Javed Iqbal: The unending struggle of Bastar adivasis

Years after the Muria and the Koya were displaced from Dantewada by the atrocities of the Salwa Judum and the Maoists, their houses would be destroyed repeatedly by the Forest Department who calls them 'encroachers'. The IDPs would also fight with the local koya tribes over resources. Yet the Forest Department simply blames the adivasis for forest loss in Khammam, without even asking how much land all the Koyas and the Murias lost in the last 100 years in Khammam - massive land alienation studied by the late civil servant Girglani. The latest settlement that was destroyed as an 'encroachment', was only two kilometres away from Badrachalam town centre, which is actually adivasi land.

Around 43 families from the villages of Millampalli, Simalpenta, Raygudem, Darba and Singaram in Dantewada district, lost their makeshift homes for the second time in three months in the Mothe Reserve Forest of Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh on March 26, when the forest department, mandated to protect the forests, evicted them using force. A large number of families are internally displaced persons who’ve escaped the Salwa Judum-Maoist conflict of Dantewada and have lived in Khammam as informal labour.

Most originated from Millampalli, that was burnt down by the Salwa Judum in 2006 and Maoists have killed at least three people — Sodi Dola, Komaram Muthaiya and Madkam Jogaiya in the past 10 years. Another resident of Millampalli, Dusaru Sodi, used to be a member of the Maoist Sangam but would eventually become a special police officer who witnesses from Tadmentla and Morpalli alleged was present during the burnings of the villages or Tadmetla, Morpalli and Timmapuram in March 2011 by security forces. His name again reappeared in testimonies by rape victims, submitted to the National Commission of Women and the Supreme Court by anthropologist Nandini Sundar.


Madvi Samaiya and Madvi Muthaiya from the village of Raygudem were also killed by the Maoists. In Simalpenta, the Sarpanch’s brother Kurra Anda was killed by the Maoists in 2006.In Singaram, an alleged encounter that took place on January 9, 2009, where 19 adivasis were killed by security forces as alleged Maoists.

In Khammam, most of the IDPs/migrants have worked as informal labour during the mircchi cutting season, earning around Rs100/day and live off their savings in the summer season when there is no work, and little access to water to a majority of the settlements. The Muria from Chhattisgarh, or the Gotti Koya as they are known in Andhra along with Koyas from Chhattisgarh, have been in a struggle to appropriate the reserve forest land of Khammam for podu cultivation, often leading the forest department to evict them, aware that the entire forest cover is turning into a ‘honeycomb,’ as described by the DFO Shafiullah, who pointed out to satellite imagery of a pockmarked forest in Khammam, back in 2010...

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_the-unending-struggle-of-bastar-adivasis_1684183

With Photos:
http://moonchasing.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/the-unending-struggle-to-exist-for-bastars-adivasis/

The last of the asbestos miners

When miner Dansingh Bodra was asked about the people from his village who he worked with in the asbestos mines of Roro, who have all died before their time, he slowly starts counting, first to himself, and then loudly: “gyaara, Pooliya Sondi… baara, Rohto Gop… taira, Bagan Sondi… chowda, Vijay Singh Sondi… pandra, Gono Sondi… sola, Harish Sondi… sattra, Sukmon Sondi… atthra, Rahto Samadh.” Dansingh himself suffers from cancer, a huge tumour grows out of his stomach.

It took him five minutes to remember the dead. A few seconds to denounce the company that laid them off one fine day when the mines shut down in 1983. “They gave us nothing, no healthcare, no pension, just these illnesses.” “I worked in the mines for 12 years, and from that day itself I used to cough, and slowly it started to get worse.”

This man with a lump growing out of his stomach remains a testament to the reality of internal colonisation, of a company that currently earns aggregate revenues of over Rs 800 crore, of industrial development, and the idea that mining offers jobs. Dansingh Bodra awaits death in a village where his three grandchildren sleep behind him suffering from fever. The mines have long but closed down, but the dust and pollution that emanates from them, still spread across the fields.

