Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 2, No. 3
Issue Coordinator: Mary Des Chene
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Essay
Reviews
- China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy (John G. Gurley)
- Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts (P. Sainath)
- The Social Dynamics of Deforestation: A Case Study from Nepal (John Soussan, Bharat K. Shrestha, Laya P. Uprety)
Two Global Villages: Yours and Others
Khagendra Sangraula
A month ago, breaking through at Kathmandu's Thankot, I managed a chance to get away. Throughout the bus journey, the mantras of the global village were resounding in my consciousness - 'development', 'human rights', 'empowerment', 'decentralization', 'liberalization', on and on. My mind was crushed under a multi-ton heap of glossy reports containing the saga of those very mantras' magical achievements - 'development', 'human rights', 'empowerment'...on and on. But on the secret inner leaves of those romantic reports there was also an unforgiving reflection of reality. Saturating that reflection, a parliamentarian's Pajero, a Minister's grand building, a robber baron's landed estate, the female sex's open trade, the music of AIDS, and Coca Cola's terror. In my view, the signal identity of today's global village is precisely that - that reflection and the meanings concealed within it.
To talk about today's unipolar global village without donning the costume of the Ram-devotee Hanuman, is not without risk. To do so, moreover, amid the English-speaking Nepali community may be yet more risky. Reading the pages of English publications it often seems as if ancient Hanuman's new global-editions are being born at a rapid rate beneath the devotional banner of an English language, white skinned, dollar-shaped Ram. As the devout labours of those who sing the glories of the global-village thus intensify, new Ramayanas may be produced by the ton in our Nepal! And, it can easily be imagined, those Ramayanas will be in English. And those Ramayanas' divine characters will be financial capital, guns and technology. In those Ramayanas the International Monetary Fund will take the place of Raja Ram. And, surrounding those new emperors of the global village will be loyal robots called 'independent countries' and 'independent rulers'.
One need not go far to find an example; the robot-herd in our country is not insignificant in size. Absorbed year round in the dirty games of coalitions, our Pajerian parties are mere robots. One builds their coalition, another tears it down. One writes their destiny, another erases it. They neither think with their own brains, nor make decisions according to their own consciences. The gift of the Mahakali package comes to them from Delhi's brain trust. And then? And then the messenger of the global financial market's emperors unexpectedly arrives in Nepal. And he makes a threat - if the Mahakali Treaty is not ratified aid will be cut off. Good enough - after receiving the hint of the financial global master the Nepali robots known as 'independent parties', singing the master's praises all the while, rush to enter the competition to stamp approval on the treaty. And, in the master's own language, they speak - The Mahakali treaty is a dazzling sun shining on the courtyard of the hungry-naked Nepalis on a moonless night! This is not the sole story of the world's financial emperors parading, via native robots, through every field of Nepali life - there is an endless series of such stories.
In Nepal, under the banner bearing the global village's message, the process of roboticization of the Pajerian parties and self-indulgent intellectuals is a speedy one. Go anywhere, meet whomever, read whatever - everywhere the fierce influence of the global village's philosophy will be experienced. In robot-fashion, and in a mysterious language, Hanuman parties, Hanuman intellectuals and Hanuman developers are reciting mantras - Om, Global Village, Coca Cola is Brahma, Aid is Vishnu, Pajero is the God of Gods, on and on. No matter how strong the willpower and power of resistance within you, this epidemic of global roboticization is not easy to escape. And so this writer has felt - under the shadow of the pressures, temptations and threats of the robot parties and robot intellectuals perhaps, without knowing it, he too is turning into a robot. Go anywhere - to find a humane person, the gleanings of the global robot-harvest must be searched for. Ask whomever‹to find a creature who refuses to become a robot is nearly impossible. At this cursed moment in history, the desire to find humane, simple, innocent, hardworking people to be portrayed in a novel led me to the dalit settlements of Parbat district.
