Socialist Action /March 2000
Strike Wave Hits India
Following are major excerpts from a statement by the Inquilabi Communist
Sangathan, Indian Section of the Fourth International.
After long years of one-sided bourgeois offensive, punctuated only by
sporadic and scattered resistance, the Indian working class has begun to
hit back against the new wave of capitalist offensive.
On Jan. 19, the lead news in The Telegraph was about the power workers'
strike in Uttar Pradesh (UP), and it expressed the fear that this might
be the turning point, with the working class awakening from a long stupor.
On Jan. 20, STAR News led off with statistics on the strike wave engulfing
India.
It was pretty impressive, and worrying for the bosses, and for the same
reason, encouraging for revolutionaries. On that day, well over a million
workers were out on strike, including over half a million employees of various
state governments, over 100,000 port and dock workers in 11 ports across
India, and a 100,000 power workers in UP.
The specific demands in each case differ. But increasingly, a common
thread tying up all the struggles is the liberalization-globalization drive
of the Indian bourgeoisie, and standing behind it, international finance
capital. The attacks, which have been allowed almost unchecked over the
last decade, include the following: cuts in real income through massive
cuts in social security spending, job cuts-both directly and indirectly
by non-recruitment-[and] cuts in retirement benefits of workers and employees....
In the name of promoting export-oriented production, the labor laws wrested
out of the ruling class in course of a century of struggles are being increasingly
flouted. The health sector is being gutted and free or cheap medical care
almost totally destroyed.
Every struggle is reported in the media not as a struggle by workers
for their survival but as a conservative conspiracy against the glorious
new policy of liberalization, which is coming as the salvation of the human
race.
But what is the truth about this? A decade of liberalization has meant
repeated rises in prices. They have meant hikes in gas, kerosene, and petroleum
products. They have meant transport fare rises.
Through devaluation of the currency they have meant a higher import bill,
a higher debt-servicing charge. Through the beginning of the privatization
of the insurance sector, they have meant the transformation of insurance
from a minimum of social security to a racket for profiteers.
Bank workers fight back
The clearest case is the bid to privatize banks and to close down a number
of banks. Bank employees, not only to increase their security, but also
to bring a minimum amount had waged the struggle for bank nationalization.
The ultimate act of nationalization reflected a compromise between this
struggle and the policies of the Indian bourgeoisie. But certainly, thefts
and the abuse of banks as purely private properties were checked.
However, in recent years, while nationalized banks have increased their
access and have reached out to ordinary people, they have also brought together
immense funds, which the big bourgeoisie has borrowed. Out of the total
$70 billion unrecovered on bad debt of the banks some 62 percent are outstanding
from big business.
So the proposal by the CII committee to close down three banks should
be viewed not as a genuine though harsh proposal to bring about fiscal regulations,
but as a plan to eliminate part of the debt by getting rid of the banks,
and to use the profit made from that deal to buy up shares in other banks.
This billion-dollar scam was halted in its track only because of the
united resistance of all the bank employees, who threatened not only to
strike all over India, but also to spill the beans about the exact amounts
borrowed by big business, violating their terms of service and risking their
jobs in the process.
The gap between the claims of the government and the bourgeoisie and
the reality was equally glaringly exposed in the case of the power sector.
For years, millions of rupees have been poured into the nuclear power sector,
ostensibly to produce clean, safe, cheap energy. In fact the total amount
of power produced in this way is quite limited.
Money has not been spent in other areas as lavishly. Instead, the government
and the IMF have now come to an agreement whereby in UP the state electricity
board will be broken up into three organizations, and in the process 20
percent or more of the employees will lose their jobs.
The supposed reason for this restructuring is that the SEB is a loss-making
unit. Yet why is it that so much electricity is stolen (i.e., drawn by illegal
lines not properly recorded) or why is it that big shot industrialists do
not clear up their dues? By striking in the face of unremitting government
hostility, the workers are forcibly posing these questions in public.
Forge a working-class united front!
The workers who are waging these struggles do not always have a revolutionary
orientation or even a clear understanding of the complex relations between
the Indian government, the Indian big bourgeoisie, and international finance.
But the clarity of their actions, in striking out against the class enemy,
is in sharp contradistinction to the paralysis of will displayed by the
major left parties, who analyze endlessly the nature of fascism and the
new stage of the imperialist offensive, but who can propose no better action
than combining with the so-called progressive bourgeois forces in and out
of parliament.
The port workers and the power workers fought on despite the threat to
deploy the armed forces and other paramilitary forces, or despite actual
deployment of the same. By doing so, the port workers have already compelled
the government to declare a partial victory for the strikers.
Such victories are never final. But they are more serious than paper
agreement in the name of an anti-fascist united front. The Indian left has
never given up its Stalinist heritage. So the united front that left parties
talk about is not a working-class united front. They talk about a front
between the working class and the so-called secular, democratic, anti-fascist
bourgeoisie.
The working class in India is divided. It is split regionally, it is
split in terms of sectors of industry, and in a number of other ways. But
if specific struggles can see a unity of all the diverse organizations and
currents, the results can be dramatic, as the port workers' struggles and
previously the bank workers' struggles showed.
The task of communists is not to rein in working-class struggles in the
name of not frightening bourgeois allies, but to point out the historic
direction of struggle and to take the lead in creating class unity and deepening
class struggle.
Socialist Action /March 2000 |