Bande Mataram, an immortal and unforgettable newspaper in the history of Indian Journalism

ABVP JNU VIBHAG: Vande Mataram: Soul of our Nation and Nationalism
On 7 August 1906, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) started his paper Bande Mataram, which became an immortal and unforgettable newspaper in the history of Indian Journalism.

Kaushal's blog: Neo-Colonial Captive Minds
11 Nov 2009 by Kaushal - Most worrisome of all is that the infection has affected the perceptions and self-appraisal of large sections of the Indian national collectivity itself, despite the intuitive pronouncements of great spiritual leaders of the Indian renaissance like Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo.... [...]

And the man who picked it out from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's classic Bengali novel 'Anandamath' was no less a leader than Sri Aurobindo himself. To the surprise and consternation of the British Viceroy and his officials, thousand-throated cries of “Vande Mataram” rent the skies of India during the inspiring beginnings in those dramatic years of the national independence struggle. [...]

To continue with Danino. “B.R. Ambedkar is our second example. Known in India chiefly for his campaign in support of the lower castes (he himself was a Harijan) and his work on the Indian Constitution, it is often overlooked that in order to find out the truth of the European Theories about Aryans and non-Aryans, high and low caste, he did precisely what Sri Aurobindo exhorted Indians to do: he went to the source, and studied the Veda for himself, with an open mind. His conclusions are unequivocal, though regrettably they are largely ignored by those who profess to follow his lead and who more often than not make a strident use of the very theories he sought to demolish..." By Devan Nair (Oct. 14, 2009) (Devan Nair, former President of Singapore, has sent the following message to be posted to the ECIT egroup. As an intellectual, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, and student of the recent re-evaluation of the Aryan-Invasion Theory, his message is very interesting to ponder.)

Voice of Pakistan: Vande Matram In Deoband
8 Nov 2009 by Exposing the biggest sham democracy - India Just a cursory glance at the widely accepted translation of the song from Bengali to English by Sri Aurobindo makes it clear that the image of mother goddess, and the bowing before her goes against the seminal grain of Islam; ...

Vande Mataram; The history and politics By Shamsul Islam Facebook
Even Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose), propounder of Hindu nationalism in India, translated it as the "National Anthem of Bengal". As we will see in the translation done by Aurobindo, referred to “seven crores” [70 million] of people worshipping motherland. This was the population of the then Bengal Province (which, besides what is now Bangladesh, included Bihar and Orissa too). So the crucial fact should not be missed that Vande Mataram touted as symbolizing “Mother India” was in fact meant to glorify Bengal only, a rather narrow and regional perspective. milligazette.com/Archives/2004/01-15May04

Vande Mataram Translation by Aurobindo [Quoted in Bhabatosh Chatterjee (ed.), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Essays in Perspective, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1994, p. 601.]

Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore: Editorial
28 Oct 2009 - The Bhagavad Gita is held as such. It is revered as the rare 'scripture of liberation'. What this liberation is, who seeks it, who is the giver of liberation, who, the enjoyer, through what methods is this liberation procured and what . ...

Why Hinduism is known as Santana Dharma? ? Sri Aurobindo
28 Oct 2009 - Hinduism gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a ...

Indian Literary and Critical Theories in English: A Comparison
10 Nov 2009 by vivekdwivedi1980@gmail.com (Vivek K. Dwivedi) Even Sri Aurobindo, who could be described as the least oppositional to the West amongst the significant theorists, did not passively accept Western Theoretical positions as the West presented them. Even he played a significant role in ...

Sangarsh: Spiritual Religion Can Safeguard the Indian Nation Friday, November 20, 2009
Mahesh Kaul: In June19, 1907- Sri Aurobindo another proud son of the soil, revolutionary visionary and philosopher spoke thus, on Swami Vivekananda, “Apart from the natural attachment which every man has to his country, literature, its traditions, its customs and usages, patriotism has an additional stimulus in the acknowledged excellence of a national civilization. If Britons love England with all her faults, why should we fail to love India whose faults were whittled down to an irreducible minimum till foreign conquests threw the whole society out of gear. But instead of being dominated by the natural ambition of carrying the banner of such a civilization all over the world, we are unable to maintain its integrity in its native home. This is betraying a trust this is unworthiness of the worst type... Posted by Ranjeet Sharma at 7:08 AM

Issues and Insights: Why Was Gandhi Killed (Full)
13 Nov 2009 The chapter gives you Sri Aurobindo's views on Gandhi / Ahimsa. It contains excerpts from a book India's Rebirth by Sri Aurobindo. 5. Food for Thought is a brief summary of the above along with a correlation to current events. ... esamskriti.com

Michael Madhusudan Dutt - Meghnadh Badh Kabya Bengali Poetry ...
8 Nov 2009 by info@washingtonbanglaradio.com (WashingtonBangl... Sri Aurobindo wrote about Megnad Badh Kabyo and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, "All the stormiest passions of man's soul he expressed in gigantic language." Listen to recitation of Michael Madhusudan Dutta's epic Bangla poem Meghnadh Bodh ...

ekkentros free thoughts: ageless body and timeless mind - Seminar ... The most fascinating of all the myths about death is the story of Savitri-Sathyavan, adopting which sage Aurobindo wrote his famous epic poem “Savitri’, to bring out his idea of the supramental manifestation on earth, achieving immortality. The legend of Savitri is one of the side stories found in the Mahabharata in its chapter or part relating to ‘Forest’ (Vanaparvam). [...]

But its spiritual and mystic meaning comes out in Aurobindo’s epic poem by the same title. The Savitri story held an irresistible fascination for Sri Aurobindo, because Sathyavan stood for Truth and Savitri for a wife’s devotion and power. When they come together, the union gets charged with enormous possibilities, ready to dare even Death. On the material plane his poem begins on the day Sathyavan is fated to die. And the poem ends with the resolution of the crisis, that is, wresting satyavan from the clutches of Yama, the lord of death.

ageless body and timeless mind - Seminar Report
SEMINAR organized by Current Books and conducted by Ekkentros Forum on 25-9-09 (Friday) Venue: Currenr Books Premises, Thalassery. Participants Present: Sri K.V.Kunhikrishnan, IRS (Retd), Chairman of the Forum, Dr. Babu Ravindran, Prof. P.M.Sankarankutty, Dr. K.P. Thomas, Dr. Md. Abdulla, Prof. Mohanan Nair, all members of the Forum, Sri. K.P.Kunhikrishnan Nair, Mrs. Shobha Rajagopal Menon, Principal (Retd), St. Kabir High School, Ahemedabad. Prof. Richard Hay, Member of the Forum arrived late as he was held up in his college.

George Quant Interviews Dr. Debashish Banerji: Return of the Veda ...
27 Oct 2009 by nalandainternational Dr. Banerji is an authority on Indian contemporary art and philosophy, which includes the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Veda, especially in its contemporary applicability. A master story teller, his book is based on his dissertation ...

Think beyond borders; reach out and feel at home in the world

Home > Opinion > The world outside the box
Antara Dev Sen
DNA, Thursday, November 19, 2009

It is time we woke up to the alarming u-turn we have taken in the path of liberalism and inclusivism that had once marked our culture. The Hindu right, in fact, have come so far away from our philosophy of cultural tolerance, that even Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the brazenly right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is complaining about some political parties "converting India's diversity into discrimination for political gains". Sadly, the proponents of Hindutva have been doing this for years, with cultural chauvinism ruling religious, linguistic and regional identities.

Only a pathological fantasist would believe that India never had discrimination and that its pluralism never faced problems. The greatness of our culture lies in the ability to overcome these differences and thrive as a pluralistic country. And when we started out as an independent nation, we chose this as the way forward. This resolve was stamped into not just our Constitution and laws, but also in the cultural institutions established around that time -- like the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust -- that would promote multiculturalism through the many language literatures of the country. Close on their heels came cultural institutions from overseas.

Take the Goethe Institute, known here as the Max Mueller Bhavan, which is now celebrating 50 years in India with a flourish of art, theatre, films and literature. But maybe we should step back for a moment and think of what Goethe and Max Mueller stand for. They were great German thinkers and writers, certainly, but to me their primary importance lies in their ability to think beyond borders. Whatever their respective flaws, they could reach out and feel at home in the world.

"Self knowledge comes from knowing other men," said Goethe, whose idea of Weltliteratur or world literature triggered the concept of literature without borders. About 200 years ago, he had put cultural xenophobia firmly in its place: "You will find the most pronounced hatred of other nations on the lowest cultural levels."

And Max Mueller, who triggered an interest in Indian studies and comparative religion about 150 years ago, talked of how he found the greatest peace and joy in Indian philosophy. He had translated the Upanishads and the Rig Veda and was disturbed by the narrowness that had crept into the interpretation of Hinduism. He hoped for a reformation. "It is the root of their religion," he said of the Rig Veda, "and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years." For his efforts, he was criticised furiously by Christian chauvinists then and by Hindu chauvinists later.

We also tend to forget our own glorious tradition of free thinkers. About 350 years ago, Dara Shikoh translated the Upanishads into Persian, taking it out of the confines of Sanskrit and Hinduism and giving it a wide international readership. In modern India, Rabindranath Tagore established Visva Bharati, or the University of the World, in Bengal almost 90 years ago. The thirst for other cultures has consistently been part of our pluralistic tradition.

Front Page > Opinion > FROM DREAM TO REALITY - BENGAL’S CRISIS HIDES IN IT THE POTENTIAL FOR CHANGE N.K. Singh The Telegraph, Thursday, November 19, 2009

There is no denying the fact that Bengal is at a crossroads. This is because, on the one hand, economic opportunities are enormous if the transition is successful and orderly. The price of failure, on the other hand, is inordinately high. And yet, because there is change in the air and because the foundation has already been laid, the prospect of a resurgence is much brighter than at any time in the past. The present crisis embeds in itself the opportunity of change. India cannot prosper without a prosperous Bengal. And a prosperous Bengal will make for a prosperous India. THE AUTHOR IS A MEMBER OF THE RAJYA SABHA

Religiosity is getting deeply rooted in everyday life

Invading The Secular Space By Ram Puniyani
14 November, 2009 Countercurrents.org

India has quite a broad fare of God men. There are Gurus, Sants, Maharajs, Acharyas and Purohits (clergy) in the main. Their role has been changing over a period of time. Last three decades seem to be the time of their major glory, with their presence in all spheres in a very dominating way. Their number has also proliferated immensely and while some of these are big players, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Baba Ramdeo, Asaram Bapu to name the few. There are hundreds of them scattered in each state. Many of them are working in close tandem with Hindu right, Swami Assmanand, Late Swami Laxmananad Sarswati, Narendra Mahraj etc.

