Purpose to profits: Akula’s incredible journey
This is not the best of the times to review Vikram Akula’s book. He is hanging on a roller-coaster ride that started in 1998 and has seen the world turn topsy-turvy. For him, a celebrity, the party was well-planned: His organisation SKS Microfinance had ablockbuster IPO, listed at a premium, and he would have moved on a book promotional tour before differences led to the sacking of SKS CEO, and a regulatory tsunami hit the state of Andhra Pradesh, where his operations were concentrated.
The book is a story of Akula’s journey from comfortable New York to rustic Narayanakhed. His rediscovery of India was not easy.
For those who believe that Vikram was an overnight success, this story is an eye-opener. It took a decade of hardship, a brush with personal bankruptcy and physical threats to achieve this success. To pick an idea, struggle with implementation and be recognised as the face of Indian microfinance is no mean achievement. Akula worked hard to be where he is.
While one could argue about the ideological position on how best to serve the poor, it is unfair to use his story to make a case against commercial microfinance. A reading of his dissertation (2004) and the events that have unfolded later, gives an indication of why he calls his quest “unexpected”. Unfortunately, the book does not connect these dots. While we know that it is unexpected, the details as to what led to the change of heart are not filled. From saying “I bought a one-way plane ticket...
packed a single gym bag... to travel like Mahatma Gandhi …no excess material goods… .” (page 20), to “I’ve made a tonne of money… more than I ever thought I would make in my lifetime and my kid’s lifetime combined… .” (Interview with Business Standard ), is a long, ideological journey.
Akula’s internship with Deccan Development Society (DDS) lays the basic arguments: The poor have no time for lectures on empowerment; they care about education and health but they want to get on with life (page 43). Therefore, move from an all-round development to a single-point intervention of microfinance.
The book starts with a woman in a purple saree asking Akula a life-changing question: Why is she not getting microcredit while being poor? The answer: Scale. The book ends with another woman showing off her colour television set, thanks to SKS loans, and an inadvertent job for her son. With loans buying her buffaloes and a kirana store, her poverty is eradicated. Mission accomplished. Or is it? Poverty is a complex phenomenon. To understand where Akula comes from, I take three quotes from the book: “When we started... people decided to test us by not paying... We instructed our loan officers not to leave... until the repayment came… The entire village would realise there was some issue... And that person would lose izzath — lose face. Losing face is a fairly devastating thing in a village context, and people will do anything to avoid it.” (Page 76) In an instance where the loan was taken to buy a goat but kept to buy food, his assistant tells the customer: “Buying food doesn’t generate income, so you’ll be no closer to getting out of poverty that way. Either buy a new goat, or give us back the loan money.” (Page 82) The third is about interest rates: “…we actually could have charged much higher interest rates… while… undercutting the moneylenders. But our goal was not to be extractive; it was to make enough profit to cover our costs and fund further growth.” The SKS controversy is also about coercive lending and the first quote shows a thin line between coercion and persuasion. The second instance is even more intriguing when there is a toss-up between current consumption/survival and future income. The third quote is not borne out by SKS’ numbers as of 2009 and 2010 — the proportionality of transfer of reduced costs to borrowers is not in sync with the gains accruing out of increased efficiency.
As the book claims, SKS has indeed shown how a model inspired by McDonald’s could scale up, reaching more clients than competitors. It is not the most profitable (Spandana and Share turn in better numbers) and its yield ratios are lower (putting it in the middle of the exploitative scale, with organisations like BASIX at the lower end). But all this contradicts the discourse that we get in the first half of the book where Akula tries to look at clients in their eyes, peep into their hearts and live their lives, using participatory methods. Starting with client-centric methods, why did SKS shift to an efficiencyobsessed model, cutting meeting times using stop watches and scheduling village routes on a single road (page 103)? What happens to the poor families which do not fall on the SKS highway? The move from a clientpoverty-focused model to an investor-prosperity-focused model is rapid. It is so rapid that the stories of several clients committing suicide because of coercion are brushed aside as clients who had not defaulted to SKS but must have borrowed from rogue micro-finance institutions. For a person whose life changed because of a question asked by a woman in a purple sari, 17 client suicides should have led to a deep introspection and review of business practices. But the SKS response is like the style of the book: more assertive and less reflective.
The book is titled A Fistful of Rice but the cover picture shows two palms full of rice, a classic mismatch endemic to Akula and SKS. Is it delivering more than the promise or promising more than the delivery? It is for the reader, and for history, to decide.
mssriram@gmail.com
BOOK REVIEW
MS SRIRAM
A FISTFUL OF RICE
My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability
Vikram Akula Harvard Business Review Press 191pages; `495
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Endgame of capitalism Living in the End Times
Zizek (Verso hardback, £20), the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is the latest in the spate of books unleashed by the Great Contraction of 2007-2009. It offers a reliable analysis of the crisis in a language, without the academic jargon, that the intelligent common reader can understand. Zizek has skillfully assembled all the elements of the crisis: its causes in financial deregulation and global imbalances, the pros and cons of amonetary versus fiscal stimulus and how difficult it is to design a system within the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism that wants material abundance without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”. Zizek, in short, has seen the future of the capitalist world, and it doesn’t work.
What Zizek says is much the same as he said in his hugely successful Indian tour earlier this year. Global capitalism is in a state of terminal decline. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions are all coming together to hasten its demise. But if the end of capitalism seems to many the end of the world, how is it possible for western society to face up to the end times? In his analysis of the “economic Armageddon”, as he puts it, Zizek borrows the model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Ross of the five stages of grief which follows upon learning that one has terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact); anger (which explodes when one can no longer deny the fact); bargaining (in the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact); depression; and finally acceptance (“If I can’t fight it, so I may as well accept it.”) The Swiss psychiatrist applied the same schema to any form of personal loss, emphasising that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order. Zizek adapts the model to explain the present state of play in the capitalist world: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and acceptance.
The five chapters follow the same scheme but are interspersed by Interludes which elaborate the cultural and political forms of these stages from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Zizek concludes his study with an argument for the return to a Marxian critique of political economy, though he detects the limitations of a potential communist culture after the failure of Soviet communism.
Zizek’s prognoses, which he has repeated in his lectures and his earlier two books — First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Object of Ideology —can’t be faulted because they are based on facts. What is new in the book is what Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. Zizek says these “are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as ‘the institutionalisation of envy’”.
Zizek has borrowed heavily from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Marx and others to elaborate his thesis on the inherent crisis of late capitalism. The contradictions which form the more interesting sections of the book are contained in the Interludes that take current cultural forms as examples of how consumerism, gone wild, is eating into the dynamics of capitalism. Take the opening chapter — Denial: The Liberal Utopia — where the Interlude deals with Hollywood films, the ultimate amnesia that makes you forget the world around you. Zizek takes Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) as a case study of Hollywood’s “ideological universe”. The film, which is an adapted version of a Tom Stoppard play, is centred round the code breakers who work day and night to crack the German “enigma” code in the Second World War. But this, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to attract audiences. So, a love story is put in which introduces two enigmas — the enigma of the German code and the enigma of love or the woman.
Zizek is saying that western audiences demand suspense and uncertainty till the play is over but there must be a happy ending to round it off. America as a social and political organisation was committed to a cheerful view of life; to be otherwise would be an invitation to commercial disaster. Zizek takes other films to substantiate his point that the Hollywood ideology is determined by what the market demands and not by the truth of the “situation” which encompasses everything, politics, economy, philosophy and so on.
The Interlude of the second section on Anger deals with the injustices of the new world order imposed by the capitalist world and is followed by the Interludes of Depression and Withdrawal. But Zizek believes that the crisis is so deep that it gives us a chance for a new beginning, and quotes Mao Zedong, “There is a great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” But he doesn’t elaborate the new directions that the West should take or even if it is politically feasible to do so.
There is a great deal with which you could agree (and disagree) with the book but all the same it will provoke you to take notice of Zizek, as the West is doing now.
What Zizek says is much the same as he said in his hugely successful Indian tour earlier this year. Global capitalism is in a state of terminal decline. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions are all coming together to hasten its demise. But if the end of capitalism seems to many the end of the world, how is it possible for western society to face up to the end times? In his analysis of the “economic Armageddon”, as he puts it, Zizek borrows the model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Ross of the five stages of grief which follows upon learning that one has terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact); anger (which explodes when one can no longer deny the fact); bargaining (in the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact); depression; and finally acceptance (“If I can’t fight it, so I may as well accept it.”) The Swiss psychiatrist applied the same schema to any form of personal loss, emphasising that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order. Zizek adapts the model to explain the present state of play in the capitalist world: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and acceptance.
The five chapters follow the same scheme but are interspersed by Interludes which elaborate the cultural and political forms of these stages from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Zizek concludes his study with an argument for the return to a Marxian critique of political economy, though he detects the limitations of a potential communist culture after the failure of Soviet communism.
Zizek’s prognoses, which he has repeated in his lectures and his earlier two books — First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Object of Ideology —can’t be faulted because they are based on facts. What is new in the book is what Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. Zizek says these “are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as ‘the institutionalisation of envy’”.
Zizek has borrowed heavily from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Marx and others to elaborate his thesis on the inherent crisis of late capitalism. The contradictions which form the more interesting sections of the book are contained in the Interludes that take current cultural forms as examples of how consumerism, gone wild, is eating into the dynamics of capitalism. Take the opening chapter — Denial: The Liberal Utopia — where the Interlude deals with Hollywood films, the ultimate amnesia that makes you forget the world around you. Zizek takes Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) as a case study of Hollywood’s “ideological universe”. The film, which is an adapted version of a Tom Stoppard play, is centred round the code breakers who work day and night to crack the German “enigma” code in the Second World War. But this, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to attract audiences. So, a love story is put in which introduces two enigmas — the enigma of the German code and the enigma of love or the woman.
