Decay of the spirit of Islam?

from The Economist

The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation, by Ali A. Allawi, Yale University Press.

For those (and they are many) who are convinced by the thesis that the West and its values are under remorseless siege from a menacing and resurgent Islam, Ali Allawi’s antithesis may seem a little surprising, even absurd. But the author is a distinguished Iraqi who has twice served in post-Saddam governments in Baghdad and whose last, much-acclaimed book was a searing indictment of American (and Iraqi) failings. Though the two books tackle very different themes, what they have in common is their author’s intimate knowledge of both Islam and the West, and his unflinching honesty.

Mr Allawi calls his new book an “attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam”. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.

The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. For all their pretence of offering an “Islamic alternative”, they represent, or so he argues, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb.

Mr Allawi calmly and methodically deconstructs an Islamic revival which has failed to live up to its promise. Islamist movements and secular governments anxious to pay lip-service to Islam have, between them, failed spectacularly to anchor themselves in genuinely Islamic principles: principles which, for Mr Allawi, are as much about inner spirituality as outward religiosity. The results are everywhere to be seen. Autocratic governments abuse human rights, whether in Islamic Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan or in secular Egypt and Syria. Economies are corrupt and maladministered, and their supposed ethical principles, such as Islamic banking, are a sham. There has been a profound loss of cultural creativity, apparent, for example, in the decay of the Islamic city and its time-honoured traditions of craftsmanship, piety and community.

Mr Allawi buttresses his case with some striking statistics: “The creative output of the twenty or thirty million Muslims of the Abbasid era [750-1258] dwarfs the output of the nearly one-and-a-half billion Muslims of the modern era.” Per head, the income of the wealthiest Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates) is 200 times that of the poorest (Somalia).

Is there a solution? Mr Allawi, himself a Shia Muslim, believes the mystical (or Sufi) tradition must be an integral part of the revival of Islamic civilisation. But here too—although Sufism retains a strong grassroots following in several parts of the Muslim world—he finds himself at odds with both the modernist and puritanical (Wahhabi) strands of Islam, which disdain the individualistic heterodoxy of “folk Islam”.

The West has not helped. Mr Allawi castigates the hysterical Islamophobia which came in the wake of the attacks of September 2001, as well as the hubristic attempts to “reform” Islam in the name of defeating terrorism. He insists that the challenge of recapturing the “spirit of Islam” is a task for Muslims, not outsiders. The stark choice for the Muslim world is between the revival of its civilisation, difficult as that is to achieve, and its secularisation—“the dissolution of Islam into modernity”. Mr Allawi is not sanguine.

Image: From The Spirit of Islam: Experiencing Islam Through Calligraphy, an exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia.

Literate city?

Too bookish for crime? Photo: Piyal Adhikary.

I have written earlier about how 'literate' my city, Calcutta is (see here and here.

Well, now the great Amartya Sen no less, has given the ultimate certificate to Calcutta.

I reproduce the report from today's The Telegraph on Amartya Sen's lecture in London.

.....

Calcutta low crime linked to books: Sen

by Amit Roy

London, April 20: Calcutta has the lowest crime rate in the world because of the civilising effect of books, Amartya Sen said today in his keynote opening address at the London Book Fair.

Even by Sen’s exacting standards, it was by common agreement one of the Nobel Prize winner’s most brilliant speeches when he spoke on “India in the Modern World”.

With India chosen as the “market focus country” at the London Book Fair this year, the economist and moral philosopher examined the possible relationship between a love of books and low crime.

After his speech, Sen told The Telegraph: “I don’t know the answer but it is something worth looking into.”

This year the British Council has brought nearly 50 authors from India who, between them, represent 15 languages. Nearly 100 publishers from India have also made the journey to the Earl’s Court exhibition centre in London.

It was pointed out that India is now the third largest publishers of English books in the world. This works out to 15,000 titles a year.

The Indian book market, now worth £625 million, is growing at 10 per cent a year, with Hindi titles making up 26 per cent of the market.

Sen, however, did not deal with dry statistics. His speech made Calcutta sound the most exciting literary city in the world.

The question he posed was: “Does the culture of books influence the life of the city in any profound way?” He then offered an intriguing theory which even the people of Calcutta might not have considered.

“To consider one remarkable feature, Calcutta has, by a long margin, the lowest crime rate in the world, including the incidence of homicide and murder,” he said. “While the number of murders per hundred thousand people per year varies between 2 and 10 per year in many cities in Europe and America, and between 15 and 50 per year in many cities in Africa and Latin America, the homicide rate in impoverished Calcutta is only 0.3 per cent — a fraction of the rate in any other city in the world.”

He then drove him his point: “Indian cities generally have low murder rates, around 2.7 on the average (rather like London but much lower than American cities like New York or Chicago), but Calcutta in particular beats them all — even the famously peaceful towns of Singapore and Hong Kong — in terms of the lowness of homicide rates.”

He came round again to his fundamental question: “Does the peculiar love of books and culture, and here I would add Calcutta’s fondness for theatre, too (often produced at very low cost), have a role here? I don’t really know, and there is no rigorous work on this that has properly tested any of the possible hypotheses.”

He had cleverly planted the germ of a revolutionary thought: “It is abundantly clear that the standard explanation of crime in terms only of economic poverty does not tell us much about the incidence and causation of violent crime, including homicide. There is certainly some research to be done here.”

Sen appeared to speak not so much about modern India but why Calcutta was just about the most fantastic city in the world bar none. In terms of the number of people who attended, the Calcutta Book Fair was the biggest in the world — bigger than even Frankfurt, he stressed.

He said that “the city I came from, namely Calcutta, has a huge book culture”.

He remembered the pavements in College Street with their spread of books and nearby stores jammed with volumes of every description. “I should perhaps mention here, in these precarious roadside shops that the future film director, Satyajit Ray, read publications on films from across the globe, which introduced him to the traditions of world cinema. A considerable part of Satyajit Ray’s affection for the city that he loved despite finding it ‘monstrous, teeming, bewildering’ (perhaps because of that) related to the book culture that expanded his horizon so radically, even on the sidewalks of Calcutta.”

He also disclosed how his own life had been changed by Calcutta’s book culture. “It was in one of the College Street bookshops, called Dasgupta’s, that my friend Sukhamoy Chakravarty found at the end of 1951 a copy of a recent book by a brilliant economist Kenneth Arrow.”

On his friend’s recommendation, Sen read the book “which would radically influence my direction of work. I often wondered whether my life would have gone very differently had my friend, Sukhamoy, not been such a book hound.”

Perhaps Sen’s keynote address should have been called, “Calcutta: why you should book your ticket this afternoon.” Sadly, there are no longer any direct flights from London to Calcutta, a city increasingly isolated from the rest of the world by political and economic Luddites, most analysts would say.

During the question and answer session, Sen demolished the logic behind Mulayam Singh Yadav’s manifesto commitment to downgrade the English language. He argued this would only serve to increase the admitted inequalities between those who knew English and those who did not. The answer, as far as Sen was concerned, was to ensure more people had the opportunity to learn English.

.....

Reading the report this morning, I was seething with annoyance. I wrote to some friends: "I have never heard such piffle in my life! I'm, sure you too would agree, on the basis of whatever you know about Calcutta, how abominable his comment is. Sadly, all the not-so-wonderful "Calcuttans" are going to be full as rosogollas with pride reading this. Would be great if you fired off a riposte! I would love to carry that on my blog.

.....

Sumanta Banerjee wrote:

Amartya Sen seems to have been swept off his feet by his nostalgic memories of childhood and youth in Calcutta, before it became "Kolkata". Being an `argumentative Bengali', and fond of theorizing, he has come up with this rather fanciful notion that the city's low rate of crime (is that substantiated by facts?) is due to its love for books!