In the hell-like settlements of dalits, sitting within their circle, I sought for sensitive means to measure the influences of the global village's development mantras. What kind of gifts has the global village been sending to dalits? The chain of mantras came to life again on the slate of my memory - development, human rights, empowerment...on and on. Taking the measure of the hellish life of a dalit settlement from an intimate vantage point I felt - the boons of the global village portrayed by Kathmandu's development paper factories are simply illusions. The harsh reality of the global village is the cruel life of dalits. If that's so, then what is the presence of the global village in the lives of dalits like?
Development comes there as mockery. In the village, though a few development pipes arrive, not a drop of water comes. Roads arrive there as terror. A road runs through the bottom of the village settlement. The road has snatched away the load-carrying of the poor, confiscated their bread and butter. A bridge has reached there as a hobgoblin. The bridge built over the river has eaten up even their little ones' scarce gruel. Before the bridge was there, dalit women would search the forests and jungle for firewood and, taking their very lives in their hands wading the swollen river, would go to Baglung bazaar to sell the wood. Nowadays, on the bridge, an armed sentry guards against use of the forest. A new occupation hasn't been created; the bridge has snatched away the old one. School has arrived there as a torture-chamber. Aspiring dalits do not have the financial wherewithal to send their sons and daughters to school. Those who, regardless of whether they eat or not, do send them, their children flee the school as humiliations and beatings become unbearable.
Those of dalit lineage must not touch the drinking water vessels of those of Bahun-Baraju lineage; if they touch them they'll be thrashed. Dalits are Hindus, but to enter a Hindu temple is strictly forbidden to them. When drinking tea in tea shops they must wash their own glasses; if they don't the Bahun-Baraju lineages form an All-Party United Front to suppress them. There, the development, human rights, empowerment, decentralization, liberalization and other such things portrayed in the stacks of glossy reports of Kathmandu's development-dandies, are completely absent.
Some things are there: underdevelopment is there, demons' rights are there, disempowerment is there, centralization is there, un-liberalization is there. The Pajerian parties' people, coming in search of votes, look just like humans; after the votes are in the bag, while advocating Pajeroism they are intent on suppressing dalits materially and spiritually, and protecting the dominance of their own jati and class.
In the urban marketplace developers multiply like monsoon mushrooms. But among these developers, who never tire of intoning, 'human rights;, 'people's empowerment', and other development mantras, it is hard to imagine one who is usually a critically thinking, independent person. It seems as if their individuality is also undergoing rapid roboticization. The global masters, in their role as dollar donors, have fixed strict limits on their outlooks. Confined within those narrow limits, they seem just like helpless frogs in a water tank.
I'd like to ask these multi-hued intellectuals and developers who have contracted to eliminate the hardships and dry the tears of dalits, the exploited and the humiliated: Lords and Lordesses! Without bringing transformation to the putrefied social structure, how can transformation be brought about in putrefied human relations? But the developers are helpless; they have no order from the dollar donors to lay a finger on the putrefied social structure.
Cocking an ear from the hellish courtyards of dalit settlements, a slogan can clearly be heard in the undertones of the global village's enchanting metaphors: "Lords of the world unite!" In the end, what for? To intentionally cause the desertification of all of nature and of human souls in order to satisfy greed and jealousy! The unfortunates of the world also have some aspirations and dreams, and they too have families and relations. Just maybe, they too worry for the future of their descendants.
The roboticized parties and intellectuals may say - 'the philosophy of today's global village, based on greed and jealousy, is the eternal and final philosophy of human civilization. Therefore, there's no alternative to it.' But just like the tyrannical lords, dalits, the exploited and the humiliated also have their own slogan: "Dalits, exploited and humiliated of the world unite!" In the end, what for? Reversing human relations based on greed and jealousy, to lay the foundation for a life of bread and poetry based on love and collectivity.
It is not only the world's tyrannical lords who harbour a dream of a "global village"; such a dream sleeps within the simple and innocent souls of the world too. Trying to look insightfully into the minds of Nepal's and the world's dalits, exploited, and humiliated, it seems as if a sleeping volcano lurks there. One day it will awaken and explode. And the global village's other, new and living stream of banners will begin to wave. Respected ladies and gentlemen! Whose global village are you on the side of?