These are the ones who have created their own niche with different techniques, while Shankarachayas, are associated with the Mutts coming from historical times, the Akshrdham chain is also not very old a tradition. The Pramukh swamis (Chief Guru) of these temples wield enormous clout. One recalls Anand Marg came up during the decade of seventies and not much is hearing of that now.

Overall religiosity has been on the upswing and not many are protesting the promotion of blind faith by many such God men. The rational thought and movement is on the back foot and political leadership, social leaders, of many hues are bending over backwards to please these Babas, some of whom are also dispensing health and some of them claim to be looking into the crystal ball of future.

There is an interesting correlation between the coming up of adverse effects of globalization, rise in the anxieties and deprivations and the current dominance of God men. Many an interesting observations about these God men are there, the major one being the rise in alienation in last three decades along with the rising religiosity in the social space. Many a remarkable studies on this phenomenon are coming forth.

One such is by a US based Indian scholar of repute, Meera Nanda. In her book, The God Market, she makes very profound observations. She points out that this rising religiosity is manifested in boom in pilgrimages and newer rituals. Some old rituals are becoming more rooted and popular. She sees a nexus between state-temple-corporate complexes also. Secular institutions of Nehru era are being replaced by boosting demand and supply of God market.

A new Hindu religiosity is getting deeply rooted in everyday life, in public and private spheres. The distinction between private and public sphere is getting eroded as the case of Sai Baba in Maharashtra Chief Ministers official bungalow shows. Hindu rituals and symbols are becoming part of state functions; Hinduism de facto is becoming state religion. Hindu religiosity is becoming part of national pride with the aspiration of becoming a superpower. She observes a trend of increased religiosity. In India there are 2.5 million places of worship but only 1.5 million schools and barely 75000 hospitals. Half of 230 million tourist trips every year are for religious pilgrimage.

Akshardham temple acquired 100 acres of land at throw away price. Sri Sri Ravishanker's Art of Living Ashram in banglore has 99 acres of land leased from Karnataka Government. Gujarat Govt. gifted 85 acres of land to establish privately run rishikul in Porbander. Most significantly Nanda argues that the new culture of political Hinduism is triumphalist and intolerant, while asserting to be recognized as a tolerant religion. While claiming to have a higher tolerance, its intolerance is leading to violence against minorities.

It is because of this that even if the BJP may not be the ruling party, the political class and other sections of state apparatus have subtly accepted Hindu religiosity and the consequent politics as the official one, and so the justice for victims of religious violence eludes them. The question is, can the struggle for justice for weaker sections also incorporate a cultural-religious battle against the blind religiosity and proactive efforts initiated to promote rational thought. Comments (8)

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Nehru’s ghosts
Hindustan Times, November 15, 2009 by Meghnad Desai

It was Gandhi’s idea that India should have a single national language, and that it should be Hindi/Hindustani. The idea of Hindi as the sole national language offended many in the South. Their languages not only had different scripts — not Devnagari in which Hindi was being projected — but also completely different vocabularies which, while...

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That Hindi is our national language seems to be one of the most successful rumors spread in our country - The rumor with the widest reach - that probably gave birth to this Hindi arrogance. I wish these leaders and crores Indians realize the fact that India does not have a National language. There is no such thing in our constitution.

The national language of the United States is English and that of Ireland is Irish. The national language defines the people of the nation, culture and history. India is culturally so diverse, there are so many languages spoken that there cannot be any one such language that defines the culture and history. As of 2009, the Indian constitution recognizes 22 scheduled languages. Neither the Constitution of India[1] nor Indian law specifies a National language. Posted by Bharath Ganesh at 2:08 AM Dash Maniac a.k.a. Bharath

Should the Left abandon its politics and join insurgency?

The Crisis of the Left --Prabhat Patnaik

There is a theoretical ambiguity in the Left that underlies the crisis that it now finds itself in. On the issue of industrialisation, the real issue is whether it occurs through subservience to the logic of capital or it occurs without compromising the dialectics of subversion of the logic of capital. Subscribing to the view that the only immediate choice is between “development” and an attempt to overthrow the system negates any scope for Left politics.

The scope for Left politics arises by rejecting this binary choice, by transcending the problematic that the only immediate choice is between subservience to the logic of capital and attempting to overthrow the system. Transcending this problematic is precisely the resolution of the theoretical crisis of the Left. And the possibility of politics that is created thereby will also resolve the practical crisis of the Left. EPW 31-10-2009 [PERSPECTIVES] Issue : VOL 44 No. 44 October 31 - November 06, 2009 [...]

Hence opposition to industrialisation, even in the sense of implanting modern large-scale industrial units, lacks validity. But the real issue is not whether industrialisation occurs or not, but whether it occurs through subservience to the logic of capital or whether it occurs without compromising the dialectics of subversion of the logic of capital. The issue in short is not one of “use-values”, i e, what thing is produced, but of relations of production, i e, whether the production of the thing jeopardises the Left’s role in carrying forward the dialectics of subversion.

Subscribing to the view that such a dialectics of subversion is impossible for the Left if it leads state governments, that the only immediate choice is between “development”, a euphemism for subservience to the logic of capital, and an attempt to overthrow the system, which is what both the “development advocates” and the ultra-Left would want us to believe, negates any scope for Left politics. The “development advocates” would conclude from this view that the Left must abandon its politics and become subservient to the logic of capital; the ultra-Left would conclude from this view that the Left should abandon its politics and join insurgency. Both are wrong.

The scope for Left politics arises precisely by rejecting this binary choice, by transcending the problematic, common to both the ultra-Left and the neoliberals, that the only immediate choice is between subservience to the logic of capital or attempting to overthrow the system. Transcending this problematic is precisely the resolution of the theoretical crisis of the Left. And the scope for politics that is created thereby will also resolve the practical crisis of the Left.

Notes 1 These figures are taken from Utsa Patnaik (2007). 2 I have developed this argument at greater length in a 2002 essay “The Antinomies of Transnationalism”. 3 See in this connection Georg Lukacs’ review of Nikolai Bukharin’s book Historical Materialism (republished in 1966).
References
Lange, Oskar (1963): Political Economy, Volume 1 (Warsaw: Pergamon Press).
Lukacs, George (1966): “Technology and Social Relations” (republished), New Left Review.
Patnaik, Prabhat (2002): “The Antinomies of Transnationalism” in The Retreat to Unfreedom (New Delhi: Tulika Books).
Patnaik, Utsa (2007): “Neo-Liberalism and Rural Poverty in India”, Economic & Political Weekly, 28 July.

History is in itself ideological and an instrument of political power

Imprisoned by History Aspects of Historicized Life By Martin Davies
offers a controversial analysis, grounded both in philosophical argument and empirical evidence, of what history does in contemporary culture. It endorses and extends the argument that contemporary society is, in historical terms, already historicized, shaped by history – and thus history loses sight of the world, seeing it only as a reflection of its own self-image. By focusing on history as a way of thinking about the world, as a thought-style, this volume delivers a major, decisive, thought-provoking critique of a crucial aspect contemporary culture and the public sphere.

By illustrating the ways in which history enforces socially coercive attitudes and forms of behaviour, Martin Davies argues that history is therefore in itself ideological and exists as an instrument of political power. Contending that this ideological function is the "normal" function of professional academic history, he repudiates entirely the conventional view that only biased or "bad" history is ideological. By finding history projecting onto the world and getting reflected back at it the exacting, history-focused thinking and behaviour on which the discipline and the subject rely, he concludes that history’s very "normality" and "objectivity" are inherently compromised and that history works only in terms of its own self-interest. ISBN: 9780415995207 Published November 04 2009 by Routledge.

Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World
New York Times - Kenneth Chang - ‎Nov 2, 2009‎
AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic... But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining ...
America, a whiff of Hindu Organiser - Brad Pfeiffer - ‎Oct 12, 2009‎
Hindus believe there are many paths to God. By Ms Miller's interpretation, America has conceptually become more of a Hindu society than a Christian society. ... Media Watch
Organiser - ‎Nov 1, 2009‎
Wrote Miller: "A Hindu believes that there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Quarn is another, yoga practice is a third. ... U.S. Views on God and Life Are Turning Hindu Newsweek The Smart ...
We Are All Hindus Now. By Lisa Miller NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 15, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009 America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

Nabakrushna Choudhuri, the devout Gandhiite, Narendra Deva, the gentlest of souls

FATED TO FADE AWAY - It is high time the Left wore its thinking cap again
Cutting Corners - Ashok Mitra Front Page > Opinion > Story > Friday , November 6 , 2009

A faded group photograph one chances upon shows the faces of the earnest members of the first national executive committee of the Congress Socialist Party formed exactly 75 years ago, in 1934. The CSP was put together within the folds of the Indian National Congress as a kind of ginger group to push the lugubrious juggernaut of the great parent party towards a more radical direction. The elderly caretakers of the Congress listened — half-mockingly, half-patronizingly — to the new breed who talked of such exotic things as happenings in the Soviet Union and the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the fascists in Italy as direct spin-offs of economic depression and mass unemployment. Even in the United States of America, capitalism was said to be malfunctioning, the ranks of hunger marches swelled every day, extensive public works under State auspices were somehow saving the system. The dedicated crowd milling within the CSP were grappling with the significance of these events for India.

The nation must of course be freed, here and now, from foreign shackles, but that was not enough. What sort of free India was it to be, what would be the contours of its social and economic order? India belonged to its masses: the overwhelming number of dispossessed peasantry and underpaid workers and artisans of various descriptions as well as the mute castes and tribes at the receiving end of exploitation over centuries. The Congress must adopt concrete programmes for a total reconstruction of the economy in post-independent India so that a proper kisan-mazdoor raj emerged. The CSP was going to see to all that.

Its first national executive committee, the faded photograph attests, was a curious mélange: Farid Ansari, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Dinkar Mehta, Nabakrushna Choudhuri, Narendra Deva, P.Y. Deshpande, S.M. Joshi, Soli Batlivala, S. Sampurnanand, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Jayaprakash Narayan, N.G. Goray, Achyut Patwardhan, Purushottam Trikamdas, Charles Mascarenhas. It was too improbable a combination to last long; it did not.