To start with ... there are crimes and crimes, various nuances and shades. If burglaries, rape and murder are cognizable crimes, what about nursing-home doctors fleecing their patients and botching up operations (a regular phenomenon in Kolkata), or private tution-hungry college teachers exploiting their students, or a chief minister ordering the police to fire upon unarmed protestors and encouraging his party goons to burn villages? Aren't these crimes ?

And more importantly, aren't the perpetrators of these crimes great book-lovers - the doctors poring over medical texts, the teachers parading their erudition with volumes tucked under their arms, the chief-minister quoting poetry while inaugurating book fairs ?

In fact, by concentrating only on cognizable offences as defined in the Indian Penal Code (like murder, theft, burglary, etc) which are usually attributed to the illiterate, uneducated plebs (those bereft of the knowledge of books), we deliberately wink at the crimes of the educated book-lovers, and thereby betray a class bias.

May I go a bit further? During my research in crime in 19th century Calcutta, I found an interesting connection between the increasing availability of books (on modern chemistry, for instance) to the educated Bengali middle classes with the emergence of new types of criminals (although few in number) from among these classes - quack doctors learning to concoct medicines that could slow-poison some unsuspecting victims, or forgers learning from the texts how to manufacture inks that would delete portions from a will and replace them with a different version without arousing any suspicion. From this finding however I wouldn't jump to the reverse conclusion - that books lead to crimes!

I would have expected Amartya Sen to refrain from a similar simplistic conclusion that a city's crime rate rises or dips in proportion to its love of books. What about other metropolitan cities like London, Paris, New York? Are they less book-loving? Yet, as far as I know, crime rates there are quite high.

.....

Dulali Nag wrote:

Wonder what prompted him to utter such inanities... I believed he was not one to bow to the demands of political correctness. And what about some statistics on the number of book-lovers in New York, London, Chicago, and Mexico City vis a vis the number in Calcutta? And I cringe in my imagination faced with those "Calcuttans" who would be "full as rosogollas with pride reading this". These are the people who actually line the divide between the upper crust and the lower class in Sumanta Banerjee's essay on crime in Calcutta. These are hypocrites of the first order, 100% complacent, and exercise their agency only when it comes to deriding others.

.....

Ravi Vyas wrote:

Sumanto, a dear friend, kindly forwarded Amartya Sen's lecture at the London Book Fair that you had sent him, about low crime rates in Calcutta becoz of the Bengali's love of books. I fully endorse your view that this is a lot of bullshit but I want to add to it.

I was a publisher for almost 25 years and can claim to know the state of the book market in Calcutta - at least much more than AKS does. Publishers not only publish but also take on the much more onerous task of promoting and selling the books. As chief editor at Longman and later in Macmillan, I know the ground realities. I have walked the streets - College Street and all the rest - like a male prostitute, marketing and selling my wares. So have my colleagues who supported me.

There is a myth about the Bengali intellectual that needs to be exploded. True, long ago there were some pioneers but that is long since over. Besides, the best of them migrated (this includes AKS) to Delhi and elsewhere, where they have done good work. It is NRBs (non-resident Bengalis), not those in Calcutta, who should be commended.

The Calcutta book market is moribund. Nothing moves; it is stagnant. College Street only has the remains of the day. The long and short of this is: AKS has become obnoxious. He pontificates on just about everything - nurition, the virtues of the free press, India-China and all the rest - things he knows little about.

Boss-napping

Caterpillar's Grenoble chief executive, Nicolas
Polutnik, was held captive in his office after announcing
layoffs. (By Laurent Cipriani - Associated Press)

Calcutta added to the lexicon of labour militancy in the late-1960s with gherao.

Around the same time then, there was an uprising in Paris, with 10 million workers on strike and all universities and factories occupied.

Well, four decades later, once again in France, a luta continua, the struggle continues...

Edward Cody writes this report, published in The Washington Post.

French Workers Hold Bosses Captive to Force Negotiations

GRENOBLE, France: The striking workers had no battle plan, but their jobs were endangered by layoffs, and they were itching for a confrontation.

So when managers at the U.S.-owned Caterpillar factory here refused to negotiate under pressure, workers recalled, resentments that had built up during several years of increasingly sour labor relations suddenly boiled over. About 40 employees invaded the executive suite, locked five top bosses inside and said they would be released only after resuming talks on the strikers' demands.

"It was spontaneous. We just had it with them," said Benoit Nicolas, 38, a Caterpillar line supervisor and delegate from one of several striking unions, the General Labor Confederation. "They refused to talk, so we locked them up until they agreed to negotiate."

The takeover, at midday March 31 in a Grenoble suburb in the Alpine foothills 75 miles southeast of Lyon, ended without injuries 24 hours later. It was one of more than half a dozen "boss-nappings" over the past month in factories across France, a whiff of revolution by workers who are facing massive layoffs because of the global economic crisis.

The hostage-takings, a specifically French reaction to the worldwide crisis, have been denounced as illegal by President Nicolas Sarkozy. But they have been widely applauded among the French people -- and in some instances have brought results. Most of all, they have dramatized the extent to which, in France perhaps more than anywhere else, the perspective of class struggle remains lodged in many people's minds and shapes the way they view the economic crisis.

The latest detention took place Thursday, when workers facing layoffs at a printer plant near Strasbourg run by Faure et Machet, a Hewlett-Packard contractor, confined their bosses in a meeting room for about 12 hours and forced them to continue negotiating on a severance package. Previously, a 3M executive in Pithiviers was held overnight after announcing layoffs, as were the head of Sony France in Pontoux-sur-Ardour and three expatriate British bosses in a Scapa Group adhesive tape plant at Bellegarde-sur-Valserine.

Trying another tactic, workers facing layoffs at the Celanese-owned Acetex-Chimie plant in Pau started a rotating hunger strike, with Mayor Martine Lignières-Cassou taking a turn to show solidarity.

More spectacularly, François-Henri Pinault, a luxury-brand magnate who recently married actress Selma Hayek, was surrounded in a car in the middle of Paris by salesclerks upset at layoffs in his stores. Before police came to his rescue, television cameras captured the Gucci millionaire negotiating through the car window and snapping to his captors that their actions were altogether inappropriate.

The historic class-struggle reflex has been sharpened because, in the view of many French workers, the current crisis is the fault of rapacious Wall Street speculators and their French equivalents. Reports of fat bonuses and stock options, even in businesses that accepted anti-crisis subsidies, have exacerbated the popular outrage. In opinion polls, about half of those queried support the workers who carry out boss-nappings.

"There is no justice in France today, and even less in America, because the bosses went to the casino with our pension money," complained Rene Mirisola, 46, a machinist and 24-year Caterpillar veteran whose schedule has been reduced to part time.

Jérôme Pélisse, a sociologist at the University of Reims who specializes in labor conflicts, said the French labor union movement descended from a tradition of confrontation. The main Caterpillar plant here, for instance, sits next to Leon Blum Avenue, named for the socialist prime minister whose Popular Front government in the 1930s instituted paid vacations and the 40-hour workweek despite bitter opposition from French industrialists.

Moreover, Pélisse said, France's perennially high unemployment rate means laid-off workers will have difficulty finding new jobs. "When they leave, they have to leave with a lot," he said, drawing attention to the demand for severance packages that are at the core of many labor-management disputes, including Caterpillar's.

Capturing the mood in its own way, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine published a front-page cartoon Wednesday showing executives in a fancy restaurant, sharing tables with their mistresses and calling their wives on cellphones to explain that they would not be home for dinner because they had been abducted by workers. Another cartoon showed a bedraggled manager exiting his factory with strikers in the background and telling a companion, "I think I deserve a kidnapping bonus."

In that vein, Pierre Piccarreta, another delegate from the General Labor Confederation, said union negotiators have demanded that executives at Caterpillar's Grenoble factory give up their bonuses for 2008 and turn in their company cars to sweeten the pot for severance payments. The demand was rejected out of hand, he added.

