SALAWA JUDUM CPIM Version Works So Well!

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time- Four Hundred Thirty Five

Palash Biswas

http://indianholocaustmyfatherslifeandtime.blogspot.com/

Much Before the Fall of USSR, I had read a book on the New Class emerging in Soviet Russia in my DSB Days in Seventies. It heralded the Fall of the Legacy of Stalin and Lenin! I may not remeber the author whom I did not notice at all as we Never Imagined Socilist Imperialism or Socialist Fascism. Those days are GONE! USSR Disintegreted. Now the Ruling Marxist Brahaminical Hegemony, following the line of Capitalist Economic Ethnic Cleansing and dying for Foreign Capital Inflow to feed its Regemented Hungry Ever LPG Mafia Gestao, is NOT Ashamed of Replicating RSS. Bengal line of SALWA Judum hits Success despite MAOIST TMC Honeymoon! Chidamabram would love to see Buddhadev continuing in the Writers!

NEW CLASS

The Left Front in West Bengal has proved its uniqueness in many ways. It believes, for example, that education does not have anything to do with learning, or with students, or their needs and futures. Instead, education is a fief to be ruled over by its followers, while the Front's leaders play peek-a-boo with English, chasing it up and down Classes I to VI to III and I. Such uninformed doggedness had doubled the odds for a whole generation of students, but the Left Front did not notice. Now it is venturing into regions yet untrodden, by splitting the primary and secondary school education boards into two. Perhaps the Left Front feels its continuation in power is at risk — which is apparently unthinkable — and has decided to re-establish itself as a friend of rural Bengal. Only what it plans to do is very unfriendly, especially towards the children in the villages. The panchayat and rural development department will now run primary and secondary education boards independently of the state's school education boards. The government and the newly responsible department seem to have no qualms about lack of expertise: all expertise is elitist anyway.
After a murder, the wise sleuth follows the money. After a new policy, especially by the Left Front, the wise citizen of Bengal follows the votes. Following the votes leads to the fact that around 55,000 teachers in the shiksha kendras, created according to the requirements of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, will have their jobs regularized and their pay scales revised. There will also be more jobs as the new boards are created. The Centre had directed the panchayats and the state school boards to jointly run the shiksha kendras, going up to Class VIII, to ensure that all children in the age group of 6-14 went to school. In West Bengal, the panchayats had already almost taken over; the state government is merely making this official because there are votes to be gained. This means the institutionalizing of an inferior level of education, a deliberate injection of hardened inequality when school education is struggling to reach equality throughout the nation. Thousands of children are being ruthlessly condemned to end their studies in Class VIII, because a school system in the control of panchayats would not be equipped to send pupils into the higher classes of state schools. But destroying children's futures is one of the things that make the Left Front unique.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/opinion/story_12739388.jsp

CPM tracker cells pinpoint Maoists
Cadres set up 50 listening posts

PRONAB MONDAL

Calcutta, July 27: The "pinpoint" information that helped the joint forces bust a Maoist camp yesterday has shed light on the existence of a string of listening posts set up by CPM cadres in rebel-dominated areas of West Midnapore.
Police sources said yesterday's risky night raid in which six Maoists were killed was facilitated by a specific tip-off from one of the 50-odd CPM camps in the area.
Nearly every one of these armed outposts are near police camps, which means the joint forces can rush to their aid if they are attacked by the rebels.
Police sources said most of these camps set up by the cadres were located in Goaltore, Salboni, Dherua, Bhimpur, Jamboni, Bhalukbasha and Binpur, all areas with a substantial Maoist presence.
Apart from acting as a deterrent for the Maoists, these camps help the cadres collect information about the movement of the rebels and alert the police. The sources said these armed camps also help cut off back-up support for the Maoists during encounters with the security forces.
Although the government has not given official sanction to these camps, such cells cannot operate in an area where joint forces are deployed without some sort of backing or blessing from the administration. Completely cut off from the area, both the administration and the security forces were finding their hands tied by lack of information and intelligence.
"We received specific tip-offs before our raid in the Ranja forest last month as well as yesterday's raid in the Metala forest. Both proved successful as we managed to kill several Maoists on both occasions," West Midnapore police chief Manoj Verma said, without making any reference to the CPM outposts.
Among the six Maoists killed yesterday was Sidhu Soren, a leader whose writ ran over vast swathes of the rebel belt. Eight Maoists were killed in the June 16 encounter in the Ranja forest near Lalgarh, the joint forces' biggest success yet against the Bengal rebels.
It's not that the cadres haven't counted losses. Police sources said some of them have been killed in clashes with the rebels. "Sometimes we find bodies lying inside the forests that cannot be identified," an official said. "We believe these are bodies of CPM cadres who have come from outside the district to lend support to their comrades here."
The sources said the CPM set up the first camp at its party office in Enayatpur, near Dherua, last September (see graphic). Armed cadres stationed there beat back a group of Maoists trying to enter Midnapore town.
Encouraged by this, the CPM set up more armed camps in different parts of Maoist-infested areas where the police have a significant presence. The sources said the arms the cadres use include AK-series rifles so that they can match the firepower of the Maoists.
Supplies reach the camps from neighbouring states, and are sometimes routed through Calcutta. According to the police sources, a consignment of 5,000 cartridges intercepted by Calcutta police recently was meant for the CPM camps. The consignment was coming from Bihar.
While the police identified the person in Patna who supplied the ammunition, they were silent on who the cartridges were meant for. Four persons were arrested in connection with the haul. All four are in judicial custody now.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/frontpage/story_12739894.jsp

Sidhu family refuses to take body

NARESH JANA

Sidhu Soren (top); Lakshmimoni, his mother, on Tuesday. (Samir Mondal)

Goaltore, July 27: Sidhu Soren's family has refused to take his body and claimed the leader of the Maoist-backed People's Committee Against Police Atrocities was a martyr "for his country" who was killed in sleep.
"My son has laid down his life for his country. We will not take his body from the police. What will I do with a dead son?" asked Sidhu's father Jamadar Baskey, shortly after turning away policemen who had gone to his the family's house this morning and asked him to identify Sidhu's body in the morgue of the Midnapore Medical College and Hospital.
Sidhu, 23, was gunned down with five other Maoists yesterday in the Metala jungles near Lalgarh.
Jamadar's comments almost echoed the claims by a Maoist source after the encounter yesterday that Sidhu had "committed suicide while fighting like a hero" without specifying if he did so to avoid imminent capture.
Jamadar sounded defiant and warned of retaliation. "I told the policemen I will not go (to the morgue). The police have killed my son in cold blood while he was sleeping. The police can't take control of Jungle Mahal by killing my son. The villagers will resist the police with bows and arrows," said the 55-year-old small farmer, sitting in the courtyard of his two-storey mud-walled house in Karkata, a small tribal village 15km from Lalgarh town.
Sidhu alias Bhuta Baskey — the secretary of People's Committee and the chief of its armed wing Gana Militia — was the second of Jamadar's five sons and a daughter.
All of Sidhu's family had gathered at their house. Neighbours streamed in to console them. Sidhu's mother, Lakshmimoni, sat with her other sons and daughter, occasionally breaking down.
The villagers backed what Sidhu did as a leader of the People's Committee. "In our village there is no electricity and the only tube-well is out of order. No political party has ever thought of our plight. What Sidhu was doing is right. The police have killed him to take revenge," said Gurudas Soren, who had come from adjoining Bandhgora.
Sidhu's elder brother Sagen echoed Gurudas. "We don't believe he was a Maoist. The police shot him dead and then placed the arms and ammunition on him," said Sagen.
Jamadar said Sidhu was a Class IX dropout and had been out of home for the past seven years.
Sidhu's youngest brother Gopi, a Class VII student at Ramgarh High School, said the People's Committee leader had called about two months ago. "He asked me to take care of my parents."
West Midnapore police chief Manoj Verma said the authorities would have to cremate the body if the family remained adamant. "Sidhu Soren was a hardcore Maoist. If his family does not identify and take the body, we will cremate it according to the law."

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/bengal/story_12739920.jsp

State of flux tells on Salboni timeline

SAMBIT SAHA

Sajjan Jindal

Calcutta, July 27: Bengal's ill luck hung heavy like a bad taste in the mouth when Sajjan Jindal today ushered in the biggest foreign direct investment yet in metal in the country.
Japan's JFE Steel will pick up a nearly 15 per cent stake in Jindal's JSW Steel for Rs 4,800-5,000 crore but the milestone also served to highlight how the Salboni project in Bengal has slipped into the sideline and is about to miss a deadline.
"We intend to start construction by the end of this fiscal (March 2011). It will take three years from then to complete the first phase and start production," Jindal said from Mumbai, responding to a question by The Telegraph.
He was referring to the 10-million-tonne steel plant JSW Steel is expected to build in West Midnapore's Salboni.
The timetable set by Jindal today means the project is expected to start production at least three years later than originally scheduled. When JSW signed the agreement with the Bengal government in January 2007, the target for commencing production of 3 million tonnes of steel in Phase I was 2011. Now production is slated to begin in 2014.
A scaledown also seems to have taken place. Jindal said a 300MW power plant would be built in the first phase. However, the plan earlier was for an 800MW power plant in the first round and another of matching capacity in the second leg. Company officials said environment clearance had been secured for only 300MW in the first phase.
Jindal and the state government did maintain the timeline more or less till the groundbreaking ceremony took place at Salboni on November 2, 2008.
But a Maoist bombing that day set the stage for tumult in Bengal. The bomb targeting chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee exploded in front of Jindal's convoy, triggering the events that led to the Lalgarh insurgency and deployment of central forces.
The Salboni project ran into rough weather also because of the global financial crisis. India waded out faster than the rest of the world — one of the reasons JFE invested in an Indian company.
Jindal said the Bengal project topped JFE's agenda when the companies began talks last year. But JFE decided to invest in the holding company, JSW Steel, as it wanted to wrap up the deal "quickly".
"We are still in discussion with JFE for their participation in the Salboni project," Jindal said. The Bengal project of Rs 35,000 crore is being executed by JSW Bengal, in which JSW Steel has around 94 per cent stake.
Biswadip Gupta, the CEO of JSW Bengal, said the funds from JFE would indirectly benefit the local project. "It will help the parent company to shed debt. Consequently, it will be easier for JSW Bengal to raise fresh loans from banks to execute the Salboni plant."
The Salboni project is one of the few mega steel projects to have land, coking and thermal coal mines, water allocation, environment clearance and special economic zone status. Still, the timeline keeps getting stretched.
Some feel the Maoist insurgency could be a factor but not the only one. Jindal said: "It's a worry (the local condition), the safety of our people. But the project site is not affected."
The political instability in the state has not helped either. If construction starts next year, it will coincide with the Assembly election that is expected to result in a change of guard. "All these factors have taken away the state government's bargaining power. It cannot force an investor to stick to deadlines now," said an industrialist from Mumbai.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/frontpage/story_12739905.jsp

