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The Socialist Party in Ireland took a turn towards radicalising left-leaning, feminist youth in the early 2010s, as well as a growing abortion rights movement, including through our leading female and LGBTQ members initiating ROSA Socialist Feminist Movement on International Womens Day, 2013. Rather than consciously rejecting weak spots in our tradition, our approach emanated from applying ourselves to a concrete development and utilising every tool available to us: looking again at theoretical contributions on Marxism and gender oppression; drawing lessons from previous feminist waves; developing out a strategy to build the movement that could win abortion rights; consciously seeking to build the socialist feminist wing of the growing pro-choice movement in order to cohere both a working-class, struggle-based feminism in opposition to liberal feminism, and also to draw around us those radical youth and working-class women and LGBTQ people from which we could build the forces of revolutionary socialism.

In hindsight, this was a changed approach in our tradition a necessary one. The Socialist Party in Ireland and its forerunner, Militant, have a history of taking principled stances in opposing all forms of discrimination, and taking initiatives such as inviting gay rights speakers to Labour Youth summer camps in the 1980s that were attended by many hundreds; standing up to anti-choice groups like SPUC, and being part of abortion rights protests, all at a time when it was unpopular to do so. However this work was mostly reactive, piecemeal and not sufficiently rooted in a socialist feminist perspective. This is evident in a review of decades of Militant and Socialist Party Conference documents, rife with frequent omissions in relation to socialist feminism a deficiency evident in our late decision to positively embrace the term itself, done at a Socialist Party Conference in the early 2010s.

In 2018, a major dispute broke out in the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), with the central leading body, the International Secretariat (IS) launching an attack on the Irish section, the Socialist Party, on account of its socialist feminist work, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the success of the ROSAs intervention into the abortion rights movement. A major internal dispute enveloped the CWI, with a minority who remained loyal to the IS splitting away in 2019, with the majority renaming the organisation as International Socialist Alternative (ISA).

The IS and the executive of the England and Wales section had much crossover. Throughout the CWI, there was never a uniform approach on socialist feminism, with some sections having a decades-long proud tradition of knitting it into all aspects of its work. This review will make reference in detail to the England and Wales section of the CWI both because of its importance in the Trotskyist movement, but also because its political approach was reflected inside the IS across the decades. In a shameful example of its current trajectory, the minority around Peter Taaffe and Hannah Sell that split away the refounded CWI is open to coalescing with the increasingly transphobic George Galloway.1

The roots of the very worst attitudes displayed at the height of the bitter dispute that enveloped the International in 2018 namely a thinly-veiled, myopic and conservative suspicion of feminist struggle at the heart of the IS can be traced back over decades. The congenital deficiencies in the CWI related to a Marxist approach to womens oppression have expressed themselves in our theory, perspectives and practical work in different ways over our history.

During the 20182019 dispute, the ex-members wrote that there was a grain of truth in the post-feminist idea that women were on the verge of winning equality in many countries. This proposition, as well as being imbued with crass insensitivity to the prevalence of gender-based violence in every country in the world which has been a vital driver of the feminist wave that has emerged since the 2010s, seems to at least be pointing away from the idea that gender-based oppression and capitalism are so intertwined that the latter has to be dispensed with to begin to end the former.

In departing in some way from the foundational point that capitalism is utterly incapable of ending gender-based oppression, or using formulations that implied being anything less than crystal clear on this question, did represent a departure from our tradition on behalf of the IS Majority. Rather than representing some qualitative change in their position, however, this departure was a product of the lack of a systematic, integrated and serious approach to our socialist feminist work over decades.

Womens oppression is part and parcel of capitalism. Hence feminist movements and struggle have been a feature of capitalism throughout its history. The development of capitalism heralded opportunities for women to organise in struggle, as well as developing new ways in which womens and LGBTQ oppression would manifest itself and be reproduced. In contrast to feminist ideas or concepts, Hal Draper located the first examples of women organising for feminist demands as taking place in tandem with the French Revolutions upswing from 17891793, and above all in its left wing.2 A crucial part of the liberatory potential for women contained in the onset of capitalism was tied to that of the working class as a whole. It was precisely the creation of the working class, a social force with the power to be capitalisms gravedigger, which allowed for the possibility of socialist change and the elimination of the material basis for all exploitation and oppression.

In our history and tradition in the CWI, the contribution of Engels has been correctly highlighted. In a taboo-busting and extraordinarily enlightened contribution for its time, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State made a number of contentions that generally hold up, including backed up by more accurate anthropological research and findings that have become available since Engels time.3 The central thesis: that gender-based oppression didnt always exist and therefore was not immutable and could be ended, was and remains vital. Citing the beginning of class-divided societies linked to developments in agriculture circa 10,000 years ago as the world-historic defeat of the female sex, Engels claimed that the primitive communism of early hunter-gatherer societies show that the model of the patriarchal family, including monogamous marriage (with the emphasis being with the womans monogamy), was not the natural way of things but was a socially-imposed means to pass on private property through a male line.

Understanding the connection between the beginning of gender and sexuality-based oppression and class-divided societies means understanding that a society without classes where the economy is socially owned and democratically planned could be one without oppression; making the socialist struggle inextricably linked to the struggle for womens and LGBTQ freedom and vice versa. This is a key foundation of a Marxist analysis of gender-based oppression and formed the central plank of the analysis of the CWI throughout its history.

However, even on this question, there was a lack of deeper engagement. For example, Marxs notebooks from later in his life, which were not published until after Stalins death, writings that were the subject of many debates and discussions on the left regarding socialist feminism, were not really considered or delved into in the CWI tradition. This work from Marx illustrated a heightened sensitivity to different questions of oppression, to their importance as an impetus for class struggle, and how important it was for socialists to take the right approach in order to be able to build a united class struggle. These writings also gave an insight into the ongoing discussions, collaboration and fine-tuning of political analysis and positions of Engels and Marx over decades as opposed to there being some final word in one text on womens oppression.4 Engels himself did a number of revisions of the Origin text as more information became available to him one could not credibly argue that the spirit of this was the tradition embodied in our theoretical work on womens oppression throughout the CWI.

The work of Clara Zetkin, who pioneered a working-class and socialist feminist approach via her work on the left-wing of the SPD in Germany, was not sufficiently highlighted in the CWIs tradition. Similarly, the work of female revolutionary leaders in seeking to establish an International Communist Womens Conference and elected leadership as part of the work of the Communist International, as well as the work of the Zhenotdel after the Russian Revolution, which sought to wage a struggle to further womens emancipation in every respect, were not sufficiently discussed or considered a central basis to our work.

The indisputable fact that women played a vital role in the Russian Revolution itself tens of thousands of women workers were the first to rise up during the February Revolution was a huge boost to the female cadre in the Marxist movement who were pushing for a revolutionary, working-class feminism. The Stalinist counter-revolution consciously sought to attack the gains made in the revolution, disorganising and demoralising the working-class womens movement. Trotsky details this in the chapter, Family, Youth and Culture in The Revolution Betrayed precisely because socialist feminism was as integral to the revolution as the attack on it was to the counter-revolution.5

While Engels contribution was of course brilliant and foundational, there were naturally many gaps that a number of academic Marxists have sought to fill. If central to womens oppression is the role of the traditional family and the passing of private property through a male line, what does this mean for the working-class masses who are property-less? If capitalism inherited womens oppression from previous incarnations of class-divided societies, how has it been reproduced and ingrained in different ways throughout capitalisms history? It was to the detriment of the CWI that we did not sufficiently engage in this theoretical struggle ourselves, as evidenced in weaknesses in our perspectives related to womens oppression and feminist struggle over the decades, but most clearly seen in insufficient attention to the special impact of neoliberalism on working-class and poor women something that is part of the material basis for the new feminist wave of the 2010s and beyond.

Some trends within the school of social reproduction theory (SRT) have made useful insights in relation to these questions. Those around the Feminism for the 99% pamphlet have played a role in popularising some basic left feminism namely the need for a conscious split from and opposition to bourgeois, establishment feminism and this has been informed by strands of SRT.6

The most pertinent idea behind SRT is that the oppression of women under capitalism is connected to the particular role that women, especially working-class and poor women, play in reproducing the labour force for capitalism. This reproduction of the workforce for capitalism is done via unpaid labour of poor and working-class women, especially in the domestic sphere, and also by elements of the capitalist state where women predominate as workers, such as schools and hospitals. By honing in on the particular role that women play as underpaid care workers and as unpaid carers under capitalism (something rooted in the ideology of the patriarchal family), which is vital to maintaining and reproducing capitalisms labour force from which surplus value is extracted, they succinctly and clearly sum up an inextricable connection between exploitation and oppression in capitalism. While you can find formulations that are in line with this insight in CWI material including from the 1990s, it mostly lacked the same precision.

If you scour the material of the CWI historically on women, there are a number of facts that present themselves, as well as some political themes. Firstly, its the lack of material that is striking. Gender oppression is absent from the founding documents of the CWI, written in 1970, an important year of the second feminist wave. The main theoretical journal of Militant, the Militant International Review, had only one theoretical article on womens oppression between 1969 and March / April 1994. The final issue in 1995 contained the only article on gay rights. Given that feminist mass struggles of the second wave, as well as the gay liberation movement, were contemporaneous to this material, the absence of comment and analysis of the same is telling.

If one goes back to the roots and early days of the CWI, particularly when one looks at the material of Ted Grant and the attitudes that lie behind this material, clear problems present themselves. This includes a dismissive attitude to struggles against oppression outside the labour movement. Unfortunately it also includes a suspicion of gay rights activism and even an implication that this is a petit bourgeois concern. Echoes of such crude economism and a patronising attitude to struggles against oppression is something that has persisted in the IMT (founded by Ted Grant and Alan Woods after the split in 1992) organisation over the decades.

Another feature you will find in early CWI material is a somewhat patronising and contradictory attitude in relation to working-class women. Its usually contended that they are a more backward section of the working class, which is capable in times of revolution of great sacrifice and radicalism, but whose role is perhaps questionable at other times.

The origins of the CWI were based on a necessary break with forces within the Trotskyist Left that had developed a wrong, disorientating perspective in the post-war period. Within the USFI, a position developed that at root placed a major question mark over the revolutionary potential of vital sections of the working class within the advanced capitalist countries, and in doing so, over revolutionary working class leadership and potential full stop. In this way, the USFI leadership not only looked to, but often tail-ended student, feminist and anti-colonial movements to try to fill the gap. In orientating to important social struggles, it failed to raise the revolutionary socialist programme, key to which is the need to link up with the organised working class, and the working class as a whole to build the social weight and power to make revolutionary change.