"We live in a crazy world, and if things don't change, there is going to be a revolution," Piccarreta told a rally Tuesday, generating whoops from the workers. "We demand redistribution of the wealth that has been generated by Caterpillar. Today the workers are calling the tune."

Workers at the rally, numbering about 600, shouted and whistled when Piccarreta urged more defiance. They booed and sent up catcalls when he brought up Sarkozy's condemnation of their tactics. The refusal of Caterpillar executives to forgo company cars elicited cries of "scandal" and "shame."

"They say we're a bunch of hotheads," screamed a bearded worker, seizing a microphone and addressing his colleagues. "We're not hotheads. The problem is that they are jerks."

Union organizers said they were convinced that the hostage-taking was a success, forcing management to take them seriously. Only after the executives in Grenoble were held captive during the night, the organizers said, did they call U.S. headquarters, get authorization to pay workers for several strike days and resume negotiations.

The chief executive of Caterpillar in Grenoble, Nicolas Polutnik, told employees in February that the factory would lay off 733 of its approximately 2,500 employees, citing a drastic decline in orders for Caterpillar's earth-moving and construction equipment. Many workers already had been put on part-time schedules. Reducing the number of layoffs is the unions' main goal, organizers said, but they are also seeking increases in the severance package.

Polutnik was one of the five senior executives taken hostage. The human resources director, Maurice Petit, was released at the end of the day because of a heart problem. But Polutnik and the other three spent the night in the executive suite with a rotating team of workers acting as jailers.

Since then, talks have been held in government offices with involvement by the central government's regional representative and telephone discussions between the representative and senior Caterpillar executives in the United States, union officials said. The Grenoble management team now moves about town with bodyguards, they added.

Despite Sarkozy's call for respect of law, French authorities have brought no charges against the Caterpillar workers or others who have taken executives hostage. But a Grenoble court on Friday ordered the removal of 19 workers who were camping at the factory entrance and harassing employees who tried to enter.

Touched with violence

The Telegraph

Indian society is inured to everyday sights of cruelty. Little boys working in roadside teashops being cuffed or slapped around, children carrying loads, washing clothes and utensils, running barefoot after their mothers rushing to catch the train back home after a day of labour in the city are common sights that no one registers as cruel or uncivilized. People would be surprised if told that such sights are a marker of a society’s selfish myopia, insensitivity and lack of concern about the rights and needs of the less fortunate. Efforts to spread awareness and the honing of laws, against child labour for example, may have been intended to rouse people from these characteristic darknesses; evidently they have failed. Instead, people turn inhumanity into spectacle. A young girl, Moyna Das, accused of stealing from a house, was tied by her wrists to the grills of a window outside the house to be beaten up. She was ultimately — and ironically — ‘rescued’ by the police. In the news photograph that showed Moyna tied up, the heart-breaking helplessness of her face is given its true context by the grinning, eager faces of young women close by. They seem to represent the monstrous blood-thirst and love of bullying violence that lurk in today’s society.

The people of West Bengal, whether in the city or in towns and villages, have developed a habit of taking the law into their own hands. A petty thief or a pickpocket, if caught, is very often beaten up by a vengeful mob to an inch of his life, and sometimes killed. The excuse is that the police would let the offender go; it is up to the victimized people to make sure he does not do it again. It is true that the politicization of every institution and the links of local politicians with criminals have together undermined public trust to a great extent. But all that this negative synergy does is encourage the love of violence among citizens, for the opposite of order is always disorder. Citizens feel righteous in their inhumanity: when a theft should just be reported to the police, they become the accusers, judges and executioners all in one. The most basic forms of civic life are now not just at risk, but also in danger of being forgotten. The trend is terrifying.

The enthusiastic violence is always directed at the weak, poor and helpless. No one can be more vulnerable than a young girl allegedly caught stealing in a strange neighbourhood and exposed to a delighted public. She should not have been there if society had any pretence of being civilized. The Left in West Bengal has always liked to claim credit for the absence of communal and caste discrimination. But the arrogant contempt towards claims of the humanness of the poor is a disguised form of casteism that expresses itself typically in public spectacles of collective violence of the kind Moyna faced. When violence is the only mode of touching, it is the other side of a culture of untouchability.

Sweet Lemonade!

I just discovered that Deb S, from Saint Louis, Missouri, has nominated me for the Lemonade Award.

Wow! Thank you Deb! What an honour!

The Lemonade Award recognizes blogs that show great attitude and/or gratitude.

It is now my turn to honor ten other blogs. Before I announce the winners, here are the rules for the award:

1. Put the logo on your blog or post.

2. Nominate at least 10 blogs that show great attitude and/or gratitude.

3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.

4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.

5. Nominate your favorites, and link to this post.

I am delighted to nominate the blogs I find deserving of the Lemonade Award. Here are the names, in (blogger) alphabetical order.

Anil
Awab
Bhupinder
JP
Kavitha
Madeeha
Nayyar
Rahul
Tyler
Unheard Voice

Congratulations to all of them!

The path of Greed

These London demonstrators seem to
instinctively get philosopher Francois
Flahault's point that "The desire for
existence that has taken the path of greed
becomes a blind addiction. A way of being
that one cannot undo." (Photo: Leon Neal /
AFP / Getty Images

Daya has made the profound observation that "It had taken man 2,500 years to come back to the truth stated by the Buddha... It was man’s greed which led to inequality and suffering, it will continue to cause suffering, until we can do away with our greed and envy."

This article by François Flahault, makes the same point.

The Abuse of the Desire for Money or the Drugs of Capitalism

by François Flahault
Le Monde

Are politicians thinking about the common good when they talk about "moralizing capitalism?" Undoubtedly, they are primarily thinking that they must calm discontent to maintain their credibility: a democratic state is supposed to fulfill the function of third party between the powerful and the weak. Yet now, even in the United States, which, through skillful electoral marketing, had long succeeded in making the poor vote for the rich (a success that has created imitators), the crisis has just reminded everyone that a gap exists between those two groups.

Must the search for the common good translate itself into a "moralization of capitalism?" All things considered, that would be a rather advantageous compromise for economic actors. Since everyone is painting themselves over in green (as ecology makes compulsory), why not also "communicate" the ethical character of companies, as long as a few concessions are being made anyway?

To the extent that it underestimates the balance of power, moral discourse plays its role, however involuntarily, in concealing those power relationships, that is, in the staging of rationality. The big economic and financial groups are powers, forces. We need to extend Montesquieu's great idea about the limitation of powers to the relations between politics and the economy. Since every power naturally tends to exert and extend itself, none self-limits of its own volition. Only one force can limit another force. In these last few months many economists have said what must be done to reform capitalism. Now, it remains to gather together the forces that would allow it to be done: a thing all the more difficult to do, given that one of the great victories of economic power has been to convert politicians to a doctrine which facilitates the supremacy of economic power.

Economic science generally and the free market doctrine in particular can be seen as a staging of rationality. Justifiable and convincing in many respects, that staging only makes it all the easier to forget power relations and the desire for power.

As we have seen, the faith in self-regulation applied to financial markets is altogether illusory. But if the role attributed to it in economic theory is questionable, there's another role it plays that the theory does not discuss, but which it fulfills particularly well: convincing economic actors (especially the most powerful ones), and, where possible, politicians, that it is useless to concern themselves with the common good, useless to worry about the long term. One need only leave it to the invisible hand: natural providence which all by itself achieves the common good. Under the appearance of rationality, the lack of accountability that is encouraged this way leaves the field wide open to the strongest.

The Desire for a Rolex

This staging of rationality is used to give credence to the figure of the individual transparent to himself, of the thinking person in a world of things. What must not be allowed to show through is that at the very heart of economic calculations, humans continue to grapple with one another, and that, within those interactions, they are not as transparent to themselves as they want to be or believe themselves to be.

