Anna's Protest against Corruption is nothing but Proxy War for Big Business!

-Rajesh Tyagi/ 27.8.2011

A whole series of huge scams, from 2G to CWG, one larger than the other, siphoning of trillions from public funds, has surfaced recently, triggering political crisis of the capitalist rule by discrediting it completely in the eyes of the masses. Customary reaction of the government to the situation, in sending some to jail and some to bail, failed to address the public outcry.

Intervention of Anna Hazare, at this critical juncture, was thus welcomed by the capitalist bosses without reservation, the same bosses to whom major part of loot from public exchequer can be traced back. In this intervention, they sought opportunity in double sense- firstly to put off the mass anger and secondly to tighten the noose around the neck of omnipotent bureaucracy.

Whenever exploitative misrule of capitalists has plunged into crisis, petty bourgeoisie reformists like Anna Hazare have jumped forward to save it, placing demands for its restructuring here and there, giving vent to anger of the masses and thus throwing the question of its revolutionary overthrow by the working and toiling people, out of the gear.

Contrary to perception advanced by many petty bourgeois reformists like Arundhati Roy, as she has expressed in her recent article, Anna Hazare never did put a challenge to the system or the political power of the capitalists. On the contrary, he has demanded its perfection through gradual reforms. If Anna Hazare is challenging the system, run by corporates, as is perceived by Roy or others, why is it that the whole corporate world is supporting his move? Search for resolution to this apparent paradox takes us to the fallacy of the view entertained by the petty bourgeois reformists like Roy.

Fact is, that it is none but the corporate bosses themselves, who expect to be the real beneficiaries of whatever limited success this Anna movement achieves.

In the first instance, limited demand of team Anna for a super-bureaucrat ‘jan lokpal’ does not go beyond cleansing of the existing system. This very limited reformist program instead of damaging or weakening the system, is on the contrary aimed at strengthening it, by purging it of the ‘ills’ like corruption, that are inviting wrath of masses, forcing them to turn against the misrule of corporate bosses.

Capitalists have taken power in India in 1947, in conjunction with landlords and in agreement with British colonialists. Squeezed, between the two, capitalists failed to assert themselves as an independent ruling class since the very beginning. This general weakness of Indian capitalists found its reflection in their weak control over the political power too. This weakness, resulted in reliance upon bureaucracy and bureaucracy gradually acquiring more and more weight in political set up, emerging as final arbiter for conflicting interest of social classes and groups in bourgeois democracy.

While the elected organs of bourgeois power, top of them the parliament, continued to suffer political and moral decay alongside the decay of credibility of bourgeois politicians and parties, bureaucracy had become the real organ of power in the country. With its increasing weight in structures of governance, aspirations of bureaucracy had no limits, as it continued to grab an ever-increasing share in the immense corporate loot.

Not satisfied, with huge salaries, perks and privileges, and the innumerable bribes it collects from different layers of society, it finally took to arm-twisting the top corporate players too. As 2G scam has demonstrated, spectrum allocation bids were settled on under-table cuts. Unable to withstand this poaching at the hands of bureaucracy, corporates were themselves desperate to clip the wings of bureaucracy and bring it to its knees. Lacking but in real power, means and instruments to accomplish this by itself, big business sought such opportunity in the protest movement of petty bourgeois crusaders of team Anna, a movement based on very limited demands, narrow perspective and Gandhian means of protest, and immediately threw its weight behind the protest.

This ‘crusade’ against corruption, has legitimately drawn immense support among the urban and rural masses, as people drawing their own varied impressions and meanings from the term ‘corruption’, find a channel in it, to express their anger against the corporate misrule.
However, notwithstanding varied impressions of people who support the movement for different reasons, the corporate world, supports and fuels this movement, in its own class interests. Not only the owners of big business and corporate CEOs have declared their whole hearted support to the movement, but far right wing formations, those most reliable props of big business, like RSS and BJP have openly and actively backed this movement against corruption.

It is not without reason that whole corporate media is spreading the word of Anna, while Anna refises to utter even a word against the big business who have really cornered all the wealth through all corrupt means and are real beneficiaries of the entire game.

While petty bourgeoisie provides popular mass base to the movement, it is the big bourgeois whose agenda it pursues, as it cannot have an agenda independent from that of the big bourgeoisie. Big business thus happily backs Anna for its demand for replacement of ‘dishonest capitalism’ with an ‘honest capitalism’, while ensuring that it remains for ‘capitalism’.

Stalinist and Maoist parties as usual adhere to agenda of big bourgeois and call upon the working class and toilers to support the protest of Anna Hazare. More radical of them, however, preach the workers to join the protest on the premises of a false hope to take a leading role therein. All of them however fail to expose the class character and limited agenda of the protest movement to the working class, toilers and youth and rather to arm them with a real revolutionary program for overthrow of capitalism.

Petty bourgeois agenda against corruption is debased and farcical. Corruption is not an overgrowth upon the body of capitalism, but essential outcome of its operation, that stems out of its fundamental contradiction- that between the real power of money on one hand and the farce of democracy on the other. Capitalism on the one hand establishes the rule of money (perpetuating inequalities of all sorts and everywhere), while on the other it makes false proclamation of rule of law (popular deception of ‘equality of all’ before the law). In real life, money, however, torpedoes this legal farce, without exception, asserting its supremacy over and above all laws and rules. This is what in general parlance we know as corruption.

In essence, corruption is thus nothing but assertion of power of money, and is inseparably bound with the system of capitalism. In both its forms- collusion between governments and corporates or direct bribery of officials- corruption is woven into the texture of capitalism. Thus all talks of its eradication under capitalism, are false and a means to deceive the people.

Working and toiling people, thus, have no real interest in the issue, whether the capitalists rule through honest or dishonest means, or how the conflict between capitalists and bureaucracy is settled. Interest of working and toiling people lies in overthrow of capitalism itself, through a socialist revolution, and not in its reform.

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