(A shorter version of this article appeared in Republica daily on October 12 2011:  http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=37041)

In the belly of the beast
Marxism and Baburam Bhattarai in New York City

PRANAYA SJB RANA

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
- Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

NEW YORK – What really is the relevance of Marxism in the 21^st century? In Kathmandu, I look around at the explosion of buildings: the malls, the ‘cheap’ housing, the shiny, all-glass office towers. There are laptops and iPods, Coca-Cola, KFC and Pizza Hut. We have the World Bank, the IMF, the ADB. We are part of the global world of capital. And though many may roll their eyes when Baburam Bhattarai talks of ‘imperialistic capitalism’, it is no less an accurate term. Capitalism carries on the legacy of imperialism, only now through culture and globalisation. It is the subjugation of the world under the banner of the dollar. One for all and all for none.

So what really is the relevance of Marxism in the 21^st century? Capitalism took a dangerous blow this past decade, with the American economy is shambles, drained by its warmachine, and its monolithic debt to China, not to mention the crumbling economies in Europe, led by Greece and Italy. But capitalism doesn’t die so easy. It’s a many headed hydra, each time one of its heads is cut off, another two sprout to take its place. But these are trying times. We’ve sold our souls to many devils. Each corporation and conglomerate a different devil and each World Bank, each IMF a neoliberal shaitan in disguise. In an era that puts so much stake in material, a new house, a new car, money in the bank, cash to spend, new furniture, new clothes, its hard to take Marxism seriously. Wealth is defined as individual property: how rich are you? The social structure at the heart of Nepali society is slowly being eaten away by this very notion of wealth: that things belong to me, not to us, not to a whole but to one single individual who claims independence from the group. Even though this very individual is but one node on a matrix of relations: as mother, father, brother, son, student, teacher, sister, writer, artist, academic, businessman, shopkeeper, farmer, conductor.

Baburam Bhattarai realises this. He is a smart man, a clever man, a political man. A man whom Gramsci might have been proud of. He seems to embody praxis, that confluence of the theoretical and the practical. This is at the Theresa Lang centre of The New School in New York City, where three years earlier Comrade Prachanda gave his own New York talk. Contrary to Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal though, Baburam Bhattarai is quiet, confident and restrained. When he comes up to speak, he looks smaller than everyone else. His moustachioed face is broken in a small smile, one that betrays the irony of speaking about Marxism in America, in New York City, only few blocks north of Wall Street. First he speaks as an academic, neatly excusing himself as a scholar lured from the world of academia by the call of revolution. He speaks of historical dialectical materialism and how no other system can really explain, to him, the functioning of the world. He mentions that the struggle of the world is a class struggle, one of the working class. Nepal doesn’t have a proletariat but we have peasants, says our Right Honourable Prime Minister saap. More than a decade ago, our PM, then known as Laldhoj, along with Comrade Prachanda, armed these farmers, these poor from the villages and a bloody bloody revolution was fought. And it was won.

Baburam makes reference to the Paris Commune, a model that he gravitates towards even in his academic writing. He distances himself from Stalin, even though Comrade Joe adorns the party flag. He calls Stalin’s regime “mechanistic and codified.” Baburam’s version of Marxism, under the tutelage of Maoism, is adaptive. For Baburam, Marxism is “a combination of universality and practicality.” This a reference to Marxism’s universal applicability but only through a mediation of local social forces, hence its practicality. “This is my belief,” he says emphatically.

I want to believe this man because I want to believe in Marxism. I want to believe that the hard fought revolution that cost so many Nepali lives is not going to be wasted. I want to believe it is possible to hold on to your soul, despite losing your body to capital. I want to believe that we are all capable of treating each other with the worth that we treat ourselves, not as commodities, not as sources of labour but as human beings that are an end in and of themselves and not just a means. We have toppled the monarchy, we’re rewriting the very fabric of our country, we’re negotiating footholds and handholds for every caste, creed, group, religion and affiliation. I want to believe that this is the man who will not disappoint, who won’t be just another jogi with his ears pierced. I want to trust in this man’s knowledge and dedication to Marxism as a tool for social reform, not as authority or as oppression. I want to believe that this man has learned from ten years of bloody war. “It is better to be a revolutionary than to talk about it,” he says himself. But the revolution hasn’t ended, in fact, the hardest part begins now.

Andrew Arato, professor of Political Theory at The New School, questions Baburam stridently. He is clearly sceptical and doesn’t believe any of Baburam’s claims. There are others who question Baburam, Partha Chatterjee, Mary Des Chene and Sanjay Reddy but none are as critical as Arato. Baburam brushes the questions aside, answering them as evasively as he can. He replies with vague promises and assurances of commitments to various nebulous causes. Now he is politician mode. He isn’t lying outright but he is shifting the truth, evading it. Sitting there in the audience, I watch as pieces of paper are collected from the audience and sifted through. A series of critical questions about land reform, the Tibetan community and the economy are levelled at the PM. He is unfazed and proceeds to answer just as he did to the academics. The final question, more of a statement than a question, comes from Afghanistan and Baburam smirks. He knows when a question is not a question.

I am disappointed when I leave. I talk to Nepali friends outside and some American communists. We Nepalis agree, it was a disappointing talk but the Americans seem pleased.