This approach had very serious real-life consequences for the socialist struggle. Notably, the organisation was ill-prepared for the working-class revolutionary general strike in May 1968 in France and failed to make the impact it could have in a revolutionary situation in a huge industrialised capitalist country in a year of revolution. The CWIs necessary foundations in rejecting this approach and perspective, however, failed to contain a readjusted Marxist perspective on questions of oppression one that was inextricably intertwined in the whole programme and perspective for working class consciousness, agency and power. This then tended to mean that the CWIs approach to anti-oppression struggles was characterised too much by what it was (correctly) rejecting, and not enough based on a developed and proactive Marxist analysis and perspective towards the same. This particularly pertained to issues of feminism and LGBTQ liberation.

Ted Grants appalling position on gay rights, while never the official position of the organisation, was later rejected in Militant and the Socialist Party, but this was done in a haphazard fashion. LGBTQ members were vital agents in pushing this. Helen Redwood, who was a founding member of the LGBT caucus in Britain and went on to become the national LGBT organiser, said about the same that, whilst we should be critical of the poverty of our earlier analysis and neglect of work on LGBT+ issues that left us trailing behind other organisations on the left, once LGBT comrades took the bull by the horns, in general, there was no block to the caucus developing this aspect of work. Nevertheless, how much more effective could our intervention have been into the exploding movements of LGBT+ people in the 1980s and 90s had this aspect of work been led from the top and integrated into our national perspectives and strategy.

Peter Taaffe did reference in a limited way some mistakes regarding the LGBTQ struggle in the past in an article in Socialism Today, and also in a defensive way in the Marxism in Todays World pamphlet. But this was not sufficient. Recognising mistakes should be done in a more systematic and political fashion in which the organisation is enabled and empowered to fully draw out lessons, or mistakes will be repeated.

While the IS frequently referenced Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) an inspiring display of solidarity from the defining class battle that was the 19845 British miners strike but they never owned up to an uncomfortable reality, namely that one founding member of LGSM was in Militant and has stated that Id been in the Militant for 10 years though they didnt support or even acknowledge LGSM and had a very dismissive attitude on gay rights.7

Some of the economistic and dismissive attitudes referenced above are found in material well into the 1980s. For example in 1985 Ted Grant wrote in an internal bulletin: The American SWP exaggerates support for liberal middle class issues as womens liberation and gay liberation. It is of course correct to fight against any persecution of homosexuals and to work for equal rights for women. But it is necessary to fight for working class womens struggles and to concentrate on the working class issues as the main work of Marxists8 How callous when you consider the historical context, namely the heartwrenching discrimination and suffering that the gay community was being subjected to during the AIDS epidemic.

Politically, it utterly separates out economic questions, the working class issues, from questions of oppression. It ridiculously implies that issues of oppression, sexual repression etc. are middle-class concerns. It fails to understand that the intersection of exploitation and oppression can be especially radicalising. Implicit is the idea of a defensive position on these issues that we oppose repression / oppression, but that we dont concern ourselves with proactive calls for increased freedom and liberation for the oppressed. This can be directly contrasted with a Bolshevik approach to fighting oppression thats exemplified in Lenins What Is To Be Done (1902). In raising class consciousness, Lenin advocates for all socialist worker activists to be tribunes of the people who speak up against all forms of injustice that the system metes out no matter what class is affected, in an effort to truly agitate against the system and build working-class agency, consciousness and power.

The notion that working-class women are a more backward section of the working class is evident in the 1985 British perspectives document that states that, conditions of life under capitalism are the cause of the political backwardness of women They try to find a road out of the problems of life under capitalism by building their own little nests, separate and apart from the struggle of the working class. But as soon as they come to realise the impossibility of opting out of the struggle under capitalism From this layer will come some of the best fighters.9 Its not necessary to spend time parsing this quote that sits so incongruously in any document in 2022. Suffice to say, actually reviewing where such attitudes derived from with a view to fully correcting mistakes so we can hone and refine our Marxist analysis and programme for today, is absolutely necessary.

Notwithstanding the above, the real experience of Militant in Britain in the 1980s still an outlier in terms of what Trotskyists achieved in building an organisation of thousands at the cutting edge of a high-pitched class struggle inevitably was far richer. Working-class women revolutionaries were forged in inspiring working-class struggles with strong socialist feminist elements, including the Militant-led 1983 Lady at Lord John strike in Liverpool against sexual harassment, and the seminal British miners strike. Increasingly, women in the regions intervened into the womens sections of the Labour Party, and began to organise themselves in Militant, including very importantly laying the groundwork for the establishment of a National Womens Bureau in the earlier part of the decade.

These factors were important precursors to the fact that from the 1990s, a more open approach was taken to socialist feminist initiatives. During the dispute with the IS Majority, the existence of the Campaign Against Domestic Violence (CADV) was held up, not only as an inspiring initiative from the past, but as proof that the IS and British NC Majority were beyond reproach on these issues. This way in which it was referenced actually spoke to the opposite their deficiencies; given that an initiative from a quarter of a century ago was all they could point to, albeit an important one.

There was also a certain dishonesty in how CADV was referenced. The truth is that this initiative emanated not from the IS or British EC but from women who were mostly outside the central leadership. Certain tensions over a protracted period that existed between the same have been documented by Margaret Creear, former national womens work coordinator and central organiser of the CADV, in her PHD.10 Details documented in her study speak to many of the strengths of Militant and the Socialist Party regarding socialist feminism, as well as the weaknesses.

Some of the most striking features of the campaign included the strong written material regarding intimate partner and family-based violence and its development into a significant broad-based campaign with annual conferences and many interventions into trade unions and communities. It also had a positive internal influence in the organisation, including pushing an internal code of conduct to challenge sexism and abuse as it may arise within the organisation, and its work was also the basis upon which the member who was designated as the national womens organiser was included on the Executive Committee (EC), albeit belatedly and probably reluctantly, according to the memory of some current ISA activists.

As well as the CADV initiative, the CWI took a necessary stance in the 1990s of rejecting so-called post feminism a neo-liberal concept that contended that equality was within the grasp of women if they strove to reach for it as individuals.

As a campaign of the 1990s, the CADV existed in a very different era to today. Any current socialist feminist campaign against gender violence would more easily be able to raise a broader socialist programme. This is because of the mood and consciousness of the working-class and young women who are unwilling to accept any vestige of sexism and oppression; who are already making links organically between different issues, from housing and homelessness, to climate crisis, to systemic racism, to state and interpersonal violence.

One interesting point to note is that in Sweden, the Refuse to be Called a Slut campaign was established in the Swedish section in 1998, also at a time of broader retreat of the labour movement, social struggle etc. It had a different orientation to CADV. It was a campaign in the schools against sexism. Like CADV, it was an initiative that broadened into a real and lively campaign that was led by CWI activists, but attracted quite a broad periphery. The key difference with CADV was the fact that it was primarily orientated to very young people, young women in particular teenagers in high school who wanted to fight against the sexism they experienced there.

In summary, centrally amongst key figures in the IS over decades certain weaknesses persisted in relation to a Marxist approach to fighting womens oppression. This was often not elaborated, but rather was indicated in a lack of political material, a lack of campaigning or internal initiatives, or when important initiatives were developed, for example the CADV, the fact that they were pioneered and pushed from outside the central leadership, with an often luke-warm reception followed by eventual acceptance of the facts on the ground of good work that had to be recognised.

Theoretical weaknesses will inevitably affect and limit an organisations analysis and points of action in the current. A low point for this was when the draft World Perspectives document for the December 2017 International Executive Committee (IEC) included nothing on gender oppression. This was the year that started with the womens marches on Trumps Inauguration Day which marked the single biggest day of protest in US history up to that point, as well as inspiring solidarity protests in cities and towns all around the world. It was the year that ended with the #MeToo social media explosion that reverberated amongst many different social layers across the world, becoming a slogan for workers fighting sexual harassment in their jobs, and is still an iconic reference point today.

This telling omission prompted Swedish delegates to propose a motion to affirm that all our perspectives documents should include analysis in relation to gender and sexuality-based oppression, consciousness and struggles. Fundamentally, if our perspectives analysis is a guide to action, the real test is to analyse how they fared in preparing us for the feminist awakening and waves of struggle of the 2010s onwards.

While there was some reference in material to the impact of the neoliberal era on working-class women, it was not sufficiently analysed such that points of action for our work were drawn out. In reality, for a period of decades, the roots of todays radicalisation and struggles have been expanding. These include: increased female participation in capitalisms workforce, e.g. in the past 30 years there has been a 20% increase in female labour force participation in OECD countries;11 the nature of increased female labour participation in the neoliberal era, e.g. increased women factory workers in the east, increased low-paid service sector workers in the west, where women predominate and the use of less organised, part-time, casual women workers is a means to increase exploitation; the neoliberal attack on already insufficient public amenities, meaning increased exploitation for workers in these sectors where women workers also tend to predominate, entwined with the knock-on negative consequences for women who continue to bear the brunt of unpaid care work; the effects of a certain ideological backlash from the 1990s against gains of previous feminist and labour mass struggles with a proliferation of sexist tropes in mass culture. Furthermore, the political consequences of the Great Recession itself: of increased polarisation, and a turn away from the political establishment, also contains the threat of the growth of the far right, posing a threat to women and oppressed groups but also potentially fuelling further radicalisation of them.

The above gives merely a glimpse into some of the processes happening over decades that have fed into feminist movements and consciousness of the 2010s and 2020s. Its also important to mention that the increased visibility and activism of the trans community has especially been a feature of the past decade. The brutal reality of capitalism and its inability to deliver basic rights, such as housing and healthcare; its racism that is tied so much with class; its destruction of the environment that threatens human life as we know it; are also all factors driving the material basis for a working-class feminism to emerge.

The CWI failed to sufficiently analyse the above processes and draw out a perspective from the same. We did not predict the scale and depth of the movements and consciousness that have emerged. In fact the minority that split away now, still called the CWI, continued to downplay and understate the movements even as the facts on the ground were already established. They were further impeded in their ability to see what was actually unfolding by their economistic tendency to dismiss the significance of the issue of gender violence. This issue, inextricably linked to the question of the right to bodily autonomy, has been a key theme in the global feminist revolt of the 2010s up to the present day, and will continue to be so. It is an extreme expression of gender inequality and oppression.

Without a sufficient analysis of what processes in capitalism meant for women, and most of all for working-class and poor womens lives and consciousness, there was inevitably a dearth of conclusions drawn either in terms of mapping out potential flashpoints for struggle, or in terms of concrete initiatives of the CWI linked to these. The success of ROSA in Ireland was a certain inspiration to launch Campaign ROSA in Belgium, an initiative that has made an impression in a growing feminist movement placing a working-class and socialist feminist approach in an influential position vis a vis other trends.