ROUGH AND TUMBLE
- Three questions about the talks between India and Pakistan

Krishnan Srinivasan

The latest round of high-level talks between India and Pakistan ended in a fiasco. Even at the worst period of relations between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, there was never a round of talks at foreign-minister level that ended in such acrimony and mutual media hostility. Neither side has emerged from this event with credit. Now that the theatricals have died down somewhat, three basic questions remain to be asked and answered.
The first is why the talks between S.M. Krishna and S.M. Qureshi took place and ended so badly. There were preparatory talks between the foreign secretaries and the home ministers that should have paved the way but, in reality, the ground had not at all been properly prepared. The top leadership in India was apparently divided on the merit of holding the talks, and this view was shared by the real authority in Pakistan, namely the army. Thus, there were more infiltration attempts from Pakistan in Kashmir and instigation and financing of stone-throwing mobs, with the predictable lethal reaction from the security forces. This set the stage for Pakistan to bring up the issue of human rights and the future status of Kashmir.
In New Delhi, a few days before the talks, details of the David Headley interrogation were leaked to the media that explicitly implicated the Pakistan military and ISI in planning and executing the terrorist attacks of 2008 in Mumbai. These revelations were extraordinary and not in keeping with the understanding with the US, where Headley's plea bargain is still sub judice. It would have been possible to make far better use of this information had it been kept confidential and used selectively, for example, shared with influential countries and the 13 other governments that had lost their citizens owing to the terrorist attack, and used as a pressure point on the establishment in Islamabad.
To make matters worse, the home secretary, G.K. Pillai, then took it on himself, or was instructed, to visit a newspaper office and underscore the point that the ISI was instrumental in the terrorist attack on Mumbai. Irrespective of the truth of the leaks, both sets of actions sabotaged Krishna's position and played into the hands of Pakistan. Pakistan is a sovereign state, whatever its failings may be. To have one of the institutions of state assailed by a bureaucrat from another country is to invite a tit-for-tat reaction. India would have done exactly the same thing if one of our major institutions had been similarly indicted, and Pakistan's position is worse than ours because the civilians, even the foreign minister, have to kowtow to the army and appear holier than the pope. Governments are not known for their propensity to apologize or eat humble pie. Did our home ministry think it would achieve results with Islamabad by issuing a public charge-sheet?
Krishna has every reason to feel aggrieved by Pillai's comments and their timing. How is it that bureaucrats in India are given the liberty or authority to make statements that have a bearing on policy and international relations? This is a trend that needs to be reversed urgently if more fiascos, both at home and abroad, are to be avoided. In the United Kingdom, whose practices in this regard we would do well to follow, civil servants are totally anonymous and unknown to the general public. If Pillai had been instructed to make such views public, it needs to be known who authorized this action. The sad truth is that before and after the Islamabad talks, New Delhi looked strangely dysfunctional.
The Krishna-Qureshi meeting was badly timed. Given the official sentiments on both sides of the border, it would probably have failed in any case, but prudence demanded a reasonable time to elapse for both capitals to digest the impact of the visit of the home minister to Pakistan and the action, if any, taken in consequence of that. It appears that the foreign ministers were locked into a pre-arranged time-frame that was badly misjudged. The basic necessity for such high-level talks is that they should be meticulously prepared, and all possibilities of unpredictability eliminated. In this case, it seems that even the agenda was not known to both parties — Pakistan wanted to resurrect the composite dialogue under a new nomenclature and India had a mandate to discuss only the terrorism issue. What was the purpose in Krishna covering nothing but the same ground that the home minister had dealt with three weeks earlier? The dismal outcome of the press conference only revealed the total lack of choreography: even the most dim-witted politician knows that you lose control of a press conference if you fail to bring it to a conclusion at a time of your choosing.
The second question is whether India should be talking to Pakistan at all. The Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition party, does not think India should. Certainly, as Richard Nixon said, "talking is not better than not talking, if you do not know what you are going to talk about". But India is the only country in history that has two nuclear-armed, potentially-hostile neighbours sharing its land borders, and it is inconceivable that it should not be talking to both, not least to give itself more options in dealing with either. Also important, though not crucial, is the fact that all the influential power centres in the world would like to see India and Pakistan in a dialogue. And there is plenty to talk to Pakistan about — trade, re-opening of consulates, visa regime, sporting links, transit to Afghanistan, prisoners on both sides, fishermen who mistakenly sail into the others' waters, communications, rivers, and so on. Talking to Pakistan also resolves one dilemma; we cannot insist on bilateralism on the one hand and refuse to talk to Pakistan on the other.
The third question is about how we can expect any positive results from talking to Pakistan. India always said it would only engage in bilateralism with Pakistan, which is why it does not take the evidence on Mumbai to the United Nations counter-terrorism committee or the Security Council. For years, New Delhi said it would not discuss Kashmir, then it said that Kashmir could be discussed, and now, it is saying that we have to have a priori satisfaction on terrorism. Each of these positions can be justified in its context, but collectively they have not helped in moving the dialogue forward. Pakistan, for its part, has purveyed its share of deceit and double-dealing with the likes of Kargil and Hafiz Saeed.
Presupposing that both countries sincerely wish to make progress in addressing bilateral problems, the answer will lie in a structure of discussions that are more or less continuous and as far removed from the public gaze as possible. The temptation to rush to the summit with the lure of photo-opportunities must be firmly resisted. The public on both sides must deliberately be sensitized over a long period to the prospect of concessions; there can be no solutions without give and take. Expectations of quick results and media circuses should be discouraged; the public should get accustomed to the banality of Indo-Pakistan meetings. The format should include discussions between the police, customs, border guards, immigration, home, defence and external affairs officials of both countries at the working level, and later extended to the army and intelligence contacts.
The endeavour must be to achieve a broad-based framework for building confidence. This will not be easy, for so far we have been talking to the wrong people in Pakistan — it is necessary for us somehow to involve the Pakistan army. A window of opportunity opened during General Musharraf's presidency, but was lost through India waiting for a 'legitimate' government. All impediments to trade should be removed. This will lead to building trust and have its effect, in time, on Pakistan's military thinking since they will be direct beneficiaries.
This scenario is difficult and long drawn out, but it is time it was seriously contemplated. There are no shortcuts, and we cannot have a cherry-picking approach to bilateralism. After 63 years of the Kashmir dispute, one would have expected the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to be better briefed. She is wrong in assuming that any 'solution' of the Kashmir question would be a magic formula transforming the relationship between the two neighbours. Such a view ignores the whole ethos of Pakistan's existential hostility to India as a means of asserting its fragile nationhood.

The author is former foreign secretary of India

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/opinion/story_12727754.jsp

Life term for political killing

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Chinsurah, July 27: A Hooghly court today sentenced 11 CPM activists to life imprisonment for killing a Trinamul supporter 10 years ago by beating him up with rods and giving him electric shocks.
Susanta Sadhukhan, the pradhan of Nalikul panchayat now and a CPM activist then, his father Madan and younger brother Prasanta along with others had dragged Sukumar Dhok out his house accusing him of stealing poppy (posto) seeds from a grocer in their Malia village on the night of October 16, 2000.
No complaint of such theft had been lodged against Sukumar. Nalikul Trinamul chief Samiran Mitra said Sukumar had been singled out as he was working to expand his party in the area at a time the CPM held sway.
A police officer said the group took Sukumar, 32, to a local club and beat him up with rods, chains and sticks. "Sukumar was beaten up for about half an hour. They even gave him electric shock," the officer said.
Seema, his wife, ran out of the house and pleaded with those beating up her husband to spare him.
"But the doors and windows (of the club) were shut and my cries for help fell on deaf ears," Seema said. A neighbour informed the police about half an hour later. But the attackers escaped before the force arrived.
Sukumar was taken to Haripal block health centre from where he was taken to Imambara district hospital in Chinsurah. He was immediately referred to Calcutta Medical College and Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries on October 19.
The sentence was passed by Paban Kumar Mondal, additional district and sessions judge of Hooghly special court in Chinsurah.
The police had started a case against 13 CPM supporters.
After eluding the police for two months, all surrendered before the Hooghly court. Two of them were, however, released during the trial.
CPM district secretariat member Sunil Sarkar admitted that all the 11 persons sentenced were supporters of his party.
However, CPM zonal committee secretary Dula Bhowmik said: "Three of those sentenced today — Susanta Sadhukhan, Nityananda Das and Aurobinda Das — are branch committee members of the party. The rest are our party supporters. They are our assets and we will appeal in the high court."
Recounting that horrific night, Seema said they were sleeping with their three-year-old daughter when they heard someone banging on the door. "My husband opened the door. About a dozen CPM supporters entered and dragged him out. They accused him of stealing posto and said he would be tried in the local club."
Seema's lawyer Pratim Singha Roy said "we waited 10 years but got justice".

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100728/jsp/bengal/story_12739898.jsp

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New class

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1 Early theories
2 Djilas' New Class
3 Similarity to other analyses
4 John Kenneth Galbraith's "New Class"
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading

7.1 Articles

[edit] Early theories

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

Theories describing the elite in the Soviet Union as a new class initially emerged in 1917. These theories were pursued most strongly by anarchist theorists and occasionally by syndicalists, left communists and council communists. This strand of analysis has remained one of the major positions within anarchism on the role of the elite in the Soviet-style societies.