A few days later, I come across an article online with pictures of Baburam with his family: his beaming wife and smiling daughter. The man in those photographs is the same Baburam, sometimes a slight smile, sometimes a stare. But the photographs are strangely comforting. They connect Baburam the father, the husband to Baburam the politician, the Maoist in an oddly human manner. I wonder if this is the same man who led the Maoists during their insurgency. I wonder if he had ever held a gun to someone’s head. I wonder if he has ever killed a man. But I also wonder if he’s a devoted father, a devoted husband. I look at Baburam and his family next to a green metal armoire, a familiar Godrej to every middle-class Nepali household.

I think I want to believe in Baburam a little longer. I trust in Marxism as an antidote to this rabid disease that is capitalism. I hope that Baburam is not just content with interpreting the world. He needs to change it. This is my belief.

(originally published in The Kathmandu Post, July 28 2011: http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2011/07/28/oped/terrorism-by-other-name/224547.html)

Media speculation was rife immediately after the twin terrorist attacks on Oslo. Experts weighed in and fingers were immediately pointed at radical Islam. Before all the facts has even been ascertained, the western media was overrun with reports of non-existent Islamic groups ‘claiming’ responsibility and terrorism ‘experts’ speculating on the involvement of al-Qaeda. Even the New York Times, that bastion of western liberal media, fell victim. They reported: “Powerful explosions hit Oslo; Jihadis claim responsibility.” Similar reports appeared on the BBC, The Washington Post, all focussing on how the heinous acts, which have taken the lives of 76 people, were the acts of Islamic terrorists. They were right on one account and wrong on another. It was an act of terrorism, but it wasn’t Islamic.

It has by now emerged that the prime suspect in the Oslo attacks is Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing nationalist, Muslim-hating xenophobe, contributor to the conservative blog Atlas Shrugged (after Ayn Rand, patron saint of the US Tea Party) and for any and all reason, a terrorist. The New York Times was still attempting to pin the blame on al-Qaeda, pointing out that other terrorist groups and factions around the world were learning from al-Qaeda and mimicking their ways. As if no one knew how to improvise bombs before al-Qaeda, as if no one had thought to bomb government buildings with a political agenda before al-Qaeda. Richard Silverstein, on his website, points out the New York Times fallacy: “Are the only terrorists in the world Muslim? If so, what do we call a right-wing nationalist capable of planting major bombs and mowing down scores of people for the sake of the greater glory of his cause? If even a liberal newspaper like the Times can’t call this guy a terrorist, what does that say about the mindset of the western world?”

Blogs like Electronic Intifada were the first to point to how quick the liberal media jumps on the it-was-the-Islamists bandwagon. It is clear the western world doesn’t regard terrorism as being carried out by anyone other than Muslims. To them, that is terrorism, anything else is extremism.

Terrorism has now been relegated to who accepts responsibility for it. Instead of focusing on the horror of death and destruction, terrorism is now a name game. If linked to an Islamic group, then it is terrorism. That is why, the US and its liberal media is careful to use terrorism when it suspects a Muslim is involved and when a white, Christian, anti-government radical crashes a plane into a building, it is termed merely ‘extremism.’ This is why when the Palestinians launch a rocket at the Israeli Defence Force, it is called terrorism and when the IDF indiscriminately bombs a Palestinian settlement, it is called retaliation. The civilian bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan and the drone attacks on Pakistan by the US are not termed terrorism, even though it spreads a more palpable terror. No, that is merely democracy in action. But when Iraqi and Afghani locals, be they al-Qaeda or not, target specific military bases, specific military operations of an invading, occupying army, it is termed terrorism.

In Europe, the biggest threat is not from radical Islamic groups but from nationalist extremists like Breivik who are virulently afraid of what they call ‘Islamification of Europe.’ Of the 294 terror attacks attempted or executed on European soil in the year 2009, only one was linked to radical Islam, reports Glenn Greenwald for Salon magazine and Robert Lambert on Al Jazeera, Mehdi Hasan, editor of the New Statesman, quotes figures compiled by Europol, the European police agency. In 2006, only again only one out of 498 documented terrorist attacks across Europe were linked to “Islamists”; in 2007, it was four out of 583.

Terrorism is not always so blatant, there is also terrorism of propaganda and terrorism of rhetoric. Such rhetoric is always divisive and creates an insider and an outsider. Whenever there is trouble, it is always the outsider who is blamed. There were Twitter reports from Norway, immediately following the attacks, of violence against Muslims. An innocent, vulnerable minority was targeted based on assumptions alone. This is the kind of violence rhetoric breeds. And it leads to a culture of fear where you fear cops if you’re brown, you pray that you will not be singled out for a ‘random’ check of all your baggage, your check your facial hair before you leave for the airport.

Glenn Greenwald asks ironically, “Will tall, blond, Nordic-looking males now receive extra scrutiny at airports and other locales, and will those having any involvement with those right-wing, Muslim-hating groups be secretly placed on no-fly lists?  Or are those oppressive, extremist, lawless measures — like the word Terrorism — also reserved exclusively for Muslims?”

That the western world is so quick to blame is no surprise. It still reeks of Bush’s “either you are with us or against us” rhetoric. Even President Obama’s address after the Oslo attacks made veiled references to an “international” threat. But it is an even sadder state of affairs when the so-called experts on terrorism, the so-called liberal media like the New York Times, fall sway to stereotyping. The disappointment with the leftist liberal media is not new. It has been growing for some time. That is why people are migrating to social media blogs from traditional news outlets, where regular folk, not just experts, hold sway over opinion. On blogs, there is room for debate, and it is blogs like Electronic Intifada that expose the hypocrisy of the leftist western media.