Had an international ROSA socialist feminist initiative been considered, even in 2016 alongside Campaign Rosa in Belgium, it would have anticipated the openness to anti-capitalist feminism and the strong consciousness for organising on an international basis that has been widespread in the movement, aiding the shaping of its socialist feminist wing, in opposition to liberal feminism.

An International Womens Bureau (IWB) structure was only established with the inception of the ISA. There was never such a structure in the CWI. Sometimes ad hoc meetings of women comrades were convened literally at the margins of international events during lunch breaks, or at unreasonably late hours after mammoth sessions of the official agenda had finished. This was emblematic of the low priority attached to the socialist feminist work on behalf of the IS members who were setting the agendas.

While members in Brazil were playing a lead role in the PSOL Womens Sector, a potentially important left plank in the PSOL party as a whole; while US members over the course of a decade were fine-tuning their thoughtful policies to fight sexism inside the socialist movement; while Russian members were testing out more and more socialist feminist initiatives as they were learning that female and gender-queer youth were some of the most open to fight and struggle against Putin there was no serious, collective drawing out of the lessons on an international basis.

From very early in the ISA, a conscious approach was taken to the question of waging a struggle internally to foster the most conducive culture possible for the full participation and political development of all members, with special attention given to supporting and assisting those members who suffer different forms of oppression, and with consciously reviewing and rejecting the lack of sufficient attention to the same in the CWI.12

A key part of this is raising the consciousness and understanding of our membership regarding all forms of sexism, harassment and abuse, and to build a zero tolerance approach to these inside our organisations, including codifying this in policies and procedures.

Weaknesses and mistakes made over the years on these questions of course cut across the engagement and development of female, LGBTQ and people of colour members. The struggle to thread socialist feminism and anti-oppression through all our work requires a conscious effort in every regard, including inside all our movements.

A noticeable trend when reviewing weaknesses in the CWIs history in relation to socialist feminism was the tendency to crudely separate worker and class exploitation from questions of oppression. As well as suffering exploitation and oppression as a member of the working class, the majority of working-class people on a global level will be affected by one or multiple forms of particular oppression, be it racial, gender or sexuality-based oppression, ableism etc. Of course their radicalisation will be affected by all of their experiences of being degraded, hurt and hemmed in by the system of capitalism.

Making a social revolution against the system will involve exploiting every fault line, agitating against every single cruelty and injustice that the system metes out and seeking to build a struggle and movement capable of drawing in the widest possible layers of the exploited and oppressed. Suffice to say the working class, if active, organised and imbued with a socialist consciousness, uniquely has the power to take down capitalism. The unpaid labour of workers is the source of all profits, and by withdrawing their labour workers can shut down the entire profit system. Making a revolution against capitalism will require seizing the key levers of the economy, and naturally workers concentrated in those industries have a strategic role to play, not only in disempowering the capitalist class but also in constructing a workers state.

The following quote from the England and Wales Majority in the Name Change Debate in 1996 is illustrative of a problem, however:

a Marxist organisation [needs] to recognise that it will be a mass movement of the working class, within which the industrial working class will play a key role, which will draw behind it those youth, blacks and Asians, lesbian and gay activists who are presently scattered in single-issue campaigns.13

Statements such as this are unfortunately guilty of failing to recognise the inter-connection of questions of exploitation and oppression for women workers, workers of colour etc. While purporting to argue the opposite, inherent in the quote is a denigration of struggles on questions of oppression. These are merely single-issue campaigns. These struggles and these oppressed layers will be drawn behind the industrial working class, were told. Even the insensitive use of this language is symptomatic of not really trying to win oppressed layers over to socialist and Marxist politics. Sections of society whove been systematically told to go to the back will not take kindly to any organisation that may display even a hint of such an attitude.

Fundamentally, though, in advocating for the key role of the working class, whats implied is a view that the most powerful sections of the working class are mainly male, presumably straight, maybe white etc. This was never true, and its certainly not true today. The most powerful sections of workers do of course particularly include industrial workers, whose labour contributes so directly to profits for the capitalist class. Millions upon millions of these workers are women, are migrants, are people of colour! Other sectors of the working class are also powerful retail workers, sanitation workers, transport workers, healthcare workers the latter not so much because of the direct role their labour has in creating surplus value, but rather because of the role that their labour plays in ensuring the reproduction of a healthy workforce for capitalism. Looking around the world at the working class today only serves to highlight how anachronistic this conservative view of the working class is.

Another unspoken attitude seemed to be a fear that anti-oppression struggles would be divisive within the working class, impeding the working class in building the type of united movement necessary. The opposite is true. Failure to fight sexism, racism, LGBTQ oppression as integral to the working-class and socialist programme would spell a failure to build the type of united class struggle needed. It will also allow liberal feminists to assume leadership positions in movements, derailing these struggles and neutering their potential. Of course, in the midst of working-class struggle, not to mention in the throes of making a social revolution against the whole system, every perceived wisdom and all existing prejudices and ideas will be called into question.

Perhaps the most brilliant and succinct elucidation of a Marxist approach to fighting oppression was given by Irish socialist James Connolly. He was speaking in 1915 about the suffrage movement, and imploring the whole labour movement to get behind it. Extraordinary human that he was, empathy and respect for those suffering oppression exuded from every fibre of his being, and was inextricable from his revolutionary socialism:

None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter. In its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have arisen to strike them off, and cheer all the louder if in its hatred of thraldom and passion for freedom the womens army forges ahead of the militant army of Labour. But whosoever carries the outworks of the citadel of oppression, the working class alone can raze it to the ground.14

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Socialist Feminism || The CWI & Socialist Feminism Redressing a Checkered History - International Socialist

This excerpt features the introduction to Mark Hagers recently published book, Elusive Ideology: Religion and Socialism in Modern Indian Thought, along with the books first chapter on the foundational work of the prototypical Hindu socialist, Vivekananda.

This is a study of what could be called the ambivalent relationship between religion and socialism in modern Indian thought. It highlights both congruences and antagonisms between religious and socialist ideas in a handful of leading thinkers. It explores problems they encounter attempting to reconcile religious and socialist concerns. It emphasizes the general character of these problems by highlighting recurrence of common themes. It also explores differences among these thinkers and suggests that those variations create a pattern of distinguishable responses to a unified set of concerns. India is sometimes not recalled these days as a haven for socialist thinking. Look again.

Attempts to restate traditional religious ideas and to juxtapose them with Western socialist ideas are so pervasive in modern Indian thought as to constitute perhaps its most distinctive and unifying characteristic. In varying ways, leading figures weave together interpretations of socialist ideas and traditional religious ideas, often so as to imagine social institutions and practices where spiritual values and economic organization might be mutually reinforcing.

It is not strange that socialism and religion should have an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, their orientations tend to diverge. Socialism concerns itself with problems of material production, while religion devalues material concerns for spiritual ones. On the other hand, socialism generally and religion often translate concerns for human fulfillment into social visions of solidarity-sentiments of interdependence between private and general well-being. This resemblance sets religion and socialism apart from liberalism and capitalism, for example, which in their social theories typically de-emphasize solidarity. The commonality of religion and socialism tends to bring them into contact, but contrasting orientations can make that contact a tense one.

Ambivalence between religion and socialism has been especially acute in India, due largely to experiences of imperial subjugation. In the late nineteenth century, resistance to imperialism spawned a set of attitudes, including socialist and religious ones, which could be called the first Indian radicalism.

Imperialism, as it seemed, was first of all an experience of economic subservience and exploitation. The rise and triumph of industrial capitalism in Great Britain struck many as dependent on economic dominance over India, the impoverishment of which fueled Britains enrichment. Indian thinkers learned to focus on capitalisms negative features. In imagining eventual liberation, they strove to imagine a system of non-exploitative production. They called it socialism.

Imperial subjugation was secondly an experience of cultural anxiety and doubt. Indian thinkers inhabited a twilight zone, feeling the attractions and repulsions of both Western and Indian cultures. Dominance of the West, combined with the apparently advanced nature of Western ideas, prompted an impulse to denigrate Indian culture. At the same time, dreams of liberation from imperial rule prompted impulses toward denigrating Western culture and exalting India.

The case for prompt liberation gained strength from asserting that Western culture was harmful to Indias well-being but weakened under any sense that Western culture was superior or necessary to Indias progress. Advocacy of Indian culture over Western culture involved sympathy toward religious themes.

Thus, radical resistance to British rule commonly linked up with advocacy of both socialism and traditional religion. Less radical anti-imperialism, by contrast, generally went with more muted economic critiques and less fervent allegiance to religion. This contrast exemplified itself in turn-of-the-century schism in the nationalist movement between Extremists and Moderates. There was generally more of both explicit socialism and religious preoccupation in viewpoints of Extremists such as Tilak, Aurobindo, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lala Lajpat Rai than with Moderates like Ranade and Gokhale.

Modern Indian radicalism then, originated with intense symbiosis of religion and socialism, a symbiosis that ironically remained ambivalent. Born from experiences of imperial subjugation, this ambivalent symbiosis later fed upon the increasingly negative example of Soviet socialism. Some admired early Soviet developments while others frowned from the start on communist atheism and violence. Criticism mounted as the Soviet system grew increasingly autocratic, bureaucratic, cynical, and repressive. This did not, however, induce leading Indian thinkers to ignore problems of Western hegemony or to embrace the developed West as savior of the free world. They developed instead a critique of both Western and Soviet systems culminating in Nehrus sponsorship of a Non-Aligned Movement for the Third World. This Third World consciousness reinforced India in its anti-imperial impulse to seek out virtues in its own heritage. Rejection of Soviet socialism struck some as leaving no option but to develop a socialism rooted in Indias distinctive heritage of flourishing religious sensibility.

For several reasons then, juxtaposition of religion and socialism lies at the heart of modern Indian thoughts most characteristic failures and achievements. It can therefore stand as an axis around which to interpret that thought as a unified intellectual tradition. This tradition drills down on a distinctive problematic: to interweave socialist ideas with Indian religious ideas in pursuit of a sound and worthwhile ideology. By problematic, I mean a persistent pattern of interrelated questions defining the subject matter for a system of inquiry. By ideology, I mean simply some picture of a better society combined with ideas on how to achieve it. As will become clear, the problematic explored here is an elastically-defined intellectual universe. It is by no means a unified answer to a single question, but rather a cluster of questions and proposed answers driven by a distinct and persisting sense of moral and intellectual unease.