[edit] Djilas' New Class

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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

A theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Djilas the Vice President of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia under Tito, who participated with Tito in the Yugoslav People's Liberation War, but was later purged by him as Djilas began to advocate democratic and egalitarian ideals (which he believed were more in line with the way socialism and communism should look like). The theory of the new class is in contradiction to the claims of certain ruling Communists, such as Stalin, who argued that their revolutions and/or social reforms had resulted in the extinction of any ruling class as such. It was Djilas' observation as a member of a Communist government that Party members stepped into the role of ruling class - a problem which he believed should be corrected through revolution. Djilas' completed his primary work on his new class theory in the mid 1950s.

Djilas claimed that the new class' specific relationship to the means of production was one of collective political control, and that the new class' property form was political control. Thus for Djilas the new class not only seeks expanded material reproduction to politically justify its existence to the working class, but it also seeks expanded reproduction of political control as a form of property in itself. This can be compared to the capitalist who seeks expanded value through increased sharemarket values, even though the sharemarket itself does not necessarily reflect an increase in the value of commodities produced. Djilas uses this argument about property forms to indicate why the new class sought parades, marches and spectacles despite this activity lowering the levels of material productivity.

Djilas proposed that the new class only slowly came to self-consciousness of itself as a class. On arriving at a full self-consciousness the initial project undertaken would be massive industrialisation in order to cement the external security of the new class' rule against foreign or alternative ruling classes. In Djilas' schema this approximated the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union. As the new class suborns all other interests to its own security during this period, it freely executes and purges its own members in order to achieve its major goal of security as a ruling class.

After security has been achieved, the new class pursues a policy of moderation towards its own members, effectively granting material rewards and freedom of thought and action within the new class – so long as this freedom is not used to undermine the rule of the new class. Djilas identified this period as the period of Khrushchev's government in the Soviet Union. Due to the emergence of conflicts of policy within the new class, the potential for palace coups, or populist revolutions is possible (as experienced in Poland and Hungary respectively).

Finally Djilas predicted a period of economic decline, as the political future of the new class was consolidated around a staid programme of corruption and self-interest at the expense of other social classes. This can be interpreted as a prediction of the Brezhnev era stagnation by Djilas.

While Djilas claimed that the new class was a social class with a distinct relationship to the means of production, he did not claim that this new class was associated with a self-sustaining mode of production. This claim, within Marxist theory, argues that the Soviet-style societies must eventually either collapse backwards towards capitalism, or experience a social revolution towards real socialism. This can be seen as a prediction of the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Robert Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through history also contains a discussion with Djilas, who used his model to anticipate many of the events that subsequently came to pass in the former Yugoslavia.

[edit] Similarity to other analyses

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

Of course, the specific notions of Djilas are his own development, however the idea that bureaucrats in a typical Marxist-Leninist style state become a new class is not his original idea. Bakunin had made this point in his IWMA debates with Marx in the mid to late 19th century. This idea was repeated after the Russian revolution by anarchists like Kropotkin and Makhno, as well as some communists. In 1911 Robert Michels first proposed the Iron law of oligarchy, which described the development of bureaucratic hierarchies in supposedly egalitarian and democratic socialist parties. It was later repeated by a leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky through his theory of degenerated workers state. Further on, Mao Zedong also had his own version of this idea developed during the Socialist Education Movement to criticize the Party under Liu Shaoqi. Of course, this wide range of people over the decades had different perspectives on the matter, but there was also a degree of core agreement on this idea.

From the other side of the fence, the work of Friedrich Hayek also anticipated many of Djilas' New Class criticisms, without placing them in a Marxist context (see esp. The Road to Serfdom). American paleoconservatives adapted New Class analysis in their theory of the managerial state. Karl Popper's criticisms of utopian social pursuits in The Open Society and Its Enemies are markedly similar to Djilas' views, which were nonetheless developed independently.

[edit] John Kenneth Galbraith's "New Class"

Canadian-American liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith also advocated a technocratic "New Class." Galbraith believed that modern society had become too complex and required guidance by a technocratic, well educated elite.[1]

[edit] See also

Bureaucratic collectivism
Degenerated workers state
Deformed workers state
New Soviet man
Public choice theory
State capitalism

[edit] References

^ John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/obituaries/30galbraith.html?ei=5090&en=c486b75860ff8fb3&ex=1304049600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[edit] Further reading

Đilas, Milovan (1983, 1957). The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (paperback ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0-15-665489-X.
Đilas, Milovan (1969). The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class. trans. Dorian Cooke. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ISBN 0-15-693125-7.
Đilas, Milovan (1998). Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism's Self-Destruction (hardcover ed.). ???: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-679-43325-2. . See also the NY Times Books feature with Chapter One online, and also the May 10, 1998 NY Times book review.
Trotsky, Leon (1991, 1937). The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (paperback ed.). Detroit: Labor Publications. ISBN 0-929087-48-8. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/index.htm. Leon Trotsky's famous work considers the alleged betrayal and corruption of the Russian Revolution by Stalin and the new bureaucratic ruling caste.
Sawer, Marian (ed.) (1978). Socialism and the New Class: Towards the Analysis of Structural Inequality Within Socialist Societies. Bedford Park, Australia: Australasian Political Studies Association. ISBN 0-7258-0074-7.
Hayek, F. A. (1994, 1944). The Road to Serfdom (paperback ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-32061-8.
Kaplan, Robert D. (1993). Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-08701-2. http://www.ralphmag.org/djilasZA.html.

A meta-list of relevant publications. Related to Barbrook, Richard (2006). The Class of the New (paperback ed.). London: OpenMute. ISBN 0-9550664-7-6. http://www.theclassofthenew.net.
Orwell, George (1984, 1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four (paperback ed.). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 0-15-166038-7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four.
Gouldner, Alvin Ward (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era. New York: Seabury Press. ISBN 0-8164-9358-8.
Kellner, Hansfried; and Frank W. Heuberger (eds.) (1992). Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and New Capitalism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-443-9.
Lasch, Christopher (1995). The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03699-5.
Budrys, Grace (1997). When Doctors Join Unions. Ithaca: ILR Press/Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8354-9.

[edit] Articles

Registan (October 1/06) - The "New Class": The Rise and Fall of NGOs in Central Asia. Quotes extensively from a presentation by Laurence Jarvik to the Central Eurasian Studies Society, held the University of Michigan. Founding editor Nathan Hamm was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan.
Mutualist.org - Liberalism & Social Control: The New Class' Will to Power. Most New Class criticism comes explicitly from either the Left or the Right. Rarely does one seem to come from both at once.
The New Criterion (October 1999) - Remembering Milovan Djilas

The New York Review of Books (December 7/67) - Same Old New Class. A reply by Christopher Lasch

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Capitalism in the New Russia

*	Institute for Historical Review

Capitalism in the New Russia

by Daniel W. Michaels
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-1992, and the end of the centrally controlled "command economy," a new class of wealthy private capitalists with close government connections has emerged in Russia. The new ruling clique that has replaced the Soviet-era "nomenklatura" is widely referred to by the American-origin term "istablishment."
At the same time, life for most Russians has not improved. The great majority still struggles to survive, sometimes below the subsistence level. Industrial and agricultural production have fallen 50 percent in recent years, and millions are not paid their paltry salaries on time. Because most people lack hard currency to buy anything but essentials, consumer goods are generally accessible only to successful speculators, the mafia, and higher government officials. For the average Russian, and especially the elderly, life is not just impoverished, it is becoming desperate. [See: "Nationalist Sentiment Widespread, Growing in Former Soviet Union," Sept.-Oct. 1995 Journal, pp. 8-10.]
Russians pin much of the blame for this catastrophe on the ineffectual government of President Boris Yeltsin and his Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. In a public statement issued last December, a group of prominent Russian intellectuals spoke out on the crisis in their homeland:
The catastrophe has run its course. The economic policy of Yeltsin's and Chernomyrdin's aides has made a small section of the former communist nomenklatura and of the "new Russians" unbelievably rich, plunged most of the nation's industry into paralysis, and reduced the majority of the population to poverty. As far as property ownership is concerned, the gap between the rich and poor is much deeper now than that which led to the [1917] October [Bolshevik] Revolution.