Even today, as per law, especially as per section 22 of the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981, all asbestos mines have to be closed. But Hyderabad Industry Limited, part of the CK Birla Group, did not close their mines at Roro village at Chaibasa, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand. As a result, the asbestos fibres that are blown into the wind, that seep into the fields and rivers, still exist 30 years after the mines shut down.

“So many people died before they turned forty,” said Birsingh Sondi, who points to his neighbours house, “There lived Mangalsingh Sondi, who was 25 when he died, and he never even worked in the mine. His father, Sukmon, worked there, and he died a few years ago too.”..

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_the-last-of-the-asbestos-miners_1634805

Labor Discipline and the Decline of the Soviet System

The issue of labor discipline lay at the very heart of the antagonistic relationship between the Soviet elite and its work force. That "discipline" was slack in Soviet factories has long been noted by Western and Soviet commentators alike: high labor turnover; absenteeism, closely tied to heavy drinking on and off the job; and, more importantly, a highly irregular pace of work, with periods of intensive labor (usually involving forced overtime) interspersed with countless opportunities for time wasting, slow work, and a general disregard for production quality.

The historical genesis of this system of work is complex, and beyond the scope of this article, but one factor in particular deserves special stress. In order to consolidate its rule, the emerging Stalinist elite had to break down actual and potential opposition emanating from virtually the entire society: the peasants who resisted forced collectivization, and the industrial workers (largely drawn from that same peasantry), the majority of whom resented and to a certain extent resisted the hardships and pressures of industrialization. This required an atomization of the population, in particular the working class—not perhaps a total destruction of mutual solidarity, but the elimination of its ability to function collectively as a class, and the erosion of its consciousness of itself as a class. At the same time, the bureaucratic, almost cavalier planlessness of the Five Year Plans created a deep labor shortage. For the regime this was to prove a fatal combination: a depoliticized, but alienated and bitter work force which, because labor power was desperately scarce, could neither be induced nor compelled to work efficiently.

The result was that workers became a central—but by no means exclusive—cause of the long-term trend toward chronic inefficiency and economic decline which plagued the Soviet system. Workers, while politically powerless to alter the system, compromised the elite's ability to extract and dispose of the surplus product. They thereby became a prime cause of its instability. Virtually every phase of Soviet history therefore witnessed a concerted struggle by the elite to find ways to improve labor performance. Under Stalin, the emphasis was on naked coercion; to the extent that such measures proved unsuccessful, the economic losses this entailed were compensated by the existence of a massive slave-labor sector.

The failure of the Stalinist strategy produced two major periods of attempted reform, under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, which sought to solve the problems of poor motivation and effort by combining the incentives of political liberalization with the economic sanctions of tighter wage policies and, under Gorbachev, the threat of unemployment. As we now know, these efforts also failed to produce the desired results because the reforms could not go beyond the intrinsic limits of the system. No reform could challenge the basic power relations on which the elite's continued rule rested. Thus the fundamental antagonisms which destabilized production remained unresolved, and the system continued on its path of irreversible decline...

Stalinist industrialization had given rise to a specific labor relationship in which workers were rendered unable to confront the ruling elite or even industrial management as a collective entity in their pursuit of either economic or larger political goals. The bureaucratic and planless nature of the system, however, with its absence of systematic economic regulation, allowed workers to assert negative sanctions directly at the point of production. This was not "resistance," but individualized defensive action by an essentially atomized and depoliticized work force. Workers became a source of the system's long-term tendency toward economic decline, a fact explicitly recognized by both Khrushchev and Gorbachev when providing the rationale for their respective reform programs. Unless workers could be made once again to identify with the system and emerge from their demoralization, no moves toward greater economic efficiency would be possible. Insofar as the elite's privileges depended on such an economic rationalization, its own existence was therefore placed in jeopardy. It is for this reason that the Stalinist system could not be termed a "mode of production." It operated at such a high level of internal contradiction and instability that it could never be more than a historically transient social formation.