By framing my analysis in terms of a problematic, I hope both highlight its centrality and to suggest a certain logic in its unfolding. Particular controversy may emerge from my treatment of thinkers within the problematic as failures or successes. By failure and success, I mean something quite particular: the degree to which various thinkers, in their deployment of religious and socialist ideas, manage to remedy the complementary weaknesses of each. Religions typical weakness as ideology is failure to visualize practical institutions to embody and express its values in all spheres of activity. Religion is often especially weak in reconciling aspirational values with demands of productive activity. Socialisms frequent weakness lies in failure to investigate and cultivate spiritual virtues needed in any worthwhile system of socialized production. Socialisms frequent and erroneous conceit holds that achieving socialized production-common and roughly equal ownership of productive resources-itself ensures moral regeneration. Even when it does focus on spiritual regeneration it often treats those concerns as secondary to socialized production.

Modern Indian thinkers have tried to steer a middle course avoiding typical failings of both socialism and religion. They by and large reject what may be called materialist socialism, which imagines either that right economic organization must precede cultivation of fraternal social relations or will yield such relations automatically afterward. These thinkers also by and large try to avoid what may be called pure religious ideology, which imagines that spiritual transformation can usher in a harmonious and just society prior to or without need of transformed productive organization. With one interesting exception they grope to articulate an ideology of mutual dependence and reinforcement between spiritual growth and socialist productive arrangements.

Within this problematic success lies especially in emergence and refinement of Gandhian socialism. Gandhian socialism maintains a simultaneous focus on cultivating virtue and socializing productive arrangements. Widespread practice of moral virtue and progressive socialization require and reinforce each other, pursued in tandem not isolation. These insights, crucial to Gandhian socialism, characterize the entire tradition examined here, with Ambedkar as the interesting exception. What distinguishes Gandhian socialism from failures within this tradition is its clarity in perceiving the issues and coherence in solutions offered. In a sense, therefore, this is a study of the background and development of Gandhian socialism. In contrast to many Gandhian studies, it seeks to locate Gandhi in a particular intellectual-historical framework. It seeks to understand the context of ideas in which Gandhis thought evolved as well as the pivotal impact of his thought upon that context.

Part I examines Vivekanandas thought as the problematics first full-blown articulation. The protean character of this thought will be evident throughout the study as it explores themes, problems and vicissitudes that Vivekananda first raises somewhat awkwardly.

Part II explores failures within the problematic: formulations which, though steeped in its peculiar concerns, resolve those concerns in ways not conducive to innovative thought and progressive action. Part II classifies these failures in terms of differing attitudes toward the Hindu tradition. Bhagavan Das formulates a backward-looking Hindu socialist ideology based on the specific classical social scheme set out in Manu, the ancient text of legal and religious orthodoxy. Bipin Chandra Pal and Sri Aurobindo, by contrast, formulate forward-looking Hindu socialisms, de-emphasizing Manus specific framework and stressing instead notions of social order they find implicit in certain Hindu themes. While Aurobindo emphasizes Advaita, inquiry into the non-dual or non-divided nature of reality. Pal, stresses Bhakti, theistic devotionalism. B. R. Ambedkar, finally, represents complete rejection of Hindu tradition as any source of progressive social ideas. Though he repudiates Hinduism, he maintains identification with Indian spiritual culture by embracing and interpreting Buddhism, treating it as chief historical antagonist to Hindu social values.

For differing reasons, all these formulations represent dead ends within the problematic. Though rich with interesting and provocative conceptualizations, they lack the ideological fecundity of Gandhis thought. In various ways, thinkers examined in Part II paint themselves into ideological corners.

Part III inspects Gandhis thought, focusing especially on the evolution and revision of certain key ideas. It highlights how, despite serious problems in his thought, Gandhi lays the foundation for a self-consistent and plausible, innovative, and progressive theory of a worthwhile society and how to build it. Though Gandhis concept of wealth trusteeship is unpromising, two corollaries of his non-violent philosophy become cornerstones of Indias distinctive political vision: Gandhian socialism. One is sarvodaya, construction of egalitarian village communities. The other is satyagraha, non-violent confrontation as method of social change.

Parts IV and V trace the impact of Gandhis ideas upon Indian socialists rooted in Marxism. Here lies the emergence of a distinctive school of thought that can be called Gandhian socialism. Part IV explores partial Gandhian socialism by way of Asoka Mehta, Narendra Deva and Jawaharlal Nehru. Partial implies not inferior thought, but rather a somewhat piece-meal way of fusing Gandhian notions with socialist ones.

Part V explores thorough Gandhian socialism by way of Ramanohar Lohia and J. P. Narayan. These two differ from those in Part IV by the self-consciousness and ambitiousness with which they set about articulating a Gandhian socialism. They are also distinct in their strong emphases on religious themes, issues and ideas.

The Conclusion briefly considers some previously unaddressed questions on Hindu-Muslim confict and on the emergence, shortfalls, limits and significance of Gandhian socialism. There are two reasons for study of modern Indian thought in terms of the patterned problematic outlined here. It serves to clarify the distinctive concerns and ambitions of the thinkers involved, both individually and collectively. It also augments our own thinking about social matters, underscoring crucial issues and making accessible some serious reflection on them. The studys ultimate purpose is to emphasize interdependence of the material and the spiritual in social matters. This theme raises anlogies both Marxist and theological that may warrant brief comment.

A Marxist analogy arises from my bisection of social matters into a material realm of productivity and a spiritual realm of religion, culture, and values. This may recall Marxs distinction of economic base from ideocultural superstructure. Marx sees causal linkage from productive arrangements to religious and cultural values. The tradition explored here departs from dogmatic versions of that paradigm, ones that portray ideocultural superstructure as causally determined by a dominant material base. To thinkers examined here, such views underestimate both possibilities for ideological change within an existing productive order and the necessity of such change in creating new ones.

The theme of spiritual-material interdependence may also bring to mind a theological analogy: incarnation. Gandhis thought implicitly entails a theory of incarnation-penetration of the material by the spiritual. For Gandhi, incarnation is no single event or series of events, but rather an ongoing transfiguration of the material by the spiritual, through which human affairs grow progressively moralized. This spiritualizing process reaches into the material sphere of production and presses for moral transformation there. Incarnation thereby embodies spiritual values in the material sphere, replacing exploitational arrangements by moralized ones. Gandhis thought rebukes doctrines of incarnation that fail to seek moralized productive arrangements.

Part 1

Origins of a problematic

Vivekananda: Socialism and the Reconceptualization of Hindu Religion

Uninvited walk-on rock star at the World Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) was born in Calcutta with the given name Narendranath Dutt. He was the son of a successful attorney. In 1881, during his college education in Calcutta, Vivekananda first encountered the ecstatic mystical prophet Ramakrishna. Vivekanandas relationship with Ramakrishna deepened after Vivekanandas college education, upon the death of Vivekanandas father in 1884.

Between 1884 and 1893, Vivekananda divided his time among his discipleship to Ramakrishna, work at various jobs to support his family, and wanderings throughout India. In 1893, he addressed Chicagos World Parliament of Religions, where his speech brought him instant celebrity. He toured the United States lecture circuit until 1895, then travelled by way of England, continental Europe and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) back to India, arriving in 1897. It was in 1897 that Vivekananda launched a social service organization known as the Ramakrishna Mission. In 1899, he voyaged again to the West, returning to India fatigued and ill the following year. He thereafter remained in India, lecturing and writing insofar as his health permitted until his death.

His journey to the West in 1893 represented a mission unprecedented among Indian social reformers. He sought both to propagate Indian religious ideas and to secure funding for relief programs targeting the plight of Indias downtrodden masses. His subsequent shuttling between India and the West exemplified a turn in modern Indian sensibilities, and his writings mark a new era in Indian thought.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Indian thinkers had investigated a broad range of religious and social issues, motivated by desire to purge Hindu society of beliefs and practices inappropriate to contemporary challenges or to their conceptions of Hinduisms essential genius. Arguments flared and movements emerged in a surge of visionary activity unprecedented since the days of medieval Bhakti. Issues various and vital demanded attention: the meaning or meaninglessness of ritual, the true nature of caste, the oppression and liberation of women, for example. It remained, however, for Vivekananda to focus on one of Indias most glaring ills: poverty, degradation and subjugation among most of Indias vast population.

I am a socialist proclaimed Vivekananda, the first major Indian social thinker to do so. He devotes great attention to the misery of Indias masses. No Indian thinker before him had stressed, as he did, urgent need to eradicate mass poverty. After Vivekananda, no Indian thinker could ignore issues of poverty, exploitation and socialism.

It was not merely the fact but also the manner of this new concern that made Vivekanandas career paradigmatic. His travels between India and the West manifested fervor to forge some synthesis of Indian spiritual and Western material cultures. The way forward for India and perhaps all humanity lay in achieving a progressive material culture harmonizing rather than conflicting with Indian spirituality. Vivekanandas dream was to become the dream of an entire era.

THE AMBIGUOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF SOCIAL ACTION

One striking feature of Vivekanandas thought is its ambivalence on the religious meaning of progressive social action. Vivekananda pays official allegiance to certain classical Indian conceptions of religious life. The ultimate religious task, he claims, is personal spiritual liberation, conceived as escape from a meaningless conventional world into a transcendental dimension of awareness. Escape from the conventional world is, among other things, an escape from society, conceived as a realm of transient, illusory and ultimately meaningless relationships. He rejects the notion of social progress: how could there be progress in such a transient and meaningless realm? The balance of social ill and good remains forever constant, despite manifold apparent changes. Social evil and social good reflect aspects of worldly maya, matters of illusion and ultimate irrelevance from the standpoint of true spiritual insight.

Why then should anyone engage in any kind of social action? Vivekananda suggests that the value of social action lies exclusively in contributing to personal spiritual liberation. The most captivating aspect of conventional reality or maya is preoccupation with concerns of ones worldly self. Social action entailing personal sacrifice helps the individual achieve liberation from such bonds of worldly ego-centricity. Vivekananda repeatedly speaks of the world as a moral gymnasium in which individuals can strengthen their spiritual natures through exercises of self-sacrificial social action.

Vivekananda seems on the surface unaware of any contradiction in advocating self-sacrifice for a society that cannot thereby benefit. Self-sacrifice implies a preference for a wider social good over a narrower personal one. This makes no sense if the possibility of wider social good is denied.