Corrupt Businessmen Flourish

During the Soviet era, centralized Communist Party rule ensured that economic activity, however inefficient, was at least fairly predictable, with a more or less reliable work force. Although living standards were low, this "banana republic with rockets" was stable in the way that a prison is.
Now lawlessness prevails in Russia, with business life functioning at a level similar to that of Al Capone's Chicago. There is no effective system of laws to ensure the fair and orderly operation of business, banking, finance, insurance, stock trading, and so forth, and existing laws are neither consistently nor impartially enforced. Lawlessness and excess are more often rewarded than punished, and people have little protection against fraud by the new criminal class.
Russia specialist Richard F. Staar, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, reports in The Washington Times (Nov. 27, 1996):
In his book, Comrade Criminal, Stephen Handelman discussed connections between the already then well-established mafia underworld and corrupt bureaucrats, a relationship that apparently now has reached into the Kremlin itself. According to former Russian Social Security Minister Ella A. Pamfilova, a cynical redistribution of property currently is taking place. In her words, "The nature of the ruling class has not changed ... It is the same old corrupt, elitist, nomenklatura-bureaucratic swamp."
What is changing involves the national economy, half of which already has fallen under mob control, according to Security Council Secretary Ivan Rybkin. Former Director of the CIA, Robert M. Gates estimated earlier this year that two-thirds of all commercial institutions, some 400 banks (those in Moscow already control 80 percent of the country's finances), several dozen stock exchanges, and 150 large government enterprises are controlled by the mob.
A recent Russian periodical revealed that about 40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product is in the hands of organized crime, mow merged with corrupt official and businessmen.
One prominent scandal involves a businessman named Anatoly Aronov, who is under indictment for establishing some 500 fraudulent paper corporations. By cleverly manipulating the slipshod Russian banking system, and taking full advantage of the uncontrolled market economy, the vulnerability of inexperienced Russians, and the general climate, Aronov created a phantom business empire. After establishing the paper companies as "legal entities," Aronov then sold them at great profit to unwary Russians.
The disorder of Russia's banking system has been described in a November 12 , 1996, article by Rafail Kashlinksy in Vestnik, a Russian-language magazine published in the US. Of the more than 2,700 banks in Russia at the beginning of 1995, it reports, by the end of that year the Central Bank of Russia was obliged to revoke licenses of 225 of these, while more than 800 banks finished the year with large losses. Another 500 banks, including some of the largest (such as the Moscow Interregional Commercial Bank), were near bankruptcy by mid-1996.
Woodrow Wilson Center analyst J. Johnson, dispatched to Russia to evaluate the situation, found four main reasons for the country's banking crisis: a lack of professionally trained personnel; credit policy shortcomings; the monopolistic right of the quasi-government Sberbank to intervene in many instances as a government agent, giving it an unfair advantage in attracting clients and gaining access to useful information; and, the role of organized crime, which forces some bankers to divert time and resources to protecting themselves.
Crucial to the transition to a market economy is transferring business enterprises from state to private ownership. But this process has been ridden with abuse and corruption. Most of the oligarchs of Russia's new business elite are not self-made men. On the contrary, they were simply given control of (state-owned) oil, gas, automobile, banking and other enterprises -- essentially as gifts of the Yeltsin government to whom, of course, the newly-wealthy (and often youthful) businessmen are indebted.
Through the office of 35-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Alfred Kokh, the government assigns most of the enterprises to friends or supporters of Yeltsin and his administration, who, as new corporate CEOs, show their appreciation by supporting the government with money and favorable media coverage.
In an illustrative case, the Yeltsin government transferred 80 percent ownership shares in Russia's second largest oil company (formerly the state-owned Yukos company) to Mikhail Khodorosvsky, 33-year-old former head of the Communist Youth League and founder of the Menatep Bank. In return, Khodorosvsky turned over $168 million to the Yeltsin administration. (Newsweek, March 17, 1997).
The Russian word for privatization, "privatizatsiya," is routinely and cynically rendered by Russians as "prikhvatizatsiya," meaning "grabbing," or "piratizatsiya," meaning "pirating."
Russia's most successful new businessmen, the so-called "Big Seven" (and their main business holdings), are: Rem Vyakhirev (Gazprom), Boris Berezovsky (Logovaz), Vladimir Gusinsky (Most Bank), Vaghit Alekperov (Lukoil), Alexander Smolensky (Stolichnyy Bank), Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Rosprom), and Andrey Kazmin (Sberbank).
These seven men alone, experts believe, control virtually half of the companies whose shares are rated the highest at the national stock market. Other prominent members of the new business elite include Vladimir Potanin (Oneksim Bank), Vladimir Vinogradov (Inkombank), Anatoly Dyakov (RAO EES Rossii), Yakov Dubenetsky (Promstroybank), and Petr Aven (Alpha Bank). (Izvestia [Moscow], Jan. 5, 1997).
It is estimated that more than $60 billion has already found its way from Russia into Swiss banks, reports the London Financial Times. Of this amount, $10 billion is believed to be mafia money. This same paper also reports (Feb. 14) that criminal groups control some 41,000 companies in Russia, half the banks and 80 percent of the joint ventures.
Conscious of the precarious foundation of the Russian economy, foreign businessmen are understandably apprehensive about investing in this treacherous environment.
To deal with the situation, some steps have been taken. Russia's Federation (national) government is attempting to introduce a Civil Code based on that of The Netherlands, while American advisors have written statutes to govern operations of joint stock companies. But because Russia's historical experience has little in common with either the Dutch or the American, it is doubtful that these administrative imports will prove very effective.
Previous Russian experience with capitalism -- from the mid 19th-century to the 1917 revolution, and during the short-lived "New Economic Policy" (NEP) period (1921-1928) -- is scant help in establishing a modern free market economy. While it is true that industrial development advanced rapidly in Russia in the decades immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War (1914), it is also true that the plight of the emerging working class was often miserable -- a source of unrest that contributed to the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917. And the NEP experience was too brief and limited in scope to serve as a useful model. (The corruption of "Nepmen" incidentally provided abundant source material for Soviet satirists.)
Unless and until drastic changes are made, a healthy market economy cannot develop. These changes must include: a comprehensive code of business and banking law to protect investments, a credible judicial system to rigorously and impartially enforce the laws, a sweeping purge of corrupt police personnel, a country-wide crackdown on crime and corruption, and a stable monetary policy.
What is particularly tragic about Russia's economic calamity is that this vast land has such potential. In addition to a generally capable and well-trained managerial and working population, Russia is rich in natural resources, including oil, iron ore, gold and timber. Properly administered, this could be a very prosperous country.

Political Corruption

Without honest and effective political leadership, though, prosperity for the great majority will remain an elusive hope. Given its record so far, the government of President Boris Yeltsin can hardly be expected to provide the needed guidance and direction.
During last year's election Russian banks directed substantial resources to favored political candidates. While some backed the national-patriotic and Communist candidates, those who supported Yeltsin were rewarded. Thus, when Yeltsin formed his new post-election administration he appointed Vladimir Potanin, the 35-year-old president and co-founder of the country's biggest private bank, Oneksim Bank, as first vice premier for economics.
Because Yeltsin owes his July 1996 reelection victory in large measure to the financial and media support of Russia's new plutocrats, his government is widely disdained as an instrument of alien interests. Although many former Communist Party officials (including Yeltsin himself), as well as former KGB functionaries, continue to occupy high-level positions in Russia, the Yeltsin administration is widely regarded as an American-controlled and -directed "internationalist" regime. Yeltsin's chief of staff and primary economic advisor, Anatoly Chubais (age 41), is viewed as a US stooge at best, and a CIA agent at worst.
Opposing Yeltsin and his adherents is a diverse array of nationalists: national communists, national socialists, and national capitalists. In general, they call for a healthy, nationally-conscious Russian folk capable of defending and restoring the nation's dangerously dissipated ethnic and cultural character. [See: E. Zündel, "My Impressions of the New Russia," Sept.-Oct. 1995 Journal, pp. 2-8.]
Easily the most popular political figure in Russia today is General Aleksandr Lebed, a decorated Afghan war hero and the broker of peace in Chechnya. Even his critics concede his basic honesty. "Ordinary Russians are as far from the real levers of power today as they were during Soviet Communist Party rule," says Lebed. Half the nation's economy, he adds, is controlled by "a small group of banks and financial-industrial groups, while the other half is controlled by criminal clans."
To protect their own corrupt business empires, the new plutocrats around Yeltsin will predictably do everything in their power to keep Lebed, or any authentically Russian figure, regardless of popularity, from taking power.
Not surprisingly, Lebed complains that he now has become invisible in the pages and programs controlled by the major media barons. In addition, no major bank will help finance him for fear of Kremlin retribution. (Newsweek, March 17, 1997.)
Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov reportedly (Washington Times, Feb. 8) have discussed forming a political alliance to keep Lebed out of power if Yeltsin dies in office. Chernomyrdin and some of his backers, among them Moscow's major bankers, are said to fear possible arrest as part of a nationwide campaign against corruption demanded by Lebed. (Chernomyrdin and Zyuganov have been personal friends since they served together six years ago on the Central Committee of the former Soviet Communist Party.)
To deal with the growing nationalist sentiment, authorities in Moscow are considering steps to crack down on its most extreme manifestations. Moscow's Municipal Duma is considering a measure that prohibits the display or political use of symbols associated with Third Reich on the grounds that they disrupt the general order, incite to violence in a multinational society, and foster political extremism. Also forbidden would be the wearing of uniforms, displaying swastikas, and the use of the Roman (Hitler) salute as a greeting.

Zionist Kingmaker Berezovsky

Personifying Russia's new ruling class is Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, a Jewish business magnate, media mogul, and high-ranking government official whom US News & World Report calls (Jan. 13, 1997) "the most influential new capitalist tycoon in Russia." His business empire includes a bank, one of the few national television channels, oil concerns and automobile dealerships. (Forward [New York], Nov. 22, 1996.) After taking advantage of high-level political connections to quickly amass enormous wealth, Berezovsky provided large sums and favorable media coverage to insure the re-election of President Yeltsin, who then appointed him to the country's national Security Council.
An important step in Berezovsky's ambitious upward climb was his acquisition of Sibneft, Russia's sixth-largest oil company. He gained this immensely important asset not through honest business practices or competitive bidding, but as a gift of the State Committee for the Management of State Property. Committee head Kokh simply appointed Berezovsky to take over Sibneft, and President Yeltsin signed the papers to approve the transfer. (Komsomolskaya Pravda [Moscow], Jan. 25).
Contributing to his image as the stereotypical international capitalist, Berezovsky ostentatiously roars around Moscow in a dark-blue bulletproof Mercedes 600, protected by a BMW in front, and bodyguards in Mitsubishi jeeps on either side. His private security staff numbers 150, including 20 former KGB technical surveillance specialists.
In the view of the country's "democratic reformers," the US News & World article continues, "Berezovsky and his ilk" have "exploited for personal gain wrongheaded economic reforms that were impoverishing the average man." Berezovsky
has proved that building wealth in the new Russia has much to do with government cronies smoothing the way and little to do with free competition ... Most disturbing of all to Russian reformers is the impunity with which Berezovsky has operated. His road to capitalism would have landed him in jail in most civilized countries, but brought no criminal charges in the new Russia.
Berezovsky, reports the New York Jewish weekly Forward (April 4, 1997), is "among those fabulously wealthy and hugely resented new Russian industrialists -- robber barons accused of milking Russia dry -- who bankrolled Mr. Yeltsin's presidential campaign, buying the keys to the state." Berezovsky has publicly boasted that he and six other top businessmen -- some of them Jewish -- control 50 percent of the Russian economy.
Not long ago Berezovsky bragged to the London Financial Times: "We hired [First Deputy Prime Minister] Chubais. We invested huge sums of money. We guaranteed Yeltsin's election. Now we have the right to occupy government posts and use the fruits of our victory." (Quoted in Forward, April 4, 1997)
An article in a December issue of the American business magazine Forbes accuses Berezovsky of running a criminally corrupt business organization. Headlined "Godfather of the Kremlin?," the article concludes "It sure looks that way."
A major scandal erupted in late 1996, following Yeltsin's appointment of Berezovsky as deputy chief of Russia's national Security Council (akin to the US National Security Council), when it was revealed that he had acquired Israeli citizenship three years earlier.
Responding to those who questioned the propriety of a wealthy businessman with foreign citizenship holding a highly sensitive security post, "Berezovsky and a number of television and newspapers journalists in his employ responded with racial demagoguery, accusing his critics of anti-Semitism." Berezovsky "met with the editors of Izvestia for a series of interviews in which he mixed charges of anti-Semitism with thinly veiled threats of violence." (Forward, Nov. 22, 1996) He has even brazenly insisted that Yeltsin has a moral and material obligation to Jewish business in Russia. (Komsomolskaya Pravda, Nov. 5, 1996).
"Every Jew, regardless of where he is born or lives, is de facto a citizen of Israel," Berezovsky declared in a candid response to his critics. "The fact that I have annulled my Israeli citizenship today in no way changes the fact that I am a Jew and can again become a citizen of Israel whenever I choose. Let there be no illusions about it, 'every Jew in Russia is a dual citizen'." (Segodnya ["Today"], Nov. 14, 1996).
The Security Committee of Russia's parliament (the Duma) has appealed to Yeltsin to remove Berezovsky from his sensitive Security Council position on the grounds that his dual Israeli-Russian citizenship legally disqualifies him from occupying the post. According to the Russian Federation's Citizenship Law, he could legally occupy this post only on the basis of a specific agreement between Russia and Israel. No such agreement exists. Moreover, the Duma committee contends, Berezovsky is further disqualified because he has failed to sever his business connections after accepting the position. Finally, before he could be given legal access to classified information, the Federal Security Service would have to investigate and clear him. (Segodnya [Moscow], Feb. 19)
With good reason, the well-informed Jewish weekly Forward (Nov. 22) has expressed concern that Berezovsky's illicit business activities and his arrogant public statements, as well as President Yeltsin's indulgence of him, may aggravate anti-Jewish sentiment and thereby jeopardize the future of all of Russia's Jews:
Given that many of the moguls who backed Mr. Yeltsin's [reelection] campaign, including Mr. Berezovsky, are Jews, it seemed he was tempting, if not openly inviting, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories ... Yeltsin's failure to fire Berezovsky really puts the future of democracy in Russia, and the bizarre situation of the Jews there, in even sharper focus.