Communists like Namboodiripad, Batlivala and Dinkar Mehta left this clandestine shelter by 1941. Nabakrushna Choudhuri, the devout Gandhiite, also soon detached himself, and later became Congress chief minister of Orissa, and subsequently joined Vinoba Bhave in his bhoodaan mission. Sampurnanand too, at some point, became Congress chief minister of India’s largest state; by then he was an arch-social conservative leaning towards Hindu orthodoxy. Minoo Masani, a great admirer of Soviet collectivization in the 1930s, somersaulted, ending up as a foaming-in-the-mouth anti-communist and co-founded the Swatantra Party. Narendra Deva, the gentlest of souls, gradually withdrew from active politics and remained satisfied with his role as an ideologue of socialism, a slice of Marx, a slice of Gandhi, mostly Rousseau. Jayaprakash Narayan, the underground hero of the 1942 Quit India movement, mellower with the years; most of the time he was with the Praja Socialist Party — the CSP’s direct legatee — but was also with Vinoba Bhave. He finally led the nava nirman struggles in the 1970s to emerge as the father figure of the Janata Party, which demolished Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. He was lucky to die before his handiwork broke into smithereens.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was always a rebel of a woman in search of a cause, which at the end she discovered in cottage crafts and the theatre movement. Of the rest, S.M. Joshi, Achyut Patwardhan and N.G. Goray clung for long years to the Praja Socialist Party and its later incarnations, walked into the Janata Party when J.P. put it together, then migrated to the Janata Dal or one of its innumerable factions. Some of them had developed pockets of influence among a number of caste groups, ‘other backward classes’; innate feudal instincts, however, drove them to waste their strength in endless internal squabbles until it was disaster time.

The Indian National Congress, it would seem, was both the curse and the ultimate provider of shelter for several of those rebels who loved to talk socialism in their calf days. It supposedly represented ‘the stream of national consciousness’; its cloying charm was almost impossible to resist. For quite a few of them, the expression, ‘national consensus’, would have a bewitching effect: yes, engage in debate, let arguments and rhetoric have free flow, yet, at the end of it, it would be gross lack of patriotism not to fall in and join the national mainstream.

Others had disappeared; for the past few decades it is, therefore, only the communists who could claim the socialist inheritance. The Left and the communists became synonymous. Given their ideology, the communists, many had expected, would not get caught in the trap of ‘national consensus’. Were not they the quintessential Left, the other side in the class war, where there could be no scope for compromise with adversarial forces? Their failure to tackle satisfactorily the class-caste dialectic was, however, a major problem. Equally ticklish was the issue of whether the global brotherhood of the working classes transcended national priorities.

Prabhat Patnaik held that the words and the deeds of the left did not match

Revolutionary Democracy Editorial Board
Tahir Asghar, Malem Ningthouja, Ashim Roy, Vijay Singh, C.N. Subramaniam
Editorial Address K-67 Jangpura Extension New Delhi-110014
Revolutionary Democracy is a half-yearly theoretical and political journal published in April and September from India. It contains materials on the problems facing the communist movement, particularly relating to Russia, China and India, the origins of modern revisionism, the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and developments in the international communist movement. Vol. XV, No. 1-2, April-September, 2009 A Requiem for the Left? Nirmalangshu Mukherji

Saner elements from within the left, such as Prabhat Patnaik, offered more plausible explanations. Patnaik held that the words and the deeds of the left did not match. While the left correctly opposed the nuclear deal, it did not take the issue to the people in terms of mass campaigns; rather the left chose to pursue the issue in terms of opportunistic electoral alliances, losing thus the main political thrust of its opposition to the Congress. Although the criticism does bring out a significant organisational failure of the left, the issues of alliance with the Congress and the nuclear deal had little to do with election results in 2009, as we saw. To mention again, the resounding victory of Nitish Kumar is a case in point.

More significantly, Patnaik argued, the left’s own adoption of neo-liberal policies in Kerala and West Bengal (while opposing it in the rest of the country) alienated the left from its principal electoral support – namely, the urban and rural poor. No doubt the events at Singur and Nandigram did finally expose the said duplicity of the left’s policies, argued against forcefully and repeatedly by Prabhat Patnaik – and, to be fair, by Amartya Sen – in recent years. It is questionable, however, how far this single element explains the massive character of the left’s electoral defeat. For example, there is no clear evidence of the correlation between adoption of neo-liberal policies and electoral rejection by the people in the rest of the country.

Measured in absolute terms, neo-liberal policies are far more entrenched in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu, Orissa, and Bihar, and in each case the existing ruling formations fared reasonably well. In fact, apart from Nitish Kumar, the main success-story of 2009 elections is the resounding victory of the virulent – often murderous – neo-liberal regimes in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. Contrasted to these states, the implementation of neo-liberal policies in West Bengal are in their infancy. In fact, Singur and Nandigram could be viewed as the first major attempts by the government to pave the way for big corporations to encroach on people’s habitats, and in each case the government was defeated by people’s resistance. So the real question is, where this new popular militancy against the left is coming from; adoption of neo-liberal policies does not seem to provide an adequate answer.

People’s apparent indifference to the growing encroachment of neo-liberal policies in their lives, as suggested above, is a deeply distressing issue. The corporate media champions this phenomenon as people’s support for neo-liberal policies, not surprisingly. But, as the widely publicised uprisings in Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal – and the scattered and not so publicised resistance movements across the country – testify, neo-liberal policies are deeply unpopular. They have to be. Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, among others, have done much empirical work in recent years to bring out the large-scale devastation caused by the aggressive adoption of neo-liberal policies in India: sharp increase in hunger and unemployment; loss of habitat; fall in rural productivity and income; increasing impoverishment; alarming fall in nutrition levels; destruction of environment; and increasing repression by the state and the state-sponsored mafia. Yet, apparently, election results do not seem to reflect this catastrophe.

Propagandistic appeals to Gandhian and Lohiaite doctrines notwithstanding, it is clear by now that, except arguably for the left, every mainstream political party in India is fully committed to neo-liberal policies of governance. It follows that any meaningful opposition to neo-liberalism can only be launched by the left, if at all. Notwithstanding the left’s complaints against neo-liberalism ensuing from party headquarters, journals, seminars, and speeches in the parliament, the left has failed to generate any people’s movement on this issue in the last two decades. [...]

The beginning of the left-rule in the late 1970s was preceded by perhaps the darkest period in the recent history of West Bengal. The Congress chief minister Siddharth Shankar Ray unleashed a reign of terror in which armed lumpen youth, in close collaboration with the security forces, virtually took over the functioning of the state. The rest of India may not be fully aware of the bloodbath, but the people of West Bengal were simply unwilling to relive the nightmare. Since the only opposition to the left – namely, the Congress, and its tributary, the Trinamool Congress – consisted mainly of the rogue elements of the Ray-regime, the left enjoyed considerable electoral immunity for nearly two decades despite its growing unpopularity.

The combination of withdrawal of pro-people policies, increasing control of the mafia and repression of the state, the misuse of the panchayat system, the appeasement of urban elites, adoption of neo-liberal policies, and almost absolute failure in terms even of ‘good governance’, finally convinced the people that there really is no basic difference between the previous Congress-rule and the current left-rule. This allowed the previously unwanted elements to crawl back into the mainstream of politics as a viable alternative to the left. It is of some interest that although Mamata Bannerjee is very much a product of the Congress, she appeared on the scene much after the horrors of Congress rule. Hence, her personal image is largely untarnished by the terror of the 1970s.

The dam of unvoiced resistance finally burst when the system of repression invaded people’s habitats in Singur and Nandigram under the direction of big business. The electoral verdict of 2009 is essentially a verdict against the very character of left-governance; the people of West Bengal have finally been able to see through sustained propaganda to conclude that there is not much left of the left anymore. Click here to return to the April-September 2009 index.

***

Open Letter to Noam Chomsky: Nirmalangshu Mukherjee Department of Philosopy University of Delhi
For the effect of neo-liberal policies and the disasterous consequences for the poor, we don’t need ‘maoist’ sermons. In fact they have been a little too late in joining the resistance. For a non-’maoist’ account, I find the rigorous economic account by the noted economist Utsa Patnaik’s work helpful; for example, The Republic of Hunger, 2001. The general struggle against SEZs and neo-liberal policies began in the mid-’90’s when the ‘maoists’ were still fighting their own war of area-control in Andhra and Bihar.
By: Nirmalangshu on October 26, 2009 at 5:51 PM

outlookindia.com web - Nov 03, 2009 Opinion Web Oct 27, 2009 The Politics Of Petitions
Very distinguished persons like Noam Chomsky are routinely asked to sign hundreds of petitions. In most cases, they are compelled to react in terms of prima facie plausibility based on quality of content, personal acquaintance, previous knowledge, and the like... Nirmalangshu Mukherji

Lay down those home-made arms indian express - NIRMALANGSHU MUKHERJI

Whose WAR? Hard News - In response, Delhi University professor, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, wrote in an open letter to Chomsky, "The organisation (CPI-Maoist) has no presence ...

***

Nirmalangshu Mukherji I started out aiming to become a philosopher of science, drifted into epistemology, moved on to classical philosophy of language, became drawn to cognitive science, and somehow ended up looking at biolinguistics, nature of musical organization, and the general properties of the human mind. Currently working on a book tentatively titled Routes to Reference. The work generally falls under what is now known as internalist approaches on human language; among other things, I hope to examine how the human linguistic system interacts with non-linguistic systems to ‘give’ the world to us so that we can talk about it on favourable occasions.

I am also professionally interested on general questions of life, including the character of philosophical practice. There is no conscious attempt, but sometimes these two apparently disjoint interests seem to merge. There is also a third, more recent interest: to do something about peace, justice, human rights. There is little academic philosophy in it, but I don’t think I could have written them without lifelong engagement with philosophy. Last updated December 2008 http://people.du.ac.in/~nmukherji somanshu@bol.net.in Nirmalangshu Mukherji :: TEACHING Professor Department of Philosophy University of Delhi Delhi-110007, INDIA

Media theorists ought to study money as a medium

Steven Shaviro argues that part of our difficulty in making coherent sense of the crisis, reflects the way we experience as individuals, the market economy as something alien to us, over which we have no power. The boom and bust cycles that are intrinsic to capitalism are instrumental in instilling this sense of fatalism in people. One possible challenge to this fatalism is repoliticising one of the most ubiquitous aspects of the economy: money. Nearly all capitalist theory assumes ‘the neutrality of money’, yet rather see it as a vanishing mediator we need to understand, as this credit crisis has shown, that money isn’t a faithful ‘representation’ of wealth that exists, rather it is something that has it own intrinsic density and weight. Re-Public: Reimagining Democracy

Steven Shaviro - A modest proposal: Some thought on the crisis

But we ought to know — after McLuhan as well as after Marx — that a “medium” is never neutral. It only seems “transparent” to us because it is so ubiquitous; we take it so much for granted that we fail to notice its workings. We are unaware of the effects of money for the same reason that (as McLuhan put it) fish are unaware of water. The one thing that economics never takes into account is the materiality, and medium-specificity, of money itself. Media theorists ought to study money as a medium, in the same way that they study television, video, and Web 2.0 as media — but unfortunately, for the most part they don’t. And political economists ought to pay attention to the materiality of money, instead of regarding it just as a “vanishing mediator.”

