Reactions of the powerful to the pandemic provide a distinct window to the current state of human society. The picture we see through this window is ugly and brutal. Disempowering and dehumanising structures of governance, ego-maniac rulers searching for opportunities even in mass tragedy, and rich stashing away more riches through public fraud, even while the poor starve and die, darken this pictures. Articles in this issue of Critique try to look deeper. They do not treat the Corona pandemic as an unforeseen event, but use it like a lens to explore why our society has reacted the way it has?
The
year 2020 was the most turbulent in recent history. The novel corona virus
claimed not only over 1.8 million humans, but also disrupted regular
functioning of society. Looking ahead, it is becoming a cliché that things will
not go back to the normal existing before the pandemic.
Verily,
future historians are going to mark the year 2020 as when qualitatively new
ways of social interaction, economic behaviour, work and entertainment became
dominant. Digital communication technologies reached such levels of
sophistication and penetration during the pandemic, that a virtual social world
separate from our bodily existence, and freed from its constraints of time and
space, took on a life of its own. Techno-managers found that it is more
profitable to get mental workers do the work from their homes, any time of the
day, all days of the week, than provide them office spaces where they work
during regulated hours. Urban middle
classes even in a poor country like India found that getting regular consumables
delivered at home via digital marketing platforms is much more convenient than
shopping. The entertainment industry, including cinema and sports, discovered
that there is no need to crowd people in theaters and stadia to make money.
Managers of higher education had been pushing for online learning for years.
Now suddenly, without any controversy and opposition, they got teachers to
teach, students to learn, and awarded degrees without bringing the two together
in physical spaces of colleges and universities. Of course, the new virtual
world of digital social interactions exists on top of the labour of a
cyber-proletariat: like eight thousand contract workers of Winstrom mobile
factory near Bangalore who had to go on a strike to get three months’ back
wages, or armies of delivery men and women who swarm into cities every morning
from warehouses of digital marketing behemoths, or workers who lay fiber
cables, build mobile phone towers, and maintain the equipment of network
control centers and delivery points at private homes and buildings. They have
no employment security. In a directly physical sense, their work is
back-breaking, as well as alienating. But that is the old story of work under
capitalism, nothing new there!
Modernity
is closely associated with separation between the private and the public. A new
domain of public life in factories, offices, marketplaces, mass politics,
universities, and also of protests, demonstrations and revolutions has emerged
in distinction from private life of consumption and leisure with immediate
family members. Modern public life creates distinct forms of sociality. It is
this public sociality which is going to be most directly impacted by
developments during the pandemic year. Simultaneously, new stresses are going
to be felt subjectively, as activities hitherto restricted to the public domain
enter the domestic sphere. How would humans cope with these new stresses,
without help from older forms of public sociality, remains to the seen?
If
one axis of social processes unleashed by the pandemic is directed towards
changing future, the other axis digs into the realities of human society here and
now. The current capitalist society is structured by authority, hierarchy, and
relations of exploitation and oppression. As governments, corporates, public
institutions and households scrambled to face pandemic’s shock, guiding
principles and primary concerns of this structure came out into the open. Does
a government act first to secure the welfare of the most vulnerable, or is it
more concerned with creating a safety firewall around already privileged? Does
a central banker provide new liquidity to the unemployed and the poor, who
would use it for immediate consumption and generate demand for industries, or is
it meant primarily to prevent a fall in financial markets, where the rich keep
most of their assets? Is the sole focus of an education system on technocratic
fixes, or does it look after the needs of students who lack digital means, or tries
to meet the necessities of physically challenged students who are completely at
a loss under lockdown? The wielders of levers of control in our society have left
little to doubt about answers to such questions. The choices they made during the
pandemic speak loudly.
Reactions
of the powerful to the pandemic provide a distinct window to the current state
of human society. The picture we see through this window is ugly and brutal.
Disempowering and dehumanising structures of governance, ego-maniac rulers
searching for opportunities even in mass tragedy, and rich stashing away more
riches through public fraud, even while the poor starve and die, darken this
pictures. Articles in this issue of Critique try to look deeper. They do not
treat the Corona pandemic as an unforeseen event, but use it like a lens to
explore why our society has reacted the way it has?
Anamika
begins her article COIVD 19 ke dauraan
hamaaree schoolee shikshaa vyavasthaa (Our school education system
during the COVID 19) by highlighting the two pre-existing features of
school education in our country; one, the extreme inequality of education resources
among children from different socio-economic backgrounds, and two, the
degradation of teachers to passive enforcers of official diktats. Steps taken
by school managements in response to pandemic intensified these further. Government
run schools, where children of working poor families study, stopped providing
essentials like mid-day meals, books and stationery. Without paying any
attention to special circumstances of these children, school management decided
to go for online teaching. Teachers and students were forced to rely upon their
private digital resources, which only furthered the neoliberal agenda of privatization
of social services. In his article Pandemic’s
Red Pill, Sanjay Kumar focuses on four aspects of Indian and global
political-economic reality. Migrant workers’ crisis in India during lockdown
showed that the so called largest democracy of the world does not provide basic
citizenship rights to its most vulnerable. Taking advantage of increasing
unemployment, employers have slashed wages. Even when the economy is contracting,
corporate profits have zoomed. The management of economic crisis globally shows
that the finance capital of American imperialism dominates the global economy.