Zizek is saying that western audiences demand suspense and uncertainty till the play is over but there must be a happy ending to round it off. America as a social and political organisation was committed to a cheerful view of life; to be otherwise would be an invitation to commercial disaster. Zizek takes other films to substantiate his point that the Hollywood ideology is determined by what the market demands and not by the truth of the “situation” which encompasses everything, politics, economy, philosophy and so on.
The Interlude of the second section on Anger deals with the injustices of the new world order imposed by the capitalist world and is followed by the Interludes of Depression and Withdrawal. But Zizek believes that the crisis is so deep that it gives us a chance for a new beginning, and quotes Mao Zedong, “There is a great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” But he doesn’t elaborate the new directions that the West should take or even if it is politically feasible to do so.
There is a great deal with which you could agree (and disagree) with the book but all the same it will provoke you to take notice of Zizek, as the West is doing now.
Why Soviet planning collapsed
From Business Standard, September 4th 2010
Janous Kornai, the Hungarian economist, described centrally controlled economies in his classic work, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, as a system in which “to search, to wait, to queue, or to go for forced substitution” wasthe norm. This was translated into a Moscow joke in the late 50s as the Six Contradictions of Socialism: 1. Under socialism, everybody has a job but nobody works.
2. Nobody works but the plan was always fulfilled.
3. The plan was always fulfilled but there’s nothing in the shops.
4. There’s nothing in the shops but the table is always full.
5. The table is always full but everybody complains.
6. Everybody complains but nobody wants to change.
The subtext of the joke (there were many such) was simple: “Don’t believe a word of what you hear; trust your eyes only” because the reality of daily life in the Soviet Union was very different, as it was in other command economies. Francis Spufford, who is a noneconomist but a novelist with a penchant for storytelling, has spun out a series of short stories on what killed the Soviet economy which can be described as “faction” (part fact and part fiction) in Red Plenty: Industry!, Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (Faber, Special Indian Price £13).
Read them to be better informed and entertained at the same time — anchored in a mix of history and economics, the factual references never weigh too heavily or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In fact, some of the fiction is more true to life than the heavy academic tomes that have appeared in the What-Went-Wrong-With-Central-Planning books in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. But for all the literature that has appeared, none has been able to explain how such an all-embracing system died on its own when everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Spufford’s is an attempt using some fictional techniques to do so and it comes off brilliantly simply because at times truth can be stranger than fiction.
To begin with a comparison between an open market and a planned economy where bureaucrats, rather than the market forces, decided what goods and services would be supplied to whom and how much, what they would cost and hence priced. The pricing formula was also different. What was necessary first of all was to forget the way we do business; the Soviet system was the other with its own rules and regulations. It was the Gosplan (the state planning commission that made long-term economic plans) that decided consumption patterns. For example, how many summer dresses the women in the FarEast Vladivostok would be permitted to buy rather than what they could afford. The result was poor distribution that led to overstocking on the one hand and shortages on the other, leading to black marketing and/or wastage because no one was really responsible or accountable to anyone.
There is one point that Spufford is at pains to point out: there were plenty of Soviet economists beginning with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour, that is the costs, to make them. But they were overruled by the Party bureaucracy.
Later, as the economy grew in size and complexity in the 60s, economists wanted to bring computers into the system knowing that “rules like the tonne-kilometre target — whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance — made no sense”. If some noises were made, they became muted with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in Siberia that assured a safe future and ruled out the need to be more productive.
Given this background, Spufford provides apiquant series of short stories to show how the system worked in practice and the colossal waste it generated. No one was really bothered and why should they have been because they were all in it for the good life. So, here is just a sample of the short stories that, taken together, give a vivid picture of how the system actually worked.
Maksim Mokhov is a laid-back bureaucrat in Gosplan. He is assigned to help out arayon fabric factory where one of its machines had been destroyed in an accident. A replacement has been ordered from its Urals factory but it has refused to give an updated version without which the production quota allotted to it couldn’t be fulfilled. Enter a middleman working outside the official channels to fix the bureaucratic tangle but it transpires that there is a whole web of conspiracy surrounding the accident and the delay in supplying the replacement machine. The story illustrates how a parallel universe of criminals, Spufford calls them “lawful thieves”, ran the Soviet economy.
Spufford has a string of stories how “lawful thieves” infiltrated every nook and corner of Soviet society and why it was necessary to have Party contacts to get even the simplest things like painkillers, contraceptives, soap and toothpaste — let alone bigger things like a flat or medical care. Spufford’s fictional Khrushchev understood that things had to be ordered differently and the command economy had to go if ordinary people had to live well.
Janous Kornai, the Hungarian economist, described centrally controlled economies in his classic work, Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, as a system in which “to search, to wait, to queue, or to go for forced substitution” wasthe norm. This was translated into a Moscow joke in the late 50s as the Six Contradictions of Socialism: 1. Under socialism, everybody has a job but nobody works.
2. Nobody works but the plan was always fulfilled.
3. The plan was always fulfilled but there’s nothing in the shops.
4. There’s nothing in the shops but the table is always full.
5. The table is always full but everybody complains.
6. Everybody complains but nobody wants to change.
The subtext of the joke (there were many such) was simple: “Don’t believe a word of what you hear; trust your eyes only” because the reality of daily life in the Soviet Union was very different, as it was in other command economies. Francis Spufford, who is a noneconomist but a novelist with a penchant for storytelling, has spun out a series of short stories on what killed the Soviet economy which can be described as “faction” (part fact and part fiction) in Red Plenty: Industry!, Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (Faber, Special Indian Price £13).
Read them to be better informed and entertained at the same time — anchored in a mix of history and economics, the factual references never weigh too heavily or interrupt the flow of the narrative. In fact, some of the fiction is more true to life than the heavy academic tomes that have appeared in the What-Went-Wrong-With-Central-Planning books in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. But for all the literature that has appeared, none has been able to explain how such an all-embracing system died on its own when everyone expected that it would have to be killed. Spufford’s is an attempt using some fictional techniques to do so and it comes off brilliantly simply because at times truth can be stranger than fiction.
To begin with a comparison between an open market and a planned economy where bureaucrats, rather than the market forces, decided what goods and services would be supplied to whom and how much, what they would cost and hence priced. The pricing formula was also different. What was necessary first of all was to forget the way we do business; the Soviet system was the other with its own rules and regulations. It was the Gosplan (the state planning commission that made long-term economic plans) that decided consumption patterns. For example, how many summer dresses the women in the FarEast Vladivostok would be permitted to buy rather than what they could afford. The result was poor distribution that led to overstocking on the one hand and shortages on the other, leading to black marketing and/or wastage because no one was really responsible or accountable to anyone.
There is one point that Spufford is at pains to point out: there were plenty of Soviet economists beginning with the father of mathematical planning, Leonid Kantorovich, who wanted to put prices on things that bore some relationship to the labour, that is the costs, to make them. But they were overruled by the Party bureaucracy.
Later, as the economy grew in size and complexity in the 60s, economists wanted to bring computers into the system knowing that “rules like the tonne-kilometre target — whereby a factory that did its job by moving 100 tonnes of materials over 1,000 kilometres was thought more successful than a factory that achieved the same result by moving half the goods over half the distance — made no sense”. If some noises were made, they became muted with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in Siberia that assured a safe future and ruled out the need to be more productive.
Given this background, Spufford provides apiquant series of short stories to show how the system worked in practice and the colossal waste it generated. No one was really bothered and why should they have been because they were all in it for the good life. So, here is just a sample of the short stories that, taken together, give a vivid picture of how the system actually worked.
Maksim Mokhov is a laid-back bureaucrat in Gosplan. He is assigned to help out arayon fabric factory where one of its machines had been destroyed in an accident. A replacement has been ordered from its Urals factory but it has refused to give an updated version without which the production quota allotted to it couldn’t be fulfilled. Enter a middleman working outside the official channels to fix the bureaucratic tangle but it transpires that there is a whole web of conspiracy surrounding the accident and the delay in supplying the replacement machine. The story illustrates how a parallel universe of criminals, Spufford calls them “lawful thieves”, ran the Soviet economy.
Spufford has a string of stories how “lawful thieves” infiltrated every nook and corner of Soviet society and why it was necessary to have Party contacts to get even the simplest things like painkillers, contraceptives, soap and toothpaste — let alone bigger things like a flat or medical care. Spufford’s fictional Khrushchev understood that things had to be ordered differently and the command economy had to go if ordinary people had to live well.
Friday, July 30, 2010
MORE MONEY THAN GOD - A bet to save capitalism | SEBASTIAN MALLABY
A BHEEK B HATTACHARYA abheek.b@livemint.com
Karl Marx didn't like speculators. “What distinguishes the present period of speculation in Europe is the universality of the rage,“ he lamented in 1856. On cue, every leftist-type worth his jhola today reserves special hatred for the speculators of our era. There is much lament about the present “universality of the rage“: Speculation these days can even drive up food prices, as one commentator ranted recently in The Independent.
That must mean then that the speculators who most embody this “rage“, none other than hedge funds, are the very avatars of freewheeling capitalism. Sebastian Mallaby, proud capital- ist, tries to find out where exactly hedge funds stand in the capital- ist scheme of things in his More Money than God. In constructing their history, he comes to the conclusion that they may well be the future of capitalist finance.
A former writer at The Econo- mist and The Washington Post, Mallaby tells his story with the keen eye of a journalist and the steady narrative of a novelist.
We're treated to both revealing factual material from hundreds of interviews as well as to the ele- gant metaphors that stitch together these different--and sometimes complex--facts.
The first such fact: What is a “hedge fund“? The term today is thrown around casually to suggest (and blame) some greedy finan- cier-type. Though it's actually hard to settle on a definition, this type of fund has tended to mean a particular way of investing. The first “hedged“ fund, started by A.W. Jones in 1949 was so because Jones took the care to bet in favour of some stocks, while betting against others. He thus “hedged his bets“, protecting himself against the ups and downs of the marketplace.