By “the materiality of money,” I don’t just mean the physicality of gold, or of metal coins and dollar bills and paper scrip. Above all we need to consider the materiality, and medium-specificity, of money at its most virtual and evanescent: the money that’s made of 1s and 0s zipping across the network, and that takes the form of derivatives and arcane financial instruments. In none of these forms is money simply neutral and transparent. The delirium of financial speculation that led us to the current debacle is precisely due to the fact that money isn’t just a faithful “representation” of wealth that exists, concretely and tangibly, in other forms; rather, it is something that has its own intrinsic density and weight.

Lots of people, both on the Left and the Right, blame the crisis upon the proliferation of “fictitious capital”: of money that was not grounded in concrete, physical wealth. We should reject this way of thinking, and say, instead, that things like credit default swaps are, in themselves, every bit as “real” and “material” as the houses whose subprime mortgages they are supposedly, at many removes, based upon. After all, these houses would never have been constructed in the first place, were it not for the financial instruments in which their deferred debts could be embodied. The non-neutrality of money, its bias and partiality, must be the starting point for any consideration of transnational capital, and of what we have to do in order to get ourselves out from under its baleful sway. Re-Public: Reimagining Democracy

It was the effect of yoga of Sri Aurobindo that fascism and communism got destroyed mutually

LETTERS TO EDITOR, HINDUSTAN TIMES, NEW DELHI
Though it is a personal view of Yechury qua “The capitalist world is destroying the past to stop the possible return of a socialistic order”, HT dtd. 10.09.09, p.10, but still I am sending a rejoinder as thousands of persons having perversity of mind subscribe to these views of Yechury. Bijan Ghosh 11.09.09

The world openly criticises fascism, particularly the German fascism headed by Hitler but that was just the other side of the coin which is called Bolshevik socialism, but ironically, that was admired. These two were considered as diagonally opposite or rather apparently not matching with each other – but the World-Soul was trapped in cross-roads of these two diabolic forces. And humanity is saved since both were mutually destroyed through the purging out of World War. It is true that there was a chance to defer the World War or to protect Stalin’s USSR, the home for Bolshavic socialism, and to destroy fascism alone, but it was the true grace of the heaven that both fought and got destroyed by each other, one instantaneously with the concluded notes of the second world war and the other, a few decades thereafter while the process was initiated through second world war.

Truth of the century is, Hitler and Stalin fought each other, and humanity was saved.

In reality, there was a divine diplomacy to order Hitler to launch attack on USSR, it took the formation of that Being, known as “Lord of Falsehood” / “Lord of Nations” which was the guiding-guru for Hitler and used to gave him all commands at the “bunk” at Berchtesgaden, and that formation asked Hitler to attack USSR. Hitler immediately accepted because it was his cherished dream also to destroy communism.

‘The greatest military march in world history’ advanced 600 KM into USSR within a fortnight. Churchill wrote in his memoirs: “Almost all responsible military opinion held that the Russian army will soon be defeated and largely destroyed”. In nine weeks of war, USSR lost 4500 planes, 5000 tanks and 7500 guns. But the 182-day-battle in Stalingrad was the decisive event of human history, which kept the World-Soul alive.

We have witnessed that how nature helped the cause of Hitler attacking USSR, i.e. how Hitler was made to embrace defeat on the soviet ground by the hands of nature. Hitler took the weather-chart of last 100 years, but was of vain - there was an unforeseen-unpredicted-unusual fall in temperature, breaking the record of last 100 years, it went down about minus 40 decree Celsius, German soldiers were not accustomed at that temperature and collapsed. Being forced to retreat – wrote in the walls in Istra near Moscow : “Farewell Moscow we are going off to Berlin” while Soviet soldiers wrote below, “We will get to Berlin too” and they did – Nazi flag atop German Reichstag was lowered , putting an end of fascism from the world.

Nature does most in him, God the high rest. Savitri, p. 542

It was the effect of yoga of Sri Aurobindo by which the fascism and communism got destroyed mutually. He wrote specifically (Letters on Yoga/SABCL/22/pp207-8) that “… if Russia and her dialectical materialism are to lead the world , well, fate must be obeyed and life divine must remain contained to wait perhaps for another millennium.”

The fate of the world was destined to wait for another millennium for the life divine to be established on earth, through the process of sufferings and ultimate defect of Bolshevik communism which was premised on the principles of the dialectic materialism but fate of the earth was changed by an unchanging will of Sri Aurobindo, i.e. His sadhana, which He predicted in Savitri:

Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will Savitri, p. 346

It is true that Henry Truman made the statement in the Parliament, (New York Times June 24, 1941) just on the next day after Hitler attacked Stalin’s Soviet Russia on 22.06.41 that “If we see that Germany is winning we should help the Russians and if Russia is winning we should help the German and that way let them kill as many as possible.” – though the original intention of Truman was something different since he was promoted by the unseen hands of Rothschilds who supported both the camps of the world war to made the world more unstable – which house had neither the aim to destroy fascism nor to destroy Bolshevik communism either.

Be that as it may, but the world was saved since Hitler attacked Soviet Russia, else on the contrary, the world would have been governed at the conclusion of the world war on the victory of Axis Power by the secret-mutual-agreement which was a part of Germany-USSR non-aggression treaty, known as Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, August, 1939, thus dividing the world into different shares in terms of the hidden agreement and perhaps this part of the continent would have been under the grab of the Stalin. Yechuri today is dreaming of to restore the socialistic order in the world but none of the Yechuris could even mention that why to establish a Socialistic order, those countries did establish a huge secret archives and why they are still maintained.

It must be noted that it would be unjust and inappropriate if the Humanity Today does not acknowledge with respect the sacrifice of the Soviet soldiers but for whom there would not have been any success for the life and freedom. Though they were under the guidance of Stalin but that could never devaluate their sacrifice. For every allied soldier who laid their lives for liquidating fascism, there were 40 soviet soldiers who laid their lives. More than 24 million Soviet soldier and population died (USSR 24 millions; China 15 millions; Poland 6 million; Germany 8 million; Japan 3 million) – in 1418 days of was, USSR about 14000 every day, i.e. about nine lives every minute. Bijan Ghosh 11.09.09 [Farewell to history The capitalist world is distorting the past to stop the possible return of a socialist order, writes Sitaram Yechury.] from bijan ghosh adv.bijan.ghosh@gmail.com to "Tusar N. Mohapatra" tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 11 Sep 2009 17:39 subject WW II & Sri Aurobindo: you may put in blog-- bijan ghosh

The counterpart of the desire to move forward that is becoming, is the dread of having become, of finality or death

Mediation and memory in the theory of money
via The Memory Bank by keith on 9/10/09
Money as mediation

Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal model of money and markets offered by mainstream economics. Viviana Zelizer, for example, shows in The Social Meaning of Money that people refuse to treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated thing, choosing rather to ‘earmark’ it — reserving some for food bills, some as holiday savings and so on. Her examples generally come from areas that remain invisible to the economists’ gaze, especially domestic life. People everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments. This was the message too of Parry and Bloch’s Money and the morality of exchange. When money and markets are understood exclusively through impersonal models, awareness of this neglected dimension is surely significant. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money, much as Durkheim argued for religion, is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal.

Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is highly variable. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

The two great means of communication are language and money. Anthropologists have paid much attention to the first, which divides us more than it brings us together, but not to money whose potential for universal communication is more reliable, in addition to its well-advertised ability to symbolize differences between us. As a symbolic medium of communication, money informs our subjectivity and gives concrete expression to our desires, releasing and fixing our imagination in many ways. It is a store of individual and collective memory, the stuff linking persons to their communities.

‘Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to serve my more remote purposes. Money is the purest form of the tool (…); it is an institution through which the individual concentrates his activity and possessions in order to attain goals that he could not attain directly.’ Simmel The Philosophy of Money

Indeed, as Marx argued, money is a means of communication so powerful that we often ascribe human or quasi-divine agency to it and what it buys. In some ways, Money is the God of capitalism and most of the inmates are believers. [...]

Oswald Spengler on money and number
In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler emphasized the part played by money and number in the history of Western European civilization and its North American offshoot. The first idea I draw from him is that money is just one of several abstract universals of which number, time and space may be more relevant than language. The second is that, for all their apparent universality, these should be approached as cultural particulars with their own historical patterns of growth and decline. Third, world history in our period has been dominated by the West owing to its adoption of a specific form of economic life, based on money and machines, that normally goes by the name of ‘capitalism’. Fourth, rather than adopt a timeless form of words for what interests us today, we should embrace the dialectic of ‘becoming and become’, in order to understand both the immanent direction of our present circumstances (history) and their finitude as the residue of what has already happened, the past (nature). So, finally, the question of money’s power is historically and geographically relative: we need to attend to the relationship between measurement of money as something perceptible to the senses (magnitude) and money as a category of thought expressed intangibly as abstract relations (function).

According to Spengler, the West had exhausted the historical impulse given by its modern version of economic life (featuring money and machines) and a new phase, based on politics, national religion and war, was about to take over. This was not a bad prediction, but Spengler’s interest for us lies in how he conceived of the relationship between money and other universals. Following Goethe, Spengler made a contrast between history (becoming) and nature (what has become). The counterpart of longing, of the desire to move forward that is becoming, is the dread of having become, of finality or death; and this pair together drive cultural creativity.

‘Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of becoming, is what we call ‘the present’, and it possesses that mysterious property of ‘direction’, which men have tried to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word ‘time’.’ [...]

The Apollonian idea of money as magnitude (which is classical) and the Faustian conception of money as function are opposites. ‘Classical man saw the world surrounding him as a sum of bodies; money is also a body’ (talents, coins). [...]

Spengler concludes with a prophecy that the world of money and machine-industry will be overthrown by ‘blood’ as the dominant life-principle; and at this point we leave him. But his framework contains much of value for an analysis of the conscious and unconscious influence of money on our actions today. [...]