Though Vivekananda may not see the contradiction logically, he surely feels it existentially. He could not devote so much concern to alleviating social miseries without feeling positive transformation to be both possible and intrinsically worthwhile. He cannot, despite himself, resist the notion that the very pinnacle of religious life lies in social action. I have realized he writes at one point, that altruistic service only is religion, the restare madness-even it is wrong to hanker after ones own salvation. (sic). It is rare for Vivekananda to voice this viewpoint so explicitly. Far more typical are comments that [O]ne must completely mold ones religious life in solitude, and that All the work you dois done for your own benefit. He endorses classical notions of a sharp divide between social engagement and the highest religious life. Occasional comments, however, along with the sheer scope of his social concern, indicate Vivekananda wrestling with radical notions: that the true meaning of religion is society and that the highest religious life lies in working for progressive social change.

SOCIAL CHANGE BY AND FOR THE DOWNTRODDEN

Vivekanandas writings contain curious passages in which he rails against Indian advocates of social reform. Such passages at first appear reactionary, but in fact they represent a radical new approach to Indian social change. The problem with so-called social reformers, according to Vivekananda, is that they merely criticize specific ills in hopes of provoking changes in habits. Vivekananda finds this approach nave: people do not change their practices just because they have been plausibly criticized. A few men who think that certain things are evil will not make a nation move, he writes.

Social change, he thinks, can be catalyzed, but not engineered. Masses of people must, through their own experience and reflection, create new ways of organizing their lives. True social reform requires augmenting the power of the masses to reflect and to act. Vivekananda writes:

It takes time, quite a long time, to make a healthy, strong, public opinion which will solve its own problems The whole problem of social reform, therefore, resolves itself into this: Where are those who want reform? Make them first First educate the nation First create the power, the sanction from which the law will so ring.

The masses require education and power. Hence, for Vivekananda, meaningful reform requires revolutionizing societys fundamental order, an order of hierarchical exploitation:

To the reformers I will point out that I am a greater reformer than any one of them. They want to reform only little bits. I want root-and-branch reform. Where we differ is in the Method Most of the reforms that have been agitated for during the past century have been ornamental. Every one of these reforms only touches the first two castes, and no other. The question of widow marriage would not touch seventy per cent of the Indian women, and all such questions only reach the higher castes of Indian people who are educated, mark you, at the expense of the masses. But that is no reformation. You must go down to the basis of the thing, to the very root of the matter. That is what I call radical reform.

Vivekananda seldom misses an opportunity to emphasize the plight of Indias poor or to condemn systems of exploitation that oppress them. The one thing that is at the root of all evils in India is the condition of the poor, he writes, as he describes their condition:

(C)lusters of huts, with crumbling mud-walls (M)oving aboutemaciated figures of young and old in tattered rags, whose faces bear deep-cut lines of the despair and poverty of yearsthe pitiful gaze of lustreless eyes of the hunger-stricken Devastation by violent plague and cholera; malaria eating into the very vitals of the nation; starvation and semi-starvation as second nature; the Kurukshetra (battlefield) of malady and misery A conglomeration of three hundred million souls, resembling men only in appearance, crushed out of life by being downtrodden by their own people and by foreign nations

Vivekananda points to the caste system and imperialism, priest power and foreign conquest, as twin causes of mass impoverishment. In Marx-like fashion, he analyzes both caste and imperialism as systems of exploitation in which the downtrodden produce wealth but do not own or enjoy it. He writes of the tyranny of the higher castes, in which:

The cultivator got almost nothing The protector came to be known as the king; he who took the commodities from one place to another was the merchant. These two did not produce anything-but still snatched away the best part of things and made themselves fat by virtually reaping most of the fruit of the cultivators toil and labor.

Elsewhere, he writes of the peasant, the shoemaker, the sweeper, and such other lower classes of India, who through the ages have been producing the entire wealth of the land, while non-producing classes have taken the substantial part of the fruits of their labor.

A similar analysis applies to British rule, of which he writes the main idea is blood-sucking. Indian labor and produce could support the entire nation in material comfort, if the whole thing is not taken off from them. Instead, India suffers at the hands of the British, who have carried away with them millions of our money, while our people have starved by villages and provinces. Vivekananda argues that though famine seldom visits parts of India still free from British rule, it occurs as the inevitable consequence of exploitation in British-ruled India.

Keen to alleviate the plight of Indias poor masses, Vivekananda organizes resources and activities of the Ramakrishna Mission. He urges followers to devote heart and soul to this one duty-the duty of raising the masses of India. Borrowing from ancient religious notions of foreswearing normal pursuits in favor of spiritual seeking, he urges a life of sannayasa (renunciation) for his followers, who should subdue all private desires in order to serve the masses: Vow, then, to devote your whole lives to the cause of these three hundred millions.

Less than clear as to what activities these sannayasins of service should pursue, Vivekananda focuses most concretely on education. He imagines bands of disinterested sannyasins, bent on doing good to others, going from village to village, disseminating education and seeking in various ways to better the condition of all The instruction should emphasize religion, as well as the arts of life. His images of instruction to offer seem sketchy:

Make an organized plan. A few cameras, some maps, globes, and some chemicals, etc., are needed. The next thing you want is a big hut. Then you must get together a number of poor, indigent folk. Having done all this, show them pictures to teach them astronomy, geography, etc., and preach Sri Ramakrishna to them.

Along with abstract learning should go enhancement of productive skills: the discovery of new avenues of production through exertions aided by Western science, enabling villagers to produce food and clothing for themselves.

Vivekananda imagines that such efforts will spark mass movements so as to revolutionize the whole country. Villagers will join the educational movement, accelerating expansion of knowledge and problem-solving capacity. Vivekanandas philosophy of change includes almost no analysis of specific problems or how to solve them. He explains his entire approach with a formula: (E)ducate our people, so that they may be able to solve their own problems. There is undoubted navet in this vision of mass liberation through mere education. In discerning the need for village mobilization, however, Vivekananda points out an approach which, in the hands of Gandhi and some of his followers, becomes a rich philosophy of transformation.

Exploitation, Vivekananda thinks, will ultimately cease with the triumph of socialism. In Marx-like fashion, he associates socialism with rule by the laboring class or Shudras. Like Marx, he sees the triumph of labor historically destined: (A) time will come whenthe Shudra class with their Shudrahoodwill gain absolute supremacy in every society. Again like Marx, he sees labors impending triumph as the crowning phase in an historical succession of rule by different classes. For Vivekananda, these correspond to the four varnas (caste groupings) of classical Indian social thought: (H)uman society is in turn governed by the four castes-the priests, the soldiers, the traders, and the laborers. He thinks of capitalism as rule by the commercial or Vaishya caste, awful in its silent crushing and blood-sucking power associates British imperial rule with Vaishya hegemony.

Last will come the laborer rule, writes Vivekananda, and he applauds this as the end to economic exploitation. Yet he is less than fully enthusiastic about this triumph of socialism. He sees socialism as a system or doctrine with something important missing. I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread. Nowhere does he articulate in detail what he means by the half a loaf that socialism fails to provide. He indicates, however, that socialism-though essential from a purely economic standpoint-lacks moral or spiritual dimensions crucial to worthwhile social life. Of socialism he writes: Its advantages will be the distribution of physical comforts-its disadvantages, (perhaps) the lowering of culture. By the lowering of culture, he means decline in morality, which is decline in essential religion:

Everything goes to show that Socialismis coming on the boards. The people will certainly want the satisfaction of their material needs, less work, no oppression, no war, more food. What guarantee have we that this civilization will last, unless it is based on religion, on the goodness of man? Depend on it, religion goes to the root of the matter. If it is right, all is right.

Vivekananda insists that ancient Vedantic (philosophically scriptural) Hinduism is the right religion for socialism: (E)qualising theories must have a spiritual basis, and that spiritual basis is the Vedanta only. To understand this, we need to explore his interpretation of Vedanta. This will prove helpful when we touch on other thinkers as well.

KANTIAN ADVAITA AND SPIRITUALIZED SOCIALISM

Vivekanandas Vedanta centers on Advaita, the philosophy of universal non-dualism, explanation of which occupies much of Vivekanandas effort. It is crucial to understand the Advaitic doctrine of selfhood as Vivekananda interprets it.

Advaita, he observes, asserts a non-dual theory of selfhood. There may appear to be a plenitude of selves in the world, but this is an illusion. There is, in reality, only one unitary and universal Self, in which all the many separate and particular selves merely participate.

Classical Advaita, it has often been claimed, makes no strong pronouncements in ethics and morals. The goal is private salvation, not the well-being of others. Liberation, insight on the non-duality of Selfhood, consists in gnosis, or knowledge, not moral action. Vivekanandas striking reinterpretation links the Advaitic doctrine of Selfhood with a theory of morality.

Morality for Vivekananda concerns two basic questions: what is moral action? and why should one practice it? His simple answer to the first question is: (T)he only definition that can be given of morality is that: That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral. His answer to the second question involves Advaitic interpretation of selfish and unselfish. Selfishness, concern for private wellbeing over general well-being, self-defeatingly posits an illusory, separate, and particular self, over the true and universal Self. In reality, however, there is no well-being apart from general well-being. Unselfishness pursues general well-being, the only true well-being. We learn why one should act morally: because only moral action promotes true well-being. True well-being, general well-being, advances only through unselfish action.

Borrowing from classical Advaitic philosophy, Vivekananda explains how humans naturally but mistakenly identify their well-being with illusory private selfhood. An illusion of isolated and particular selfhood arises from entanglement of universal Selfhood in the material world. There the Self inhabits particular bodies creating illusion of distinction and separation. The universal Self makes contact with nature through the sense experience of these illusory selves. This entanglement with nature, the sense experience of illusory separate selves, is root cause of selfishness. Well-being mistakenly seems identified with the bodys sensual enjoyment in the world of nature.

If pursuit of private well-being is illusion, it is also unfreedom. Selfishness is a life of slavery to sense experience, desire, and satisfaction. Vivekanandas interpretation of Advaita owes much to Kant. For Vivekananda as for Kant, morality and freedom are one and the same. Like Kant, Vivekananda conceives of nature as a realm of determination and unfreedom. In nature, events follow laws of causality that allow no variation. There is therefore no freedom in the world of nature. Human beings, through their bodies, inhabit this enslaved realm, part of nature and therefore subject to determined causality. Human action tied to nature through the body can never be free. In particular, human action is unfree if determined by sensual imperatives of the illusory separate self. Sensually determined action, selfishness, unfreedom: these are equivalent.

Freedom, by contrast, lies in control of the sensual passions by the will, which is spiritual. Freedom lies in action not dictated by nature. Free action is moral action, aimed at general rather than private well-being. That action is moral which frees us from the bondage of matter and vice versa, writes Vivekananda. Pursuit of private well-being can yield only frustration because sensual desire is ultimately insatiable, only inflamed by temporary satisfaction. Desire is infinite, its fulfillment limited, Vivekananda writes. The satisfaction of desire only increases it, as oil poured on fire but makes it burn more fiercely.