Effectively, the political relationships which kept the elite in power produced a network of social relations within production which led to the system's ultimate decline. This is significant. The system deteriorated but it was not overthrown. Stalinism's legacy was to make the reconstitution of the Soviet working class as a class (able to articulate and pursue its own radical needs) a lengthy and very difficult process. Some rudimentary beginnings were observable during perestroika, but they will take a long time to mature, perhaps several generations. In the meantime, the prospects for post-Soviet capitalism are for a stagnant, corruption-driven system, with no dynamic for development. If the alternatives are not quite socialism or barbarism, perhaps they are, at the very best, socialism or chaos.

http://libcom.org/history/labor-discipline-decline-soviet-system-don-filtzer

David Montgomery, 84, Dies; Chronicled Lives of Workers

David Montgomery, a labor historian whose experience as a machinist informed his influential writing about the culture of the factory floor, died last Friday in Philadelphia. He was 84. Mr. Montgomery, who taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Yale, wrote several books that explored the lives of workers, their rituals, their hierarchies, the power relationships among them and with their in-house managers, and the communities they formed.

In books that included “Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872,” “Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles” and his magnum opus, “The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925,” Mr. Montgomery created vivid pictures of workers in the iron foundries, steel plants and munitions and electrical equipment factories of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For most of the 1950s, Mr. Montgomery worked as a machinist in Minnesota and New York, and in both places he was a union member and organizer who, in the cross hairs of anti-Communist McCarthyites, was fired from a number of jobs. (Mr. Montgomery was, in fact, a member of the Communist Party. He quit after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian rebellion of 1956.)
He entered academia at a time when labor studies was a field viewed largely in terms of economics. But along with other scholars, including the Englishman E. P. Thompson and the Americans David Brody and Herbert G. Gutman, Mr. Montgomery helped establish what became known as “new labor history,” a branch of inquiry that rerouted research away from its traditional focus on union organizing, strikes and relations between companies and unions. Instead, these historians — and generations of students after them — began seeing labor more in terms of social history.

“One of the signal achievements of Mr. Montgomery and his many energetic students,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, writing about “The Fall of the House of Labor” in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, has been “to put social drama and moral seriousness back into the struggles of labor, not just the great strikes at Homestead and Ludlow, but also into the seemingly mundane conflicts over a change in work rules or a five-cent wage advance.”

David Montgomery was born on Dec. 1, 1927, in Bryn Mawr, Pa.; his father was an insurance executive. He was educated in Pennsylvania as well, graduating from the Haverford School and, after serving in the Army in Los Alamos, N. M., as World War II was ending, Swarthmore College.

His first jobs were in factories in New York City and Minneapolis, and at the end of the McCarthy era he turned to academic life, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in history, from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation became his first book, “Beyond Equality,” published in 1967, and he became a close colleague of Mr. Thompson’s.

Known as a shy and humble man who came alive behind a lectern or on a soapbox, Mr. Montgomery won teaching awards at both Pittsburgh and Yale, where he gained local fame for, among other things, actively supporting the campus clerical workers in their 1984 strike..


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/david-montgomery-84-dies-chronicled-lives-of-workers.html


Also see: 

US labour historian who approached the study of capitalism through workers' experiences:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/11/david-montgomery

Labour conditions in China's toy factories

With Christmas three weeks away, an undercover investigation has revealed the bleak realities of life in Chinese toy factories serving a market worth £2.8bn a year in the UK alone. Big brands such as Disney, Lego and Marks & Spencer pay only a fraction of the shop price of products to the factories that make theirtoys. Last summer – as factories geared up to cope with demand for the Christmas period – investigators spent three weeks in the industrial cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan. In some cases, they found that employees:

■ worked up to 140 hours overtime a month;

■ were paid up to a month late;

■ claimed they were expected to work with dangerous tools and machines without training or safety measures;

