Generally, as it happened and still happening, protest against government’s corruption and governmental party’s, leaders’ corruption end with demand of resignation and naturally that means ‘in the coming election vote out of power some x party (and vote for some y party) – we saw two such ‘great’ anti-corruption movements ending in change in government in last 33 years – the VP Singh led one and Anna Hazare led one. Incidentally, in both cases, ultimately BJP could gain, perhaps by god’s blessing corruption of their leaders is less felt by the voters vis-à-vis their ‘devotional’ activities. This time also this theme of ‘a change in government is the need of the hour’ is being percolated by loyalists of opposition parties. If the discussions that are going on among the so-called middle-classes are analysed, which even include some utterings like ‘the system itself is to blame’, seldom or never a ‘change of the system’ a radical departure from the present capitalist precapitalist order is sought after. Talks against the ‘system’ end up in searching for more honest leader/party and voting for a change in government. Thus, anti-corruption movements are so dear to all parliamentary parties.
Whatever happens every time: the section of the middle-classes and the top layers of the society, when they are dissatisfied with a certain govt, do not have the power of ‘making’ a movement, or, ‘changing’ the govt, i.e., ministry, in the next vote. So, they need the support of those sections who cannot think, usually, except in rare cases (which are much publicised to create an illusion among these sections) that their kids or they (18-35 years age group) can become a ‘govt service holder’. However, number of ‘govt serviced holders’ are decreasing since decades – for example, we are approaching the golden-jubilee of Railway Strike of 1974 with number of railway staff less than halved, while passenger-kilometres and tonne-kilometres transported by those workers have increased exponentially. Govt units are being closed and/or privatised, and even that happened in left ruled Bengal, because there is essentially no difference between the Industrial Policy chalked by Jyoti Basu and the line of Manmohan Singh.
We are in a society run by capitalists in their neo-liberal era. And corruption is blatantly interwoven with capitalist run state-system, so much so the Times of India editor Jug Suraiya once in his witty style wrote (on Aug 19, 2020): “It’s a question of vocabulary. Change the word ‘bribe’ into ‘tip’ and ‘corruption’ becomes ‘capitalism’.”
Due to capitalism’s relationship with brazen corruption, it often creates a deception that corruption, theft, loot etc are the main drivers of capitalist exploitation and not the thing on which capitalism is based, that is, surplus value extraction. People are astonished to find that capitalist Goutam Adani who was ranked 250 in list of world’s richest-persons in 2017 is now in rank 4 – such astonishing achievement in 5 years! What is not publicly visible is that more than one-third of his ‘worth’ is actually ‘debt’ and many of his debts were written off by the govt owned banks. It was not Adani who only got this privilege, many more capitalists got this opportunity, and the RBI or the honourable court of justice could not yet disclose the list of such fortunate ones and how much advantage they got in last 30 years of liberalisation. All capitalists, even smaller ones, tries to influence insiders of ‘state’ to get ‘favour’, licenses, orders – even sales representatives of competing brands come to a shop owner and offer ‘greater margin’ – it happens within the private sector also. Just for securing an ‘order’ meant 5-10% even a decade or more ago. Nonetheless, surplus value extraction is the characteristic form of exploitation of capitalism. .
31/07/2022
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