Money is the ocean we swim in these days. Despite or because of this, its role in human affairs continues to be demonized and the attempt to return it to the marginal role it was confined to in agrarian civilizations always finds a ready audience. Money surely generates value and significance in human interactions as much as it erodes it. It is a symbol of our relationship as an individual person to society (hitherto more often singular than plural). This relationship may be conceived of as a durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity in a collective memory whose concrete symbol is money. Or it may be viewed as the outcome of a more creative process in which we each generate the personal credit linking us to society. The potential for shifting meanings, identities and memories lies in the reflexivity of money and language. This latter outlook, however, requires us to abandon the notion that society rests on abstract grounds that are more solid than the transient exchanges we participate in. Few people at present are prepared to take that step, preferring to receive the money they live by, rather than make it. When the meaning of money is seen to be what each of us makes of it, we may be less inclined to think of Money as the somewhat archaic God of capitalism that it has become. Paper presented at the workshop ‘On either side of the economic science of money’, Université de Paris X, Nanterre, 18-19th September 2009

It's a great pity that the dreams and the hopes of Sri Aurobindo are yet to be realised

downtoearth.org.in/ Apt title Comments:
The title you've selected for your magazine is a good one. After all, the earth is all that matters for human beings. Sri Aurobindo once said, "We bless.... this land of ours which has been even as a mother unto our nation. Blessed be this our own, our Motherland, which holds the promise of a far more glorious future for her sons than what has been theirs in the past...."

It's a great pity that the dreams and the hopes of Sri Aurobindo and millions of us who had fought for India's freedom are yet to be realised. After four decades, why is it that 80 per cent of our people have no access even to safe drinking water? Why are more than half our people illiterate and why do they live below the poverty line? Why is it that we are still one of the poorest countries in the world? We have to find answers to these questions. I do believe that your magazine will play a vital role in doing this.
Sender's name: H DEVADAS, New Delhi (Mar 30 2002 10:09AM)

Jun 1, 1994 - Journal of Religious Thought: Focuses on the work of Aurobindo Ghose and his philosophy regarding the place of spirituality in the evolution of human beings, dubbed as `world reconstruction.' Life of Sri Aurobindo; Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo; Sri Aurobindo and world reconstruction. From EBSCOhost Connection: Aurobindo Ghose and world... ($$)

Oct 7, 1995 - The Mother is based upon an extremely strange but true story of a European woman who became the partner (their relationship is far from clear) and successor of Sri Aurobindo, one of India's greatest spiritual teachers. After his death she took over as head of the ashram and, ... From Here's why Westerners are drawn to India Journey To Ithaca By Anita Desai Alfred A. Knopf, 312 pages, $32

Jan 20, 1997 - Sri Aurobindo and Sanskrit by Sampadananda Mishra; Institute of Research in Social Sciences, a unit of Sri Aurobindo Society, Pondicherry, India. There is no doubt that the Sanskrit language made a very deep inmpression on Sri Aurobindo. It might even be said the he approached the ... From Radio touts 210 million listeners weekly.... ($$)

Apr 12, 1998 - The Cambridge intellectual was none other than Sri Aurobindo, who took a first in classics, and then became guru to India's best known ashram. At least Sri Aurobindo was Indian. The self-appointed messiah was French. This was the woman known as the "Mother", whose kindly face stares ... From Creme caramel amidst the rickshaws

Nov 19, 1998 - VADODARA, Nov 18: A national seminar on `Aspects of the Constitution of India - Some Aurobindonian Perspectives' will be organised by the Sri Aurobindo Research Foundation, in collaboration with the Faculty of Social Work, MS University, on November 28. ...
From Seminar on Constitution

Dec 17, 1998 - There was also the Frenchwoman known simply as The Mother who presided over the devotees of Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali revolutionary who fled to French-ruled Pondicherry. The community flourished and expanded under The Mother's stewardship, with branches in every Indian city and hundreds ... From Sonia Gandhi's Foreign Chic Article from... ($$)

Sri Aurobindo's opinions on socio-economic issues came out in "Bande Mataram"

Jinnah and Secularism: Crime of Jinnah By: Dr. Dipak Basu Aug-24-2009 Author's Home Page (The author is a Professor in International Economics in Nagasaki University, Japan)

Sri Aurobindo had advised Gandhi to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan to keep India united, but Gandhi asked Sri Aurobindo not to interfere in political matter. It is still a mystery why Gandhi wanted partition so much, that, according to BR Ambedkar, even in 1940, Gandhi had accepted the Pakistan-proposal and in 1943 in collaboration with Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, had drawn up a detail plan to partition India.

Desicritics.org: Minority Institutions: Examining the Foundations
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Mauss can be seen as a “total social fact”

Marcel Mauss’s economic vision, 1920-25 from The Memory Bank

The First World War was more than a watershed; it was an irreversible fissure in modern European history. The state had acquired undreamt of powers in the course of the war: to mobilize and kill off huge armies, to control production and distribution, to monopolize propaganda; from now on it was a struggle between rival state forms for world domination. The claim of Western societies to lead the rest of humanity in reason and civilization had been mortally wounded by the senseless slaughter of the trenches. Life after the war was quite unlike what had gone before. Marcel Mauss, who admitted to a sense of relief when the war first allowed him to escape from his scholarly burdens, took his time to resume his academic and political activities. The death of Émile Durkheim and numerous colleagues during the war took some adjusting to, while some close friends told him it was now time to grow up. So, to a double life as a professor of the religions of uncivilized peoples in the marginal École pratique des hautes études and as a political activist-cum-dilettante, he now had to add responsibility for the movement launched by his uncle at a time when the sociology project still felt rather precarious.

Yet the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. Mauss’s political party and the Left in general had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his Écrits politiques (Marcel Fournier editor, 1994) were written in this period. He resumed teaching religion at the École pratique and was able to relaunch Année sociologique by the period’s end, contributing to it his most famous essay, on The Gift, “In memoriam: the unpublished work of Durkheim and his collaborators” (see Jane Guyer here) and a vast amount of work as editor and reviewer. He suffered some reverses at this time, including a serious illness, but remained optimistic for both political and intellectual regeneration on a social scale that was increasingly international in scope. He began serious work on a book dealing with the main political currents of the day, nationalism and socialism. His interest in the American “potlatch” was expanded by the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), confirming his belief that competitive gift-exchange was endemic in Melanesia and Polynesia, as well as elsewhere. And the Institut d’ethnologie was formed in 1925 with Rivet, Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss himself in charge.

In the late 1920s, things began to unravel on all fronts. Mauss’s personal standing as a savant grew inexorably; but his party suffered political reverses, its newspaper and journal folded, the cooperative movement foundered and, after a successor half-volume, the Année sociologique second series ended; his closest friend, Henri Hubert, died in 1927. The years 1920-25 stand apart for the energy and fulfillment they brought. Mauss himself kept a sort of Chinese wall between his academic and political interests; so it is not so surprising that the two have been kept apart, especially in the Anglophone world, where his political writings are virtually unknown (pace David Graeber, 2001). Mauss allowed himself one public attempt to bridge them, the concluding chapter of The Gift. Mary Douglas, in her Foreword to the second English edition, is rather dismissive of this chapter. For her, the essay should be seen as a great leap forward in anthropological science, theoretical forerunner of his Manual of Ethnography (Nick Allen editor, 2007) and a suitable launch of his career at the Institute: “his own attempt to use the theory of the gift to underpin social democracy was very weak…really jumping the gun” (1990:xv).

I have to agree that the essay itself does not provide an effective intellectual bridge between the two compartments of Mauss’s life. The Gift approaches the evolution of human exchange as moving through three stages: from a total exchange of services as in moiety systems, through competitive gift-exchange involving political leaders to individual contract, whose illumination (“the non-contractual element in the contract”) was the aim of Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society (1893), itself the main source for Mauss’s essay. Yet any elaboration of what capitalist markets are really like or even a recapitulation of Durkheim’s main arguments are largely missing here. As a result, the programmatic conclusions float at some remove from the substance of the essay and his successors have been able to suppose that its point really is just to expose the “gift economy” to scholarly view. Mauss himself is responsible for the contrasting interpretations that his essay has generated. Hubert did not spare him at the time: “It is often rather vague…Are you really sure that the development of social insurance can be attached to your ‘human bedrock’, as you say?” (Fournier 2006:244).

So, why then take seriously the relationship between Mauss’s sociology and his politics? (Sylvain Dzimira, Marcel Mauss: savant et politique, 2007). Mauss, while tending to his uncle’s legacy, was making a profound break with the latter’s sociological reductionism in these years, opening himself to psychology and the humanities, while espousing a method of “total social facts” which underpins The Gift and figures prominently in those same conclusions. This was just one of the ways he responded to the war. Another was the shift to studying contemporary politics in his (ultimately abortive) “Nation” project. I have argued elsewhere that Mauss himself can be seen as a “total social fact” in ways that undoubtedly concerned him and might deserve our attention. I do not claim that his work is a seamless whole, just that it might pay to juxtapose his disparate efforts of this extraordinary period as a way of throwing new light on the meaning of his great essay for us today.

To that end, I propose here to examine his journalism in the years, 1920-25, with a view to isolating his views on economy at the time. I will then offer an interpretation of The Gift, particularly as it bears on markets and money, as well as the proposals offered by Mauss there for the management of our societies. The aim is a more integrated account of his economic vision, one that has resonance for our own crisis. We will see. Such an exercise goes to the heart of a persisting translation problem which partly accounts for the diverging traditions of Maussian scholarship that we hope to bring together in this conference.

***

Professor Amartya Sen has written a remarkable book, The Idea of Justice. Set the record right
Professor Sen: You have just written what could be the most important treatise in political philosophy of the first decade of this century. Please do us a favour and do yourself one. Do not praise the Left and confer on “adharmic anyayis” the respectability they do not deserve. - Jaithirth Rao Tags : jaithirthrao, column Posted: Friday, Aug 21, 2009. The writer divides his time between Mumbai, Lonavla and Bangalore jerry.rao@expressindia.com

Christians learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false

We Are All Hindus Now By Lisa Miller NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 15, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal.

The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."

Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves "spiritual, not religious," according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria religion" as "very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing from different religions, because they're all the same," he says. "It isn't about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that's great, too."

Then there's the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the "self," and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we're burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection," agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say "om."

Institutions created by the Constitution could not develop the animation to keep them clean, creative and constructive

The Asian Age Unfulfilled dreams Deccan Chronicle 19 Aug 2009: OP-ED By Jagmohan

In a message to the nation, broadcast from the All-India Radio on August 15, 1947, Sri Aurobindo spoke about some of his dreams. He dreamt of a free and united country without which India could not fulfil her true destiny. But what the country got was Partition, accompanied by riots, rapes, plunder, loss of half-a-million lives and displacement of another one-and-a-half-million people. Sri Aurobindo had hoped that Partition would go. But it has not gone. Instead, the dimensions and depth of the dividing lines have increased. Terrorism, subversion, separatism and differences of caste and creed have made a dangerous headway.