This fundamental tenet has somewhat survived, even as hedge funds have evolved fantas- tically. Mallaby shows us the “block trading“ days in the 1970s (waiting for someone to dump a large block of stocks, buying them as the dumping lowers the price, and then selling them when the price springs back up); the “trend surfing“ days of the 1980s (watch- ing data charts carefully to ride a bull market and getting out as it turned bearish to bet against it); and the “quant“ days starting in the 1990s (computers detecting financial signals humans can't).
And hedge funds evolved over the last 50 years in step with changes in the macroeconomic landscape. Back when exchange rates were fixed and capital couldn't cross borders easily, Jones wouldn't have dreamed of betting against national currencies. But George Soros, the most famous hedge fund titan till date, could bring both the UK pound and the Thai baht to their knees in the 1990s. Mallaby displays an impressive grasp of history here: As ideas and policymaking shifted, the strategies of funds have had to, too.
But some things have remained the same. “Repellent and attrac- tive, objects of envy and yearning“ simultaneously, hedge funds have remained the “wizards of modern capitalism's favorite pastime, the unabashed pursuit of money“.
Many maintain that this unabashed pursuit must be con- trolled, but Mallaby insists other- wise: Society should tolerate these speculators because, in their greed, they have ended up per- forming a social function (most of the time at least). Block trading provided liquidity to those look- ing to offload many shares; attacking the baht forced Thai- land to abandon an inflexible currency framework, arguably for the better; and all the quantita- tive tricks have, on most days, tried to make prices reflect reality instead of sentiment.
Of course, the days when they aren't so noble, hedge funds have been known to create mayhem.
Yet before we pass judgement on those fund managers who almost crippled the financial system in the past, Mallaby's narrative con- verges on to the present day, when some bankers did fully crip- ple the system.
This book (thankfully) isn't part of the 2007-09 crisis literature, but it adds a great twist to it. To wit, if the big banks failed and threat- ened to take down the whole sys- tem, why doesn't finance rely more on hedge funds? This crisis killed 1,500 funds, without imper- iling the system or requiring government bailouts. Many of them eve n prof ited bec ause they weren't as stupid.
Mallaby is convinced that through all the evolutions and shifts, some things have kept hedge funds unique--and kept them performing a social func- tion--unlike other financial firms.
They continue to rely on individ- ual geniuses, not lumbering bureaucracies. They continue to be driven by contrarian instincts: They don't get sucked into the tide. And they continue to be taut and lean: Because the managers' own savings are often at stake, risk is perhaps better managed and incentives better aligned. Still, after this last gut-wrenching crisis, can we really stomach these unregulated hedge funds?
Mallaby is remarkably fair in addressing this concern. Aware of the exhausting debate over finan- cial regulation that preoccupies the world, he doesn't pretend that his recommendations will stand the test of all time, or that they are free of costs. He offers sufficient nuance, which we should give its due. The only sharp opinion he clings to is that he likes his specu- lators. He wants their rage to be even more universal.
Friday, July 2, 2010
CHARLES DICKENS - MICHAEL SLATER - Under the magic lantern
For those anyone who loves literature, the question of how literary work comes into being, of what relationship there is between the creation and the creator, is of an interest almost as urgent as that felt for the books themselves. When a writer gives us the gift of a character we cannot forget, of a scene or story that changes our relationship to our world, of a way of thinking that wakes us from linguistic or moral inertia, we crave a closer contact with that life and mind. These are the pleasures offered by literary biography, and they may be abundantly found in Michael Slater's new biography of a man who we might legitimately consider the 19th century's greatest writer, Charles Dickens.
Slater's book weighs in at over 600 pages, and in all fairness it would have been hard to make his book any shorter than this, for Dickens' life itself was a vast one.
The son of a financially reckless clerk who on more than one occasion was sent to jail for not paying his debts (forcing the young Charles, at the age of 12, to leave school for a few months and work in a factory), Dickens acquired his enormous success, wealth, good- will and standing purely by dint of his energy, ambition and resourcefulness. Beginning his working life as a parliamentary reporter, he swiftly demonstrated the power of what a famous actor friend of his called his “clutching eye“, or eye for detail that seemed to bring a scene alive. His journalistic descriptions of London streets and incidents soon found an audience not just in the periodicals but when collected, into books. This work constituted Dickens' training for a literary career in which Lon- don--a city he called his “magic lantern“--occupied the centre.
To a greater extent than some of Dickens' earlier biographers, Slater emphasizes that the writer is worth understanding not just as a literary figure but indeed as a businessman. In Dickens' time it was not very common for a writer to make a living from his books alone. Indeed, book publication itself was not the thing that we know it to be now. Most novels of the day--and most of Dickens' novels--appeared first in serial form in weekly or monthly periodicals, accompanied by illustrations. Only later were some of them given the dignity and standing of book publication.
Slater shows how, once Dick- ens began to acquire a sense of his audience, he relentlessly plot- ted and schemed to make not just his art thrive but also his finances.
At times, by undertaking to cover all production costs in return for a larger share in profits, he over- turned the traditional publisher- author business relationship by turning his publisher essentially into no more than a printer. He was happy to prepare handsome, expensive editions of his slim “Christmas books“ (the best and most famous of which is A Christmas Carol, one of the greatest short novels in the English language) and cheap omnibus editions of his collected works. Having sold the copyright of some of his books when in need of money, he later bought them back at a much steeper price, just so that he might have control over his entire oeuvre.
Indeed, Dickens' greatest success was to to balance the competing pulls and pressures of literary artistry and commercial success.
His stories are often melodramatic, but they are incandescent with marvelous metaphors, powerful descriptions of people and place, great flights of comic imagination, and also a sympathy for human frailties and an outrage at injustice perpetrated both by individuals and by systems. There is in them a luminous perception not just of particular characters and their predicaments, but also of an entire society. Slater describes the working notes that Dickens used to prepare to set up the structure of a story, and the way Dickens' language, themes and characters develop across his career. Dick- ens' sociability, infectious energy, and appetite for life and for narrative are in evidence everywhere.
In her short biography of Dick- ens, the novelist Jane Smiley remarks that the relationship between a novelist's life and his work is not unidirectional, but rather dialectical. “Just as Dickens's novels were in part commentary on his life,“ she observes, “so his actions, in part, grew out of the way that writing novels gave his feelings and thoughts specific being.“ In other words, just as Dickens wrote novels, so too did his novels in some way write him. The evidence of this claim is most fully worked out in Slater's meticulously researched and readable biography.
Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.
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Slater's book weighs in at over 600 pages, and in all fairness it would have been hard to make his book any shorter than this, for Dickens' life itself was a vast one.
The son of a financially reckless clerk who on more than one occasion was sent to jail for not paying his debts (forcing the young Charles, at the age of 12, to leave school for a few months and work in a factory), Dickens acquired his enormous success, wealth, good- will and standing purely by dint of his energy, ambition and resourcefulness. Beginning his working life as a parliamentary reporter, he swiftly demonstrated the power of what a famous actor friend of his called his “clutching eye“, or eye for detail that seemed to bring a scene alive. His journalistic descriptions of London streets and incidents soon found an audience not just in the periodicals but when collected, into books. This work constituted Dickens' training for a literary career in which Lon- don--a city he called his “magic lantern“--occupied the centre.
To a greater extent than some of Dickens' earlier biographers, Slater emphasizes that the writer is worth understanding not just as a literary figure but indeed as a businessman. In Dickens' time it was not very common for a writer to make a living from his books alone. Indeed, book publication itself was not the thing that we know it to be now. Most novels of the day--and most of Dickens' novels--appeared first in serial form in weekly or monthly periodicals, accompanied by illustrations. Only later were some of them given the dignity and standing of book publication.
Slater shows how, once Dick- ens began to acquire a sense of his audience, he relentlessly plot- ted and schemed to make not just his art thrive but also his finances.
At times, by undertaking to cover all production costs in return for a larger share in profits, he over- turned the traditional publisher- author business relationship by turning his publisher essentially into no more than a printer. He was happy to prepare handsome, expensive editions of his slim “Christmas books“ (the best and most famous of which is A Christmas Carol, one of the greatest short novels in the English language) and cheap omnibus editions of his collected works. Having sold the copyright of some of his books when in need of money, he later bought them back at a much steeper price, just so that he might have control over his entire oeuvre.
Indeed, Dickens' greatest success was to to balance the competing pulls and pressures of literary artistry and commercial success.
His stories are often melodramatic, but they are incandescent with marvelous metaphors, powerful descriptions of people and place, great flights of comic imagination, and also a sympathy for human frailties and an outrage at injustice perpetrated both by individuals and by systems. There is in them a luminous perception not just of particular characters and their predicaments, but also of an entire society. Slater describes the working notes that Dickens used to prepare to set up the structure of a story, and the way Dickens' language, themes and characters develop across his career. Dick- ens' sociability, infectious energy, and appetite for life and for narrative are in evidence everywhere.
In her short biography of Dick- ens, the novelist Jane Smiley remarks that the relationship between a novelist's life and his work is not unidirectional, but rather dialectical. “Just as Dickens's novels were in part commentary on his life,“ she observes, “so his actions, in part, grew out of the way that writing novels gave his feelings and thoughts specific being.“ In other words, just as Dickens wrote novels, so too did his novels in some way write him. The evidence of this claim is most fully worked out in Slater's meticulously researched and readable biography.
Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.
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The queerness of E M Forster
From Business Standar July 3rd 2010
A good biography is itself a kind of a novel. Like a classic novel, a biography believes in the notion of a “life” — a life as a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist
—Cynthia Ozick: Art and Ardour ,1983 Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81)
Biographies of writers are interesting only insofar as they illustrate the work, and to do this effectively requires a discursiveness on the part of biographers that makes them take an imaginative leap beyond formal records.