(Khagendra Sangraula is a fiction writer and essayist. Recent story collections include Hastakshep and Mai Diwas).
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China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy
Author: John G. Gurley
Publisher: London: Monthly Review Press, 1976
Mao, "Maoism" and Social Transformation
Mahesh Maskey
Advocating socialism over capitalism, Albert Einstein rejected a system that trained individuals to "worship acquisitive success" in favour of one that develops "a sense of responsibility for fellow men in addition to promoting [one's] own innate abilities". He argued that all should reflect on socialism, for what was at stake, in Einstein's understanding, was human nature itself.
It is thus worthwhile to reflect on Gurley's book which, though 20 years old, combines an exceptionally clear exposition of the fundamental principles of Maoism with a detailed analysis of Mao's economic strategies from 1927 onward. Such analyses can help to move today's debates from the level of "for or against" to a deeper understanding of Mao's own principles and activities, against which Nepali versions of Maoism may be measured.
Like "Marxism", "Maoism" is a much abused term. Lin Piao eulogized Maoism as universal truth; for the Russians it became a derogatory term. After Mao's death, the Revolutionary International Movement (RIM) revived the term, giving it a sense close to Lin Piao's. Mao preferred "thought" to "ism" for his philosophical understanding, for some very practical reasons, and fought against any tendency to transform his thoughts into an imposing doctrine. Deng's China reduced "Maozedong thought" to the experience before the Great Leap Forward negating, in effect, its very substance. Gurley uses the word "Maoism" for the coherent ideology evolved by the integration of Marxism with Chinese reality, helping us to see into the heart of Maozedong thought and its practical applications in China.
During the late 60s and the 1970s, the Chinese development experience was widely admired in Third World countries. Shifting the dominant paradigm of development from an emphasis on growth and "development of productive forces" to the primacy of distribution and participation, it asserted that productive forces can be released and developed by continuous effort to change the social relations of production. China's achievements and experience in mass mobilization, debureaucratisation, health and educational policies, reliance on local initiative, and appropriate technology, provided a comprehensive alternative for development in the searching decade of the 70s.
For socialist revolutionaries, China also provided inspiration for theoretical regeneration of Marxism. Dissatisfied with the soviet type "bureaucratic state socialism" and Yugoslav type "market socialism", they looked towards this new path of "transition to socialism" which, many serious thinkers claimed, revived the original socialist values of equality, participation and collectivism. Renowned economist Paul M. Sweezy went so far as to assert that, "Mao was undoubtedly the greatest Marxist and revolutionary since Lenin, and history may in time rate him even higher".
John Gurley's book helps us to appreciate the reasons for such praise of Mao and his thought. It provides rare insights into his policies and activities by linking them to their underlying philosophical rationales. The first chapter, after summing up key differences between Maoist and capitalist economic views, brings the essence of Mao's approach to us. Gurley writes:
Perhaps the most striking difference between the capitalist and Maoist views concerns goals. Maoists believe that while a principle aim of nations should be to raise the level of material welfare of the population, this should be done only within the context of development of human beings, encouraging them to realize fully their manifold creative powers Development is not worth much unless everyone rises together: no one is to be left behind, either economically or culturally. Indeed, Maoists believe that rapid economic development is not likely to occur unless everyone rises together. Development as a trickle-down process is therefore rejected by Maoists, and so they reject any strong emphasis on profit motives and efficiency criteria that lead to lopsided growth.
This emphasis on collective cultural transformation was central to Mao's philosophical thinking - ever alert against slipping into what Einstein called the "worst evil of capitalism - the crippling of the social consciousness of individuals" by the exaggerated competitive attitude driven by the profit motive. Gurley's discussion of Mao's thoughts about markets, prices and profit motives, and his criticism of intellectuals and economists who divorce theory from practice and promote rote learning, clearly conveys the Maoist theory of knowledge.