Vladimir Gusinsky

Nearly as rich and as influential as Berezovsky is Vladimir Gusinsky, another immensely wealthy Jewish banker and media magnate who played a key role in reelecting Yeltsin. (Forward, April 4, 1997) An outspoken advocate of Jewish interests, Gusinsky is a close ally of presidential chief of staff, Chubais. According to a Wall Street Journal report, he has ties to organized crime.
After a meteoric career building Most Bank, Gusinsky now devotes his energies to Media-Most, a new media holding company that includes the important NTV television network; a slick television weekly, "7 Days"; a popular radio station, "Echo of Moscow"; and a weekly news magazine, Itogi, which is published in partnership with Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post company); NTV-Plus satellite television network; and a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper, Sevodnya. (The Washington Post, March 31, 1997). He also has close connections with international media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
When Prime Minister Chernomyrdin arrived in Washington, DC, in early February for a meeting with President Clinton, the 44-year-old Gusinsky accompanied him. On the day of their arrival, author/ journalist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote (Washington Times, Feb. 6):
On the surface Gusinsky is chairman of the powerful Most Bank and the "independent" Moscow TV ... His bank was on the CIA's recent list of banks with Russian mafia connections. In 1994, Most Bank was the scene of a bitter shootout with Mr. Yeltsin's then-favorite KGB General Aleksander Korzhakov after which Mr. Gusinsky and his family temporarily exiled themselves to London. Most Bank is also known as a veritable den of former KGB men, and not KGB men from the professional intelligence sections, but from the notorious "Fifth Chief Directorate."
Mr. Gusinsky now has a new role to play. He has had himself named head of the Russian Jewish Congress, and the suspicion is widespread that he will use his growing contacts with the American Jewish community to cry "Discrimination!" whenever anyone dares to criticize his business methods ... We need to recognize what a delicate and dangerous moment this is in Russia when President Yeltsin's life hangs in the balance, and men like Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Gusinsky are readying to fill the vacuum that will surely open soon. They have talked publicly about using "constitutional means" when the time comes to insure an appointed president rather than new elections (in particular to avoid a victory of the honest General Aleksandr Lebed).

Crucial Jewish Role

No one can really understand Russia's tumultuous social, political and economic situation, with its complex contending forces, without an awareness of the role of Jews, both in the past and today, and the popular attitude toward them.
During the Soviet era, Jews played a prominent, perhaps dominant, role in the ruling Communist Party and in economic, cultural and academic life. [See: M. Weber, "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Early Soviet Regime," Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal, pp. 4-14.] Today Jews hold conspicuous positions of great wealth and authority. Although they make up perhaps three percent of the total population, Jews wield power vastly disproportionate to their numbers. As the London Times noted recently (Jan. 27, 1997):
Prominent Jewish figures today enjoy unprecedented positions of power in politics, the media and the private sector, and have emerged as some of Russia's most creative and talented minds. Boris Berezovsky, the most influential Russian Jew, who holds the post of deputy head of the Security Council as well as controlling a small business empire, even boasted recently that the country was run by seven key bankers, most of them Jewish.
Although anti-Semitism is still a powerful undercurrent in Russian society, and could resurface in the event of a nationalist leader coming to power, for the moment anti-Jewish sentiment is rarely voiced openly.
Besides such business figures as Berezovsky and Gusinsky, a recent Forward article (April 4, 1997) cites such high-ranking Jewish government officials as: Boris Nemstov, first deputy prime minister in charge of social welfare, housing reform and restructuring of government monopolies; Yakov Urinson, deputy prime minister for economic affairs; and, Aleksandr Livshits, deputy head of Yeltsin's administration.
Anti-Semitism was strictly illegal during the Soviet era. Today anti-Jewish sentiment is not only widespread, it is openly and sometimes forcefully expressed, in spite of Yeltsin government disapproval. Russian newspapers frequently and often emotionally discuss their country's national-ethnic questions, the re-awakening Russian nationalism, and the role of Jews in society, in terms of an ongoing struggle between nationalism and internationalism. "Isn't it a pity that anti-Semitism is flourishing in Russia today like 'chrysanthemums in a garden'," the frankly nationalist paper Zavtra ("Tomorrow") sarcastically comments (No. 47, Nov 1996).
Even Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the reconstituted Communist Party (currently the main opposition political force), has written in his book, I Believe in Russia:
The ideology, culture and world outlook of the Western world became more and more influenced by the Jews scattered around the world. Jewish influence grew not by the day, but by the hour.
Reflecting the widespread bitterness of many Russians is a front-page article in Zavtra (Nov. 1996, No. 48), which charges that a group of "13 banker apostles" has gained control of the country. It went on to warn readers: " ... The Constitution has been one-third torn to pieces right under your nose in the last five years, and from this day on you will live under the jurisdiction of the Jewish bankers whose wallets protect the thugs of [television stations] ORT and NTV."
Informed Russians are quite aware of America's special relationship with Israel, with the Jewish lobby's mighty influence in the United States, with the preferential treatment given by the US immigration agency (INS) to Jewish immigrants, and with the zealous US concern for Jewish welfare in general. Accordingly, Russian nationalists tend to view Jewish capitalists in their country as quasi-agents of the United States.
Concerned about a possible backlash, many Russian Jews, reports the Moscow correspondent of the Forward (April 4, 1997), now say that "there are too many Jews in government. There are too many Jewish bankers running the country." Jews fear that with such a conspicuous profile they will be viewed as a group that has grown wealthy through dishonest practices at the expense of the productive working people, and that Russians will blame them for humiliating and ruining the nation. Anyway, a prominent Jewish community leader notes, "people here have quite bitter memories of the participation of Jews in the [Bolshevik] revolution." (Forward, April 4, 1997)
Writing in Zavtra (No. 43, Oct. 1996), analyst Aleksandr Sevastyanov describes the contrasting attitudes of Russians and Jews with regard to Russia's future:
There are many Jews in the country who preach the idea of a new Russian empire for the simple reason that for them Russian imperialism is a synonym for internationalism under new circumstances. Not having succeeded in its time with the Comintern [the Soviet- controlled Communist International], they now say "let's try an empire." Their ideal is a flourishing multinational Russia, where the Russians themselves are not really the rulers.
For us nationalists, this kind of Russia is pure nonsense -- not worth our time or our support. Every normal Russian believes in his heart, and rightly so: "We have created this state and we shall rule it." On the other hand, every typical Jew thinks to himself: "Yes, you Russians created the state, but we Jews shall rule it because we are the elite of the Russian nation, the natural claimants to the role of an imperial people. And we shall do so because we are the richest, the most united, the best educated, and the most cultured. If we do not rule Russia, then who?"
And, alas, today we Russians are not yet in a position even to pretend to an imperial role. The Soviet empire collapsed because the Russian people lost the ability to preserve or prevent the collapse of the great nation they had been built up over the centuries. To attempt to recapture its former ruling role, without first recapturing the ethnic strength that made it possible, would be suicidal. Solzhenitsyn is again right when he says: "Any attempt to restore the empire today would be tantamount to burying the Russian people." We must first concentrate on solving the problems that have weakened us as a people. They are, first and foremost, demographic, and only secondarily economic, social, military, cultural, and the rest. We most reject all other activities that do not focus on the revitalization of our people. We cannot permit ourselves to be diverted from our absolutely essential goal, which is ethno-egocentric -- not even by the ephemeral lure of empire building.