Not to do so would be to gloss over the lies and silences at the heart of everyone’s lives that would hardly tell us of the man within and/or what made him tick. Because most biographies (especially ours) end up as hagiographies, of lives too good to be true, and few last. Not only are most of us distrustful of exemplary lives in the heroic sense, but certain subjects seem, over time, to be more or less interesting because of the frame of interpretation, the cultural baggage changes. Wendy Moffat’s EM Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, Special Indian Price Rs 999) would enjoy a longer life for two reasons: first, A Passage to India has established Forster as the most popular literary novelist here; second, because “connections” between “people, nations, heart and head, labour and art” that were Forster’s great themes are of perennial interest here as well as everywhere else in this age of globalisation.
The book is in two parts — “Grown Up Man” and “Happiness Can Come in One’s Natural Growth” — with a Prologue that sets the tone of the whole book: “Start with the fact that he was a homosexual.” But the question that Moffat asks is why after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, Forster never published another novel although he lived to be ninety. In 1970, or perhaps a little later, he confided that “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter”. This has been taken as an expression of regret but Moffat takes it as a kind of relief probably because Britain was still very intolerant of gays and Cambridge could well have asked him to “pack up”. (After all, William Empson, who was to become one of the great literary critics with his work Seven Types of Ambiguity, was expelled from his Cambridge college and from the town itself in 1929 for possessing a packet of contraceptives in his rooms!) So much for Oxbridge tolerance.
Whether homosexuality is a part of our DNA is still an open question, but the mother’s dominant influence in early childhood has something to do with the way we grow up. Forster’s early life was, to use an American expression, “zipped up”. He was brought up very much under his mother’s thumb that, no doubt, gave him a sense of security and a smattering of bourgeois mannerisms, but nothing else besides. To a large number of Indian students who were always welcomed to his rooms at King’s College, the overwhelming impression that they carried was Forster’s “solicitousness” (“Call me Morgan”) which many mistook for an easy familiarity and an invitation for a return visit.
But what comes through from his diaries that are filled with such observations as “the bodies of men drying off after bathing in the Thames” is that Forster was unsure about the direction of his own life and that he remained till the age of 37 “a closet homosexual”. All that changed in 1917 when he was posted to Alexandria with the Red Cross, free from the constraints that were imposed by Cambridge. After an affair with a soldier, he fell in love with a tram conductor that finally ended in bed. Moffat has pieced together this part of Forster’s life from bits of a letter which reads like a poem: “Dear Morgan/I am sending you the photograph/I am very bad/I got nothing more to say/...My love to you/My love to you/My love to you/Do not forget ever your friend.” “Only connect”, the yearning epigraph to Howards End provides a clue to Forster’s silence despite his extraordinary gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humor. At the end of A Passage..., we have the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding into the sunset along different paths. Since all novels have a strong autobiographical content, though “with experience totally transformed”, could this parting of ways be taken as a search for a love that dare not speak its name? Sex certainly provided a glue to Forster’s inner life. He embraced London’s gay subculture no holds barred and makes no secret that he was quite happy with unconventional arrangements: first, with a stocky taxi driver and then a very long relationship with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, to whom he gifted a small part of his will.
Biographies always leave some questions unanswered about the silences that we keep only to ourselves. Moffat could have been a little more courageous about the contradictions of Forster’s inner life, friends with some of the leading intellectuals of the time but intimate only with working class men with whom he couldn’t possibly have any life of the mind?
A good biography is itself a kind of a novel. Like a classic novel, a biography believes in the notion of a “life” — a life as a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist
—Cynthia Ozick: Art and Ardour ,1983 Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81)
Biographies of writers are interesting only insofar as they illustrate the work, and to do this effectively requires a discursiveness on the part of biographers that makes them take an imaginative leap beyond formal records.
Not to do so would be to gloss over the lies and silences at the heart of everyone’s lives that would hardly tell us of the man within and/or what made him tick. Because most biographies (especially ours) end up as hagiographies, of lives too good to be true, and few last. Not only are most of us distrustful of exemplary lives in the heroic sense, but certain subjects seem, over time, to be more or less interesting because of the frame of interpretation, the cultural baggage changes. Wendy Moffat’s EM Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, Special Indian Price Rs 999) would enjoy a longer life for two reasons: first, A Passage to India has established Forster as the most popular literary novelist here; second, because “connections” between “people, nations, heart and head, labour and art” that were Forster’s great themes are of perennial interest here as well as everywhere else in this age of globalisation.
The book is in two parts — “Grown Up Man” and “Happiness Can Come in One’s Natural Growth” — with a Prologue that sets the tone of the whole book: “Start with the fact that he was a homosexual.” But the question that Moffat asks is why after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, Forster never published another novel although he lived to be ninety. In 1970, or perhaps a little later, he confided that “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter”. This has been taken as an expression of regret but Moffat takes it as a kind of relief probably because Britain was still very intolerant of gays and Cambridge could well have asked him to “pack up”. (After all, William Empson, who was to become one of the great literary critics with his work Seven Types of Ambiguity, was expelled from his Cambridge college and from the town itself in 1929 for possessing a packet of contraceptives in his rooms!) So much for Oxbridge tolerance.
Whether homosexuality is a part of our DNA is still an open question, but the mother’s dominant influence in early childhood has something to do with the way we grow up. Forster’s early life was, to use an American expression, “zipped up”. He was brought up very much under his mother’s thumb that, no doubt, gave him a sense of security and a smattering of bourgeois mannerisms, but nothing else besides. To a large number of Indian students who were always welcomed to his rooms at King’s College, the overwhelming impression that they carried was Forster’s “solicitousness” (“Call me Morgan”) which many mistook for an easy familiarity and an invitation for a return visit.
But what comes through from his diaries that are filled with such observations as “the bodies of men drying off after bathing in the Thames” is that Forster was unsure about the direction of his own life and that he remained till the age of 37 “a closet homosexual”. All that changed in 1917 when he was posted to Alexandria with the Red Cross, free from the constraints that were imposed by Cambridge. After an affair with a soldier, he fell in love with a tram conductor that finally ended in bed. Moffat has pieced together this part of Forster’s life from bits of a letter which reads like a poem: “Dear Morgan/I am sending you the photograph/I am very bad/I got nothing more to say/...My love to you/My love to you/My love to you/Do not forget ever your friend.” “Only connect”, the yearning epigraph to Howards End provides a clue to Forster’s silence despite his extraordinary gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humor. At the end of A Passage..., we have the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding into the sunset along different paths. Since all novels have a strong autobiographical content, though “with experience totally transformed”, could this parting of ways be taken as a search for a love that dare not speak its name? Sex certainly provided a glue to Forster’s inner life. He embraced London’s gay subculture no holds barred and makes no secret that he was quite happy with unconventional arrangements: first, with a stocky taxi driver and then a very long relationship with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, to whom he gifted a small part of his will.
Biographies always leave some questions unanswered about the silences that we keep only to ourselves. Moffat could have been a little more courageous about the contradictions of Forster’s inner life, friends with some of the leading intellectuals of the time but intimate only with working class men with whom he couldn’t possibly have any life of the mind?
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Roubini Urges Goldman Sachs Breakup, Possible CDO Ban:
book review
May 7 (Bloomberg) -- Nouriel Roubini has a modest proposal for deflating Wall Street’s bubble-prone bankers.
Break up Goldman Sachs Group Inc., he says. Consider banning collateralized debt obligations. And why not compensate traders with slices of their own exotic securities instead of with cash or shares?
These prescriptions crop up in “Crisis Economics,” a rigorous yet highly readable look at why booms and busts occur and how to keep them from wreaking havoc on the real economy.
Roubini is usually remembered as “Dr. Doom.” He’s the New York University professor who predicted in 2006 that the U.S. would soon suffer a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust and deep recession. What’s less appreciated is that he based his forecast on years of studying booms and busts. His conclusion: Financial crises are hardwired into capitalism.
“Far from being the exception, crises are the norm,” he says in this book, written with journalist Stephen Mihm. To prove the point, they open with a brisk history of crises, from currency debasements in 12th-century Europe to the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
By the 18th century, asset bubbles had become a common feature of capitalism: Witness John Law’s Mississippi Company and the South Sea Bubble. Panics punctuated the 19th century, and the crisis of 1907 famously prompted J. Pierpont Morgan Sr. to lock bankers up in his private library until they agreed to rescue the Trust Company of America.
(Hank Paulson attempted to replicate that act of brinkmanship one weekend 101 years later, when he leaned on Wall Street’s elite to arrange a private rescue of Lehman.)
‘The Same Script’
Crises tend to “follow the same script over and over again,” the authors say. A bubble swells the price of some asset well above its underlying value, and speculators borrow to buy into the boom. As the heap of credit rises, anyone who utters the word “bubble” is shouted down with the usual taunt, “This time is different.” It never is.
Ever since Adam Smith, economists have tended to focus on how markets succeed, not why they fail. So the book recalls the work of “crisis economists,” a rare breed of outliers such as John Maynard Keynes, Hyman Minsky and Joseph Schumpeter.
As this list suggests, Roubini and Mihm aren’t adherents of any particular economic school. They find merit in Schumpeter’s vision of “creative destruction,” waves of innovation and winnowing, yet they also credit Karl Marx for recognizing that capitalism is inherently unstable and prone to crises.
Walter Bagehot
Much of the book focuses on the mechanics of how the U.S. housing market bubbled and popped. The pathology -- and the chosen cure -- would have been familiar to Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century editor of the Economist, who argued that it takes a lender of last resort to halt a plunge into financial terror. He never foresaw the “deeply flawed version of his prescription” that emerged in 2007 and 2008, Roubini and Mihm say.