How to realize fully the manifold creative powers of human beings is central to debate among different currents of socialist thought. Maoists reject a one-sided emphasis on material development that belittles the question of human nature, and encourages development of productive forces by all means. Such emphasis coupled with bureaucratic centralized planning, Mao contended, only reinstates worship profit and accumulation of property, fueling a reverse process of capitalist restoration and displacing human beings from the centre. The post-Mao China under Deng accords well with Mao's predictions.
Gurley's book will be most informative if readers keep these issues in mind. It provides a step-by-step account of the economic and social construction of Chinese society during the struggle of 1927-1949, and after the communists came to power. Giving a clear exposition of Mao's dialectical thought, Gurley describes Maoist policy making as "the act of choosing the form of struggle most suitable for resolving a contradiction. "For Maoists, he says, "an economic policy is a form of struggle intended to expand society's productive forces by resolving a contradiction".
Gurley shows how the different economic policies that came into existence during and after the revolution were tailored to the changing nature of principal contradictions. These highly specific adjustments are succinctly demonstrated in relation to the changes in land reform policies and deserve serious attention of readers. Whatever the system of reform, these class struggles were conducted through the active participation of the masses. "Mass line" for Mao was the essence of revolutionary practice with the human factor always taking priority over "labor power".
In accordance with Mao's emphasis to understand things and processes in motion, Gurley periodizes the economic policies of Maoist China in six distinct "waves" from the post-1949 land reforms through industrialization and collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, a period of readjustment and the Cultural Revolution, to post-1970 policy of balanced growth. Though the book does not treat the post-Mao era, it helps us to understand what was at stake: whether China followed a model giving primacy to productive forces or one giving primacy to struggle to change production relations.
Collectivization in China following land reform, and proceeding through various levels of cooperatives, seems distinctive in the lack of coercion as compared to the Russian experience. China's experiment with 'The Great Leap Forward' and 'Cultural Revolution' provided alternative paradigms to the world. In academic circles, there are equally strong criticisms of high-handedness, abuse of authority and anarchy in these periods, especially the Cultural Revolution. However, Gurley notes, quoting Mao, that the central principle Mao wanted to turn into a social reality was that epitomized in the slogan "serve the people".
Despite Mao's intent, "Maoism" has been subject to abuse from a wide spectrum of political interests, from terrorist groups to the political currents that visualize it as absolute truth or infallible dogma. The word "Maoism" itself has come to bear a different connotation, at the insistence of RIM, which attempts to distinguish it from "Maozedong thought". The result has been a forced attempt to copy the strategy of Chinese revolution in other countries, despite Mao's own repeated cautions that his strategies were specific to Chinese conditions. In doing so these "Maoists" have missed the very essence of Mao's dialectical vision of things and processes in movement and change, of integrating universal principles with the particular realities of a country.
Gurley's book provides a foundation for understanding the Chinese experience and its lessons for social transformation today, for both critics and adherents of Maoism. This is particularly critical for students of Mao's thoughts since, as Gurley concludes, in order to learn from the revolutionary development experience of China, one has to develop the ability to discern what aspects of that experience are suitable and appropriate for the realities of one's own country.
(M. Maskey, a physician and lecturer in the Dept. of Community Medicine, TUTH, is presently studying epidemiology in Boston, USA.)
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Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts
Author: P. Sainath
Publisher: Penguin, New Delhi, 1996
Price: Rs. 295
Reporting on Poverty
Stephen L. Mikesell
This volume of reports by award winning journalist P. Sainath to the Times of India (1993 - 1995), not only draws intimate descriptions of the poor as human beings, largely in their own words, but analyzes in great detail the processes that give rise to poverty.
As Sainath tells us, not a single newspaper in India has a correspondent covering the issues of poverty and development exclusively. The full-time 'beats' covered by the mainstream press are business, politics, sports and fashion--in short, the doings of the "beautiful people."
When the media does cover the poor, poverty is presented as an event, such as drought, cholera, or a minister cutting ribbons. Poverty, however, is not an event but a process, requiring in-depth research among the poor and asking uncomfortable questions. Usually it arises over long periods of time due to the convergence of many different factors: unequal landownership, usury, IMF restructuring, government corruption, imposition of big dams and so forth.