A Time of Ominous Transition

Still emerging from seven decades of Soviet rule, Russians are groping toward a new sense of national identity. Not yet having come to grips with its past, this is a land of historical paradox. Thus, Lenin's embalmed corpse is still enshrined in a monumental sarcophagus on Moscow's Red Square, and not a single former Communist official has been brought to trial for Soviet-era crimes.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has observed, Russia today is neither an authentic political democracy nor a genuine free market economy. While an ambitious few amass vast fortunes and great power through illicit deals, the country's productive workers, children and elderly suffer. A small oligarchy rules over a population that lives in near destitution. "Democracy in the true sense of the word does not exist in Russia," writes Solzhenitsyn. He continues:
There exists no legal framework or financial means for the creation of local self-government. People will have no choice but to achieve it through social struggle ... This system of centralized power cannot be called a democracy ... The fate of the country is now decided by a stable oligarchy of 150-200 people, which includes the nimbler members of the old Communist system's top and middle ranks, plus the nouveaux riches ... Our present ruling circles have not shown themselves in the least morally superior to the Communists who preceded them ... Russia is being exhausted by crime, not a single serious crime has been exposed, nor has there been a single public trial ... This destructive course of events over the last decade has come about because the government, while ineptly imitating foreign models, has completely disregarded the country's innate creativity and singular character as well as Russia's centuries-old spiritual and social traditions.
For the historically minded observer, the parallels between Russia today and Germany during the pre-Hitler Weimar republic years are striking and portentous. In each case, there has been severe economic, political and social upheaval, monetary chaos, substantial loss of territory, and humiliating subordination to foreign powers following the abrupt collapse of an seemingly entrenched political regime. Unscrupulous individuals, many of them members of an alien ethnic minority, have exploited their foreign connections and the prevailing disorder to quickly enrich themselves at the expense of the common people. Major media and financial institutions are largely in the hands of people with no national loyalty. In each case, the social dislocation has come with a drastic fall in cultural and moral standards.
Much of the talk in the United States about democracy in Russia is as ridiculous today as it has always been. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose. Throughout its history, Russia has been ruled by an elite, entrenched in Moscow and St. Petersburg, often of non-Russian origin and fascinated by Western philosophies.
As a potentially wealthy country with a proud and illustrious past, it is difficult to imagine that Russians will permit the current miserable and humiliating situation to continue indefinitely. At the same time, it's hard to see how Russia's problems can be mastered without very drastic change.

Daniel W. Michaels is a retired Defense Department analyst who lives in Washington, DC. After graduating in 1954 from Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa), he studied in Tübingen, Germany (1957), with a Fulbright scholarship.

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SPEAKING FREELY
The birth of Russia's new energy class
By Justin Dargin

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

Milovan Djilas, prominent Yugoslavian author and subsequent critic of Josef Tito, developed the theory of the "new class" - a phenomenon that took the vacated position of the ruling bourgeois/aristocracy. The new class, according to Djilas, did not seek property control but political control: not one of them had

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significant holdings, but, as a class, they owned everything.

Djilas proposed that the new group incrementally came to the self-realization that it constituted a distinct class. However, once realized, it undertook rapid scale industrialization to buttress its power and exclude opponents, internal and external. The members of the new class, as long as they submitted to the group's goals, had superior access to the material rewards that the system has to offer.

President Vladimir Putin's Russia provides an opportunity to study the new class of socio-economic-political interests that are coalescing, based on the shared interest in and ownership of the state's energy resources. This triumvirate is composed of the security services (Siloviki), the politicians and the business elite.

In most oil and gas producing nations, taxation over the extractive industries is the primary tool for expropriation of previously generated wealth, present as infrastructure investments and capital goods. The class structure of a society is governed and defined by the relationships between specific groups of individuals and the interaction between the two methods of wealth acquisition, political or economic.

However, the more prevalent the political venues are in a society, then the more likely that the beneficiaries of expanding state intervention may be designated as a separate class. This new class comprises all individuals, and their political and biological kinsmen, whose positions in society stem from state expansion as the political means of wealth acquisition in society.

It is important to clarify that the class itself, or the individuals that comprise it, may not have a full understanding of the formation of a concretized group. A member may not realize aligned goals, or interests with others in that class. However, after a period of time, as it becomes evident that there are shared special interests, a common class consciousness evolves. Moreover, the ascension of a class identity will harden more in those that are net beneficiaries of the system (in Russia's case the oil and gas industry), rather than the more diffuse net losers from the political intervention in the market.

Russia's triumvirate of Siloviki, energy oligarchs and bureaucrats will obtain a decisive advantage in honing a consciousness of their common interests and promoting a broad consensus of the measures necessary to defend those interests.

The Siloviki comprised 58.3% of the Security Council in 2003, 33.3% in 1993 and an insignificant 4.8% in the Politburo of 1988. Instead of Djilas's massive industrialization, this group seeks expanded control over the mineral resources, which then allows the state to fund its expansion. In compliance with Djilas's new class, as long as members do not upset the prevailing social order, the new class has channels for material enrichment that are woefully closed to the average citizen.

The financial collapse of 1998 in the Russian banking and financial sector solidified the power of this class around the extractive industries. The collapse of Moscow's banking sector decimated the power base of the Moscow-centered oligarchs in banking and finance but gave a corresponding boost to the regional oligarchs, who dominated local production around the oil and gas industry. The ruble's devaluation prompted the industrial sector's enhanced role in politics, which oligarchs in the more Russo-centric regions occupied, to the detriment of the cosmopolitan elite in the financial sector.

However, the parasitical nature of affairs becomes increasingly manifest because the beneficiaries of the political means in an essentially capitalist system depend upon the uniqueness of the economic system to survive. Although the two classes coexist in a symbiotic relationship, the predatory political classes feed off the wealth-accruing groups, without which they would not survive. On the other hand, the groups that use economic tools can survive and in fact generally thrive in the absence of political interference.

In the Russian backdrop, the energy oligarchs and the Siloviki guiding the state ship are in a sense co-dependent. The state needs the revenue inflows generated by the oil and gas industry to survive; and the energy oligarchs and their state-dominated energy companies receive enhanced business opportunities. With these contradictions, it is Kafkaesque to surmise that Russia sails a sound ship of state. The New Russian State is gripped by an inherent instability, which resonates with contradictions the longer it prevails.

Although the 1990s were dominated by a relatively small group of tycoons, the dawn of the 21st century saw power spread across a larger, more geographically dispersed group, which actually showed greater dependence on the state institutions than had the Moscow-centered banking and finance oligarchs. Because Putin appointed important government figures to head state energy corporations, the post-2001 era saw the new class(es) develop apace.

During the preliminary stages of the current restructuring, a we/they dichotomy formed the basis of a new weltanschauung (worldview). A definite set of class interests develop at this period, which then becomes second nature during the subsequent socialization process. As the restructuring formalizes, the new class(es) assume a more cohesive form and a more synthetic shape, with resource nationalism as the glue that holds together their unity.

In contrast to the emergence of the new class under communism, Putin's new adherents seek to control the levers of the extractive industries and to exert Russia's power outward. The new class so to speak etches itself into the state machinery and state-dominated firms, just as Baron von Munchhausen's wolf eats itself into the horse and then finds itself harnessed and has to draw the sledge. Perhaps due to the necessarily dependent nature of the energy sector with regard to the oil-consuming nations, state centralism in Russia has a distinctly expansionary essence.

However, in its incipient phase, Putin stands iconically above the fray, as he plays one group against the other to maintain his personal power over the governmental apparatus. Putin's legacy will be that of a disciplinarian; he molded a heterogeneous group of people, with diverse interests and forged them, sometimes against their will, into a more cohesive unit.

Justin Dargin is the author of Rebuilding the Iraqi Oil Industry: Legal and Constitutional Strategies for Sustainable Post-Saddam Development featured in the forthcoming Rebuilding Sustainable Communities in Iraq (2008).

(Copyright Justin Dargin 2007.)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/IL06Ag01.html

The New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia - Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin

The New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia

A lecture to the delegates of the Third World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, delivered

on July 8th, 1921, on the significance of the new economic policy of Soviet Russia

Source: The new policies of soviet Russia, Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1921, pp. 43-64.
Transcription: Daniel Gaido
HTML Markup: Steve Palmer
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

In order to understand the new policy and its practical importance, we should consider it in connection with the economic and social crises, which we had to go through this spring. The experience of the Russian Revolution has proved that our former notions of the revolutionary process were rather naive. Even the orthodox Marxian section thought that all the proletariat had to do to take over the technical apparatus after ejecting the upper layers of the bourgeoisie was to capture the reins of power. Experience taught us something very different from that. It proved that during the proletarian dictatorship the complete dissolution of the old capitalist apparatus is a necessary stage in the revolutionary development.
Perhaps some will object that this experience does not give us a theoretical proof and that the development in other countries may assume a different character from that of Russia. They may say that Russia is backward, her proletariat is not numerous, and big industry constitutes a small proportion of the economy of Russia. In Western Europe and in America, however, the development will take quite a different direction. This idea can be refuted not only by Russian experience — we are convinced of the absolute inevitability of an economic disorganization generally during the revolutionary process.
Every revolution is a process of reorganization of social relations. In a bourgeois revolution this process is not so thorough or extensive as in a proletarian revolution, because capitalism has already been developed and only a political transformation becomes necessary. Feudal property had already become private property, and the bourgeois revolution had only to secure this private property and allow it a wider scope of action. It was mainly a question of transferring the political machine from one set of owners to another. But even in this case it was necessary to undergo a certain process of reorganization, which had to be paid for dearly. Even a bourgeois revolution is accompanied by a temporary decline in productivity. Such was the case in the Great French Revolution.
The same was manifested in the American Civil War, where economic development was thrown back for a decade. In a proletarian revolution the same thing takes place on a much larger scale. During a proletarian revolution we must not only destroy the State machine, but completely reorganize the industrial relations. That is the most important point.
What are the industrial relations in the capitalist system? First of all there is a capitalist hierarchy, the subordination of one group to another; higher up there is the class of capitalists, then follow the directors, then the technical Intelligentsia, the so-called new middle class, then the skilled workers and finally the rank and file workers. If these industrial relations are to be recognized it means that we must first of all and immediately destroy the various ties that bind these groups. The workers achieve this not by street fights only, but by struggling industrially by means of strikes, etc. The working class cannot win the army in time of Revolution if the soldiers obey their officers. It is equally necessary to bring about a breakdown in industrial discipline, if the proletariat is to gain a hold over the economic apparatus.
Once these ties between the classes and strata are severed, the whole process of production will be brought to a standstill. When the workers strike or fight on the barricades, no work can be done. When there is a sabotage on the part of the technical intelligentsia, the whole process of production is interrupted. Only when the proletariat is fully in possession of the whole government machine can it put down such attempts. Until that time the process of production will be paralyzed. Kautsky and Otto Bauer were talking utter rubbish when they spoke of the continuity of the process of production and wish to connect it with the revolution. It would be the same if an army wishing to defeat its officers were to preserve a strict discipline under their command instead of killing them. Either the revolution will win, and then there is an inevitable disorganization of the process of production, or discipline will be maintained, and then there will be no revolution at all. Every revolution is paid for by certain attending evils, and it is only at that price that we can bring about the transition to higher forms of economic life of the revolutionary proletariat. We need not be afraid of that temporary disorganization. One cannot make omelets without breaking eggs.