Bagehot opposed indiscriminate bailouts and argued that only solvent institutions should get access to loans, they write. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, by contrast, rescued illiquid and insolvent institutions alike.
His unprecedented actions probably helped avert another Great Depression, the authors say. His rush to prop up the system also set a dangerous precedent and may “sow the seeds of bigger bubbles and even more destructive crises.” They incurred massive costs -- U.S. deficits are forecast to reach some $9 trillion over the coming decade -- and dulled the appetite of lawmakers for a deep regulatory overhaul. They euthanized the forces of “creative destruction.”
Too Big
So what should be done? Like Simon Johnson, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, Roubini and Mihm want to break up too-big-to-fail institutions. Their hit list includes JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman, to name a few.
The authors also want to change how bankers get paid, to force them to put more of their own skin in the game. Creating bonus pools calculated on average performance over several years might help. So might putting their bonuses for high returns into escrow for several years, with future losses subtracted from the total.
The Fed, for its part, should use its power to impede bubbles by removing the punchbowl, the authors say. And it’s time for a 21st-century version of the Glass-Steagall Act, to create extensive firewalls.
As for CDOs -- a.k.a. “Chernobyl Death Obligations” -- they must be heavily regulated if not banned. CDOs resemble dodgy sausages, they say: Someone needs to scrutinize the loans that go into them to make sure they don’t include “rat meat and trichinosis-laced pig parts.”
“Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” is from Penguin Press in the U.S. and from Allen Lane in the U.K. (353 pages, $27.95, 25 pounds).
India — The Political Economy of Growth, Stagnation and the State, 1951–2007
Matthew McCartney , India — The Political Economy of Growth, Stagnation and the State, 1951–2007 . : Routledge Taylor & Francis , 2009 . xxvii + 278 pp. £85.00 hardback .
Ever since India launched economic reforms in 1991 and 1992 — articulated in the budget by Manmohan Singh — there has been a growing body of literature emerging from scholars of rival schools of ideology about the fate of India's reform process, what led to it and how it has unfolded. This discourse, however, is led mostly by economists, who often use various econometric analyses to study India's political economy. The book under review is one of the few titles in recent times that seeks to explain India's political economy by looking at the transformations occurring in the state as an institution, as well as the behaviour of the state.
McCartney offers a convincing argument that the trajectory of India's political economy is determined by a number of factors in which the state plays a decisive role, such as the mobilization and allocation of the economic surplus to those wishing to invest productively, particularly in the finance arena. He also discusses the role of state as institutions that are necessary for overcoming the conflicts inherently associated with economic development.
One of the peculiarities of India's political economy is that the country has been ruled by the Congress Party for decades (since 1947) and it has remained a major player in the current era of coalition politics. Its dominance in India's democratic politics is such that scholars describe the Indian party system as the Congress system. McCartney attempts to explain India's political economy in terms of the rise and fall of the Congress party in the electoral arena, and the related transformations unfolding within. According to him, the Congress Party previously played the role of conflict management by incorporating dissent, providing mediation and allocating (political rents) relatively efficiently. The Indian state continued to be successful in mobilizing resources — but after the mid-1960s was increasingly unable to allocate them productively, and India became locked in a political economy of stagnation. But the claim that the Congress Party played a complementary role is not new; there was a study by Myron Weiner which made a similar argument.
The author describes one episode of stagnation and three episodes of growth during the period. The various ways of categorizing an episode of growth/stagnation are considered. The book considers both quantitative and qualitative factors. The definition is not made purely on the basis of average rates of GDP growth. He also describes the complementary roles for the state in promoting economic development for which the state must: (1) mobilize and allocate the economic surplus to those wishing to engage in productive investment (finance); (2) ensure that the surplus is invested productively (production); (3) utilize institutions to overcome the inherent conflicts that exist during the process of development (institutions). One of the arguments the book advances is that the Indian state was able to overcome the conflicts associated with industrialization because it contained within itself an inclusive institution — the Congress Party. The Party worked as a mechanism to absorb dissent. Why it was able to do this — but other parties were not— is another legitimate question that needs incisive analysis and is ignored in this book.
McCartney analyses stagnation during the period 1965 to 1980 and challenges the argument that there was a problem of mobilization because the Indian state was unable to tax property and income from profit. He shows that the state was successful in mobilizing, but the pattern of mobilization was different compared to the previous era. He also discusses how sharp falls in both public and private corporate investment after 1965–66 illustrate that the state became less efficient in allocating resources to projects essential for development. Thus, the major argument is that the stagnation after the mid-1960s was not due to the failure of resource mobilization but to the fact that the surplus was being consumed and invested less productively. If that is the case, then the blame lies on the shoulders of the policy-making community and not on the institution of the Indian state.
McCartney shows that between 1979–80 and 1991 the state was unable to overcome the conflicts associated with development. The Congress Party, although dominant electorally during the 1980s, was no longer the inclusive institution it had been in the 1950s. Congress in the 1980s was unable to incorporate dissident groups other than through broad and expensive fiscal transfers; its local level organization had disappeared. The party was unable to accommodate local factions or provide opportunities within the party for local elites. But the author seems to have missed the argument that such incapacities of the Congress Party were not of its own making. Rather it was the massive democratization processes that generated awareness among people and politicized the citizenry in a manner that crippled old forms of co-option from delivering results.
Next follows an analysis of how the Indian state influenced several areas between 1991 and 2007, which were key to mobilization and allocation of resources. These areas were: mobilizing domestic savings; creating institutions to mobilize private sector savings; influencing retained earnings and profitability. The state was also able to draw people into its project through an ideological appeal, even though people were not gaining from reform. One would like to ask why the state was able to do this at this point in time but not before, as there had been efforts to liberalize, particularly in the early 1980s.
Without doubt the book shares interesting insights on many issues of the Indian political economy, state and party politics; yet the absence of any analysis regarding the role and nature of non-Congress parties remains one of its major shortcomings. All in all it is refreshing to read a book whose research is non-conventional in many ways. It will assist scholars who hope to learn what is right and what is still wrong about the Indian economy.
Ever since India launched economic reforms in 1991 and 1992 — articulated in the budget by Manmohan Singh — there has been a growing body of literature emerging from scholars of rival schools of ideology about the fate of India's reform process, what led to it and how it has unfolded. This discourse, however, is led mostly by economists, who often use various econometric analyses to study India's political economy. The book under review is one of the few titles in recent times that seeks to explain India's political economy by looking at the transformations occurring in the state as an institution, as well as the behaviour of the state.
McCartney offers a convincing argument that the trajectory of India's political economy is determined by a number of factors in which the state plays a decisive role, such as the mobilization and allocation of the economic surplus to those wishing to invest productively, particularly in the finance arena. He also discusses the role of state as institutions that are necessary for overcoming the conflicts inherently associated with economic development.
One of the peculiarities of India's political economy is that the country has been ruled by the Congress Party for decades (since 1947) and it has remained a major player in the current era of coalition politics. Its dominance in India's democratic politics is such that scholars describe the Indian party system as the Congress system. McCartney attempts to explain India's political economy in terms of the rise and fall of the Congress party in the electoral arena, and the related transformations unfolding within. According to him, the Congress Party previously played the role of conflict management by incorporating dissent, providing mediation and allocating (political rents) relatively efficiently. The Indian state continued to be successful in mobilizing resources — but after the mid-1960s was increasingly unable to allocate them productively, and India became locked in a political economy of stagnation. But the claim that the Congress Party played a complementary role is not new; there was a study by Myron Weiner which made a similar argument.
The author describes one episode of stagnation and three episodes of growth during the period. The various ways of categorizing an episode of growth/stagnation are considered. The book considers both quantitative and qualitative factors. The definition is not made purely on the basis of average rates of GDP growth. He also describes the complementary roles for the state in promoting economic development for which the state must: (1) mobilize and allocate the economic surplus to those wishing to engage in productive investment (finance); (2) ensure that the surplus is invested productively (production); (3) utilize institutions to overcome the inherent conflicts that exist during the process of development (institutions). One of the arguments the book advances is that the Indian state was able to overcome the conflicts associated with industrialization because it contained within itself an inclusive institution — the Congress Party. The Party worked as a mechanism to absorb dissent. Why it was able to do this — but other parties were not— is another legitimate question that needs incisive analysis and is ignored in this book.
McCartney analyses stagnation during the period 1965 to 1980 and challenges the argument that there was a problem of mobilization because the Indian state was unable to tax property and income from profit. He shows that the state was successful in mobilizing, but the pattern of mobilization was different compared to the previous era. He also discusses how sharp falls in both public and private corporate investment after 1965–66 illustrate that the state became less efficient in allocating resources to projects essential for development. Thus, the major argument is that the stagnation after the mid-1960s was not due to the failure of resource mobilization but to the fact that the surplus was being consumed and invested less productively. If that is the case, then the blame lies on the shoulders of the policy-making community and not on the institution of the Indian state.
McCartney shows that between 1979–80 and 1991 the state was unable to overcome the conflicts associated with development. The Congress Party, although dominant electorally during the 1980s, was no longer the inclusive institution it had been in the 1950s. Congress in the 1980s was unable to incorporate dissident groups other than through broad and expensive fiscal transfers; its local level organization had disappeared. The party was unable to accommodate local factions or provide opportunities within the party for local elites. But the author seems to have missed the argument that such incapacities of the Congress Party were not of its own making. Rather it was the massive democratization processes that generated awareness among people and politicized the citizenry in a manner that crippled old forms of co-option from delivering results.
Next follows an analysis of how the Indian state influenced several areas between 1991 and 2007, which were key to mobilization and allocation of resources. These areas were: mobilizing domestic savings; creating institutions to mobilize private sector savings; influencing retained earnings and profitability. The state was also able to draw people into its project through an ideological appeal, even though people were not gaining from reform. One would like to ask why the state was able to do this at this point in time but not before, as there had been efforts to liberalize, particularly in the early 1980s.
