Wednesday, January 9, 2013

India - not only people's war - A worker's Life -

GurgaonWorkersNews no.53 - January 2013
www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

*** A worker's Life - What all we/you do - FaridabadMajdoorSamachar no.288

A conversation with a worker from Faridabad, his upbringing in a village in UP, his labour migration to the Punjab as agricultural worker, his life as an industrial worker in Delhi area. It is his individual story, but it is at the same time the story of a dominant part of global working class today: the migration between village and town, the wandering between different jobs and sectors, the dissolution of old social structures, the necessity to form new ones. Their existence bridges the knowledge of agricultural work, the knowledge about the misery of village life, the skills of modern industry and industrial struggle, the anger towards the urban betrayal. In the face of their social experience, any claim that workers’ consciousness is necessarily reduced to the ‘economic dimension’ will be doomed to wither in the shadow of irrelevance. The ‘falling back’ into the village becomes untenable, so does the ‘leap ahead’ into the urban
 whirlpool. The whirl’s centre is formed of mainly temporary employment in core industries, connected to both, global production-chains and the large fringes of slum economy. The centrifugal forces are growing and hardly allow a settled existence. New desires and collectivity emerge from the central point and are washed into the periphery. Only if future working class movements are able to organise around this dynamic, but fragile social connection between urban industrial centres and periphery will they be able to express a communist tendency. The current social connection is on the shoulders of the migrating workers. The Pearl River generation of migrating workers has become the pendulum of global capital. Their pushs-and-pulls between southern hinterland and global workbench and the rushes of northern austerity crisis will have to crack the systemic borderline of under/development and reiterate the necessity to make the step beyond.

*** Suggested Reading for Future Armament

The global and historical character of the current crisis forces us to coordinate both debate and practice ‘for workers self-emancipation’ on an international scale. Following recently written or translated texts are selective, but we think that they can stand as examples for ‘general theses’, ‘concrete analysis’ and ‘historical debate’ of class struggle and revolutionary movement.

A longer article dealing with the question of the 'market'-character of capitalism, questioning out-dated 'socialist' concepts which equate capitalism with the anarchic market and socialism with the state-planned economy:
http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/zirkular/24/e_z24_markt.htm

A text describing the relationship between the struggles and ideas of the workers of the Porto Marghera chemical plant in Italy, along with the group Potere Operaio which they were closely linked to, and the ex-student activists in West Germany who tried to learn from the Italian example and develop similar workers' initiatives in their own part of Europe.
http://www.libcom.org/library/external-internal-militants-workers-autonomy-porto-marghera-seen-west-germany-1971-1974-

An historical and political overview on the non-proletarian and therefore non-communist character of international Maoism:
http://insurgentnotes.com/2012/10/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/


News from India's Special Exploitation Zone -
www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

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