about the American
establishment, even if in the end America comes out invariably as the land of
the brave and the free. In one such movie (I watch too many to remember which
one) an earthy fellow who is a CIA operative tries to bring his idealist
colleague to senses by saying something like this – you must understand the
game. We have to bring democracy to them, and we have to bomb the hell out of
them to do so. Afterwards we do what we are best at – clean up and rebuild.
On
a more serious note, the Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz – the other
Joseph – reckoned that the “the true cost of Iraq war – quite apart from its
tragic human toll – which the Bush Administration estimated at $50 billion” was
sixty times larger. This was in 2008 when he came out with his book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, and this
calculation was only about the junior Bush’s war in Iraq. One can imagine the
full magnitude of blood-money spent or made (which is the same thing when it
comes to wars under capitalism) during more than three decades of incessant wars
in the region.
Getting
back to the Japanese, one will have to concede that they are no longer known
for spilling blood. They have done their share in the past. At the end of the
Second World War their own blood was spilt, perhaps more than what could
perversely be called their fair share. This does not mean that they no longer
need the machinery for spilling blood. That part is now done by others, mostly
by the Americans who are the new brutes in the global division of labour. The
Japanese and also the Germans – allies during the two World Wars and leading brutes
of that era – are among the new sophisticates.
One
would be mistaken, however, to attribute to the Americans an exclusive monopoly
of blood-spilling. They may be the biggest brutes on the planet but they
outsource much of the actual job to others. They are able to do so because
others have their own reasons to carry out the killings. In the so-called clash
of civilizations, which is actually about three interlinked things – oil,
Israel and world hegemony – and fundamentally about a single thing – money,
Americans may have killed tens of thousands of Arabs, but Arabs have killed
hundreds of thousands of Arabs. Who can say that this has nothing to do with
the local rulers – the sheiks, satraps and mullahs? Who can say that these do
not have diabolic designs of their own? Who can say that the rivalry, for
example, between the Saudis and the Iranians in the modern times has nothing to
do with the medieval Sunni-Shia divide and other civilizational maladies?
It
is distressing to note, more so for someone from a non-western society, that
all the killing fields of the recent decades have been in those parts of the
world where people had their own reasons – cultural, civilizational, religious,
ethnic or otherwise – to indulge in slaughters and genocides. Writing about the
1994 massacre of Tutsis by the Hutus, Mahmood Mamdani went through a great deal
of intellectual toil to find out why victims become killers. (He did not
exactly phrase the question in this manner; the title of his book was, When Victims Become Killers.) The book
has deep insights into this tragic and complex affair as far as it goes. But it
may not have gone far enough. In answering such questions about most such
episodes, and perhaps in the Hutu-Tutsi case too, one will have to go deeper into
the cultural soil and farther into the historical terrain than place all the
blame at the doors of colonialism and the formation of modern political
identities.
It
may be hard to answer such questions at the deepest theoretical levels, but
being alive to them can be of help at the practical-political level. It can help
in appreciating complexities and in avoiding simplistic conclusions.
Complexities may not always have their origins in a single source, and even
when they do it may not be the most effective strategy to take all battles to
the origins. To take a recent example, the American President has just announced
(the announcement came on the anniversary of 9/11) that the United States would
degrade and eliminate the ISIS. Among other things, it has drawn quick reaction
from many of those who oppose American imperialism as a matter of principle.
They appear to be equating it with any other act of imperialist aggression.
This can hardly be taken as an example of discerning political judgment. If
Americans are being forced to hit a demon that they might have created
themselves, should one end up siding with that demon just because Americans are
now on the opposing side?
The
brutes are courted by the sophisticates not always for the act of spilling
blood. The former are useful in many other ways. For example, in most
situations they can manage the political affairs much more effectively than the
sophisticates. This is all the more true for a polity such as in India. The
rough and tumble of mass politics in such countries requires having guts like
the new Indian prime minister has. Those who have the stomach to spill blood
are better equipped to manage democratic politics in such a society. Most of
the political commentators and the entire “free media” have now undertaken the
task of building up the new prime minister’s image as a statesman and a super-leader.
They may no longer be inclined to recall all the deeds that have gone into the making
of his political career.
It
would be erroneous, however, to trace all seeds of political success to the
guts of a leader. Seeds of a kind require a certain type of soil to flourish.
It is interesting to note the difference between the task of seeking a mandate
from the people and the task of running the state for which the mandate is
sought. The same politician operates in two different modes for the two tasks.
The same political party shows one face to the people and another to capital.
Winning elections may require lies and vulgarity, strife and riots, but to
conduct affairs of the state requires the avatar
of a vikas-purush (messiah of
progress).
It
is often pointed out that lies repeated a hundred times appear as truths.
Commentators who nurse anxieties about the recent political developments, and
retain the courage to express them, caution repeatedly about continued usage of
the Nazi propagandist’s stratagem. But this is not the full story. There is yet
another weapon in the political arsenal of the unscrupulous. This one is far
more poisonous and effective than hammering a hundred lies. It is the art of
sending out dark messages to the public at large while sitting in the full
glare of television cameras and moral-factual scrutiny. You can tear the
message apart but you cannot stop the sender from sending it, nor prevent the
recipient from receiving it.
Take
the example of Love Jihad. One can
easily prove that it is nothing but a figment of imagination of an extremist
mind. The facts and the arguments force the Hindutva
spokesmen to dance around the issue and even disavow the exertions of their
party and other outfits to turn it into the next emotive issue suitable for coming
elections. The Home Minister of India, who is a multi-starred general of the Hindutva
army and second-in-command of the present government, concedes that he does not
know the meaning of the term. But all this does not count. The job is done; the
purpose is served and the objective achieved; the message has been sent and
properly received. A fear has been lodged and reinforced in many Hindu hearts
that their young women may be lured into another religion and may deliver
progenies belonging to that religion.
It would be a mistake to think that such things are
merely a mischief of the fringe elements. Indeed such a ‘mischief’ can turn a
fringe element into a center-piece. One may recall the slogan given by a
would-be prime minister – Ame Paanch
Amara Pachees – a variation on the family planning slogan of Hum Do Hamare Do, which was meant to describe
a particular community. There was no need to verify if every man of that
community had four wives with an average of six and a quarter offspring per
wife. Such messaging is unstoppable because the recipients are hard-wired to
receive them. The remarkable abilities of the brutes to manage polities such as
India arise from the cultural wiring of the society. It is superficial to blame
only the brutes for the brutalities. One must dig deeper into the cultural and
civilizational soil and be honest about what one finds there.
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