In reality, trust, mistrust, desires, passions, all that has no less place in business than in private life - to which one would like to confine affect. Calculations, figures, cleverly thought-out strategies, yes, the means are rational. But the ends? The desire to enrich oneself has nothing rational about it. It's a matter of passion, if one understands "passion" to mean all that relates to the desire to exist, to the desire to enjoy one's place among others, and, if possible, a good place. A childish desire that persists into adulthood. The desire to own a Rolex, for example. Nonetheless, the desire to exist is not necessarily puerile. Testifying to the universal life force that moves us all, it deserves our complete attention.

The desire to exist has no content fixed by our genes, no object that responds to it, as water does to thirst. That makes it a desire without object or limit. Hence the reason desire for money is so largely shared: money is that substance which exists in unlimited quantities and with which one may buy all that one wants.

Except that it's not a substance, but the fruit of shared trust, a liquid that exists only on condition that it circulate. That's why abuse of the desire for money ruins confidence and trust, drying up its circulation. If there's any truth the crisis has returned to our notice, it's certainly that one. Already in 2003, economist Frédéric Lordon took the excess in the desire for money altogether seriously. The following year, Michel Aglietta and Antoine Rebérioux published "Dérives du Capitalisme Financier" ["Aberrations of Financial Capitalism"] (éd. Albin Michel).

How would they have been heard? The desire for existence that has taken the path of greed becomes a blind addiction. A way of being that one cannot undo. For a person who has embarked down the path of excess, orienting himself to a more moderate way of life would be experienced as a reduction in diet, as being less. Ask repentant (or laid-off) traders: they will tell you about this intense addiction that tied them to the unfolding of numbers across the screen and to money that became, as for Dostoyevsky's "Gambler," simultaneously everything and nothing.

Another lesson from the crisis: the fact of being a cog in an immense machine maintains a feeling of legitimacy. For the more a way of being is shared, the more it seems justified to those who have adopted it. If I lose my way along with others, I am unaware of losing my way.

Even when, under the impact of mimetic competition, my greed spirals out of control. To maintain one's position among others is experienced as a justification. What's important is that those who pay for the game, whatever their number and whatever harm they undergo, be outside the circle of those who stick together.


François Flahault is a philosopher and director of research at the [French] National Center for Scientific Research whose most recently published book is Le Crépuscule de Prométhée. Contribution à une Histoire de la Démesure Humaine ["Twilight of Prometheus. Contribution to a History of Human Excess"], (Mille et une nuits, 2008).

Translation: Leslie Thatcher

Cynical?

I am often accused of being cynical. But I think I am critical, and discern things that most people are either insensitive to or disregard. In the last 2-3 years, whatever is happening around me, here, in the city of Calcutta, is impossible to bear. I have expressed my sense of depair in earlier posts (see here or here). It is driving me insane. For instance, the air pollution - thanks to polluting buses and auto-rickshaws whose owners have the patronage of the ruling party to remain above the law - is such that people are beginning to drop dead like flies. Or take the testimony of my colleague Amina, whose mother was recently admitted to Calcutta's leading govt hospital; she said its not a hospital but a slaughter-house, run by a mafia of looters. Or consider what one Mr Sourav Sengupta writes in a letter to The Telegraph: "...the culture of unbridled hooliganism that prevails in Calcutta and the rest of Bengal, which have been nurtured by decades of misrule and political nepotism, which in turn have given birth to roughnecks who treat state property as their own. ... Our so-called bhadralok culture is but a thin veneer concealing a rot consuming both Bengal and Bengalis."

So I was glad to re-read a talk by Robert Jensen (2001), which too begins by making the distinction between "cynical" and "critical". He goes on to say: "every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause", and "the joy is in the struggle". I reproduce Jensen's talk below.

Critical Hope: Radical Citizenship in Reactionary Times

After a recent antiwar talk in which I sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy, a student asked me, "Don't you find it hard to live being so cynical?" When I responded that I thought my comments were critical but not cynical, he looked at me funny and said, "But how can being so critical not make you cynical?"

The student was equating any critique of injustice produced by institutions and systems of power with cynicism about people. His question made me realize how easy is cynicism and how difficult is sustained critique in this culture, which shouldn't surprise us. People with power are perfectly happy for the population to be cynical, because that tends to paralyze people and leads to passivity. Those same powerful people also do their best to derail critique -- the process of working to understand the nature of things around us and offering judgments about them -- because that tends to energize people and leads to resistance.

Understanding the difference between critique and cynicism -- and the difference between hope and optimism -- is crucial to the future of any struggle against injustice. At this moment in history, those struggles must not only be about trying to win changes in policies but also about the reinvigoration of public life -- a call for participation, for politics, for radical citizenship in reactionary
times.

I don't use radical and reactionary in this case to describe specific political positions, left versus right. I am talking instead about an approach not just to politics, narrowly defined, but to the central questions of what it means to be a human being in connection with others. I think the world we live in is reactionary because it is trying to squeeze those important human dimensions out of us in the political sphere and constrict the range of discussion so much that politics does seem to many to be useless. I want to argue that our only hope is to be radical, to be political, and to be radical in public politically.

To do that, I will talk about my own journey from cynicism to hope, my own struggle both for greater understanding of my self and an understanding of something greater than me. I am going to talk about love and justice. I am going to risk being seen as naive or self-indulgent or just plain silly. That's OK; I'm just a good-natured hick from North Dakota. We're generally plodding and slow and often don't realize we're being naive, or when people are making fun of us for it.

Let me start the story when I was younger, in my teens and 20s. I saw that the world was in pretty awful shape. When I looked around at the world, I saw a whole lot of pain. The United States had just ended its terrorist campaign in Southeast Asia -- what we commonly call the Vietnam War -- and was pursuing another by proxy in Central America; rich people seemed unconcerned that their luxury was built on the backs of the suffering of literally billions of poor people around the world; people all over the place were still getting kicked around simply because they were women or non white or gay or different in some fashion; and many people seemed not to care that the ecosystem that sustained our lives was in collapse.

I looked around at all this, and I got cynical. Human beings, it seemed to me, were pretty unpleasant creatures. Human nature, I assumed, had to be pretty rotten for all this suffering to go on and on, generation after generation. Even with the advances in social justice -- and there have been advances, such as the end of slavery, greater recognition of the basic rights of women, etc. -- it is hard to be upbeat moving out of the 20th century, one of the most brutal and bloody in human history, into the 21st century, which promises to be just as, if not more, brutal.

Being cynical appeared to have some advantages. I could step back from all the chaos and be hip. I could make jokes about how stupid people were. I could pretend not to care. I could turn away from the suffering of others because I, one of the hip and cynical, understood just how pathetic a species we were. I thought I was the one who saw it all so clearly.

I stayed cynical, and disengaged, for some time. The fact that I was working at newspapers didn't help; for journalists, cynicism is an occupational hazard that takes great intelligence and maturity to resist, and I didn't possess either quality in adequate amounts. So cynical I stayed, until I went to graduate school and was given the luxury of time to read, think, and study. Lots of people go to graduate school and become cynics, or their cynicism deepens; universities can do that to people. But I got lucky and met some exceptional people -- many of them outside the university -- who helped me see another way.

For me, that way began with feminism. I read a lot and listened to women. I started to not only learn about gender and sexism, but I also picked up a new way to understand the world, a new method of inquiry for examining the ideas and institutions that shape our world. I learned to look at how systems and structures of power operate. I learned to see past the surface to the core elements of those systems and structures. When I did that, I realized that things were far worse than I had thought -- the world was in more trouble than I had ever imagined. I learned about new levels of suffering and oppression.

That's when I stopped being cynical and began to feel full of hope.