Without doubt the book shares interesting insights on many issues of the Indian political economy, state and party politics; yet the absence of any analysis regarding the role and nature of non-Congress parties remains one of its major shortcomings. All in all it is refreshing to read a book whose research is non-conventional in many ways. It will assist scholars who hope to learn what is right and what is still wrong about the Indian economy.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
''కమ్యూనిస్టు వ్యతిరేకులారా ఇక మీ విమర్శలు చాలించండి''
- ''ఫస్ట్ యాజ్ ట్రాజెడీ, దెన్ యాజ్ ఫార్స్''
- స్లావొజ్ జిజెక్ వెర్సొ ప్రెస్ పేజీలు : 157, వెల : రూ. 650
21వ శతాబ్దంలో పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థ ఎదుర్కొంటున్న తొలి సంక్షోభం గురించి అనేక రచనలు వచ్చాయి. ఇందులో కొన్ని రచ నలు సంక్షోభం తీరు తెన్నుల వర్ణణకు పరిమితం అయితే, మరికొన్ని రచనలు సంక్షోభ కారణాలు వెతికే ప్రయత్నం చేశాయి. కొన్ని రచనలు మాత్రమే సంక్షోభానికి పరిష్కారాలు చూపించే ప్రయత్నం చేశాయి. అందులో కూడా సాంప్ర దాయక పరిష్కారాలు చూపించే రచనలే ఎక్కువ. వీటన్నింటికి భిన్నంగా వర్తమాన సంక్షో భాన్ని సరికొత్త కోణంలో పరిశీలించిన రచన స్లావోజ్ జిజెక్ రచించిన ''తొలుత ఒక విషాదంగా తరువాత ఒక ప్రహసనంగా'' (ఫస్ట్ యాజ్ ట్రాజెడీ, దెన్ యాజ్ ఫార్స్) అన్న గ్రంథం. మార్క్స్ ప్రసిద్ధ గ్రంథం లూయీ బోనపార్టీ 18వ బ్రూమెయిర్ రచనలో ఒక వాక్యాన్ని తన రచనకు శీర్షికగా ఎంచుకోవడం ద్వారా జిజెక్, సంక్షోభంపై తన విమర్శ మిగిలిన విమర్శలకు భిన్నంగా ఉంటుందని చెప్పే ప్రయత్నం చేశారు. లండన్ విశ్వవిద్యా లయంలో బిర్క్బెక్ ఇనిస్టిట్యూట్ ఫర్ హ్యుమాని టీస్లో డైరెక్టర్గా పని చేస్తున్నారు జిజెక్. ఈ కాలంలో అత్యధిక విశ్లేషణలు నిర్దిష్టంగా పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానాన్ని బ్రతికించే ఏకైక లక్ష్యంతో వచ్చాయి. కాని వారంతా బయటికి మాత్రం తటస్థ విశ్లేషకులుగా వ్యవహరించారు. అటువంటి వారికి భిన్నంగా జిజెక్ ''ఇక్కడ నేను తటస్థ విశ్లేషణను ముందుంచటం లేదు. సంపూ ర్ణమైన పక్షపాతంతోనే వాదనలు ముందుకు తెస్తున్నాను. అవి కూడా పాక్షికమైనవే. ఎందు కంటే సత్యం పాక్షికమైనది. అటువంటి పాక్షిక సత్యాన్ని చేరుకోవాలంటే పక్షపాత వైఖరి తీసుకోక తప్పదు. ఇక్కడ నేను కమ్యూనిజం పక్షం వహిస్తున్నాను'' అంటూ స్పష్టంగా చెప్పారు. అంతేకాదు, ''కమ్యూనిజాన్ని నమ్మిన వారు ఇకపై ఏ మీమాంసకు లోను కావాల్సిన అవసరం లేదు. కమ్యూనిస్టు వ్యతిరేకులారా, ఇక చాలిం చండి. ఇంతకాలం అవాకులు చెవాకులు పేలారు. వాటన్నింటిని క్షమించి వదిలేస్తున్నాము. ఇకనైనా విషయాన్ని తీవ్రంగా పరిశీలించండి'' అని పేర్కొన్నాడు.
పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థ ఆర్థిక సంక్షోభాన్ని మాత్రమే కాదు, సైద్ధాంతిక సంక్షోభాన్ని కూడా ఎదుర్కొంటున్నది. ఈ సైద్ధాంతిక సంక్షోభం నుండి బయటపడేందుకు ముందుకొచ్చిన, వస్తున్న పలు సంక్లిష్ట వాదనలను కేవలం 160 పేజీల్లో సంక్షిప్తీకరించటం ద్వారా జిజెక్ ఒక నూతన ప్రపంచాన్ని పాఠకుల కళ్ల ముందు ఆవిష్కరించే ప్రయత్నం చేశారు. పుస్తకాన్ని 1. బడుద్ధాయిలూ...ఇది సైద్ధాంతిక పోరాటం, 2. కమ్యూనిస్టు ప్రత్యామ్నాయం అన్న రెండు భాగా లుగా విభజించారు. మధ్యమధ్యలో ఉపశీర్షికలు ఉన్నాయి. జిజెక్ తన గ్రంథంలో అత్యంత సంక్లిష్ట వాదనలను సంక్షిప్తంగా పాఠకుల ముందుంచే ప్రయత్నం చేశాడు. పుస్తకం చిన్నదే అయినా చదివి అర్థం చేసుకోవటానికి సమయం పడుతుంది. ఇందులో ఉన్న వాదనలు, ప్రతి వాదనలు అంత వైవిధ్యమైనవి కావటమే దీనికి కారణం. తాజా సంక్షోభం వలన విప్లవ రాజకీ యాలు, విముక్తి రాజకీయాలు తమంతతాముగా విజృంభించబోవనీ, సంక్షోభం కాస్తా సామాజిక సంక్షోభంగా మారి కార్మికవర్గంపై దాడి పదు నెక్కుతుందనీ, జాత్యంహంకార వివక్ష, యుద్ధం, పేదరికం విజృంభిస్తాయనీ, అన్ని దేశాల్లోనూ పేదలు సంపన్నుల మధ్య అంతరాలు మరింత పెరుగుతాయనీ పేర్కొన్నారు. ఈ పరిస్థితి నుండి బయట పడాలంటే పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థ చట్రం పరిధికి బయటే పరిష్కారం వెదకాలని ప్రతి పాదించారు.
మొదటి భాగాన్ని ప్రధానంగా పెట్టుబడి దారీ సంక్షోభాన్ని సమర్థించుకోవటానికి జరుగు తున్న పలు ప్రయత్నాలనూ, వాటి రాజకీయ పర్యవసానాలనూ విశ్లేషించటానికి కేటాయిం చారు. రెండో భాగంలో కమ్యూనిస్టు ప్రతిపా దనలు ముందుకు తెచ్చారు. పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం గురించీ, కమ్యూనిస్టు ప్రతిపాదనల గురించీ ఆయన ప్రధానంగా సామాజిక రాజ కీయ విశ్లేషణకు బదులు సామాజిక మనస్తత్వ వివశ్లేషణ చేయడానికి ప్రయత్నించారు. దాంతో ఈ రచనలో క్రియాశీల రాజకీయ కోణంపై డోలయమానం కనిపిస్తుంది. పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానాన్ని విశ్లేషించటంలో సమర్థవంతంగా వ్యవహరించినా కమ్యూనిజానికి సంబంధించిన పలు ప్రతిపాదనల విషయంలో యూరప్లోని సైద్థాంతిక ధోరణుల పరిమితి నుండి బయట పడలేకపోయారని ఆయన ముందుకు తెచ్చిన పలు ప్రతిపాదనలు గమనిస్తే అర్థమవుతుంది.
సంక్షుభితమైన పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానానికి కమ్యూనిజం స్థాపన మినహా మరో ప్రత్యా మ్నాయం లేదంటూ ప్రత్యక్ష రాజకీయకార్యా చరణకు ప్రోత్సహించే పుస్తకం ఇది. అదేసమ యంలో కమ్యూనిజం భావనలు వేళ్లూనుకో కుండా ఉండేందుకు, దృష్టి మళ్లించేందుకు అత్యంత మితవాదులు, ఉదారవాదులే కమ్యూ నిస్టు పరిభాషలో వాదనలు ముందుకు తెస్తారని అటువంటి వారి పట్ల అప్రమత్తంగా ఉండాలని ఆయన పిలుపునిస్తారు. అమెరికా ఆధునిక చరిత్రలో ప్రత్యేకించి 21వ శతాబ్దంలో చోటు చేసుకున్న రెండు సంఘటనలు- 9/11 ఉగ్రవాదుల దాడి, తదనంతర పరిణామాలు, 2007-2008లో పెల్లుబుకిన పెట్టుబడిదారీ సంక్షోభం...ఈ రెంటినీ పోలుస్తూ విశ్లేషణ మొదలవుతుంది. ఈ రెండు సందర్భాల్లోనూ అమెరికా పాలక వర్గాలు ముందుకు తెచ్చిన వాదనలు - అమెరికా విలువలనూ, జీవన విధానానీ కాపాడుకోవాలన్న వాదనలను ప్రస్తా విస్తూ వాటిపై తన ప్రతివాదన వినిపించారు. ఈ సందర్భంగానే 1989లో బెర్లిన్ గోడ పతనం సందర్భంగా ముందుకు వచ్చిన చరిత్ర అంతం, మానవ సమాజ అభివృద్ధిలో పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానమే ఆఖరి దశ, సంతోషదాయకమైన 90వ దశకం అన్న వాదనలు ఊహాజనిత వాదనలని జిజెక్ నిర్ధారించాడు. ఫ్రాన్సిస్ ఫుకుయామా ప్రతిపాదించిన చరిత్ర అంతం సిద్ధాంతం కూడా తప్పని రెండు సార్లు రుజువయిందని చెప్పారు.
పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థ సంక్షోభం గురించి మొదటి భాగంలో విపులంగా చర్చించిన జిజెక్ మిగిలిన వారికి మల్లే ఈ చర్చను పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం పరిధిలో నుండే చూడకుండా దాని పరిధి బయట నుండి సమీక్షించటం ఇందులోని ప్రత్యేకత. అదేసమయంలో ఈ నూతన విశ్లేషణకు అవసరమైన సైద్ధాంతిక పునాదిని మాత్రం జిజెక్ చూపలేకపోయాడు. ఈ వైఫల్యం కమ్యూనిస్టు ప్రతిపాదనల గురించిన చర్చలో మరింత కొట్టొచ్చినట్లు కనిపిస్తుంది. పెట్టుబడి దారీ విధానంలోని తాజా ధోరణుల గురించి చర్చను రచయిత ఆయిదు అంశాలుగా విభజిం చాడు. 1. అమెరికాలో వాల్స్ట్రీట్కు, మెయిన్ స్ట్రీట్కు మధ్య జరుగుతున్న చర్చ 2. సమానత్వం ప్రాతిపదికన సంపద పంపిణీకీ, పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానంలో కనిపించే సంపద వడపోతకు మధ్య జరుగుతున్న సంవాదం 3. ఆర్థిక వ్యవస్థలో ప్రభుత్వ జోక్యమే తాజా సంక్షోభానికి మూల కారణమనే చర్చ 4. సంక్షోభ రహిత పెట్టుబడి దారీ విధానం గురించిన చర్చ. తటస్థ మార్కెట్ అంటూ ఏదీ లేదని, ఏ సందర్భ పరిమితుల్లోనైనా మార్కెట్ను రాజకీయాలు నిర్దేశిస్తాయని ఆయన పేర్కొన్నాడు. చివరిగా పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానానికి ప్రపంచ స్థాయిలో ప్రత్యామ్నాయాన్ని ముందుకు తీసుకురాలేకపోతే ఈ వాద ప్రతివాదాల వల్ల వామపక్ష భావజాలానికే ఎక్కువ నష్టం జరుగు తుందని రచయిత అభిప్రాయపడ్డాడు. ఈ దిశగా పాలకవర్గాలు సంక్షోభ కారణాల గురించిన శక్తివంతమైన వ్యాఖ్యానాన్ని విస్తృతంగా ప్రచారం చేస్తాయి. తాజా సంక్షోభం పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థలో ఉన్న సంక్షోభం కాదని, నిజానికి పెట్టు బడిదారీ విధానం నుండి వైదొలగిన ఫలితమే ఈ సంక్షోభమనే వాదనలు పాలక వర్గాల వ్యాఖ్యానాల్లో అంతర్భాగంగా ఉంటాయి. ఇటు వంటి వాఖ్యానం ప్రజలను నిద్ర నుండి మేల్కొ ల్పేది కాదు. మరింత గాఢ నిద్రకు ఉపక్రమింప చేసేది. అంతేకాదు, పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం ఒక తటస్థ సామాజిక యంత్రాంగం అన్నదే ఒక సైద్థాంతిక వాదన. ప్రజలను ఆశల పల్లకి లోకి ఎక్కించిన వ్యవస్థ ఏదైనా ఉంటే అది పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్తే. పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం తన ఆధిపత్యాన్ని కొనసాగించుకోవటానికిగాను వస్తు ఆరాధాన, వస్తు కాంక్షతో పాటు భావ ఆరాధానను కూడా ప్రోత్సహిస్తుంది. ఒకసారి దేని గురించైనా ఆరాధ్యభావం ఏర్పర్చిన తర్వాత సదరు విషయం వలన కలుగుతున్న దుష్ప్రభా వాన్ని తగ్గించి చూపటంలో ఇది దోహదం చేస్తుంది. పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం భావ ఆరా ధన రూపంలో నిర్మిస్తున్న మిథ్యావాదంపై కూడా పోరాడాల్సిన అవసరముంది అని రచయిత విశదీకరించాడు.
శతృ శిబిరం ప్రచార యుద్ధం గురించి సమగ్రంగా వివరించే ప్రయత్నం చేశాడు రచయిత. శతృ శిబిర ప్రచార యుద్ధపు ఏకైక లక్ష్యం ఉనికిలో ఉన్న ఒక శక్తిని... ప్రతిఘటించే సామర్థ్యం గల శక్తిని హతమార్చటం కాదు, అసలు అటువంటి ప్రతిఘటించే సామర్థ్యం ఉన్న శక్తే ఉనికిలోకి వచ్చే అవకాశం లేకుండా చేయటమే దాని లక్ష్యం. అందువల్లనే తాజా సంక్షోభం వ్యవస్థకు సంబంధించిన సంక్షోభంగా కాక వ్యవస్థపై నమ్మకానికి సంబంధించిన సంక్షోభం అన్న వాదన ముందుకు తేవటం ద్వారా మొత్తంగా చర్చనే పక్కదారి పట్టించే ప్రయత్నం జరుగుతున్నది. తాజా సంక్షోభం నేపథ్యంలో పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం కొత్త ముసుగు తొడుక్కుని ముందుకు వస్తుంది. ''సామాజికంగా బాధ్యతాయుతమైన పర్యావరణ పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం'' రూపంలో ఇది మనకు కనిపిస్తుంది. అమెరికాలో హరిత విద్యుత్ బిల్లు, భారత దేశంలో సాంప్రదాయేతర ఇంధన వనరుల విస్తరణ గురించి జరుగుతున్న చర్చలను ఈ నేపథ్యంలోనే మనం చూడాలి. కోపెన్హేగెన్ సదస్సులో సంపన్న దేశాలు వ్యవహరించిన తీరు ఇందుకు నిదర్శనాలు. ఇటువంటి ధోరణులు పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానంలో ఆధునికోత్తర వాదంగా చెప్పుకోవచ్చు. వీటి పర్యవసానం సాంప్రదాయక పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం కంటే మరింత దారుణంగానూ, తీవ్రంగానూ ఉంటుంది. ప్రతి సంక్షోభం నేపథ్యంలో వామ పక్షాల జోక్యానికి ఎంతగా అవకాశాలు అందివ స్తాయో అంతకంటే ఎక్కువ అవకాశాలు ఒంటెత్తు పోకడలకు, ప్రజలను దారి మళ్లించే రాజకీయాలకూ వస్తాయనీ, దీనికి యూరోపియన్ దేశాల అనుభవాలే నిదర్శనాలనీ రచయిత చెప్పాడు.
మానవత్వం, మానవతావాదం గురించిన చర్చకు కూడా జిజెక్ సమర్థవంతమైన జవా బిచ్చారు. సైద్థాంతిక భావజాలాలకు అతీతంగా ఉండాలంటూ ముందుకు వస్తున్న కొన్ని భావ నలు, చర్చలు నిస్సందేహంగా సైద్ధాంతిక కోణం నుండి వస్తున్నవే తప్ప సైద్ధాంతిక భావజాలానికి అతీతమైనవి కావని ఆయన చెప్పారు. అమెరికా ప్రతిపాదిస్తున్న ప్రజాస్వామ్యం కేవలం ఎత్తుగడే తప్ప దానికి వాస్తవిక పునాది లేదన్నాడు. రాజకీయాలకు, ప్రజా జీవనానికి మధ్య పెరుగు తున్న అంతరానికీ, అస్తిత్వ రాజకీయాల ఆవిర్భా వానికీ మధ్య మధ్య సంబంధం ఉందని చెబుతూ ''ఇతరులు'' అన్న భావన రాజకీయ భావజాలంలో ఎలా ప్రవేవించింది, నాటి నుండి మనవాళ్లు, ఇతరుల అన్న అర్థంతో జరుగుతున్న చర్చలకు, అస్తిత్వ రాజకీయాలకు మధ్య ఉన్న సంబంధాన్ని కూడా స్పృజించాడు రచయిత. చారిత్రక పరిణామ క్రమంలో తెరమీదకు వచ్చిన బహుముఖ అస్తిత్వాల గురించిన సమగ్ర అంచనా లేకపోతే ప్రజలు అస్తిత్వవాదానికి, విముక్తి వాదానికి మధ్య ఉన్న వ్యత్యాసాన్ని గుర్తించలేరని ఆయన చెప్పాడు.
నేడు మనం చూస్తున్న పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానాన్ని అంగీకరించగలమా అన్న ప్రశ్న వేసి దానికి సమాధానంగా కమ్యూనిస్టు పరిష్కారాలు ప్రతిపాదించాడు రచయిత. ఈ అధ్యాయంలో జరిగిన చర్చ అంతా అనేక ప్రతిపాదనలు, సూచనలు చుట్టూ తిరుగుతుంది. సంపూర్ణమైన మార్క్సిస్టు -లెనినస్టు అర్థంలో కమ్యూనిజం సాధన అన్న పదబంధాన్ని రచయిత వాడలేదనిపిస్తుంది. మరోవైపున కమ్యూనిజం సాధనకు కీలకమైన మార్క్సిస్టు లెనినిస్టు సూత్రాలపై నడిచే కమ్యూనిస్టు పార్టీ, విప్లవానికి అవసరమైన కార్మికవర్గ నాయకత్వం, విప్లవానం తరం బూర్జువా రాజ్యాంగయంత్రం స్థానంలో కార్మికవర్గ నియంతృత్వం స్థాపనల గురించి రచయిత చర్చను వాయిదా వేశాడు. కార్మిక వర్గం పొందికలో వచ్చిన మార్పులను ప్రసా ్తవిస్తూ ప్రపంచీకరణ నేపథ్యంలో పలు రకాలుగా చీలిపోయిన కార్మికవర్గాన్ని ఐక్యం చేయాల న్నాడు. పోరాడితే పోయేదేమీ లేదు బానిస సంకెళ్లు తప్ప అన్న నినాదం నాడు కార్మికవర్గాన్ని సమీకరించటానికి దోహదం చేస్తే పోరాడకపోతే సర్వం కోల్పోతామన్న ఆందోళన నేటి సమీక రణకు పునాదిగా ఉండాలని రచయిత ప్రతిపా దించాడు. అయితే ప్రస్తుత పెట్టుబడిదారీ సంక్షో భం నుండి బయట పడి కమ్యూనిజం సాధన కోసం పోరాడేందుకు అవసరమైన సమగ్ర రాజ కీయ వ్యూహాన్ని ప్రతిపాదించటంలో రచయిత వెనకంజ వేశాడు.