To Vivekananda, true well-being implies a liberation from nature. This requires restraint upon sensual passions and material enjoyment. As with Kant, freedom requires self-restraint, exercise of power by will over nature. No freedom without renunciation, writes Vivekananda. As also with Kant, this freedom is equivalent to morality.

Vivekanandas interpretation of Advaita provides socialism with an appropriate spiritual basis. Socialism seeks an end to exploitation. Exploitation and social inequality, thinks Vivekananda, are ultimately rooted in selfishness, slavery to inherently limitless material desire:

There is a limit to the working power of human beings, but no limit to desire; so we strive to get hold of the working power of others and enjoy the fruits of their labors, escaping work ourselves.

By explaining roots of selfishness in Advaitic terms as spiritual error and its consequences in Marxist terms as drive to command the labor of others, Vivekananda shows the mutual relevance of Vedantic religion and socialism.

To Vivekananda, the main shortcoming of most socialist doctrine lies in failure to identify and attack exploitation at its root: spiritual error. Advaita, urging restraint on material passions and preference for general well-being, attacks the root of exploitation and motivates effort to build a socialist order. Sannyasins of service exemplify Advaitic renunciation as they work for social transformation.

If Advaita is crucial to actualizing socialism, the reverse is also true. Vivekananda tirelessly insists on the emptiness of spiritual values not exemplified and fostered by concrete social institutions. He writes, That society is the greatest, where the highest truths become practical. His thought weakens, however, when he tries to imagine the incarnation of non-exploitation in practical arrangements.

AMBIVALENT SOCIOLOGY

Vivekanandas exploration of the practical consists primarily of scattered commentaries on Indian and Western social arrangements. The bulk of these consists of two overlapping types: 1) contrasts of Indian and Western society; and 2) discussions of caste.

Societies, holds Vivekananda, can be distinguished from each other based on particular aptitudes for exploring and solving different sorts of problems. Hence every society displays a distinctive genius accounting for much of its overall character. To Vivekananda, the crucial distinction lies in contrast between Indian and Western societies. Indian society, he urges, is essentially spiritual, Western society primarily materialistic. India specializes in spiritual progress, the West in material progress.

Western materialism, thinks Vivekananda, inevitably fosters both exploitation and dissatisfaction. He sees Western capitalism as the apotheosis of exploitation and dissatisfaction rooted in a materialist approach to life. Capitalist wealth has not solved the problem of want, but only made it keener. Pursuit of material enjoyment brings no satisfaction, but only a greater quantum of desire. Accumulations of capital and productive power merely expand the power of selfish impulses. Hence, capitalism achieves record heights of exploitation and antagonism:

The material tyranny is tremendous. The wealth and power of a country are in the hands of a few men who do not work but manipulate the work of millions of human beings. By this power they can deluge the whole earth with blood

Vivekananda maintains that the West cannot alleviate this appalling state of affairs through its own spiritual resources. Many Westerners, he maintains, have grown weary of the competition, the struggle, the brutality of their commercial civilization. He presumably has socialism in mind when he writes that they are looking forward towards something better, calling for political and social changes as panacea for capitalist ills.

Vivekananda finds little promise in what he sees as the narrowly institutional approach of most socialists, who expect progress from mere political or social manipulation. It is spiritual culture and ethical culture, he thinks, that the West needs in order to remedy its civilizational defects. Only India, with its rich reservoir of spiritual culture, can provide Western culture what it needs. The nations of the West are coming to us for spiritual help, he writes. The West must learn from India the conquest of internal nature.

India meanwhile stands in danger of infection by Western materialism. The curse of the West-the senses, has been creeping into India, contaminating Indian culture with luxurious ideals, he writes. India must keep a firm hold on spirituality. To adopt the materializing civilization of the West courts moral ruin.

Despite these moral hazards, Vivekaranda insists that India embrace greater materialism. What is most dangerous is also most necessary. Indias poverty and exploitation cannot be alleviated without massive attention to problems of production:

We talk foolishly against material civilization Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor. Bread! Bread! India is to be raised, the poor are to be fed, education is to be spread, and the evil of priestcraft is to be removed. No priestcraft, no social tyranny! More bread, more opportunity for everybody.

There is obvious perplexity in Vivekanandas mind as he alternately condemns and praises luxury and material civilization. Socialisms practical requirements clash with its spiritual ones. Vivekananda attempts to resolve this dilemma through formula and conceptual compromise. In order to reap benefits while avoiding pitfalls, he advises that material civilization be adopted in moderate amount: A little of it, perhaps, is good for us. The notion of moderate materialism is a fertile one, but only insofar as it transcends Vivekanandas quick Goldilocks epiphany. Some thinkers explored below improve on this at least somewhat, offering spiritual discussions and productive proposals around themes of moderate materialism. On a related note, Vivekananda imagines a sort of hybrid of India and the West, producing a society progressive both materially and spiritually. Can you make a European society with Indias religion? I believe it is possible, and must be.A blend of Indian spirituality with Western material culture becomes a paradigm for later thinkers. Vivekananda articulates the paradigm but does not go far in applying it.

Vivekanandas dilemmas grow more convoluted when he turns to the issue of caste. Caste, according to Vivekananda, is a system of exploitation. It is also Vedantic religions most prominent social feature. Hence, caste is an obvious embarrassment for asserting Vedantic religion as key antidote to exploitation. The simplest evasion is to deny any link between Advaitic spirituality and caste. In religion, Vivekananda writes, there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Caste is nothing more than hereditary division of labor, comparable to networks of trade guilds. It is a mere practical arrangement, devoid of religious meaning. Vivekananda warns that exaggerated ritual aspects of caste have nearly destroyed religion. What more degradation can there be, he writes, than that the greatest minds of a country have been discussing about the kitchen for several hundreds of years, discussing whether I may touch you or you touch me, and what is the penance for this touching! Vivekananda bemoans these bizarre preoccupations:

We are neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics, nor Tantrics. We are just Dont touchists. Our religion is in the kitchen. Our God is the cooking pot, and our religion is, Dont touch me, I am holy. If this goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic asylum.

Vivekananda wavers, however, in separating religion and caste. He seeks in various ways to portray caste as an element in Vedantic religions moral and anti-exploitative genius. He portrays caste, for example, as an orientation in social life toward general well-being in communities rather than private well-being as individuals. Caste therefore exerts a moralizing influence in contrast with Western cultures encouragement of selfishness:

You Western people are individualistic. I want to do this thing because I like it; I will elbow everyone. Why? Because I like to. I want my own satisfaction So what is the basis of Indias social order? It is the caste law. I am born for the caste, I live for the caste. Born in the caste, the whole life must be lived according to caste regulation. In other wordsthe Western man is born individualistic, while the Hindu is socialistic-entirely socialistic.

In discouraging selfish individualism, the socialist spirit of caste protects the weak from exploitation. This it does by fostering cooperative rather than antagonistic economic relationships:

Competition-cruel, cold, and heartless-is the law of Europe. Our law is caste-the breaking of competition, checking its forces, mitigating its cruelties

The notion of caste as protector of the weak departs strikingly from Vivekanandas portrayal of caste elsewhere as a system of exploitation. Contradiction emerges even more sharply when Vivekananda pictures caste as a hierarchy of renunciation, with higher-placed groups cultivating morality and spirituality through material self-restraint:

The higher the caste, the greater the restrictions. The lowest caste people can eat and drink anything they like. But as men rise in the social scale, more and more restrictions come

This hierarchy of material renunciation culminates with Brahmins, the poorest of all the classes in the country, says Vivekananda, who never covet wealth. Vivekanandas sociology breaks down in his attempt to defend Vedantic religion as a source of moralizing and even socialist institutions. Caste as a hierarchy of renunciation integrates poorly with caste as a hierarchy of exploitation.

This contradiction in Vivekanandas doctrine of caste points subtler problems in his theories of social change and democracy. With such contradictory views on the nature of caste, Vivekananda cannot help but equivocate on the question of eradicating it. In one voice, he argues that caste is bondage, and Indias greatest dividing factor. Caste is a barrier to Indias progress. It narrows, restricts, separates. In another voice, he insists that, caste is a very good thing, one of the greatest social institutions ever devised. For India, caste is the plan we want to follow, because it is destined to lead Indian humanity to its goal. Though Vivekanandas views are deeply unsettled, he occasionally hints at a reconciliation. He imagines preserving caste as division of labor but destroying it as a system of exploitation. The division of labor will operate without such privileges as allow higher castes to trample on lower ones.

Eradication of exploitation does not, for Vivekananda, necessarily imply eradication of hierarchy. There will, it seems, be some castes to rule society and do its intellectual work, others to do its menial work. Though somewhat ambiguously, Vivekananda supports the notion that such divisions be based on aptitude and merit rather than birth.

Vivekananda envisions a sort of hierarchical socialism in which power differentials exist, but without exploitation. Such is his picture of the ancient caste system, prior to corruption by high-caste oppression and exploitation. He imagines a revival of that old order, such that Brahmins would once again exemplify renunciatory values and virtues, while tutoring lower groups progressively in them:

The plan in India is to make everybody a Brahmin, the Brahmin being the ideal of humanity. If you read the history of India, you will find that attempts have always been made to raise the lower classes. Many are classes that have been raised. Many more will follow till the whole will become Brahmin. That is the plan. We have only to raise them without bringing down anybody. And this has mostly to be done by the Brahmins themselves

One difficulty with this hierarchical vision is that it contradicts Vivekanandas other model of progress: mass action by the dispossessed, culminating in a Shudra regime of popular self-rule. Vivekananda the revivalist is at odds with Vivekananda the revolutionary. To be sure, Vivekananda hints that a truly egalitarian order would perhaps emerge from the system of hierarchical socialism and elite-managed change. Moreover, the two models can partially be reconciled through his notion of elite-sponsored education transmitting spiritual and material wherewithal that the downtrodden require so as to improve their own lives. The moral ascendancy of Brahmin-hood dovetails with the social ascendancy of Shudra-hood.

There is, nevertheless, a disturbing paternalistic flavor to Vivekanandas hierarchical socialism, a flavor poorly concealed by his naive faith in the liberating power of mere education. Education initiated by the elite will slowly and gently alleviate oppression. Meanwhile, there must be no direct attack upon exploitational arrangements. Vivekananda admonishes activists to take care not to set up class-strife between the poor peasants, the laboring people, and wealthy classes. No direct attack is needed because the exploitative order is historically destined to disappear through the activity of the upper classes.