That may seem counterintuitive. How did a deepening sense of the scale and scope of injustice and suffering make me hopeful? The answer is simple. For all those years, I was cynical for two basic reasons: I had the wrong view of human nature, and I didn't understand how the world worked. I thought the evil and stupidity all around me were the product of an inherently evil and stupid human nature, and therefore I didn't see any way to fight against injustice. It all seemed beyond our control.

Once I started to understand the nature of illegitimate structures of authority, I realized that in fact people (including me) were not inherently evil or stupid, and that human nature (including mine) was complex and sometimes maddening, but not inherently aimed at the destruction of the world. I came to realize that the authority structures that so bent our lives were powerful and deeply entrenched.

I also realized that most of the channels that the dominant culture offered us for working to make the world a better place were themselves deeply embedded in those authority structures, so that often the solutions were part of the problem. I realized that the analysis and action that could save us had to be more radical than I ever could have imagined. I also realized that at the moment in history in which I lived, there were relatively few people who wouldagree with any of this: People had begun to talk about a "postfeminist" age; the attacks on affirmative action and ethnic studies were emerging; the fall of the Berlin Wall "proved" that capitalism was the only possible economic system; and the United States was celebrating the slaughter of the Gulf War.

So, at the moment I realized the depth of the problem and the forces stacked against justice, I got hopeful. The hope comes not from some delusional state, but from what I would argue is a sensible assessment of the situation. Cynicism might be an appropriate reaction to injustice that can't be changed. Hope is an appropriate response to a task that, while difficult, is imaginable. And once I could understand the structural forces that produced injustice, I could imagine what a world without those forces -- and hence without the injustice -- might look like. And I could imagine what activities and actions and ideas it would take to get us there. And I could look around, and look back into history, and realize that lots of people have understood this and that I hadn't stumbled onto a new idea.

In other words, I finally figured out that I should get to work.

So hope emerged out of cynicism. I began to see the power of radical analysis and the importance of collective action. I began to take the long view, to see that we face a struggle, but that it is not a pointless struggle. The exact choices we should make as we struggle are not always clear, but the framework for making choices is there.

Hope and optimism

I have hope, but that does not mean I am optimistic.

Just as we have to distinguish between critique and cynicism, we have to realize that hope is not synonymous with optimism. I am hopeful, but I am not necessarily always optimistic, at least not about the short-term possibilities. These systems and structures of power, these illegitimate structures of authority, are deeply entrenched. They will not be dislodged easily or quickly. Optimism and pessimism should hang on questions of fact -- we should be optimistic when the facts argue for optimism.

For example, I am against the illegitimate structure of authority called the corporation. I want to see different forms of economic organization emerge. I am hopeful about the possibilities but not optimistic that in my lifetime I will see the demise of capitalism, corporations, and wage slavery. Still, I will do certain things to work toward that.

The same can be said of the problem of U.S. aggression against innocent people in the rest of the world, particularly these days in Afghanistan, where the aggression is most intense. Given the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience, I must confess I am not optimistic that such aggression will stop anytime soon, in large part because those corporate structures that drive the killing are still around. But I will do certain things to work against it.

Or take the large state research university. I am concerned about how the needs of students are systematically ignored and the needs of corporate funders are privileged, how critical thinking is squashed not by accident but by design. I am concerned about the illegitimate structures of authority that I work in and that compel me to act in ways against the interests of students. I am not optimistic that the structure of big research universities is going to change anytime soon. But I will do certain things to work against the structures.

So, why would I do any of those things if my expectations of short-term success are so low? One reason is that I could be wrong about my assessment of the likelihood of change. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life; the list grows every day. For all I know, corporate capitalism is on the verge of collapse, and if we just keep the pressure on it will start to unravel tomorrow. Or perhaps public discontent with murderous U.S. foreign policy is just about ready to crystallize and mobilize people. Or perhaps the contradictions of these behemoth universities are becoming so apparent that the illegitimate structures of authority are about to give way to something that deserves the label "higher education."

History is too complex and contingent for any of us to make predictions. We simply don't have the intellectual tools to understand with much precision how and why people and societies change. History is a rough guide, but it offers no social-change equation. Still, there's really no reasonable alternative except to keep plugging away.

Basically, there are two choices, which are common sense but that I didn't figure out until I heard them articulated by Noam Chomsky: We can either predict the worst -- that no change is possible -- and not act, in which case we guarantee there will be no change. Or we can understand that change always is possible, even in the face of great odds, and act on that assumption, which creates the possibility of progress. (See Chomsky's interview with Michael Albert.)

Every great struggle for justice in human history began as a lost cause. When Gabriel Prosser made plans to take Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the first large-scale organized slave revolt, he was fighting a lost cause, for which he was hanged. When eight Quakers got together in 1814 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, to form the first white anti-slavery society in the United States (the Tennessee Society for the Manumission of Slaves) they were fighting a lost cause. A lost cause that eventually won.

But that can't be the only answer to the question "why should I be politically active." We are human beings, not machines, and we all have needs. It is hard to sustain yourself in difficult work if the only reward is the possibility that somewhere down the line your work may have some positive effect, though you may be long dead. That's a lot to ask of people. We all want more than that out of life. We want joy and love. At least every now and then, we want to have a good time, including a good time while engaged in our work. No political movement can sustain itself indefinitely without understanding that, not just because people need -- and have a right -- to be happy, but because if there is no joy in it, then movements are more likely to be dangerous. The joy -- the celebration of being human and being alive in connection with others -- is what must fuel the drive for change.

People find joy in many different ways. As many people over the years have pointed out, one source of joy is in the struggle. I have spent a lot of time in the past few years doing political work, and some of that work isn't terribly fun. Collating photocopies for a meeting for a progressive political cause isn't any more fun than collating photocopies for a meeting at a marketing company. But it is different in some ways: It puts you in contact with like-minded people. It sparks conversation. It creates space in which you can think and feel your way through difficult questions. It's a great place to laugh as you staple. It provides the context for connections that go beyond superficial acquaintanceships.

The joy is in the struggle, but not just because in struggle one connects to decent people. The joy is also in the pain of struggle. Joy is multilayered -- one key aspect of it is discovery, and one way we discover things about ourselves and others is through pain.

Struggle confronts pain, and confronting pain is part of joy. The pain is there, in all our lives; there is no human life without pain. Pain can become part of joy when it is confronted. Struggle confronts pain. Struggle produces joy.

The joy is in the struggle. The struggle is not just the struggle against illegitimate structures of authority in the abstract. The struggles are in each of us -- struggles to find the facts, to analyze clearly, to imagine solutions, to join with others in collective action for justice, and struggles to understand ourselves in relation to each other and ourselves as we engage in all these activities.

I realize that this struggle doesn't seem appealing to many. I have heard lots of people lately say that they can't cope with the complexity of politics. It seems too much, too big, too confusing. All they can handle, they say, is to focus on their individual lives and do the best to fix their lives. I think these folks misunderstand not just their moral obligation but the nature of progress, individual and collective. We don't fix ourselves in isolation. We don't build decent lives by cutting ourselves off from problems just because they are complex. Yes, there are times when difficult situations force us to turn inward and deal with pressing problems in our lives. I have done that, and I see no need to apologize for it. But I am arguing against the permanent division of our lives into these artificial categories.

Our problems are never wholly individual, and hence they can't be fixed in individual ways. Part of the solution is always to be found in the bigger struggle, in which we all have a part.

I have learned that there is great joy in that bigger struggle. And that leads us back to the abandonment of cynicism and the embrace of hope. Cynicism is a sophomoric and self-indulgent retreat from the world and all its problems. Hope is a mature and loving embrace of the world and all its promise. That does not mean one should have unfounded or naive hope. Wendell Berry reminds us that history shows that "massive human failure" is possible, but:

"[H]ope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found." [Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 11.]

