Daily Times

The renewed class struggle in Latin America and Europe, and the explosion of the Arab revolution was a scintillating rebuke to all those who had acquiesced and capitulated to Fukuyama’s reactionary thesis of ‘the end of history’. The tremors of the Arab revolution are still reverberating far and wide. Mighty states in Asia like China and India are concerned about the impact these revolutionary events are having on the consciousness of the immense mass of humanity that inhabits these most populated countries of the world.

The immediate response in India was the mass protest of half a million workers in Delhi in the aftermath of the Egyptian uprising. The Indian political system, with its huge democratic deception and the plunder on the part of the elite, is more exposed today than it ever was. The vast majority of its 1.2 billion people despise and hate the ruling elite and the system that has plunged them into poverty of biblical dimensions.

One of the stark realities of the harrowing social life in India is that over the past one decade 15 million girls have been killed in their mothers’ wombs using technology that was actually supposed to save lives. Nearly 1,500 girls are aborted every day, as against 250 Indians who are killed in traffic accidents. There are more billionaires in India than in Japan and the elites have stashed away a staggering amount of $ 14.7 trillion in Swiss banks while 80 percent of India’s population is forced to live on less than half a dollar a day.

This immense wealth in the hands of the few is black money looted from the state and society. Corruption scandals are rife. However, the media has raised a hue and cry around this non-issue of corruption, knowing full well that although it is despicable, it is not the cause of the crisis of Indian capitalism but is rather the product and a necessary requirement to sustain this diseased system.

The historical defeat of Stalinism, which betrayed and dragged the name of communism through the mud, is not the end of the class struggle or that of revolutionary socialism. Its demise opens up new vistas for the youth and the proletariat in the left parties and society in general to move forward to a revolutionary transformation of the South Asian subcontinent.

China, on the other hand, is perhaps the only country in the world that spends more on internal security than on national defence. This year the Chinese elite have raised expenditure on its organs of repression to $ 664 billion. This shows its fear of a revolt on the part of the gigantic proletariat that has emerged from this massive industrialisation. The high growth rates and industrialisation in certain areas along the Pacific Coast has not only increased the contradictions of combined and uneven development, but the Chinese proletariat has attained enormous confidence and courage that has been shown in a number of victories of the workers in several strikes in the recent period. China today has one of the largest gulfs between the rich and the poor. Economic growth has failed to conceal the burgeoning crisis of Chinese capitalism. According to Reuters, 80 million manufacturing jobs were lost by April 2011. A similar amount of jobs are expected to be lost in light manufacturing and millions will go to the African, Latin American and Asian markets in Chinese and multinational investments. The “Chinese model” raised by the reformists and ex-Stalinists as an alternative to genuine socialism and also against the planned economy in Cuba and elsewhere is going to face explosive convulsions that will expose the betrayal of the very concept of planned economy by the Chinese bureaucracy at the end of the 1970s.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, US negotiations with the Taliban are a de facto admission of defeat. The saying circling in Washington that “the Americans have watches but the Taliban have the time” is haunting the Pentagon and the White House. The pressures to pull out have never been so strong in the US. In the present situation, whatever the imperialists do will be wrong. The “rogue” sections of the Pakistan Army and their own stooge Karzai have been so emboldened by the weakness of imperialism that not only are they defying them but openly criticising and entrapping the Americans. After Iraq, this disastrous defeat in war where US imperialism has spent more than four trillion dollars is catastrophic for imperialism.

They have also made a mess in Libya. The Gaddafi regime would have been toppled sometime ago had the mass revolt not degenerated into a civil war and the imperialists had not intervened. The Palestinians are in a new movement of resistance that now encompasses vast regions of the Middle East. Israeli arrogance conceals the underlying fear of the ruling classes. The brutalities of the reactionary monarchy in Bahrain have been tacitly supported by the imperialist politicians and the media. Wave after wave of the mass protests in Yemen are refusing to subside. Syria is engulfed by a revolt that the extreme repression of the state has miserably failed to crush. Oman and the Gulf states are in ferment. The mediaeval regimes are teetering on the brink. Saudi Arabia has become the refuge of all the despots and scoundrels of the region that had fled the wrath of mass revolts. The future of the Saudi monarchy of ex-desert bandits and thugs is bleak to say the least. The impact of the defiance of women from all corners of life demanding freedom is enormous in Saudi society. The concessions will not work, however. Splits in the dynasty can tear apart the monolith of monarchical rule.

One of the most important strengths of the Arab revolution was its spontaneity, yet it was also its principal weakness. The revolt rages on but lacks clear direction and perspective. Therefore there is confusion and disarray. Yet it has not fizzled out. There are renewed struggles in Egypt and other countries. Whatever the outcome, things will not go back to where they stood before the upheaval. The only missing factory was the lack of a Bolshevik-Leninist party that could have led it to an easy victory. This situation prevails almost everywhere. The forces of revolutionary Marxism may be small but they are growing. It is a race against time. It is possible that wherever the next revolution erupts with the presence of a revolutionary party, a socialist victory would become a reality. With the aggravating social and economic crisis on a world scale such a victory would arouse the human race to move forward and take its destiny into its own hands.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com