Ah, the revolution! It is coming!

Peter Drucker once said: “In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from”. Some Economists in our country assume that, by this, Drucker was suggesting doing Economics as a good career option for youngsters.

Not surprising, considering the fact that we indeed have economists, perched in their state funded academic ivory towers, preaching the virtues of subsidies and telling us how labour reforms are a bad idea to begin with.

It seems, once labour reforms happen, it would be difficult to earn wages without working. Now, who would know it better than these scholarly men that there cannot be a worse concept than having your wages linked to your contribution to work! I mean, can you imagine, the right to wages being conditional? The right to life is a fundamental right, and income, which is so basic to life; can it be conditional upon, say, work?

Isn’t it so obvious that the right to strike too is a fundamental right? Apparently, the honourable Supreme Court is not taking into consideration the rights and the aspirations of the common man. I didn't say this. The Professors, they said it!

Of course, the right to employment is a fundamental right as well. Doesn’t it follow that you need to be employed to have the right to strike? In which case, if someone is unemployed, it means that the state has failed to protect the rights, and hence the government should resign. Now, don’t ask me why only the government should ensure results, when the labour force of the country wouldn’t have to! Or may be I should attempt to answer that. Let me think... Is it that while the labour force forms the proletariat, the comprador capitalists, who cannot be left unaccountable, run the government?

Aha! I can see some sense now. Too good! I am glad that despite American imperialism strangling even our cultural ethos, and the liberalization, privatization and globalization, forced on us by the MNCs, the World Bank and the IMF, we have not lost the ability to think clearly. I am glad we haven’t been influenced by the steady growth in the economy or the expansion of the middle-class or even the gradual reduction in poverty. Ask the Professors and they can disprove all the changes that you think you have seen in the last two decades. In case, some things can’t be disproved, they can very well tell you how terrible those would be for the country in the long run.

Alright! Let us put two and two together: The Left in this country is allowed to have it way and the right to wages, the right to strike, and the right to be employed become fundamental rights. This, clearly, precludes the possibility of any rights to the capitalist-employer. Since the employers, given their limited rights, would then decide to minimize the use of labour, it becomes imperative upon the state to generate employment. The state, since it needs capital to employ these millions, and since it is expressly anti-national to depend on imperial agencies like the World Bank and the IMF, taxes the capitalists to the extent possible. The capitalists, who would thus see their capital sponged off, could then either go and settle abroad with whatever they have or continue producing till s/he is broke and join the labour force. You thought of cost cutting through technological change as a possibility? Sorry, the money that could have been invested in R&D would have been wiped off as taxes, and foreign-collaboration is a strict no-no! Thus, as more and more businesses close, the state steps in to provide jobs for more and more people. How long? Since there are no additional sources of capital left, the state starts pump priming and galloping inflation sets in. Or did you think of the possibility of state-run firms employing everyone who were around and still making profits and thus, generating enough capital to continue running the show? Goodness, you are so right! I mean, if we can make sure that there is no competition from anywhere for the goods and services produced by the state-run firms, why can't they make profit? May be the prices might rise a bit, but the Government can subsidize… oh, sorry, forgot that there is no money… well, prices might rise and then the salaries can be increased and then the prices may rise a little more and the salaries can rise a little further…

Hours and days pass by and finally the system comes to a stand-still! The reserve army of the unemployed swells up instantaneously and the revolution- ah! the revolution, the Professors have taught and foretold a whole generation of students - would finally happen. Of course, this revolution may not have guns and bullets. Stones and sticks should still be affordable, and in any case, Marx hasn’t said anything about that. The state, the ultimate oppressor, would finally collapse, and assuming that other countries are all too busy with their own affairs, peace, a just peace, an academically ideal condition, would prevail, even if it would be of the graveyard variety. What is important is that by then all private property would have been eliminated, and inequality would have already become history. And, well, the poor! You see, there can’t be such categories as the rich or the poor then.

The better-off and the worse-off? Yeah! The dead and the living!

My bets are on the Professors joining places ranging from Amherst to the Hague, offering new courses on neo-imperialism and underdevelopment, as soon as the Left parties come to power!

'Son-stroke' at twilight!

Thrishivaperoor: When Shri K Karunakaran, the crafty old man of Kerala politics, handed over the flag of his new party to his son, Shri K Muraleedharan, many in the audience were left wondering if he had finally lost the script. The veteran ‘leader’ would have liked his family form a dynasty at the state level in the Congress, on the lines of the Nehru-Gandhi family at the national level. For almost a decade now, he had tricked and blackmailed the Congress leadership at the Centre and at the state level, into deals, which foisted Shri Muraleedharan on to the state unit of the Congress in return for peace from him. But, the ever-spiraling ambitions of the father-son duo and the dormancy of Shri A K Antony’s leadership ended up in the parliamentary positions from the state being handed over to the opposition Left front on a platter. A complete disconnect with the grassroots meant that the Congress high-command did not know what actions to take until the state unit of the Congress had lost all semblance of credibility.

It was only after a couple of months that a leadership change in the government and a course correction in group politics happened. Less-idealistic but highly shrewd politicians took charge of the anti-Karunakaran forces in the Congress in a process, which found Shri Antony pleading once again before the party leadership for accommodating Karunakaran and his family. Yet, neither Shri Antony nor Shri Karunakaran’s friends at the centre, Shri Pranab Mukherjee and Shri Motilal Vohra, could stop Shri Karunakaran’s exit from the party. The central leadership apparently expects the party, as would anyone familiar with the see-saw politics of Kerala, a chance to sit in the opposition after the next Assembly elections. Hence, it becomes pointless to pamper Shri Karunakaran. The fact that even the Left wouldn’t openly woo him would have been considered when Shri Muraleedharan was expelled from the party for six years.

At his moment of reckoning, Shri Karunakaran was forced to choose between the party he built in the state and his son. He chose his son. Ironically, now that he finds himself outside the Congress, any dynasty, which he would have wanted to build through his son, can now be realized only in a setting similar to that of any of the Kerala Congress factions, where he could be a mere scarecrow on the fields of either of the opposing fronts in Kerala. What a fall for someone who was affectionately called by many Keralites as ‘the leader’! Smt Margaret Alwa appropriately referred to Shri Karunakaran’s problem as ‘son-stroke’. It is likely that history would judge him a trifle too harshly for succumbing to this sickness at the twilight of his life.