Hope is one of our duties. But that does not mean it is always easy. There are many times, especially since September 11, that I have had to struggle to hold onto hope. The combination of seeing the World Trade Center towers fall in an instance and then watching the unfolding of an illegal and immoral war on Afghanistan has tested my own sense of hope. I managed to hold on for a couple of months, but in the few days before I sat down to write this I could feel my sense of hope fading. At the same time that I have been writing and thinking about the war, I also have been continuing my work on sexual violence and pornography. Both spark the same feeling in my gut -- despair over how cruel people, especially men, can be. When I have to face humans' willingness to inflict pain -- and ability to find pleasure in inflicting pain -- whether in the realm of the global or the intimate, some part of me wants to die; I can't bear it. Maybe some part of me does die.

In the few days before I wrote this, I especially was having trouble in the mornings; lying awake in bed in the dark; trying to reclaim that sense of hope so that getting out of bed would make sense; trying not to think about the war but realizing that not thinking about it would be even worse; dying a little bit inside every morning, in the dark.

But those authentic underpinnings of hope remain. On the day I wrote this, I had a meeting with a student on my campus who had read something I had written about the war and wanted to talk. She said she didn't have anything in particular to ask me. She just wanted to talk to someone who didn't think she was crazy. All around her at work and school, people -- pro, con or neutral -- were refusing to talk about the war, she said. So we talked for a bit. We did politics, in a small way, the way politics is most often done. We talked about how she might organize a political group on campus. But maybe more important, we shored up each other's sense of hope. We could talk about the pain and craziness of the war without turning away.

Real hope -- the belief in the authentic underpinnings of hope -- is radical. A belief that people are not evil and stupid, not consigned merely to live out pre-determined roles in illegitimate structures of authority, is radical. The willingness to act publicly on that hope and that belief is radical.

We all live in a society that would prefer that we not be radical, that we not understand any of this. We live in a society that prefers productive but passive people. I work at a university that is part of that society, and has many of the same problems. Many classes at the university are either explicitly or implicitly designed to convince students that everything I have argued here is fundamentally loony. The same goes for much of what comes to us through the commercial mass media. Some of what I say indeed may be misguided; as I said, I understand that I could be, and often am, wrong.

But, even if I'm wrong in some ways, I'd rather be wrong with hope than cynicism. I'd rather be naive than hip. I'd rather work for a just and sustainable world and fail than abandon the hope. I understand that this position is not wholly logical; it is based on a sense of how we can best make good on the gifts that come with being part of the human community. It is based on a faith in something common to us all, a capacity that is difficult to name, but which is perhaps best summed up by a phrase once used by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Our task simply put, Freire said, is "to change some conditions that appear to me as obviously against the beauty of being human." [Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 131.]

In the end, that is the central hope: We can join together to help build not a utopia but a world in which we can struggle -- individually and collectively, through the pain and with joy -- to get as close as we can to the beauty of being human.


Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He can be reached at www.rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other writings are available online here.

Latin America Rising

Inauguration Day in Chile
represented people taking back
power, especially women. A Chilean
woman watches the ceremony wearing
a replica of the presidential sash.
Photo by Patricio Valenzuela Hohmann.


As part of a writing assignment on urban protests in Calcutta over the last two decades, I had interviewed activist Gautam Sen a few months ago, to document his engagement with the protests against squatter evictions in Calcutta. At the end of his account, Gautam-da said, "The days of party-ist culture are over. Mass movements today cannot have anything to do with political parties. There has to be an alternative politics, of grassroots organisations and mass movements. We have to learn from Latin America. There has to be control from below." At this juncture, in the context of the people's movement in Lalgarh, in the state of West Bengal in India, the reference to Latin America is most apt.

I recall, almost a quarter of a century ago, around the time I entered public activism, squatter movements in Latin America were mentioned, and we had read the writings of Manuel Castells and others on the subject.

I reproduce below an article that appeared in Yes! magazine in 2007.

Democracy Rising

by Nadia Martinez

Grassroots movements change the face of power

As the people of Latin America build democracies from the bottom up, the symbols of power are changing. What used to be emblems of poverty and oppression—indigenous clothing and speech, the labels “campesino” and “landless worker”—are increasingly the symbols of new power. As people-powered movements drive the region toward social justice and equality, these symbols speak, not of elite authority limited to a few, but of power broadly shared.

The symbolism was especially rich last year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when the new minister of justice made her entrance at an international activists' summit. Casimira Rodríguez, a former domestic worker, wore the thick, black braids and pollera, a long, multilayered skirt, of an Aymara indigenous woman. As she made her way through the throng, Rodríguez further distinguished herself from a typical law-enforcement chief by passing out handfuls of coca leaves.

Throughout the region, marginalized people are rising up, challenging the system that has kept them poor, and pursuing a new course. In country after country, people are selecting leaders who strongly reject the Washington-led “neoliberal” policies of restricted government spending on social programs, privatization of public services such as education and water, and opening up borders to foreign corporations.

Of course, there are exceptions, most notably Mexico, where conservative Felipe Calderón claimed power after a bruising battle over disputed election results. But the growing backlash has driven old-guard presidents out of power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Bolivia. And, while there are sharp differences among the new leaders, there is no question that what put all of them in power was a growing outcry against economic injustice. Over 40 percent of the region still lives in poverty, and the gap between rich and poor is the widest in the world.

No longer willing to accept perpetual poverty, Latin America's poor are redefining their societies and, in the process, redefining democracy. They are organizing large segments of society into strong, dynamic social movements with enough power to drive national politics. The challenge, of course, is to hold their new leaders accountable, to maintain the strength of the grassroots democratic power, and to go beyond symbolism to make real change.

Bolivia's Indigenous President

In Bolivia, where indigenous people are the majority, there are already some concrete signs of progress. Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, took office in 2006 with the strongest mandate of any Bolivian leader. Catapulted onto the national political stage by his struggles as a union leader defending the rights of coca growers, Morales came to power on the heels of massive popular uprisings that ousted three presidents in as many years.

Despite sitting on the region's second largest natural gas reserves, Bolivia is South America's poorest country. In tandem with a wave of privatizations that swept Latin America in the 1990s, the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was opened for business to foreign oil companies, which garnered 82 percent of the profits, while leaving a scant 18 percent for Bolivia's coffers. Shortly after taking office, the Morales government set out to rewrite contracts with private companies. Negotiators increased the country's share of the profits to 50-80 percent by renegotiating contracts with 10 different companies, which will yield billions in additional revenue for the government to sustain its new social agenda.

Spurred by his experience as a coca grower, Morales has introduced new policies that challenge the U.S. approach to the “drug war.” Coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, has special ancestral significance for Bolivia's indigenous people and in its raw form is widely used to treat maladies such as stomach upset, altitude sickness, and stress, in addition to being a part of many Bolivians' daily routine. Under pressure from the U.S. government, previous Bolivian administrations tried coca eradication. Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network in Bolivia, says that “local farmers who planted coca as a means of subsistence would often face violent confrontations with the military and security forces who were mandated to destroy their crops, which in essence devastated their only means of livelihood.”

The Morales government has developed a farmer-friendly program that allows small farmers to grow small amounts of coca for domestic consumption, while also implementing a zero-cocaine policy that includes interdiction and anti-money laundering efforts to prevent drug trafficking.

In Brazil, a Metalworker is President

The political shift in Brazil is also steeped in powerful symbolism. When Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a metalworker with an elementary education, rode a wave of popular support to the presidency in 2002, it inspired working-class people around the world. He was re-elected with a comfortable 60 percent of the vote in October 2006. Although his first term was tainted by corruption scandals and accusations from many on Brazil's left that he acquiesced too much to the demands by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for strict fiscal policies, he fulfilled some of his campaign pledges to the poor who form his political base.

