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| Bengal protests |
Like much of India there is widespread unemployment, fear over food prices and widespread corruption. The ruling communists have also been accused of severe repression and violence against opponents and on top of all that, the Indian government says that 130 million more people will enter the workforce over the next ten years and they need to put them somewhere.
But what I was thinking about as I read this is how obvious it is that capitalism cannot resolve this problem. It cannot put these people to work. There will always be "emerging" countries because capitalism cannot develop the world, it cannot feed the world's people or develop an infrastructure that doesn't threaten to destroy it environmentally. If for some reason, West Bengal sucks up this Labor power it will be at the expense of another area of the world which will increase tension between nation states and the possibility of physical confrontation.
India, along with China, Russia, and Brazil belong to the group of "emerging" economies referred to as the Brics. These are the high growth countries (India has been growing 7% a year for more than a decade) that are viewed by some as the engine of capitalism over the next period, especially China. They are in competition with the advanced capitalist economies but are also in competition with each other. India lacks China's infrastructure and is in competition with it for trade and influence in the region; it has to grow or die.
Jahangir Azis, an economist at JP Morgan expresses the fears of the ruling class clearly, "A volatile mass of young people out of work will pose major problems for social stability." he tells Business Week. The capitalist class internationally are not oblivious to what is happening in the Arab world where thousands of unemployed youth have been the driving force behind many of the uprisings there. The Chinese bureaucracy even eliminated the word "Egypt" from search engines for fear that the Egyptian events would add fuel to the growing discontent among the Chinese masses. Thousands of protests over land disputes and other issues occur in China.
In order to solve the unemployment in West Bengal, and throughout India, the authorities have to expand India's manufacturing base as a means of sucking up this surplus Labor power to avoid unrest. Indian capitalism is also is driven to do this to compete with the Chinese who are competing with the Vietnamese who are competing with the Brazilians who are........you get the drift.
Manufacturing is 16% of India's GDP compared to 42% in China says Business Week. In Vietnam industry is 41% of economic output, India's 28%. Marx explained how such developments are inherent in a capitalist economy and lead to never ending instability and crisis. The two world wars were wars of this nature.
While economic theory is important, it is obvious from reading a short piece on this region in Business Week, that unemployment, poverty, war and underdevelopment are an endemic part of capitalism and are worsening. We can see the general process at work, this is not a complex thing. Every nation wants a manufacturing base. The capitalist class of every nation state wants to accumulate capital, wants a military, an airline industry a steel mill etc. It is not possible and Utopian to think that it can take society forward. Marx wrote of this contradiction of competing nation states within a world economy, it is important to read.
Millions of workers are drawing this conclusion in one way or another. Only a few remaining Stalinist bureaucrats live in this Utopian world: "We are both pro-business and pro-poor" the state secretary of the CP in West Bengal says.
It shows how lost the theoreticians are; even my mum didn't believe that.
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