Proletarian Dictatorship and the Peasantry during the Civil War

Now it becomes clear that the price to be paid for the revolutionary process is greater where there is a more stubborn resistance on the part of all the other classes and groups to the proletariat, attaining its maximum in the country which is first in adopting the dictatorship. In Russia the class struggle involved not only a civil but also a foreign war. Where civil war is transformed into foreign war against powerful States the revolution has to be paid for at an outrageous rate. This is the chief cause of our impoverishment in the course of the last few years. Nearly 75 per cent, of our small supplies and of our latest products had to be given to the Red Army. Every intelligent man will understand what this means to our economic life.
It is impossible to live without bread. The bread question is the most difficult problem of the revolution. The process of economic disintegration during the revolution is also expressed by the severance of ties which connect town and country. When the battle of classes is raging and the process of production in towns is paralyzed, communications with the rural districts cease. The ties of finance and capital which bind the large landowners and the rich farmers to the banks are immediately severed. The same happened to the connecting links between the various peasant co-operative organizations. All exchange between town and country ceases. The credit system in particular is ruined. When towns cease to supply anything to the country, there is no stimulus to give anything to the towns. The economic equilibrium is destroyed.
As the town population must exist also in time of revolution, special means must be found to feed it. First the supplies stored in towns are consumed. Then compulsory means may be adopted against the peasants. The third expedient is the consciousness of the peasants that only the proletarian state defends them against the landowners, the usurers, and others.
The peasants were greatly influenced by that consideration during the civil war against foreign counter revolution. Our compulsory methods found their economic justification in this circumstance. As regards the arguments of the opportunists that the peasantry was opposed to the Bolsheviks and that the latter rule by sheer force, every Marxist will say that this is nonsense. Not even the Czar's government was capable of performing such a feat. Our compulsory actions found their economic justification in the fact that the peasants, as a class, fully understand that there is no other force that can defend them from the land-owners, of whose estates the peasants have taken possession. In Russia 82 per cent, of land formerly owned by large landowners was given to the peasants. The close-fisted peasant will not allow this land to be taken from him. He was wise enough to perceive that the main economic problem is to keep fast to the land, as land alone gives him the certainty of growing food. That is why he put up with our methods of requisitions and that is why we were on the whole able to maintain an equilibrium in our social structure. We felt the ground under our feet.
Of course, every war has its laws. The experience of capitalist countries has shown that the economic changes can more easily be effected in war than in peace time. The same can be observed in our country. Certain classes, especially the petty bourgeoisie, were honestly convinced that everything must be sacrificed for war. Due to this we were able to estimate our resources and regulate economy by strongly applying the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But after war was over the contradictions in this economic system came to the surface at once, first and foremost the contradictions between the regulating tendencies and the anarchical tendencies of the peasantry.

Inflexibility of the Peasant and De-classing of the Proletariat

It was proved economically that if we take away all the surplus of the peasants' produce we take away almost all the incentive to further production. If the peasant knows that he will be deprived of all surplus produce he will only produce for himself and nothing for others. The only incentive that remains is of an intellectual kind, the knowledge that he must support the workers who defend him from the landlord. After the victory at the civil war fronts the effect of his incentive was destroyed. It was observed that the cultivated area diminished. This was also due to the drafting of the labor forces to the army, to the decrease of the stocks of cattle, peasant stock generally, etc. Agriculture was in a critical condition, and we were in danger of being left without sufficient bread.
Naturally this state of agriculture reacted on industry. It is not true that our technical apparatus is totally disorganized. In many important branches of the textile and metal industries, as well as others, we possess a good technical apparatus. But the great problem facing us is how to provide the towns with the necessaries of life. In our country the workers are hungry because the exchange of goods between town and country is paralyzed.
These economic conditions have their social consequences. When large industry is in such a miserable condition the workers seek to find a way, e. g., by manufacturing small articles of every day use at the places where they work, which they subsequently sell. By such methods the proletariat becomes declassed. When in this way the worker becomes interested in free trade, he begins to regard himself as a small producer, a petty bourgeois. This means the transformation of the workers into petty bourgeois with all their characteristics. The proletariat goes back to the village where it works as small craftsmen. The greater the disorganization the stronger the process of degeneration of the proletariat, now demanding free trade.
The proletariat as such is weakened. Moreover the flower of the proletariat was destroyed at the front. Our army consisted of an amorphous peasant mass which was like wax in the hands of the Communist, and non-party men. We have lost an immense number of these proletarians, and it was precisely these who enjoyed the greatest esteem and confidence in the factories. Moreover, we were compelled to utilize the best strata of the proletariat for the State machine, the administration of all the villages, etc. To organize a proletarian dictatorship in a peasant country meant to distribute the proletarians among certain localities like so many pieces on a chess-board, in order to guide the peasants. One can imagine how the factories suffered in consequence through lack of proletarian forces. Only the worst elements remained in the factories. And on the top of it all came the de-classing of the workers. Such is the social crisis within the working class.
The peasantry had also to suffer, but not to the same extent. If we take an economic view of the subject, i.e., not in the sense of power and political rights, the peasantry has derived more benefit from the revolution than all the other classes. Economically the peasantry is better off than the proletariat, though the latter is the privileged class. The peasant feels himself stronger than ever. There are other, secondary causes. The peasant obtained a good training in the army. He returned from the war a different man. He is now on a higher intellectual and moral level than he was before. Now he understands politics very well. He says: We are the predominating force and we shall not allow others to treat us as silly children. We want to feed the workers, but we are the senior partners and demand our rights.
As soon as the war was over the peasants immediately presented their demands. They are interested in small trade. They are supporters of free trade, and opposed to the compulsory socialist system of economy. These demands were presented in the form of peasant risings in various districts in Siberia, Tambov, etc. Things did not look so bad as the counter revolutionary press tried to picture it, but these events were symptomatic. In their eyes the political solution of the economic situation consists in the motto 'For the Bolsheviks and against the Communists.'
At first this appears quite absurd, but though it is cryptically formulated this motto has an intelligent explanation. At the time of the October Revolution and previous to it we were the party that told the peasant to kill the landowner and to take his land. The Bolsheviks were then thought to be capital fellows. They gave the peasants everything and demanded nothing in return. But in the end we became the Party which gave nothing and demanded everything from the peasants. They were consequently against the communists, who were taking away their bread and moreover preached absurd ideas of communism, unsuitable to the peasants. The second watchword was free trade. The first watchword was 'For non-party Soviets against the dictatorship of a party.' If there are even communists who fail to understand that a class can only rule if it has a head, and the party is the head of a class then we can easily under- stand the peasants failing to grasp that idea. Such is the intellectual atmosphere prevailing among the lower middle-class and the peasantry.
The proletariat, too, insofar as it was de-classed, of necessity shared the same views. In some places even metal workers took up the watchwords: "Free trade," against the "Communist," for class dictatorship but against Party dictatorship. Thus the equilibrium between the proletariat and the peasantry was destroyed. A misunderstanding arose which threatened the whole system of the proletarian dictatorship. The crisis found its expression in the Kronstadt mutiny. The documents which have since been brought to light show clearly that the affair was instigated by purely white guard centers, but at the same time the Kronstadt mutiny was a petty bourgeois rebellion against the socialist system of economic compulsion. Sailors are mostly sons of peasants, especially Ukrainian peasants. Ukraine is more petty bourgeois than Central Russia. The peasants there resemble more the German farmers than the Russian peasants. They are against Czarism but have little sympathy for communism. The sailors were home on leave and there became strongly infected with peasant ideas. This was the cause of the revolt.
As is known we acted with all speed; we mobilized and sent against Kronstadt one- third of our Party Congress, we lost many comrades, but we quelled the rebellion. But victory could not solve the question. We had to take certain measures. Had there been a revolution in Germany we could have brought workers from there and have made a surgical operation. But we have to act on our own. There was one principle which we had to maintain at all costs: the preservation of the dictatorship. It was clear that we were making no concessions to the peasants. We had the picture of the Hungarian affair before us. It is true we should have come into power again after a few months or years, but the bourgeoisie would try its method of reorganization, which costs something, and then we would again try ours. The disorganization of national industry would be so terrible that no one can even guess whether any tolerable state of things could ever result from this chaos.
When the State apparatus is in our hands we can guide it in any desired direction. But unless we are at the helm we can give no direction at all. Consequently we must seize power and keep it and make no political concessions. But we may make many economic concessions. But the fact of the matter is we are making economic concessions in order to avoid making political concessions. We shall agree to no coalition government or anything like it, not even equal rights to peasants and workers. We cannot do that. The concessions do not in any way change the class character of the dictatorship. When a State makes concessions to another class it does in no way alter its class character, no more than a factory owner, who makes concessions to his employees, becomes a worker. If we look at it from a social and political standpoint the significance of the concessions lies in the pacification and neutralization of the lower middle class. Our former investigations brought us to the conclusion that the economic difficulties consisted in the lack of an incentive to increase production. Now this incentive has been offered in the substitution of a tax in kind instead of requisitions. Now the peasant knows that he will have to give up more if he produces more, but he knows also that he will keep more. Experience has already shown that such are his calculations. As soon as we decided on this new system at our party congress the area under cultivation increased at once to that of 1916 and even 1915.
Politically a general pacification has set in. The guerilla warfare in the Ukraine has lost its intensity. These political measures succeeded in putting an end to the Makhno gangs. Some will naturally doubt the wisdom of making these concessions to the petty bourgeoisie. They may say that a period of accumulation, such as existed hitherto, has been inaugurated, that usury will result which will transform itself into industrial capitalism. We are faced by the same danger as we were at the time of the Brest Peace, when we stood in danger of being engulfed by German capitalism. However, such a state of things is only temporary. Our position now is that we want bread and a pacific peasantry, or else we shall go to the dogs. Even the worker will revolt against his own government if he has nothing to eat.
Communism requires a certain time to mature and this process under our conditions of life is more painful than it would otherwise be. We have in our hands large industry, the coal industry, transport, etc. A whole period of history is required to transform the peasant into a capitalist. Our view is that capitalism will rise slowly from below, but we will keep under our control the chief branches of industry. Once this is achieved all the industrial processes will assume their normal course. The declassing of the proletariat will cease, we shall be able to invite foreign workers, etc. We could then pass on to the technical revolution, and will be able to realize the electrification of Russia, which is now in an embryonic stage. If we succeed in realizing even a part of our program then we shall get the better of the petty bourgeois tendencies. If the peasant receives from us electric light and power he will be transformed into a social functionary and his proprietary instincts will not be offended.
If the tendencies of capitalist growth gain the upper hand over the tendencies to improve large industry, then we are doomed. But we hope the contrary will be the case — then we shall master all difficulties in the field of economics.
Paul Levi and all the opportunists of the world say: 'You see, the Bolsheviks are making concessions to the peasants and we make concessions to the masses.' But this analogy is not correct. We make concessions to secure the equilibrium of the Soviet system, Levi makes concessions to maintain the capitalist equilibrium, and he does not seem to notice this little difference. We might as well say that there is an army in France and there is an army here, a police system there and an Extraordinary Commission here. The essential point is — what are the class functions of these institutions, and which class do they serve? Whoever makes an abstraction of the class lives in the skies, not on earth. And I think it would better if our enemies remain in the skies and we remain on solid earth.