The second dream which Sri Aurobindo entertained was that India, with a vast treasure of spirituality would become the epicentre for advancement of the "eternal religion" — Sanatana Dharma. But where is this religion to be found in India today? Who is preaching and practicing it? What, in fact, is seen all over the country, is an ever increasing tribe of "peddlers of arrant nonsense" who are draining out its core.

A moral chaos has engulfed the nation and the culture of corruption is spreading fast. Viewed as one of the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world, India now runs the risk of being destroyed by the virus of corruption in her politics, administration and economy.

As a class, India’s elected representatives are very similar to the description of a typical legislature given earlier by Sri Aurobindo: "He does not represent the soul of a people or its aspirations. What he does usually represent is all the average pettiness, selfishness, egoism, self-deception that is about him, and these he represents well enough, as well as a great deal of mental incompetence and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence. Great issues often come to him for decision, but he does not deal with them greatly; high words and noble ideas are on his lips, but they become rapidly the claptrap of a party".

Look at the Indian Parliament. What an uninspiring spectacle it is. The 14th Lok Sabha, for example, had about 100 members who were involved in criminal cases — 30 of whom had been charged with murder, dacoity, rape and extortion. Could an institution, dominated by such men and women, provide a national environment conducive to the realisation of Sri Aurobindo’s great vision?

The third dream of Sri Aurobindo was "a worldwide union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind". Such a union, he thought, was necessary not only because it was inherent in nature but also because its absence would imperil the freedom of smaller nations and threaten the security of bigger ones. He hoped that India would develop a "larger statesmanship" and play an effective role in this regard at the international level.

India, instead of playing a meaningful role in ushering in "a fair, bright and noble life for all mankind", has jumped on the bandwagon of those who, under the cover of globalisation, deregulation and other ingredients of neo-liberalism, are creating serious imbalances not only in the economy but also in the environment and ecology. In India itself, besides degradation and depletion of natural resources, wide disparities in income and lifestyle have come about.

Another dream of Sri Aurobindo pertained to the spiritual gifts which India was capable of delivering to the world. He had noted that Indian spirituality, its message as well as its psychic practices, were entering Europe and America. His hope was that this process, in times to come, would get enlarged. But this hope, too, does not seem to be materialising. Though yogic practices have made some headway, their overall impact has been marginal. The position with regard to spiritual teachings is even less reassuring. This is a natural outcome of the fact that India is now neither nursing her ancient nobility of temper nor developing a style of life based upon the fundamentals of her true spirituality. In light of the above analysis, a few crucial questions need to be answered.

• How is it that all the dreams, mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in his Independence day message, have virtually disappeared from the collective memory of the nation?
• Why did the steering wheel of India’s destiny remain only for a short time in the hands of those who were sensitive to the need for "giving expression to her long suppressed soul" and how did the same wheel soon come into the hands of those who have been wholly oblivious of such a need and are destroying practically every positive item of India’s heritage?

All this has happened because the post-1947 leadership by and large, failed to do what it should have done as top priority. It should have rekindled the power of the Indian mind, reawakened the purity of India’s soul and created a mental climate in which a rich crop of karamyogis could grow and a nobility-oriented culture emerge. Along with India’s Constitution and five-year plans for economic development, it could have formulated a national regeneration programme, by way of which the country should have been relieved of all the garbage that had collected in her courtyard during the long period of decay and degeneration of her civilisation, and at the same time dug out the buried treasures of her life-nurturing and life-elevating ideals towards which spiritual giants, such as Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo had repeatedly pointed their fingers.

The leadership should have realised that without providing inner energy, shakti, the institutions created by the Constitution could not develop the animation that was needed to keep them clean, creative and constructive.

As early as 1914, Sri Aurobindo, in a press interview, had significantly pointed out: "I am convinced that a spiritual awakening is the most important condition of our national greatness". Regrettably, such sane pieces of advice were all but ignored by the post-1947 leadership. The disastrous consequences of this lapse are that the moral fabric of society, weak as it already was, has been further shredded and Sri Aurobindo’s dreams remained elusive. Jagmohan is a former governor of J&K and a former Union minister

We should thus be wary of any simplistic grand narrative of our identity as a nation

The Hindu : Magazine : India 62: Soaring high? A few eminent Indians tell us what they think are some of the significant achievements since Independence. Makarand Paranjape, Poet and Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University

First of all, is India only 62? Some portions of us are much, much older, while others are not even 15 years old. That is why celebrating national birthdays each year may actually trivialise or detract from the more serious issue of who we really are. We should thus be wary of any simplistic grand narrative of our identity as a nation. But the real question in evaluating our achievements even in these 62 years is what yardsticks to apply?

If we invoke the idea of Svaraj so resonant during our freedom struggle, then we are still far from having achieved true “self rule”. We are not yet a nation of highly evolved, self-regulating citizens for whom the state is an almost unnecessary imposition. In addition, for Mahatma Gandhi a society or a nation had to be judged not by its greatest achievements in business, industry, or technology, but by how its poorest and least privileged members fared. Antodaya, the welfare of the last citizen of India, is still not our priority.

For Sri Aurobindo, a society, culture, or civilisation had to be judged by how developed its members were not just materially, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. That society or nation was successful whose citizens progressed integrally and found higher and higher levels of freedom and perfection. Today, who thinks of svaraj or self-realisation?

And yet, India’s accomplishments are considerable. Of these, I consider our new-found prosperity, even if it so uneven and iniquitous, a great achievement. What is equally important is the means to this prosperity, which is primarily knowledge or mindware. India has been both a prosperous country and a knowledge society for nearly 5000 years. But the colonial interlude brought us to unprecedented levels of degradation, poverty, and ignorance.

While notions of inferiority and mental colonialism still dog us, there is a gradual re-assertion of the genius of the common people of the land. Our ability to create wealth through the application of skills and knowledge is one of our great leaps forward as both a nation and a civilization. In addition, our democratic polity, combined with our plural, diverse, and largely free society are our greatest assets.

Sarah Abubakar, Kannada novelist

Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar were all products of a time when foreign universities were almost solely responsible for shaping the Indian intellect. That, a growing number of bright young people find academic enlightenment in our own country today, is the single most significant achievement of independent India. [...]

To make matters worse several state governments, in the pursuit of petty regional politics, are pushing for a vernacular medium of instruction. After all, which management, medicine, law or engineering textbook is written in Kannada or Tamil? These plans are only going to intellectually exclude those who are already financially excluded from the ‘education markets’. Those who want to remain in the race for education will have to own the two most valuable commodities in the Indian marketplace: money and the English language.

Rahul Bose, actor

The fact that we have a democratic secular constitution is probably our most effective step. We may have failed often in its implementation but definitely the drafting marked the significant step.
The C-DOT network conceptualised by Sam Pitroda during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure was significant. It’s the reason for a PCO in every village across the country.
Other significant moments were the National Rural Employment Guarantee schemes (NREGA), the Sarva Siksha Abhyan and the Mid-day meal Scheme. The right to information is probably the best legislation this country has ever had.
The right to food and the right to education are two acts that we can look forward. It is sad that we still have to define these basic rights of a human-being. Article 377 is a landmark this year. In a more general way the stepping in of the judiciary when state governments refused to react, though unprecedented, is extremely welcome. As told to Archana Subramanian

Sri Aurobindo conceived India as the mother, demanding obeisance from her children

SILIGURI: Independent India and the changing times Romit Bagchi
Posted by barunroy on August 15, 2009 FROM THE STATESMAN
SILIGURI, 14 AUG:

The North Bengal University academia seems unanimous in the view that ‘Independence’ as a subjective sentiment has paled into irrelevance under the impact of the socio-political changes. They, however, differ over the causes as far as the blurring of the emotion associated with the most monumental event of India as a nation is concerned. The views might prove enlightening as the nation is all set to celebrate the 63rd Independence Day.

According to an eminent academician, Mr Haren Ghosh, the process is irreversible. “Time is supreme and nothing can escape its tyranny. The patriotic fervour keeps fading with time. The crusaders for national emancipation are now mere figures of history. People no longer identify with those giants. They personified freedom through peerless self-abnegation. They are no longer real and hence the Independence Day no longer evokes passion,” he opined.

But, a celebrated historian, Dr Anada Gopal Ghosh has held the rot prevailing in the political realm responsible for the singular lack of nationalistic exuberance. “The process started off with the ascendancy of the Nehruvian epoch in the political realm. Sri Aurobindo conceived India as the mother, demanding obeisance from her children, while Pundit Nehru envisaged the country as a physical conglomeration of several people. The Nehruvian thinking prevailed and this proved precursor to the era of election-oriented politics. The soul of perennial India seems to have been relegated to the periphery,” Prof Ghosh said.

Mr Suhash Roy Moulick, the senior most professor of the NBU English department, has ascribed the development to the invasion of the occidental culture into the Indian cultural ambience.India is an eternal phenomenon not because of her physical survival in course of history but because of the persistence of her luminous spiritual culture in course of her long existence. The eclipse of this culture means national decadence. And the preponderance of the alien culture seems to have dried up the fount of patriotic vivacity,” Mr Moulick commented.

India shed the yoke of British colonial rule on the 75th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo

New era in Indian politics The Statesman
Devaparna Das

August 15, 1947 was the day when India shed the yoke of British colonial rule and became a free nation. It coincided with the 75th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo. He ushered in a new era in Indian politics in 1906 by declaring that complete and absolute independence from British rule was the aim of political action in India. What he espoused was adopted by the Indian National Congress in its resolution at the Lahore session in 1929.

In 1902 and 1904, he came into contact with revolutionary groups in Bengal and Maharashtra. But the partition of Bengal in 1905 engulfed the country in political turmoil. He started contributing articles anonymously to the Bengali newspaper by Yugantar. Sri Aurobindo resigned from Baroda College in 1906 to join the newly established National College in Kolkata as its principal. He joined as assistant editor of a new English daily called Bande Mataram launched by Bipin Chandra Pal and later assumed full control. In the same year, he persuaded the extremists of Bengal to organise themselves as the Nationalist Party collaborating with the group in Maharashtra and elsewhere in the country under the leadership of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Bande Mataram was adopted as the organ of the Nationalist Party. He evolved a programme for the Nationalist Party comprising non-cooperation, passive resistance, swadeshi, boycott and national education. He was arrested on charges of sedition for publication of some articles in Bande Mataram and was released on bail. But the prosecution failed to convict him for lack of concrete evidence.