According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, some 11 million families have benefited from the “bolsa família”—a monthly cash payment made to poor families in exchange for ensuring that their children stay in school. Signaling more pro-poor policies to come, one of the first acts of Lula's second term was announcing an 8.6 percent rise in the minimum wage.

Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution

President Hugo Chávez is best known in the United States for his overblown rhetoric against President Bush. But in Latin America, the Venezuelan president is fond of conjuring up the symbolism of Simón Bolívar, the “liberator” of South America from Spanish rule, who dreamed of uniting the region in a strong bloc. And while it has garnered little attention here, Chávez has used oil windfalls to advance Bolívar's dream. Venezuela has purchased big chunks of Argentina and Ecuador's debts to the IMF, for example, and sold discounted oil to several of its neighbors and even to poor communities in the United States. And Venezuela has signed trade pacts with several countries that include novel bartering arrangements, such as agricultural products in exchange for doctors and other technical personnel. Chávez has devised a regional trade plan to counter the Bush-favored Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA, for its Spanish acronym) aims to benefit the poor and the environment, and to advance trade among countries within the region.

In January, Venezuela and Argentina took another step towards breaking the region's dependence on such neoliberal institutions as the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank, which have conditioned lending on “free market” policy reforms and harsh austerity measures. They pledged more than $1 billion to jump-start a new “Bank of the South.” Bolivia and Ecuador have since signed on.

Within Venezuela, Chávez has made impressive progress in boosting literacy levels and providing health and other services to the poor. He has teamed up with Cuba in cosponsoring a program called Operation Miracle to provide free eye surgery to poor residents from Venezuela, Panama, Jamaica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and a growing list of other countries. The Venezuelan government is also investing heavily in creating a model of local economic development through cooperatives.

On the other hand, Chávez's fossil-fuel-based development plans—including a proposed gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina—are hardly visionary. As currently planned, the 5,000-mile pipeline will traverse areas of extreme ecological and cultural sensitivity. Several possible routes are being evaluated, but all run through the Amazon. Environmental and indigenous rights groups throughout Latin America have voiced opposition to the behemoth project, and have asked the Venezuelan government to halt all plans until they can be publicly debated.

Social Movements Redefine Democracy

Some of the most hopeful democratic advances in Latin America are not the result of official policies, but of social movements harnessing their own power. The thousands of poor peasants who make up the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil have claimed the right to settle on and farm close to 7 million hectares, or 43,000 square miles, of unused land—a territory a little larger than the state of Ohio. For millions of people who are largely outside of the mainstream economic system, access to land is of paramount importance, as they depend on it for subsistence.

Miguel Carter, of the Oxford-based Centre for Brazilian Studies, explains that groups like the MST contribute to the democratic process in important ways. “By improving the material conditions and cultural resources of its members” he says, “the landless movement has fortified the social foundations for democracy in Brazil.”

Indigenous movements, too, have gained ground. In the Amazonian region of Ecuador, after witnessing multinational oil companies for decades cut through the jungles of their ancestral lands in search of petroleum, indigenous women put their bodies on the line against the armed soldiers sent to escort oil workers. Known for fierce resistance to oil exploitation on their lands, the remote community of Sarayacu has so far succeeded in keeping the oil companies out.

Throughout Latin America, scores of indigenous peoples have demonstrated that marginalized populations can organize and mobilize effectively enough to topple governments—as they have done in Ecuador and Bolivia—despite their lack of material resources and political power.

A new characteristic of Latin American politics is greater collaboration among countries with the goal of breaking dependence on the North. In the past, countries were largely in competition for U.S. markets and development aid. Now they increasingly focus on complementing the strengths and weaknesses of one another, and seeking common solutions to their shared problems.

One example is the newly formed South American Community of Nations (CSN, in Spanish), an attempt by the 12 countries of South America to create an “area that is integrated politically, socially, economically, environmentally, and in infrastructure.” Because the initiative is new, it is unclear whether it will simply become a trading bloc that improves the region's competitive position in international markets, as is the case with the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). Alternatively, it could establish minimum social and environmental standards and the infrastructure not only to link to international markets but also to trade within Latin America.

Similarly, in a radical departure from a traditional market-based approach, the Morales government has developed a “People's Trade Agreement,” an innovative economic alternative based on principles of fair trade, labor, and environmental protections, and active state intervention in the economy to promote development.

Although still in an embryonic stage, “it is unique,” says Jason Tockman of the Bolivia Solidarity Network. “It has both a strong resonance with the alternative visions for social, economic and political integration proposed by the region's social movements, and the weight of state authority.”

The response to President Bush's visit to five Latin American countries in March is yet another sign that Latin Americans are choosing their own path, independent of the United States and its political and economic interests. Along Bush's route, thousands of people in the streets carrying colorful signs and “Bush Out” banners sent a clear message: people's movements are alive and well in Latin America, and they aren't falling for the White House's attempt to repackage the same unpopular U.S. policies under the guise of poverty alleviation.

At the same time, Chávez was able to gather and rouse into a fervor an estimated 40,000 people at an anti-Bush rally in Argentina, where he announced that Bush was a “political cadaver”—alluding to the president's increased irrelevance in Latin America.

After two centuries of the United States treating Latin America as if it were its backyard, organized popular movements across Latin America are changing the dynamics of the hemisphere. By electing more popular governments in eight countries and by organizing tens of millions of people, they have put up strong resistance to the U.S. agenda of corporate-led globalization, and they have created real alternatives on the ground. These efforts, combined with the Venezuela-led effort for alternative regional integration, not only provide the strongest counter-weight to the U.S. agenda anywhere in the world, but also offer multiple paths towards a better future for millions of people in the Americas.


Nadia Martinez was born and raised in Panama. She co-directs the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Her focus is on Latin America, where she works with environmental, development, human rights, and indigenous organizations.

Melodious sub-continent

Painting by Jean Kigel

Everyone knows the national anthem of their own country. Some people know something about their anthem, like who wrote and composed it, when it was adopted, what it means and so on.

Very few people know the national anthems of other countries, or care to. But that's to their own loss! For everyone, their own national anthem is something very special. So by knowing another's anthem, one connects with an essential part of them. Its like a people's deep signature. Besides some of the anthems of the world are simply glorious to hear.

We people of the sub-continent of South Asia should hear and learn and know one another's anthems. If nothing else, they are all so melodious, and can be sung with so much feeling. Knowing something of the shared languages of this land, I cannot but be moved to tears by the anthems of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I like to think all the national anthems of the sub-continent are siblings, which indeed they are, in a very profound sense. And the newest entrant to this melodic family is the anthem of Nepal.

I am reminded of the anecdote in the autobiography of musician Yehudi Menuhin (whose siblings were also accomplished musicians), about someone telling his mother, "Madam, you have a very musical womb!"

So here are the anthems of the sub-continent, in alphabetical order.



Amar Shonar Bangla is the national anthem of Bangladesh. It was adopted in 1972. The song was written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore in 1906. It is in Bengali.

Amar shonar Bangla,
Ami tomae bhalobashi.

Chirodin tomar akash,
Tomar batash,
Amar prane bajae bãshi.

O ma,
Phagune tor amer bone
Ghrane pagol kôre,
Mori hae, hae re,
O ma,
Ôghrane tor bhôra khete
Ami ki dekhechhi modhur hashi.

Ki shobha, ki chhaea go,
Ki sneho, ki maea go,
Ki ãchol bichhaeechho
Bôţer mule,
Nodir kule kule!

Ma, tor mukher bani
Amar kane lage,
Shudhar môto,
Mori hae, hae re,
Ma, tor bôdonkhani molin hole,
Ami nôeon jôle bhashi.

My beloved Bengal
My Bengal of Gold,
I love you.

Forever your skies,
Your air set my heart in tune
As if it were a flute.