Vivekananda argues that the historical role of a ruling class is to dig its own grave-pave the way to its own demise and toward eventual end of exploitation. This seems to borrow from Marxism, but there is a crucial difference between a Marxist formulation and Vivekanandas. In Marxist theory, there is a cunning to history by which a ruling class, precisely through pursuit of selfish class-bound interests, unwittingly creates conditions leading to its own demise and replacement by a successor dominant class. Vivekananda, by contrast, imagines ruling classes consciously pursuing their own demise as rulers by lending generous assistance to lower classes. Though the Marxist theory may be untrue, it is certainly more plausible than Vivekanandas naivete. The sophistication Vivekananda brings to bear when criticizing piecemeal approaches to social reform deserts him when he envisions the moral regeneration of Indias ruling classes. As Vivekananda himself notes, groups do not yield their ways of life simply because reformers have criticized them.

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What should modern independent India be and how can it get there? | EconomyNext - EconomyNext

For more than a fortnight 145 factory workers in Kawerau, a New Zealand town with a population of about 7,000, have been locked out by Essity, a Swedish-based multinational company. The Kawerau plant makes well-known brands such as Purex and Sorbent toilet paper and Handee paper towels.

Essity management took the brutal step on August 9 after workers took limited strike action, having rejected a pay increase of just 3 percent over three years and a lump sum payment of $4,500. The offer was well below the increased cost of living, with New Zealands annual inflation rate at 7.3 percent.

Throughout the world, governments and corporations are seeking to force workers to accept wage cuts and attacks on their conditions in response to the economic crisis triggered by the COVID pandemic and made worse by the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine.

Workers are being driven into struggle. Major strikes are erupting in Britain, the United States, and Australia. In New Zealand, thousands of healthcare workers and firefighters have recently held nationwide strikes, opposing low wages and unsafe working conditions. On August 24, 100 workers at packaging manufacturer Visy held a one-day strike, demanding a 10 percent pay rise.

Essity is a multinational Swedish-based company with 46,000 workers. It is the worlds second-biggest maker of toilet paper and tissues and also produces sanitary products, facemasks and bandages, among other products.

The company is making significant profits during the pandemic. In the first half of 2022, net sales increased 27.8 percent compared with the same period last year. Chief executive Magnus Groth boasted of record growth and higher sequential profit due to significant price increases, a bigger market share and new acquisitions. Profit for the first six months of 2022 was 2,194,000,000 Swedish Krona, which is nearly $NZ331 million.

The Kawerau dispute shows that Essity is seeking to further boost its profits by driving down real wages. The company is relying, above all, on the assistance of the trade union bureaucracy to impose a sellout deal.

Until this week, the corporate media had published only brief reports about the lockout, keeping workers around the country largely in the dark. After an initial article on August 9, the local Bay of Plenty Times finally published an update on August 23, which said no end is in sight for the lockout. An Essity manager told the newspaper that the lockout was imposed after 19 days of strike action.

Pulp and Paper Workers Union (PPWU) secretary Tane Phillips told the Times that the company is not willing to move on the lockout. A union delegate, Roger Coffin, said he was concerned some young employees, or those on temporary contracts may be struggling financially. The Council of Trade Unions (CTU) has not made any statement on the lockout.

The unions are pro-capitalist organisations, which long ago ceased to represent the interests of workers, even in a limited sense. They collaborate with management and have close ties to the Labour Party government. The PPWUs Phillips is senior vice-president of Labours Mori organisation.

The unions aim since the start of the dispute has been to isolate the Kawerau workers and prevent them from joining forces with other sections of the working class to oppose the government and corporate attacks on wages and conditions.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Phillips by phone on August 22. He said the lockout was preceded by industrial action by 62 of the plants workers, who had held regular 48-hour strikes every couple of weeks for a while during July-August.

Asked why the union had not announced these strikes publicly at the time and had kept the working class in the dark about the dispute, Phillips said: We find that if you do that, then everyone [i.e. the company] takes it very personally and they get into trench warfare pretty quickly. He added that the unions relationship with management was normally pretty good but that the lockout had caused animosity and it would take a long time to heal.

Phillips said the union wanted to go into talks with Essity management facilitated by the governments Employment Relations Authority, and it was necessary to kind of keep quiet while youre doing that kind of stuff.

The PPWU has only asked for a pay rise to match inflation, which would effectively be a wage freeze. Phillips added, significantly, that the union is prepared to negotiate something lower, as long as it is not as low as the companys offer. He similarly told Radio NZ on August 9: We will negotiate, but we cannot accept 3 percent.

The unions strategy, bluntly, is to help Essity starve the workers into accepting a sellout.

The Socialist Equality Group calls on locked out workers to rebel against the unions efforts to isolate them and to form a new organisation: a rank-and-file factory committee independent of the union. Such a committee, run democratically by the workers themselves, would fight to break the near-blackout imposed by the media and the unions, and to link up in a united struggle with workers across the country and internationally against the austerity policy of the government and big business.

Workers can only fight a multinational corporation if they adopt an international strategy. An appeal should be made to the tens of thousands of Essity workers in Australia and other countries to expand the fight for decent wages and conditions for all. The trade unions, as nationalist organisations, are hostile to such a strategy and seek to keep workers in different parts of the world isolated from each other.

The SEG also warns that workers face a struggle against the Labour Party, which represents the interests of big business. Jacinda Arderns Labour government has used the pandemic as the pretext to funnel tens of billions of dollars to the rich, while workers face declining real wages. This year, at the behest of the corporate elite, the government has kept schools and nonessential businesses open, allowing COVID-19 to spread out of control, resulting in about 2,000 deaths so far.

Kawerau is one of the poorest towns in New Zealand. In the 2018 census, Kawerau had an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent (compared with 4 percent nationwide) and only 34.2 percent of people aged over 15 were employed full-time (compared with 50.1 percent nationwide).

The town has a long and bitter experience of pro-business restructuring under successive Labour and National Party governments, imposed with the collaboration of the trade unions.

The Tasman paper mill, once the main employer, suffered repeated restructuring and job cuts after David Langes Labour government removed import controls and industrial subsidies in the 1980s, and began privatising state-owned industries, including forestry. In the 1990s, the mills workforce was slashed from about 2,000 to lower than 1,000, and there was further downsizing over the next decades. In 2021, the mills then-owner Norske Skog finally closed it down entirely, with the last remaining 160 workers made redundant.

This history points to the need for workers to take up the fight for socialism in opposition to every party in parliament and the unions. The wealth and resources produced by the working class should be used, not to accumulate profits for wealthy shareholders, but to address human needs, including the provision of high-paying jobs, with good conditions, and a high standard of living for all. The SEG calls on workers who agree with this perspective to contact us today.

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Lockout of Essity workers in New Zealand in third week - WSWS

Nepali Congress leader Pradip Giri, a noted socialist thinker, passed away on Saturday night.

He was 74.

He passed away at around 9:30pm, Dr Pankaj Barman, a senior consultant and medical oncologist at Nepal Mediciti Hospital who had been attending to Giri, told the Post. He was also battling a last-stage cancer. Pneumonia from which he had been suffering led to multi-organ failure.

Giri was admitted to Nepal Mediciti Hospital in Lalitpur last month after he returned from India after treatment for cancer.

Earlier on Saturday, a statement by his family said Giri underwent immunotherapy a week back to boost his immune system.

However, he has now developed massive pneumonia, which has further compromised his health, resulting in multiple organ failure, the statement read.

Giri, a longtime Congress leader, worked closely with the late BP Koirala. He was highly influenced by the socialist movement in India led by Jayprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohiya.

He was known as a fearless leader, not afraid of criticising his own party and the leadership and never hesitating to offer opposing and unpopular views.

He was a two-time member of the Constituent Assembly, which drafted the Constitution of Nepal 2015.

He, however, refused to sign the document, saying the process was flawed and the constitution failed to address the concerns of various sections of the societyTharus, Madheshis and Janajatis.

He had his sympathy for those who were protesting against the constitution-writing process even as top leaders of his party rushed to finalise the document.

A seasoned orator, Giri was well-versed in Marxism, often putting some communists, who claim to follow Marxist ideology, to shame.

He won the 2017 parliamentary elections from Siraha-1.

Giri, who started his political career in the early 1960s from the Nepali Congress, was also known for his simplicity, candor and wide-ranging erudition.

He never held any position of benefit.

Leaders from across the political spectrum expressed their condolences, hailing Giri as a veteran thinker, philosopher, socialist, intellect and an epitome of a leader who showed how politicians should lead a simple life.

We lost one of the brightest, most intellectual and profound thinkers of contemporary politics, said Ghanshyam Bhusal, a CPN-UML leader. A towering figure of our age committed to socialism.

Giri had a good grasp of Marxism too and was widely regarded as an intellectual who could explain Marxism to ordinary minds.

His [Giris] socialist view was different from others because he grounded socialism and Marxism philosophies in the Nepali context. A rare breed indeed, Bhusal told the Post. He was a true Gandhain someone really inspired by Indian socialist leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and the like.

A student of economics and philosophy, Giri led a simple life, according to politicians who have known him for long.

He repeatedly refused the ministerial posts offered to him.

Such a gifted orator he was that every time he spoke in Parliament, he held parliamentarians spellbound. He was one of the most sought-after politicians by television anchors.

He has written over a dozen books on economics, women, philosophy and Marxism.

Deep Kumar Upadhyay, a Congress leader who is a former Nepali ambassador to India and a longtime friend of Giris, said that an era of value-based politics has ended with Giris death.

When the incumbent Congress-led government offered to pay for his hospital charges, Giri refused, said one Nepali Congress leader, highlighting the value-based politics Giri believed in.

Before he was admitted to Nepal Mediciti Hospital, Giri was admitted to a hospital in Mumbai, India.

Despite being born in a rich family, he lived a very simple life, Upadhyay said. He was well-versed in Marxism, socialism, and social democracy. He could speak on literature to economics impromptu. A vastly knowledgeable person, he was highly regarded not only in Nepal but also India.

According to Upadhyay, Giri was one leader who always played the opposition role in the Congress, questioning the leadership and keeping them on their toes.

For a long time, Giri had built an image of an anti-Koirala leader in the Nepali Congress because of his rebellious political nature.

When the Congress split in 2002, Giri supported the Nepali Congress (Democratic) formed by Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Giri chose to remain with Deuba because both of them came from the Krishna Prasad Bhattarai camp, according to Congress leaders.

Those who knew Giri said that he had a very good understanding of world politics from the labour movement to how social democracy is functioning around the globe.

Giri was equally well-informed about the contemporary global trends, where the labour movement stands, and whether social democracy is functioning well or not, said Bhusal, the UML leader known for his interpretation of Marxism. The best thing about Giri is he looked at them and interpreted them from different angles. That kind of analytical brain we hardly find in Nepali politicians.