As the finance part of capital corners more and more social wealth, capitalist
states can no longer dress down their class character under a welfare
garb.
Sampoorna
Das’s article COVID-19, Food relief
Packages and Imaginings of the Indian State, is a critical take on the five
kg rice distribution scheme of the Assam government during lockdown. Building
upon key anthropological insights related to food, she notes that the neo-liberal
state first standardizes recipient citizens as capable of surviving only on paltry
sums of rice and pulses, and then passes on its responsibility to provide
emergency food to non-governmental organisations. Hence, the state both
politicizes food, as well as depoliticizes social welfare. Tais de Sant’Anna Machado’s article ‘So what?’ – the Coronavirus Pandemic and
the Deepening of the Black and Indigenous Genocide in Brazil puts Brazilian
president’s infamous indifference to corona fatalities in context. Brazilian
state’s narrative about the naturalisation of deaths is useful for deepening
the genocide of the Black and indigenous population. State has taken advantage
of the health crisis to continue with its policy of killing or letting die. ‘Going
Online’: Experience of Digital Education and Schooling among Students with
Disabilities by Sagarika Pradhan discusses disabled students’ education
during pandemic. She presents evidence that the lack of appropriate tools and
basic amenities for meeting their specific educational needs has led to insurmountable
problems. Along with the digital mode, the space of education has shifted to
home, which is presenting additional difficulties. Nayar Lopez Castellanos’
article Cuban Cooperation and Solidarity in Face of the Health Crisis
takes readers to Cuba. The revolution in Cuba placed high premium on providing decent
health and other social services equally to all citizens. The means adopted for this involve high
degree of social cooperation and participation. These have stood country well
while facing many challenges, including the recent Corona pandemic. Cuba’s
success in this regard should be contrasted with experiences of countries where
health services are privatized.
While other articles in
this issue discuss contexts and consequences of pandemic induced steps taken by
governments and other institutions, Praveen Verma’s Mazdoor Dhaba: Citizens’ Initiative during Corona
Pandemic in Delhi-NCR describes a unique
grass-roots effort. The immediate purpose of Mazdoor Dhaba was to provide
cooked food to unemployed migrant workers who were trying to leave the city
after abrupt announcement of countrywide lockdown. It soon took over the form
of community kitchens in two working class neighbourhoods of Delhi. Workers’
solidarity, rather than charity, was the guiding principle. However, as Praveen
describes, volunteers also encountered a parallel moral compass of ‘noble work’
and sewa with religious and spiritual
connotations. These protect the state from charges of criminal negligence, and
are easily exploited by communal rightwing political forces to deepen their
presence.
The
year 2020 was the birth centenary of Fredrick Engels, the co-founder of revolutionary
Marxism. Engel’s ideas have enlivened all efforts to go beyond capitalism in
the past century and a half. As is well known, Engels was not just a
revolutionary, but also a radical thinker. Two of his works, ‘Dialectics of
Nature’ and ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ were
original contributions in their time. Their keen insights continue to be
relevant for developing new knowledge necessary for addressing our contemporary
predicaments. This issue has abridged Hindi translations of two articles which
explore and explain this relevance. Anthropocene ke yug mein Engels ka
dialectics of nature (Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene)
by John Bellamy Foster shows how the dialectical materialist approach
exemplified in Engels’s ruminations in Dialectics of Nature is key to
comprehending the contradictory nature of humanity’s relationship with nature. Without this the challenge of Anthropocene
cannot be met. Eleanor Burke Leacock’s article is a commentary on Engel’s other
book. It counters some fairly common misunderstandings of his ideas in
anthropological research. Despite limited data at his disposal Engels drew
correct conclusions at critical points.
While
the Modi government in India has used the pandemic as an opportunity to push
corporate interests by stealth, the people are reacting back openly. Thousands
of farmers from northern states are camping on borders of national capital in
opposition to the three farm laws passed by the government to force open
agricultural markets to corporate loot. Their collective spirit, organizational
acumen and clarity of purpose is remarkable. While it seems that the pandemic
brought out the worst in rulers and the powerful, this popular protest is
bringing out the best. It is not just the division and opposition between the
rulers and the ruled which stands out. The moral fiber of the forces arrayed
across the divide could not be more contrasting.