In spring, O mother mine,
The fragrance from your mango groves
Makes me wild with joy,
Ah, what a thrill!
In autumn, O mother mine,
In the full blossomed paddy fields
I have seen spread all over sweet smiles.

Ah, what a beauty, what shades,
What an affection, and what a tenderness!
What a quilt have you spread
At the feet of banyan trees
And along the banks of rivers!

O mother mine, words from your lips
Are like nectar to my ears.
Ah, what a thrill!
If sadness, O mother mine,
Casts a gloom on your face,
My eyes are filled with tears!



Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Composed and scored by Rabindranath Tagore, it was first sung in 1911. It was adopted as the Indian national anthem in 1950. The music for the current version is said to be derived from a composition for the song by Ram Singh Thakur. It is in Sanskrit.

Jana gana mana adhinayaka jaya he
Bharata bhagya Vidhata
Panjaba Sindhu Gujarata Maratha
Dravida Utkala Banga
Vindhya Himachala Yamuna Ganga
Ucchala jaladhi taranga
Tava subha name jage
Tava subha asisha mage
Gahe tava jaya gatha
Jana gana mangala daayaka jaya he
Bharata bhagya Vidhata
Jaya he jaya he jaya he
Jaya jaya jaya jaya he!

O! Dispenser of India's destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, the Maratha country,
in the Dravida country, Utkala and Bengal;
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,
it mingles in the rhapsodies of the pure waters of Yamuna and Ganga
They chant only thy name.
They seek only thy auspicious blessings.
They sing only the glory of thy victory.
The salvation of all people waits in thy hands,
O! Dispenser of India's destiny, thou art the ruler of the minds of all people
Victory to thee, Victory to thee, Victory to thee,
Victory, Victory, Victory, Victory to thee!



Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka Hami is the national anthem of Nepal. Adopted in 2007, the lyrics were written by poet Pradeep Kumar Rai, alias Byakul Maila. The music has been composed by Ambar Gurung.

Sayaű thűgā phūlkā hāmī, euṭai mālā nepālī
Sārwabhaum bhai phailiekā, Mechi-Mahākālī
Prakritikā kotī-kotī sampadāko ā̃chal,
Vīrharūkā ragata le, swatantra ra aṭal
Gyānabhūmi, śhāntibhūmi Tarāī, pahād, himāl
Akhaṇḍa yo pyāro hāmro mātṛibhūmi Nepāl
Bahul jāti, bhāṣhā, dharma, sãnskṛti chan biśhāl
Agragāmī rāṣhṭra hāmro, jaya jaya Nepāl
Byakul Maila

We are hundreds of flowers, the one garland - Nepali
Sovereign, spread out from Mechi to Mahakali.
Amassing nature's millions of resources
By the blood of heroes, independent and immovable.
Land of knowledge, land of peace, Terai, hills, mountains
Indivisible this beloved, our motherland Nepal.
The diverse races, languages, faiths, and cultures are so extensive
Our progressive nation, long live Nepal.



The Qaumī Tarāna or Pāk sarzamīn shād bād is the national anthem of Pakistan. Adopted in 1954, the lyrics were written by Hafeez Jullundhri, and the music of the anthem was composed by Ahmed Ghulamali Chagl. It is in Urdu.

Pāk sarzamīn shād bād
Kishwar-e-hasīn shād bād
Tū nishān-e-`azm-e-`alīshān
Arz-e-Pākistān!
Markaz-e-yaqīn shād bād

Pāk sarzamīn kā nizām
Qūwat-e-ukhūwat-e-`awām
Qaum, mulk, sultanat
Pā-inda tābinda bād!
Shād bād manzil-e-murād

Parcham-e-sitāra-o-hilāl
Rahbar-e-tarraqqī-o-kamāl
Tarjumān-e-māzī, shān-e-hāl
Jān-e-istiqbāl!
Sāyah-e-Khudā-e-Zū-l-Jalāl

Blessed be the sacred land
Happy be the bounteous realm
Symbol of high resolve
Land of Pakistan!
Blessed be thou, citadel of faith

The order of this sacred land
Is the might of the brotherhood of the people
May the nation, the country, and the state
Shine in glory everlasting!
Blessed be the goal of our ambition

This flag of the crescent and star
Leads the way to progress and perfection
Interpreter of our past, glory of our present
Knowledge of the future!
Symbol of the Almighty's protection



Sri Lanka Matha is the national anthem of Sri Lanka. Adopted in 1951, the words and music were written by Ananda Samarakoon in 1940. It is in Sinhala.

Sri Lanka Matha, apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha.
Sundara siri barini,
Surendi athi Sobamana Lanka
Dhanya dhanaya neka mal pala thuru piri, Jaya bhoomiya ramya.
Apa hata sapa siri setha sadana, jeewanaye Matha!
Piliganu mena apa bhakthi pooja,
Namo Namo Matha.
Apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha
Obawe apa widya, Obamaya apa sathya
Obawe apa shakti, Apa hada thula bhakthi
Oba apa aloke, Aapage anuprane
oba apa jeewana we, Apa muktiya obawe
Nawa jeewana demine
Nnithina apa Pubudu karan matha
Gnana weerya wadawamina ragena yanu
mena jaya bhoomi kara
Eka mawekuge daru kala bawina
yamu yamu wee nopama
Prema wada sama bheda durara da
Namo Namo Matha
Apa Sri Lanka,
Namo Namo Namo Namo Matha.

Mother Lanka we salute Thee!
Plenteous in prosperity, Thou,
Beauteous in grace and love,
Laden with grain and luscious fruit,
And fragrant flowers of radiant hue,
Giver of life and all good things,
Our land of joy and victory,
Receive our gratefull praise sublime,
Lanka! we worship Thee.
Thou gavest us Knowledge and Truth,
Thou art our strength and inward faith,
Our light divine and sentient being,
Breath of life and liberation.
Grant us, bondage free, inspiration.
Inspire us for ever.
In wisdom and strength renewed,
Ill-will, hatred, strife all ended,
In love enfolded, a mighty nation
Marching onward, all as one,
Lead us, Mother, to fullest freedom.

Song and Dance

I was in hospital for treatment of a deep vein thrombus in my right leg. So I saw a load of films, copied for me a few months ago by my sister Sita. These included five films of Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director. The one I liked most was Hable con ella (Talk to Her).



The highlight of the film for me was the song "Cucurrucucu Paloma" by Caetano Veloso. I had grown up hearing this song sung by Harri Belafonte. I was hearing the song after more than thirty years. So yes, it was very moving. Not the least for Caetano's rendition. I was completely entranced by the song and was haunted by it in the days following. Amodovar filmed this at his country house, and the crowd is a group of his friends.



The lyrics (in Spanish) and translation into English are available here.

And thus did I finally get introduced to Caetano, who has been called one of the greatest songwriters of the century. Hats off to Alberto Iglesias, who was responsible for the soundtrack of the film.

Also entrancing in "Talk to Her" were the two dance sequences choreographed by Pina Bausch, the first from her production "Café Muller," and the second from "Masurca Fogo", with which the film begins and concludes.





Almodovar had evidently been greatly inspired by Pina Bausch. Pina and her group had visited our Talimi Haq School in 2006 and 2008, and so once again, there was a deep personal resonance for me.

Also among the films I saw in hospital was E la Nave Va (And the Ship Sails On), directed by Federico Fellini. That too had an appearance by Pina Bausch! In fact when Caetano made the CD of the concert in which he paid homage to Federico Fellini, he made a tribute to Pina Bausch. Caetano said, “Like Fellini. I am in love with Pina”. So he dedicated the song “Dama das Camelias” in his tribute to Fellini to Pina Bausch.



My friend Sam Mills told me Caetano's Billie Jean was worth coming out of hospital for! And so here is that.