Despite being such a great thinker and an upright politician, Giri did have some flaws, leaders close to him say.

He understood the problems in Nepali politics and would not hesitate to explain them, but he did little to address those issues, according to leaders.

In multiple interviews, Giri would say that he chose not to become a minister because he wouldnt be able to solve the problems he was talking about.

Congress leader Bimalendra Nidhi is one of the persons who knew Giri since his student days.

He was one of the prominent leaders of our times. He never did politics of power and he often had views independent of the party line, Nidhi told the Post. He was not a leader of only the Congress but of the whole country. The country has lost a fine politician its an irreparable loss.

Nidhi said Giri was a true follower of Gandhi, Lohiya and BP Koirala.

But he wouldnt hesitate to criticise BP Koirala, Nidhi told the Post. Thats how he stood tall. He lived a life of conviction. The country today lost a leader who was simple, intelligent, honest, and knowledgeable.

According to the Nepali Congress, Giris last rites will be performed at Pashupati Aryaghat on Sunday.

Issuing a statement on Saturday night, Congress whip Min Bishwakarma said Giris body will be kept on the hospital premises from 9-11am for final tributes.

His body will then be kept at the Congress party office in Sanepa from 11:30am to 2pm, where the party leaders, cadres and general public can offer their final tributes.

His last rites will be performed at Aryaghat on Sunday evening, said Bishwakarma.

Congress President and Prime Minister Deuba said on Twitter that he was shocked by Giris demise.

I am shocked by the news of the death of my friend Pradeep Giriji, the leader of Nepali Congress and an ideological and socialist thinker of Nepali politics, Deuba tweeted. With his death, Nepal has lost a true and good leader. Wishing his soul eternal peace, I express my deepest condolences to the family.

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Pradip Giri, a socialist thinker and philosopher, dies at 74 - The Kathmandu Post

Brazils presidential elections, scheduled for October 2, are being held under extraordinary circumstances. Almost six decades after the US-backed coup that overthrew President Joo Goulart in 1964, the possibility of a new military dictatorship is being openly discussed within the Brazilian bourgeoisie.

The Brazilian Socialist Equality Group (GSI) calls on the working class to mobilize its social force independently against growing dictatorial threats, rejecting the pseudo-lefts demands for its subordination to capitalism and the bourgeois state.

The official opening of Brazils election campaign on August 16 has laid bare the fraudulent claims of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaros official opposition, led by the Workers Party (PT), that it is waging a struggle in defense of the social and democratic rights of the working class and against the strengthening of fascism in the country.

While the PT promotes the idea that Bolsonaro is politically isolated and weak, his demise is only a matter of time, Bolsonaro is engaged in frantic preparations for a coup, centered on relentless claims that the Electoral Court (TSE) is preparing to rig the vote in favor of the PT candidate, former President Lus Incio Lula da Silva.

As part of this strategy, Bolsonaro has directed the Defense Ministry to mobilize military resources to call into question the voting machines, setting up a parallel vote count that will essentially give the generals a justification not to recognize the candidate declared the winner by the Electoral Court.

The president has already converted the upcoming commemoration of Brazils Independence Day on September 7 into a massive rehearsal for his putsch. He has called his supporters to take to the streets one last time against the TSE, and has tried to arrange a massive military display involving all three branches to coincide with his arrival on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, to address a fascistic mob.

A conversation leaked by the Metrpoles website has revealed how a section of the ruling class openly supports a Bolsonaro dictatorship. Shrugging off the oppositions warnings that such a regime would scare investors, Jos Koury, a real estate businessman, argued that, surely nobody will cut business with Brazil. As they keep them with several dictatorships around the world.

Bolsonaro remains fully supported in his conspiracy by the two largest parties in Congress, which failed to abandon him, as predicted by Lula, who tried without success to rekindle his old alliance with Bolsonaros chief-of-staff, Ciro Nogueira.

At the same time, the armed forces are preparing an unprecedented national mobilization on the pretext of threats of electoral violence. For the first time since 1985, battalions will be on standby to act throughout the country without being requested by the governors. While the president is certainly counting on episodes of organized violence on Election Day to open the way for emergency rule, these preparations underscore the threat of an independent intervention of military forces with the same goal.

In contrast to the advanced and explosive state of the political crisis in Brazil, the tone of the PT-led opposition campaign was set by the reading of the pro-capitalist Letters for Democracy on August 11 at the So Paulo Faculty of Law.

Endorsed and promoted by the PT, the trade unions, and its allied pseudo-left parties as a great leap forward in the fight against fascism, these cowardly letters fail to even mention Bolsonaro or his plot to overthrow democracy and establish a military dictatorship.

The first document, In defense of Democracy and Justice, was advanced by large business associations, led by the So Paulo Federation of Industries (FIESP) and by the Brazilian Federation of Banks (Febraban). The second, Letter to Brazilian Women and Men in Defense of the Rule of Law (Estado Democrtico de Direito)! was put forward individually by the barons of industry and financethe leaders of the families that own Ita bank and industrial empires such as Suzano, Votorantim, and Klabin. Signing both documents were not only former PT presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff, but also the two largest trade union federations in the country, the CUT and Fora Sindical, as well as the National Union of Students (UNE).

The political orientation of these documents was spelled out by the former justice minister of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, Jos Carlos Dias, who in the introduction of the first letter cited its unprecedented character in bringing together capital and labor in defense of democracy.

Such a remark says more than its author probably intended. The unprecedented character could be attributed to the fact that the same capitalist entities and personalities that supposedly defend democracy today supported the 1964 military coup, inaugurating a 21-year-long bloody regime that Bolsonaro celebrates and says should have killed ten times as many.

The 1964 coup was carried out ostensibly in defense of bourgeois democracy, understood by such representatives of the Brazilian bourgeoisie as the unconditional defense of private property and the right to profit.

It is also revealing that the letters declare that in todays Brazil there is no more room for authoritarian deviations. Dictatorship and torture belong to the past. They do not explain what allowed room for a dictatorship in 1964. Nor do they indicate what fundamental social and political transformations have occurred since then, and why, if Brazil's political reality no longer allows it, an authoritarian offensive is clearly underway.

The letters supportersfrom trade unionists to identity politics careerists and bankersemphasize that they have been signed not only by the cream of capitalist society, but also by thousands of police and military officers, and that the first to read them is a former president of the Military Supreme Court, representing the the top brass.

A coup, they insist, would be bad for business and opposed by foreign governments, above all by the US. And they acknowledge as their model another letter for democracy from 1977, sponsored by an undisguised fascist, Goffredo da Silva Telles Jnior, who spent his political life in the Integralist movement and supported the 1964 coup.

In other words, they insist that the bourgeoisie, the military, imperialism and even the Brazilian right wing are against a coup. The threat against democracy they are supposedly fighting, devoid of any real political or social basis, would come solely from President Bolsonaro and a handful of lunatic advisers.

The unity between the capitalists and their lackeys in the unions, the PT and its pseudo-left satellites is based upon the contention that everything is fine. The daily crises between the branches of government and the relentless declarations of generals in favor of Bolsonaro and in commemoration of the bloody military dictatorship of 1964-1985 are nothing but background noise.

The principal purpose of this political operation is to conceal from the Brazilian working class the state of terminal crisis of capitalism. On an international scale, this crisis has produced an unprecedented offensive on the living standards of the masses, motivated the malignant response of the worlds ruling classes to deadly pandemics and the climate crisis, and is driving humanity toward a Third World War. These phenomena are fundamentally incompatible with democratic forms of rule. They lie behind the rise of far-right and openly fascist forces in countries such as France, the United Kingdom, India, the Philippines and Germany, and motivated Trumps January 6 coup in the United States which serves as a model for Bolsonaro.

While Bolsonaros authoritarian offensive is aimed at crushing the resistance of the working class through a regime of open violence, the PT and its allies pursue the same goal through legal means, which include their efforts to chloroform the public about the dictatorial threats and their use of unions as an industrial police apparatus.

These operations by the rival factions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie are necessary because the working class is radically opposed to the current state of affairs. It has already begun its counter-offensive, with a powerful wave of strikes and mass demonstrations that is increasingly turning against the capitalist system on a global scale.

None of the objective driving forces behind the crisis of democracy in Brazil and worldwide are even mentioned in the letters for democracy. To raise the origins of the Brazilian political crisis would automatically expose the ostensible hopes of the letters promoters, including the reelection of Lula, as a huge deception.

The PT was founded 42 years ago by trade unionists and Pabloite renegades from the Fourth International who advocated a parliamentary path to a welfare state and even socialism in Brazil. The PTs reworking of the Stalinist two-stage theory of revolutionwhich, applied by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), had already paved the path to the 1964 military coupserved the purpose of diverting the Brazilian working class uprising that had fatally undermined the military dictatorship. The confidence they advocated in the democratic potential of the Brazilian bourgeois state has given rise, in less than three decades, to renewed threats of fascist dictatorship.

Now, highly discredited among the working masses, the PT and its pseudo-left promoters propose a repetition of that catastrophic path through a bankrupt bourgeois alliance to save Brazilian capitalism.

The adherence of major economic sectors to a declaration of opposition to Bolsonaros coup offensive expresses a division within the ruling class and the lack of confidence of certain sections in the viability of this dictatorial project. These same sections see the political soporifics offered by the PT as a necessary means of preparing such a radical change in the character of the regime.

But the dispute within the bourgeoisie is not settled. As behind the backs of the public the ruling elite openly discusses the possibility of either a violent takeover by Bolsonaro, or independent intervention by the military, there is a question none of the signatories of the letters for democracy can answer: if the tanks take to the streets, even if against Bolsonaro, who will send them back to the barracks?

In 1964, the Brazilian armed forces promised swift action and elections the following year, before staying in power for 21 years and executing, torturing, and exiling thousands.

Todays dictatorial conspiracies must be disarmed, and the working class is the only social force capable of doing so. Such a fight demands a complete political break with the PT, the unions and pseudo-left parties responsible for subordinating the working class to the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. The workers counteroffensive in defense of their social and democratic rights is inseparable from a struggle against capitalism itself, the cause of austerity, war and dictatorship. And it can only be carried out through a socialist and internationalist strategy.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the world political party that consciously represents and advances the interests of the global working class upsurge, of which the Brazilian workers struggle is an integral part. The building of a section of the ICFI in Brazil, the Partido Socialista pela Igualdade (PSI), is the great task of the present. It will open a new and decisive stage in the long history of the revolutionary struggle of the Brazilian working class.

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Down with the conspiracies of Bolsonaro and the military! - WSWS