Nikolai Bukharin Archive

Bengal under Mughals: Consolidation of Islamic hegemony

In the late sixteenth century, a dynasty of Chaghatai Turks commonly known as the Mughals annexed Bengal to their vast Indian empire, thereby ending the delta's long isolation from North India. As just one among twelve provinces, Bengal was now administered by a class of imperial officials who, regularly rotated through the realm, shared a larger, pan-Indian view of their political mission. The new ruling class lacked attachments to Bengal and its culture. This served to widen the gulf between ashraf Muslims, identified with the new wave of outsiders who swept into the delta after the conquest, and non-ashraf Muslims, increasingly identified as native converted Bengali Muslims.
It was in Jahangir's reign (1605–27 CE) that the Mughal enterprise in Bengal passed from an ad hoc pursuit of rebels to the establishment of a regular administration. In May 1608, aiming to crush rebellious elements once and for all, Jahangir appointed as governor 'Ala al-Din Islam Khan, an extraordinarily able and determined commander. A man about thirty-seven years of age at this time, Islam Khan enjoyed close ties with the emperor—the two had grown up together since childhood as foster-brothers—and possessed remarkable powers of self-discipline. Taking leave of the emperor, he moved down the Gangetic Plain at the head of an immense army of cavalry, artillery, and elephants, and a huge flotilla of war boats. After entering Bengal and pausing in Rajmahal, the army made its way through the jungles of the central delta, subdued rebellious chieftains on both sides of the Ganges-Padma river system, and finally reached Dhaka in 1610.
Soon after Islam Khan's arrival in Bengal, the Mughals succeeded in annihilating or winning over all the major chiefs entrenched in the countryside since the time of the sultans. Yet it is fair to ask how far the new rulers were able to extend their political reach beneath the level of important chieftains, or zamindars, after these had submitted to imperial rule.
In sum, by the mid seventeenth century, as both foreign observers and contemporary revenue documents attest, the Mughals had established power throughout the delta. They achieved this by means of a military machine that effectively combined gunpowder weaponry with mounted archers and naval forces, a determined diplomacy that rewarded loyalty while punishing perfidy, and the financial services of mobile and wealthy Marwari bankers. Both militarily and diplomatically, success begat success. Bengali chieftains who witnessed these successes increasingly understood that the advantages of joining the new order outweighed those of resisting it. Above all, the advent of the Mughal age, unlike previous changes of the guard at Gaur, did not represent a mere military occupation in which one ruling class simply replaced another. Nor were the changes accompanying Mughal rule merely ones of scale—that is, bigger cannons, a more dazzling court, or taller monuments. Rather, as will be seen in the following chapters, the conquest was accompanied by fundamental changes in the region's economic structure, its sociopolitical system, and its cultural complexion, both at court and in the countryside.

During the Mughal rule Sufis saints, under the patronage of Mughal's successfully penetrated Islam into the developing agrarian social order. As state-supported pioneers established Islamic institutions in formerly forested areas, three different kinds of frontier—the economic frontier separating field and forest, the political frontier separating Mughal from non-Mughal administration, and the religious frontier separating Islam and non-Islam—fused into one.

Despite the virulent ways in which Mughals had accommodated itself to North India, with respect to distant Bengal, isolated for centuries from the north, the Mughals saw themselves as distinctly alien. In part, this was because of the delta's wet monsoon climate, of which North Indian officers posted in Bengal frequently complained.In effect, Bengal had become a colony for outsiders, effectively reversing the long-term pre-Mughal trend whereby a Muslim ruling class had progressively accommodated itself to the Bengali environment owing to generations of forced marriages with Hindu Bengali women and centuries of isolation from the north.
Both the literature and the architecture of the period reveal the new ruling class's profoundly foreign—that is, non-Bengali—character. In 1626 an Afghan, Mahmud Balkhi, journeyed to Rajmahal and wrote of encountering people whose family origins lay in Balkh, Bukhara, Khurasan, Iraq, Baghdad, Anatolia, Syria, and North India. These would have been remnants of the predominantly Sunni ashraf of Akbar's day, when Rajmahal was the provincial capital. Some years later the poet-official Muhammad Sadiq Isfahani, who lived in Dhaka from 1629 to his death in 1650, kept a diary, the subh-i sadiq, in which he mentions the dozens of artists, poets, generals, and administrators he had come to know in that city. Most of these men were Shi'as whose ancestors had migrated from distant centers of Persian culture—for example, Mashhad, Teheran, Ardistan, Isfahan, Mazandaran, Qazvin, Taliqan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Herat, Bukhara, or Gilan. This suggests that between the reign of Akbar (1556–1605), when Rajmahal was capital, and that of Shah Jahan (1628–58), when Dhaka was capital, an increasing proportion of Bengal's urban ashraf, although born in North India, claimed Iranian ancestry.
The most striking statement of the imperial attitude toward Bengal was made by Akbar's chief advisor, Abu'l-fazl. "The country of Bengal," he wrote in 1579, shortly after imperial armies had routed the capital's Afghan occupants, "is a land where, owing to the climate's favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising. From the wickedness of men families have decayed, and dominions [have been] ruined. Hence in old writings it was called Bulghakkhana (house of turbulence)." Here, in this "Mughal colonial discourse," we find a remarkable theory of political devolution: an enervating climate corrupts men, and corrupted men ruin sovereign domains, thereby implicitly preparing the way for conquest by stronger, uncorrupted outsiders. In linking Bengal's climate with the debased behavior of people exposed to it, Abu'l-fazl's theory of sociopolitical decay anticipated by several centuries the similar views adopted by British colonial officials.
Even immigrant Sufis harbored negative attitudes about the Bengal. Shah Ni'mat Allah Firuzpuri (d. 1669), an ashraf shaikh from the Punjab who settled down in Malatipur near Malda early in the reign of Shah Jahan, quickly grew tired (malul) of the region. Mincing no words, he revealed his thoughts in the following clumsy but blunt quatrain:
"Bengal is a ruined and doleful land;
Go offer the prayers to the dead, do not delay.
Neither on land nor water is there rest;
It is either the tiger's jaws, or the crocodile's gullet".
While harboring such attitudes toward his adopted home, the shaikh nonetheless curried favor with the province's ruling class, whose life-style he and his descendants adopted, and from whom he accepted substantial lands in personal endowments (madad-i ma'ash).
The Mughals' feeling of alienation from the land was accompanied by a sense of superiority to or condescension toward its people. In matters of language, dress, and diet, newly arrived officials experienced great differences between Bengal and the culture of North India. The delta's diet of fish and rice, for example, disagreed with many immigrants brought up on wheat and meat, basic to the diet in Punjab. Written in 1786, the Riyazal-Salatin faithfully reflects the ashraf perspective regarding Bengali culture, and reads almost like a colonial British manual on how to survive "amongst the natives":And the food of the natives of that kingdom, from the high to the low, are fish, rice, mustard oil and curd and fruits and sweetmeats. They also eat plenty of red chilly and salt. In some parts of this country, salt is scarce. The natives of this country are of shabby tastes, shabby habits and shabby modes of dress. They do not eat breads of wheat and barley at all. Meat of goats and fowls and clarified butter do not agree with their system[s].
Mughal officers also associated Bengalis with fishermen, whom they openly despised. Around 1620 two imperial commanders, aiming to belittle the martial accomplishments of one of their colleagues, taunted the latter with the words: "Which of the rebels have you defeated except a band of fishermen who raised a stockade at Ghalwapara?" In reply, the other observed that even the Mughals' most formidable adversaries in Bengal, 'Isa Khan and Musa Khan, had been fishermen. "Where shall I find a Dawud son of Sulayman Karrani to fight with, in order to please you?" he asked rhetorically, and with some annoyance, adding that it was his duty as a Mughal officer to subdue all imperial enemies in Bengal, "whether they are Machwas [fishermen] or Mughals or Afghans." In this view the only truly worthy opponents of the Mughal army were state rebels or Afghans like the Karranis;
Bengalis, stereotyped as fishermen, were categorized as less worthy adversaries.
http://www.bengalgenocide.com/history04.php

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New class

Contents

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[edit] Early theories

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[edit] Djilas' New Class

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Finally Djilas predicted a period of economic decline, as the political future of the new class was consolidated around a staid programme of corruption and self-interest at the expense of other social classes. This can be interpreted as a prediction of the Brezhnev era stagnation by Djilas.

Robert Kaplan's 1993 book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through history also contains a discussion with Djilas, who used his model to anticipate many of the events that subsequently came to pass in the former Yugoslavia.

[edit] Similarity to other analyses

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[edit] John Kenneth Galbraith's "New Class"

Canadian-American liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith also advocated a technocratic "New Class." Galbraith believed that modern society had become too complex and required guidance by a technocratic, well educated elite.[1]

[edit] See also

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The war criminals of 1971 wanted to abolish Bengali culture, respect, and the identity ... Thus, there is clear evidence of cultural genocide, war crimes, ...