■ had to work in silence and were fined up to £5 for going to the toilet without permission.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the long hours and poor wages was how it tore families apart, separating mothers and fathers from their children for all but a few days a year. Many workers were too afraid to speak to the investigators from human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom), but two women did agree to talk on condition that their names were changed.. Read more http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/chinese-toy-factories-christmas-disney

Calibrated Indifference: Understanding the Structure of Informal Labour in India

The phenomenon of informality in labour relations is now an accepted fact of economic life in India. Between 7 and 8 percent of India’s total labour force of 390 million persons (inclusive of families and agrarian workers) work in the so-called organised sector, in registered firms, on regular salaries. This leaves some 350 million people in the unorganised, or informal sector, that allows (fifty-five years after Independence) for a work process that remains unmonitored, unregulated, casualised and without access to any official security systems whatsoever. Most registered firms also employ a certain percentage of causal labourers, thus ensuring a symbiotic link between two kinds of labour-process.


There exists a large body of data about this, indicating considerable research (both official and non-governmental), but insufficient attention has been paid to analysing endemic informality as a systemic structure. What determines its persistence? Is it sufficient to define it in terms of casual, unregulated, seasonal, unregistered, underage or mediated employment, or are there other aspects that need to be taken into consideration? What are the connections between these features, and its functional dynamic? Higher standards of living for these 350 million people would create massive demand and transform the economy. Why is this not happening?


Iniquitous work regimes are held together by what is euphemistically known as extra-economic coercion. One aspect of the relations governing informality that should enter a rigorous definition, is the prevalence of corporal punishment and intimidation as the mode of control at the work place. The state’s regulation of the recruitment and working conditions of casual and contractors’ labour is non-existent, laws on minimum wages rates in agrarian labour are rarely enforced, and maternity leave, health and accident insurance, are unknown, (despite being present in the recommendations of say, the National Commission on Rural Labour of 1991). Official under-regulation implies that other, ‘conventional’ modes of recruitment and regulation involving caste, kinship and gender operate in their place. What are these, how do they operate and what purpose do they serve in the larger order of things? This paper will explore of these issues..


Even a cursory study of casual labour and informality in India provides insights for an understanding of the most endemic of Indian malaises, that everyone complains of but few can comprehend. The relentless habit of subtracting from wages and deploying conventional prejudice for holding down those of ‘low’ social status, is, in my opinion, the stable foundation of the Indian economy and polity. Here is ‘corruption’ in action, performing its most vital function, blending caste and capital, tradition and modernity, economic coercion and violence in a system of untrammelled plunder. State officials are aware of this, and possess the power to enact and enforce regulations. That they choose not to do so implies that the problem goes much deeper. As we have noted above, it is political authority “that gives legitimacy and permanence to systems of social relations”

Read the full paper and download the pdf file: http://www.sacw.net/article2401.html

End of the Left in India?

In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian media have been gloating at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal especially and have repeatedly suggested that this signals the ’end of the Left in India’. Even at the best of times our news channels tend to avoid serious analyses of the underlying trends within the country, since they have transformed the news itself into a form of entertainment on models surpassed only by the U.S. news networks.

For its part the CPI(M) leadership has been at pains to minimise the significance of the defeat (in Bengal especially) and said that it would be wrong to write off the Left. For them ’the Left’ means the Left Fronts in Bengal and Kerala and of course chiefly the CPI(M) itself. They stress the fact that they still retain a considerable vote share, just over 40% in West Bengal for example, and there is indeed some truth in this claim. We the undersigned beg to differ sharply from both the positions stated above.

To begin with, the Left in India is not the Left parties alone and therefore the defeat of the Left parties does not mean the defeat of the Left. The Left in India has never been reducible to these large parliamentary fronts and party machines, much less to the groups embattled in the forests of India, but has always been a much wider spectrum of organisations, movements and forms of struggle that range from the hundreds of left-wing trade unions that exist in the country in all the major industrial centres, unions that are essentially independent of party control and seeking today to form a national federation, down to the dozens of popular campaigns and the organisations connected with them. 

Read more: http://sacw.net/article2095.html