The result of treating poverty as an event is that it leads government and agencies to impose simple solutions aimed at the immediately highlighted problem: tube-wells for the drought or an income-earning scam to mitigate emigration. Because these ignore the deeper roots of the poverty, the original problems persist and usually worsen, oftentimes disastrously.
The biggest problem is that the poor are not asked to participate in the planning and decision-making of projects imposed supposedly for their own good. Thus, even if projects hit at the right problem, they provide totally wrong-headed solutions.
The book documents projects that people don't ask for and don't want: artificial insemination in a region famous for its stud bulls; roads for tribals and untouchables that open them up to exploitation by plainsmen and enrich contractors; displacement of millions of people by dams, mines, national defense, and other "development" projects, creating the largest but least-reported refugee group in the world: "development refugees"; and ubiquitous debt and labor bondage, and destruction of rural society and agricultural production in India. From the perspective of the banks, contractors, and NGOs, however, such projects succeed because they spend money and their organizational objectives are met.
Drought is good press and is treated as a problem of lack of water when it is generally due to unequal distribution of water. Pumps and irrigation projects for alleviating "drought", usually in water-rich areas, ruin traditional water collection and distribution systems and create "water lords" who squeeze communities of their land and labor. Big dams displace millions - especially the most vulnerable, tribals and dalits - while benefiting city dwellers and wealthy landlords. "Resource management" of forests, bamboo groves, and rock quarries means the state takes resources away from local control and turns them over to powerful contractor Mafias who exploit communities once dependent on them.
Compensation for private land takes decades, if at all, and is never given for commonly-held forests, streams and pastures, which provide essential elements of the rural life, or for the community support institutions wiped out by development. The devastating losses of landless people, such as dalits, who depended not on land but on providing services to the displaced communities, receive no recognition.
The book finishes on a note of hope.
Gravel quarries taken from the contractor Mafia and grasping petty officials and contracted to women workers in Tamil Nadu transform the lives of their families. The government recovered Rs. 25 lakhs seniorage fees per year compared to the mere Rs. 525 collected from contractors. Said an official, "'The women's groups'...are 'infinitely more productive, law-abiding and always regular in their payments.'" - food for the thought for those World Bank and USAID-wallas in the business of blindly promoting privatization of public resources into the hands of the contractor Mafia.
In Tamil Nadu, newly literate women organize against country liquor, which by soaking up men's wages is directly connected to rural debt; and villagers' organize "van committees" to stop the forest department from turning the forests they've planted over to private contractors. In Madya Pradesh, the reservation of 30% of local panchayat seats for women promises to revolutionize local politics. In Tamil Nadu 100,000 neo-literate women learn to ride bicycles as a way out of breaking enforced routines and male-imposed barriers.
For the mainstream press, NGOs are the great hope, and it treats them as standing outside the establishment. However, most are deeply integrated with the establishment, government, and funding body agendas. INGOs use NGOs to dump unwanted commodities and obsolete technologies, while providing white-collar employment to those who might otherwise object. As Sainath points out, "Nepal, next door, has over 10,000 NGOs--one for every 2,000 inhabitants. Compare that with how many teachers, doctors or nurses it has per 2,000 citizens."
The main thing is that the poor, especially women, receive control over resources and planning. In his intimate reporting from rural India, Sainath calls the lie on mainstream coverage of poverty and points the way to very different paths of development. It should be required reading for all.
(Stephen Mikesell, an anthropologist and editor, consistently votes for losing candidates.)
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The Social Dynamics of Deforestation: A Case Study from Nepal
Author: John Soussan, Bharat K. Shrestha, and Laya P. Uprety
Publisher: The Parthenon Publishing Group, New York, 1995
Deforesting Deforestation Scholarship
Amulya R. Tuladhar
Just when the thick stand of deforestation discourses about Nepal is being rapidly deforested by academic critiques and on-the-ground forest realities, we see this one last wolf-tree. Why this book? Who do the authors want to convince? These are questions I will explore while reviewing this book.