నేడు పెట్టుబడిదారీ వ్యవస్థ ముందుకు తెస్తున్న సంక్లిష్టమైన సమస్యల పరిధి, నిడివి దృష్టిలో పెట్టుకున్నపుడు కమ్యూనిజం ఒక్కటే ఈ సమస్యలకు శాశ్వత పరిష్కారం ఇవ్వగల దని రచయిత నిర్థారించాడు. ఈ మధ్య కాలం లో ప్రముఖ చరిత్రకారుడు ఎరిక్ హాబ్స్బాం ప్రచురించిన ''సోషలిజం విఫలమైంది, పెట్టు బడిదారీ విధానం దివాళా తీసింది. ప్రత్యామ్నా యం ఏమిటి?'' అన్న ప్రశ్నకు రచయిత కమ్యూ నిజం సమాధానంతో ముందుకు వచ్చాడు. ఈ పరిష్కారం దిశగా ప్రపంచ కార్మికవర్గం పయ నించకుండా నిరోధించే ప్రయత్నంలో భాగంగానే పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానం పరిమిత సామ్యవాద భావనలను ప్రచారాస్త్రాలుగా మారుస్తోందనీ, ప్రకృతి వనరులపై ప్రజల ప్రత్యక్ష హక్కు అన్న పర్వావరణ ఉద్యమకారుల వాదనలు ఇందులో భాగమేనని ఆయన పేర్కొన్నాడు. ఇటువంటి వాదనలన్నింటికీ సమాధానం ఇవ్వాలంటే కమ్యూనిజం నిరంతరం ప్రగతిశీల నూతనత్వా న్ని తనలో ఇముడ్చుకోవాలంటాడు. సామ్రాజ్య వాద ప్రపంచీకరణ నేపథ్యంలో మెజారిటీ ప్రజలు కార్మికవర్గంలో చేరుతున్నారు. అంతర్జా తీయంగా రిజర్వు కార్మికవర్గ సైన్యం విస్తరి స్తోంది. ముందు ముందు వీరందరూ ప్రజా స్వామ్యంపేర చెలామణీ అవుతున్న బూర్జువా రాజకీయ క్రమంలో కూడా స్థానం సంపాదిం చుకునే పరిస్థితుల్లో ఉండరు. అందువల్ల ఇటువంటి పరిస్థితుల్లో మార్క్స్ ప్రతిపాదించిన అత్యున్నత విముక్తి సిద్ధాంతంలోని వాస్తవిక ప్రతిపాదనల గురించి ప్రజలను చైతన్యపర్చా ల్సిన అవసర ముంది అని జిజెక్ తన గ్రంథం లో చెప్పాడు. సామ్రాజ్యవాదపు ఆధిపత్య వ్యాఖ్యానం నడుమ వాస్తవిక విషయాలు ప్రజలకు చేరటం లేదు. అందువల్ల ప్రజలు మిథ్యావాదానికి దగ్గరవుతున్నారు. పైన చెప్పుకున్నట్లు ఈ మిథ్యావాదపు ఉపరితలాన్ని బద్దలు కొట్టి వాస్తవాలు ప్రజలకు చేరేలా చేయటం కూడా నేడు సైద్ధాంతిక పోరాటంలో అంతర్భాగమే అవుతుందని ఆయన పేర్కొ న్నాడు.
యూరోపియన్ దేశాల రాజకీయాలపై పట్టు కలిగిన జిజెక్ ఫ్రాన్స్, ఇటలీల్లో జరుగు తున్న రాజకీయమార్పులపై కూడా దృష్టి సారించాడు. ఫ్రెంచి అధ్యక్షుడు, ఇటలీ ప్రధానిల శృంగార క్రీడలు, ఆయా దేశాల రాజకీయాల్లో వాటి ప్రభావం గురించి రేఖా మాత్రంగా పాఠకుల దృష్టికి తెస్తూ, ఇవన్నీ రాజకీయాల పట్ల ప్రజా దృక్ఫధాన్ని మార్చటంలో భాగమనీ రచయిత అభిప్రాయపడతాడు. కారణాలు ఏవైనా ఇటువంటి ఏవగింపు చర్యలపై చర్చ మొదలు పెట్టిన తర్వాత ప్రజానీకం ఎదుర్కొం టున్న దైనందిన జీవన సమస్యలపైకి దృష్టి మళ్లించటం సాధ్యం కాదని, తద్వారా పాలక వర్గాలు తమ ప్రయోజనాలను యథాతథంగా కొనసాగించుకోవటంలో కృతకృత్యులవుతాయని చెప్పాడు. పైన చెప్పుకున్నట్లు సంక్షోభం పర్యవ సానంగా మితవాద రాజకీయాలు, కార్మిక వర్గంపై దాడి పెరుగుతాయి. వివిధ దేశాల్లో ఈ దాడులు ప్రారంభం కావటానికి ముందు జరుగుతున్న చర్చల ధోరణిని రచయిత ప్రస్తా వించిన తీరు ఇంగ్లాండ్, అమెరికా, ఆస్ట్రేలి యాల్లో ప్రవాసుల పట్ల జరుగుతన్న వ్యవహార శైలిని కళ్లకు కట్టినట్లు చూపిస్తోంది. ప్రవాసుల వల్లనే దేశీయ యువత నిరుద్యోగం బారిన పడుతుందన్న వాదన ముందుకు తేవటం ద్వారా నిరుద్యోగ యువతను ప్రభుత్వ వైఫల్యం నుండి దృష్టి మళ్లించటంలో వివిధ దేశాల్లోని పాలక వర్గాలు కృతకృత్యులయ్యాయి. ఈ ధోరణి ఆస్ట్రేలియాలో భారతీయ విద్యార్థులపై జరుగుతున్న దాడుల్లో మరింత స్పష్టంగా కనిపిస్తోంది.
వామపక్ష వాదనల్లో ఆధునికానంతర వాదనల గురించి కూడా రచయిత ఈ గ్రంధంలో ప్రస్తావించాడు. కార్మిక వర్గ నియంతృత్వం సిద్థాంతాన్ని వ్యతిరేకించే వారిని రచయిత ఆధునికానంతర వామపక్ష వాదులుగా వర్గీకరించాడు. కార్మికవర్గ నియంతృత్వాన్ని ఆచరణలోకి తెచ్చింది లెనిన్ నేతృత్వంలోని బోల్షివిక్ పార్టీ. అందువల్ల వీరు సహజంగానే లెనిన్ సూత్రీకరణలకు వ్యతిరేక వాదనలు ముందుకు తెస్తారు. వేతన కార్మికుల పోరాటాలను కమ్యూనిస్టు పోరాటాల్లో అంతర్భాగంగా చూడకపోవటం కూడా ఆధునికోత్తర వామపక్ష వాదనల్లో భాగంగా ఉంటుంది. దీనికి గాను వీళ్లు ముందుకు తెచ్చే వాదన ''వేతన శ్రమకు కాలం చెల్లింది. పెట్టుబడికి, శ్రమశక్తికి మధ్య వైరుధ్యం గతం మాట. దీని స్థానంలో ప్రభుత్వం, బహుముఖ వ్యవస్థల మధ్య వైరుధ్యం ముందుకొస్తోంది. కాబట్టి మనం దానిపై కేంద్రీకరించాల''న్న నూతన సామాజిక ఉద్యమకారుల సైద్థాంతిక వాదనలను తీవ్రంగా విమర్శిస్తాడు రచయిత. అంతేకాదు. కమ్యూనిజాన్ని ఆచరణ సాధ్యమైన ప్రాజెక్టుగా మలచాలంటే పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానంపై మరింత కేంద్రీకరించాల్సిన అవసరం ఉందని రచయిత చెప్పాడు. ప్రజాస్వామ్యాన్ని అర్థం చేసుకోవటానికి రచయిత ''ఎన్నికల ప్రజాస్వామ్యం ఏకాభిప్రాయంతో కూడిన పెట్టుబడిదారీ విధానమే. దీన్నే నేడు మనం మార్కెట్ ఆర్థిక వ్యవస్థ అని పిలుచుకుంటున్నాము'' అంటూ ప్రజాస్వామిక వ్యవస్థ పరిధిలోనే శాశ్వత పరిష్కారం వెతకాలని ప్రయత్నించటం సరికాదని పేర్కొన్నాడు. అందుకనే ''కమ్యూనిస్టు వ్యతిరేకులారా, ఇక మీ విమర్శలు చాలించండి. ఇంతవరకు మీరు చేసిన విమర్శలను సహించి మిమ్ములను క్షమిస్తున్నాము. ఇకనైనా పరిస్తితి తీవ్రతను గమనించండి'' అంటూ కార్యోన్ముఖులను చేయబూనుకుంటాడు జిజెక్.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
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