The Indian National Congress was dominated by moderate leaders. A group of young leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal emerged who preached a radical form of nationalism. Sri Aurobindo met Tilak at the Ahmedabad session of the Congress in 1902. The nationalists succeeded in incorporating their four-fold programme of Swaraj, Swadeshi, boycott and national education into the resolution of the Congress despite the staunch opposition of the moderates. This was a major triumph for the nationalists as the word Swaraj appeared for the first time in the resolution of the Congress. But the Congress did not implement it. The stage was thus set for a confrontation between the moderates and the extremists at the Surat session of the Congress in 1907. Sri Aurobindo issued orders that led to dissolution of the Congress. The moderates suspended the Congress and replaced it by a national conference.

The nationalists assembled separately under the presidentship of Sri Aurobindo. After the split in the Congress, the government resorted to severe repression to crush the nationalists. But Sri Aurobindo gave them courage to endure. On 30 April, 1908 two youths hurled a bomb at a closed carriage that was supposed to carry DH Kingford, the district magistrate of Muzzafarpur in Bihar, but unfortunately the bomb killed two ladies. The police unearthed a bomb factory at Manicktolla in Kolkata. Sri Aurobindo and his brother Barindra were arrested along with several others. He spent one year in Alipore jail and was exonerated of all charges. He emerged from prison a transformed man. His work continued up to February 1910. All of a sudden, he left for Chandernagore and then proceeded to Pondicherry. He abruptly withdrew from politics to pursue Yoga. The writer is a freelance contributor

We are not totally committed to defeating the totally committed who would defeat us

The Conservative Disadvantage
We conservatives are at a certain disadvantage as compared to our leftist brethren. We don’t seek the meaning of our lives in the political sphere but in the private arena: in hobbies, sports, our jobs and professions, in ourselves, our families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, clubs and churches; in foot races and chess tournaments; in the particular pleasures of the quotidian round in all of their scandalous particularity.

We don't look to politics for meaning. Above all, we conservatives do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere. We either deny that there is such a thing, or we seek it in religion, or in philosophy, or in meditation, or in such sorry substitutes as occultism. A conservative who denies that there is ‘pie in the sky’ will certainly not seek ‘pie in the future.’ He will not, like the leftist, look to a human future for redemption. He understands human nature, its real possibilities, and its real limits. He is impervious to utopian illusions. He will accept no ersatz soteriology.

A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning. Politics for a conservative is more like garbage-collecting: it is a dirty job; somebody has to do; it would be better if nobody had to do it; and we should all lend a hand in getting the dirty job done. But there is little by way of meaning, immanent or transcendent, in garbage collecting and sewage disposal: these are things one gets out of the way so that meaningful activities can first begin.

I’m exaggerating a bit. To write is to exaggerate, as a Frenchman might put it, which amounts to a meta-exaggeration. But I’m exaggerating to make a serious point. We conservatives don’t look for meaning in all the wrong places. And because we don’t, we are at a certain disadvantage. We cannot bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the political struggle. We don't even use the word 'struggle.' We are not totally committed to defeating the totally committed who would defeat us.

But now we need to become active. Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encirclement. The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration, and there are indications that they are poised to clamp down on dissent. So if you value your life and liberty, you are well advised to inform yourself and take appropriate action. Posted at 12:37 PM in Conservatism, Leftism and Political Correctness, Politics Permalink TrackBack (0) Maverick Philosopher: In Praise of Blogosophyby Bill Vallicella 9:31 AM

Open debate about values and principles

Amartya Sen on justice: How to do it better The Economist
Aug 6th 2009 From The Economist print edition
In his study on how to create justice in a globalised world, Amartya Sen expounds on human aspiration and deprivation—and takes a swipe at John Rawls
The Idea of Justice. By Amartya Sen. Belknap Press; 496 pages; $29.95. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AT THE disputed crossroads where economics and ethics meet stands Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prize-winning economist who thinks like a philosopher. In a dauntingly impressive flow of books and papers over 40 years he has done much to change both disciplines for the better, humanising the one, bringing content from the real world to the other. His work is technical, however, and the fine detail has sometimes hidden the shape of the whole. Mr Sen’s latest book answers both difficulties in magisterial style.

In the courtliest of tones, Mr Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention.

“The Idea of Justice” serves also as a commanding summation of Mr Sen’s own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being. It is often intricate but never worthy. Conceptual subtleties flank blunt accounts of famine’s causes or physical handicap’s economic effects. A conviction that economists and philosophers are in business to improve the world burns on almost every page.

Mr Sen writes with dry wit, a feel for history and a relaxed cosmopolitanism. He presumes that the values in play are of global, not purely Western, import. Earlier thinkers he cites on justice and toleration come less from fourth-century Athens or 17th-century England than from India, where he was born 75 years ago. Growing up in Bengal, he learned about poverty and equality directly, not from books.

Two themes predominate: economic rationality and social injustice. Mr Sen approaches them alike. He can, when he wants, theorise without oxygen at any height. But he believes that theory, to be of use, must keep its feet on the ground. Modern theorists in his view have drifted too far from the actual world.

Economists have tended to content themselves with a laughably simple picture of human motivation, rationality and well-being. People are not purely self-interested. They care for others and observe social norms. They do not always reason “instrumentally”, seeking least-cost means to given ends. They question the point of their aims and the worth of their wants. Well-being, finally, has no single measure and is not inscrutable to others. Its elements are many and do not boil down to “utility” or some cash-value equivalent.

Complexity, though, need not breed mystery. Well-being’s diverse elements (freedom from hunger, disease, indignity and discrimination, to name four) are generally observable and, he believes, measurable. They are, to put it crudely, matters of fact, not taste, even if his philosophical story—that what underpins the several elements of well-being is that they all extend people’s “capabilities”—is still argued over.

Rawls held that social justice depended on having just institutions, whereas Mr Sen thinks that good social outcomes are what matter. Strictly both could be right. The practical brunt of Mr Sen’s criticism, however, is that just institutions do not ensure social justice. You can, in addition, recognise social injustices without knowing how a perfectly fair society would arrange or justify itself. Rawlsianism, though laudable in spirit, is too theoretical, and has distracted political philosophers from corrigible ills in the actual world.

Other arguments feed Mr Sen’s main themes. For example, that social-choice theory (how to gauge a society’s welfare from that of its members) permits good-enough, albeit incomplete, social comparisons. Also that the inevitable fact that moral judgments are made from a viewpoint does not make moral values local or subjective; that when talking of equality, you must always ask “equality of what?”; that rights carry extra weight without necessarily outweighing every concern; that justice’s demands outrun countries’ borders.

Tying the whole together is Mr Sen’s confidence that, though values are complex, economics provides tools for thinking clearly about complexity. “The Idea of Justice” is a feast, though perhaps not one to be consumed at a single sitting.

Virtually every claim Mr Sen makes will be objected to by someone. Right-wingers who follow Friedrich Hayek or James Buchanan will treat “social justice” and “social choice” as nonsenses. Mr Sen wants to humanise canons of “maximising” rationality; behavioural economists, much in fashion, aim to ditch them altogether. Rawlsian liberals will rally to the defence of their hero. Nobody, however, can reasonably complain any longer that they do not see how the parts of Mr Sen’s grand enterprise fit together.

His hero is Adam Smith: not the Smith of free-market legend, but the father of political economy who grasped the force of moral constraint and the value of sociability. To encapsulate the shift in attitude that Mr Sen has sought to bring about, ethics and economics are to be seen as Smith saw them: not two subjects, but one.

Mr Sen ends, suitably, with democracy. It can take many institutional forms, he says. But none succeeds without open debate about values and principles. To that vital element in public reason, as he calls it, “The Idea of Justice” is a contribution of the highest rank.

In Praise of Lobbying

Lobbying Is Democracy in Action Robert J. Samuelson
We're a collection of special interests. If people can't organize to influence the government, then democracy is dead.
Published Dec 13, 2008 Newsweek From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008

Lobbyists have a bad rap, which is why politicians routinely vilify them. Denouncing them is an uncontested rhetorical lay-up. People want to blame their discontents on a conspiracy of sleazy influence merchants. Periodic scandals confirm the stereotypes: the Jack Abramoffs who wine and dine legislators, or the congressmen like Duke Cunningham who took bribes from government contractors and steered federal funds to them. But mainly the anti-lobbying bias is popular mythology.

Myth No. 1 is that lobbying is antidemocratic because it frustrates "the will of the people." Just the opposite is true: lobbying is an expression of democracy.

We are a collection of special interests, and one person's special interest is another's job or moral crusade. If people can't organize to influence government—to muzzle or shape its powers—then democracy is dead. The "will of the people" is rarely observable, because people disagree and have inconsistent desires. Of course, the "public good" should always triumph, but what represents the public good is usually debatable. The idea that the making of these choices should occur in a vacuum—delegated to an all-knowing political elite—is profoundly undemocratic. Lobbyists sharpen debate by providing an outlet for more constituencies and giving government more information.

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford its cost. Government favors them and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that.

Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants. The richest 10 percent of Americans pay about 55 percent of all federal taxes (and within that, the richest 1 percent pay 28 percent), says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals—mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that the burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all-powerful, their taxes would be much lower. As for the poor and middle class, they do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees and near retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

A final myth is that lobbying consists mostly of privileged access to pivotal legislators or congressional staffers—and that campaign contributions buy that access. Of course, this happens, but it's not the main story.

"Lobbying is much more substantive and out in the open than its ugly caricature. Lobbyists primarily woo lawmakers with facts," wrote Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, a veteran lobbying reporter, in The Washington Post. If lawmakers "see merit in a position and there is a public outcry in its favor, that's the way they tend to vote." Lobbying is modern marketing: trying to transform a group's narrow interest into something perceived, rightly or wrongly, as serving the broad "public interest." Think, say, of federal subsidies for corn-based ethanol as successful lobbying.

In 2008, there are about 16,000 registered lobbyists—people with sufficient congressional contacts that they're required to report under the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, says the Center for Responsive Politics. That's up about 50 percent since 1998. But there are also hordes of public-relations consultants, advertising managers, Internet advisers, policy experts (at think tanks and elsewhere) who are primed to influence government—and a huge support staff including, for example, "line standers" who grab scarce spots at crucial congressional hearings for high-priced lawyers. When political scientist James Thurber of American University counted all these others, the size of the influence-lobbying complex ballooned to 261,000.