But, first, a quick overview of its contents. The book contains four case studies of deforestation (Koshi Hills, Rasuwa and Nuwakot, Kailali and the Dhanusha districts), sandwiched between chapters on the deforestation debate and on forest policy in Nepal. The key research question was whether any generalizable lessons could be drawn from the case studies. The attempt is laudable since, although Nepal is swamped by place-specific studies of deforestation and forest change, even basic questions have not been answered with a respectable degree of scholarly consensus. These include: Are the forests increasing or decreasing? Are the primary causes of forest change state, market, resource scarcity, ethnicity, labor shortage or what? Despite many local case studies on each of these questions, we are at a loss to figure out what is going on for the entire country.
Soussan, Shrestha and Uprety (hereafter Soussan) attempt, unsuccessfully, to fill this void. The only general inference they manage is that deforestation in Nepal is really two distinctive problems in the hills and in the Tarai. The studies are limited to place-specific descriptions of how factors like dams, urbanization, resource scarcity, or roads are at work. Such issues have already been treated in fuller analytical detail by others. While the bulk of recent scholarly work on forest change has moved from a preoccupation with deforestation and other crisis creation to careful exploration of factors promoting stabilization and recovery of landscapes with trees, we have Soussan still pointing us to deforestation as the central problematic.
Given that the book's focus is on local-external interactions that shape forest-related social dynamics, it is strange that its "social" does not include the Western scholars who mediate, with great influence on how forest change is understood, between the local (Nepali) and the external forces (Western donors interested in sustainable development). Soussan may think this is peripheral (the introduction grants that "that there is an element of political opportunism that surrounds current interest in environmentalism"), but a number of recent scholarly works deal specifically with this nexus: Western academia's role in constructing deforestation and other crises to justify their continued intervention. In the global social dynamics of deforestation academics are active players, not just scribes, and Soussan is no exception..
The 'social construction of deforestation' asserts that deforestation, especially its alarmist version, and the politics of external intervention into the environment and sustainable development of developing countries are steeped in the political economic interests of the West. Most disturbing in this theory is the implication that the vaunted scientific objectivity and authority of scientists and scholars is subservient to larger political interests. Critiques of the role of Western scholars in constructing a deforestation crisis can hardly be dismissed as mere, leftist, out-of-touch theoretical rantings. Not only are these theoretical critiques supported by in-country, dirty-boots experience, but also by mainstream, empirical scholars with long experience in Nepal and far from the theoretical and political lineages of these critiques.
Soussan justifies this book as a contribution to "an understanding of sustainable development... in Nepal where the livelihood of the majority of the population is intimately connected with the fate of tree and land resources." In Nepal we have plenty of examples of negative effects resulting from the altruistic sounding goals of Soussan's book. In the 1970s, characterization of Nepal's environmental crisis as massive soil erosion brought interventions like USAID's $32 million Resources Conservation and Utilization Project. After massive afforestation of Chir pines, foresters had to confront local villagers who wanted broad-leaved fodder trees not unpalatable pines. Moreover, villagers suffered from the capture of local common property used for grazing.
While the interests of poor Nepalis are on the mind of authors, the end results for Nepalis and their environment are far less benign and certain than the payoffs of grant and consulting monies that European academic institutions tap from international sustainable development agencies. Both the funding sources and the publication venue of this study hint at its real audience: not cutting-edge theoreticians in the field committed to greater understanding, nor on-ground policy makers in Nepal, but the large pool of money controlled by the donor community. These do-gooders with money still subscribe to the notion that there is a deforestation crisis in Nepal driven by population explosion and "primitive" social relations. For this scientifically semi-literate audience, cutting-edge theory is too abstract, and on-ground feedback from Nepal is too far beneath them, so there remains a niche for bridgers like Soussan.
(Amulya Tuladhar is a forester currently doing a Ph.D. in geography at Clark University, USA)
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