Under Obama, this complex will expand. No one can doubt that it can capture public policy for private purposes. Sometimes this involves largely hidden and discreet favors: budget "earmarks," tax breaks or regulatory preferences. Though large for recipients, most are small in the context of government (all earmarks total less than 1 percent of federal spending). What really matter are the major policies that determine government's overall size and direction. Lobbying ensures robust debate on these issues, and whether the ultimate outcome is for good or ill, it's democracy in action. © 2008

Amazon.com: In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise from King David to George W. Bush (9780385493895): Adam Bellow

The Gift stands alone as an intellectual exercise

Marcel Mauss’s economic vision, 1920-25 from The Memory Bank

While The Gift stands alone as an intellectual exercise, when he wrote it Marcel Mauss was intensely active on all fronts at once, academic and political, in what turned out to be the peak years of his engagement with society, the early 1920s. Perhaps it is not essential to read his financial journalism in order to understand his greatest essay, written and published at exactly the same time. But I would argue that they are both indispensable to an effective grasp of the man. Certainly the dynamic understanding that he brought to the exchange rate crisis helps me to grasp why he was at once enthused by and critical of Malinowski’s account of the kula. Does it all add up to a coherent “economic vision”, placing Mauss on a par with Keynes or even Polanyi, with both of whom he has much in common? Perhaps not. But if we ask what relevance he might have to our own times of economic crisis, investigation of his essay in the context of his life and times would surely help us better to understand our own. In that sense, Mauss lives.

A postscript. Gillian Tett, a Financial Times journalist with a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge, has just published an extraordinary account of the economic crisis that has broken over the last two years, Fool’s Gold: How the bold dream of a small tribe at J.P. Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street greed and unleashed a catastrophe (Free Press, 2009). She tells the story of the specific origin of credit derivatives, their subsequent perversion and the financial disaster that they brought down on all our heads. She warned against the dangers of massive growth in the volume of “credit default swaps” and “collateral debt obligations” long before the crisis broke (and was chastised for doing so). Fool’s Gold is already a best-seller, but it is also, to my mind, the best contribution yet to public education about the economic crisis.

Tett’s account shares some of the qualities of Mauss’s journalism: forward-looking, analytical and personal, with a keen sense of history and a desire to educate the people. The common people of different nations may, thanks to her persistent and imaginative efforts, get to know better “how they can have control over themselves—without the use of words, formulas or myths”. She generously acknowledges her anthropological training, of which Mauss was undoubtedly the leading pioneer in his own country, as having given her the vision and method to see what most other professionals could not. The Année sociologique group shared a sense that intellectual progress was a result of and stimulus to social improvement. I like to think that Gillian Tett’s example shows how the two sides of Mauss’s endeavour, especially as he realized them in those crowded years after the war, might someday be brought together. Conference Mauss vivant, Cerisy, 13-20 June 2009

Libertarianism is a political philosophy which emphasizes the notion of virtue in selfishness

Petey Says: August 8th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Both Marxism and Libertarianism may sound great on paper, but the middle course between them actually produces the best long-term economic growth.
The idea of “Pro-Growth Progressivism” may be easy to mock, but it’s actually the correct answer to many, many questions.

Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 9:19 am
A more accurate version of libertarian theory is that it is based upon an idiosyncratic view of inherent (and arguably metaphysical) individual human rights that is strongly oriented to property rights and is extremely American in historical origin and flavor. Sitting atop this view of individual rights—which itself is sufficient and requires no utilitarian elaboration—is a whole bunch of utilitarian justification for a libertarian sociopolitical organization built around the notions that said organization results in the greatest overall material and psychological benefit.

This theoretical basis has three great weaknesses: first, the notion of inherent individual rights is eminently contestable. Second, the almost exclusive emphasis on individual property rights is idiosyncratic and myopic. Third, the utilitarian arguments for the benefits of the resulting sociopolitical organization are extraordinarily simplistic and are as often as not disproved by empirical fact.

In practice, libertarianism is a political philosophy which emphasizes the notion of virtue in selfishness and has as its historical genesis the exceptional American experience. As such, it appeals mostly to white American males who are moderately above-average in intelligence, economically secure, independently-minded, and prefer simplistic theoretical constructs for making political and moral decisions. It validates their own affluence/privilege not by group affiliation, but by inherent individual merit; and it likewise superficially validates the poverty and lack of privilege of others not on the basis of group affiliation, but inherent fault. In this it mimics a meritocratic view, which allows the libertarian to congratulate himself on his lack of bigotry; but, in fact, it is a facade behind which his true bigotry hides.

In my opinion, sociologically it functions the same way that class-based theories of self-justifying privilege have functioned outside the US. It appropriates the American ideal of egalitarianism—indeed, that egalitarianism is so deeply buried in the American psyche is exactly the reason why libertarianism, and not a class-based theory of privilege, is dominant—as an integral portion of its self-rationalization of privilege. And, of course, it appropriates the American notion of individual human rights for the same purposes and then builds from this a theory that argues that the accumulation of wealth through commerce is the ultimate expression of human nature.

It is the apotheosis of middle-class merchant political philosophy. It is, therefore, aggressively and without self-awareness deeply middlebrow and so very, very American in all the worst senses. Also: see de Tocqueville. Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 9:31 am
BTW, libertarianism and Objecvtivism deeply intersect because they are two sides of a brightly-colored cereal box (with a prize inside!): epistemology on one side, political philosophy on the other. They’re intellectualism for bright twelve year-olds. Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 10:10 am Another way of looking at libertarianism is to see it as classic liberalism’s evil twin. It takes the liberal values of egalitarianism, individualism, and commerce and utilizes them as the foundation for a rationale for why a rancher, a banker, and merchant are, necessarily and by their own virtues, the political and cultural elites of a small, western US town who are able to organize the world around them as they see fit far away from the interference of those meddling much-more-powerful hoity-toities in the State capitols and on the East Coast. Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 11:26 am This careful blindness is precisely mimicked in libertarian philosophy. The poor, ruthlessly exploited by the greedy monopolistic rich, are either off-stage or delivered from their oppression by a brave individual acting on his own moral authority. Good will triumph! It’s a matter of faith and a very selectively blind worldview.

Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Pace Myles SG, so-called “classical liberalism” is not equivalent to libertarianism as it exists in contemporary America. That it is so equivalent is a conceit of libertarianism, a transparent attempt to obtain intellectual authority via political lineage, and has just about exactly the same relationship to real political history and theory as Rand’s Objectivism has to epistemology and the film Western has to actual history.

I think the thing that annoys me most about libertarians (and Randroids, not coincidentally) is that while they’re ostensibly intellectuals (in a relative sense, anyway, they at least have a considered political philosophy) they are, nevertheless, inveterate intellectual lightweights…and don’t know it. (But then, the same can be said of Yglesias and he has a fucking Harvard philosophy degree, so it seems to be a common ailment these days.) Keith M Ellis Says: August 8th, 2009 at 12:13 pm If anything, the intellectual well of classical liberalism is far more powerful, developed, and nuanced in Europe than it is in America.
I agree—and that’s why it is a very different thing than libertarianism. For the love of God, the average American libertarian has barely heard of Locke (much less Berlin) but has heard of, and possible read, Ayn Rand. You can probably count on two hands the number of “classical liberals” in Europe who’ve read Rand.
The supposed intellectual underpinnings of libertarianism are ex post facto rationalizations of a cultural ethos that is in every sense, pure Americana.

serial catowner Says: August 8th, 2009 at 10:00 am
An intelligent form of libertarianism is the American Constitution.
People are born with inalienable rights, but to secure these rights, we institute governments. To maintain these rights, we limit what the government can do and how it can do it.
Intelligent liberalism is intelligent libertarianism. Liberalism was, and ought to be, the destruction of oligarchic rule, monopolies, divine right, and inequality.
All of the claptrap about “capitalism”, “free enterprise” etc etc only has a place in the discussion to the extent that it is discussed in terms of what actually happens. Libertarians have a fantasy in which all of the socialistic improvements of our society are preserved as a gift to the oligarchy they were born into, and that’s what it is- a fantasy: Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
“Liberals”, OTOH, often fantasize that the government can improve people’s lives by telling them not to drink or smoke, but not allowing people the freedoms of religion, speech, and other securities of liberty found in the Bill of Rights. The result, unsurprisingly, has been Prohibition, repealed in the case of alcohol but supported (to their everlasting shame) by many “Liberals” in the case of drugs. The evils spawned by this holier-than-thou attitude are too numerous to list here, but surely the establishment of monopolies and oligarchies by the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry deserve a special mention as being intensely antithetical to the real practice of liberalism.
Justice Black summed it up nicely, saying “When the Constitution says the Congress shall make no law respecting the practice of religion, it means the Congress shall make NO law respecting the practice of religion”.
There’s your “strict constructionism”.

Fresh Air Fund gives thousands of inner-city children the priceless gift of fun

from Sara Wilson sara@freshair.org date 7 August 2009 00:55 Social Media News Release
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There is still time to host in 2009! The Fresh Air Fund NEEDS hosts for August in these states:
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Connecticut Delaware Massachusetts Maine New Hampshire New Jersey New York Ontario Pennsylvania Rhode Island Virginia Vermont
Call (800) 367-0003 or click here to fill out a host inquiry form.

News Facts
In 2008, The Fresh Air Fund's Volunteer Host Family program, called Friendly Town, gave close to 5,000 New York City boys and girls, ages six to 18, free summer experiences in the country and the suburbs. Volunteer host families shared their friendship and homes up to two weeks or more in 13 Northeastern states from Virginia to Maine and Canada.
The Fresh Air Fund relies on donations to provide memorable summers to NYC children.
The Fresh Air Fund needs hosts for the summer of 2009.

Host a Child Thanks to host families who open up their homes for up to two weeks each summer, children growing up in New York City’s toughest neighborhoods have experienced the joys of Fresh Air vacations. More than 65% of all children are reinvited to stay with their host family, year after year.

Fresh Air Fund Host Families There is no such thing as a "typical" host family. If you have room in your home - and your heart - to host a child, you could be one too. Learn More
Fresh Air Fund Children
Fresh Air children are boys and girls, six to 12 years old, who reside in low-income communities in New York City and are eager to experience the simple pleasures of life outside the city.As one child says, "I can’t wait to get on the bus every summer so I can see my family and go swimming and hiking!"
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You can give a child the experience of a lifetime with your gift to The Fresh Air Fund! Every year, The Fresh Air Fund gives thousands of inner-city children the priceless gift of fun – and opens the door to a lifetime of opportunities. Whether it's a two-week trip to visit a volunteer host family, or a fun-filled and educational stay at one of our camps, our programs make for unforgettable memories – and open a world of new friendships and fresh possibilities. We are a not-for-profit agency and depend on tax-deductible donations from people like you to keep our vital programs flourishing. Donate online now