FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF FASCISM IN INDIA

BJP-led NDA Government's Official Celebrations of its First Year
Propaganda Can Never Fill Stomachs
The official celebrations of this BJP-led NDA government's completion of one
year have begun, Prime Minister Modi launched the celebrations amidst a
flurry of media blitz from Mathura. The BJP has announced the holding of
200 public meetings across the country. All Union Ministers, we are told,
are to hold at least three public meetings and three press conferences each,
i.e., over 200 public meetings and 200 press conferences across the country.
This may be in addition to the 200 public meetings other RSS/BJP leaders may
hold. The Prime Minister has perfected the art of feeding the NRIs with
rhetoric on his unprecedented number of foreign tours. Now the RSS/BJP will
be totally engaged in a similar feeding of the Indian people with demagogy.
The choice of the Prime Minister launching the campaign from Mathura is not
innocent. It is loaded with serious dangers of escalating communal passions
across the country. Remember that the RSS/BJP have all along highlighted
that they shall `liberate' the Ram Janmasthan (Ayodhya), Krishna Janmasthan
(Mathura) and Kashi Vishwanath temple (Benaras). Appropriately, PM Modi was
presented with a Krishna idol by the local BJP MP Hema Malini. The campaign
for building the Ram temple at Ayodhya led to the destruction of the
centuries old Babri Masjid and unleashed a vicious communal poison that
claimed the lives of thousands of people across the country and continues to
breed a deep sense of insecurity amongst the religious minorities in the
country. PM Modi has retained his seat in Benaras resigning from his home
state Gujarat, having contested in two Parliamentary constituencies. Now the
launch of this programme celebrating the end of one year from Mathura.
Ominous signals, indeed.
The spate of multi-coloured advertisements in all streams of the media has
risen to such an extent that it is doling out monetary patronage breeding
servile conformism and media sycophancy. Little wonder that media surveys
have declared that this BJP-led NDA government has passed its first year
with distinction! (The Times of India) Only when one sits for an exam can
be marks given. Here, marks are liberally being given by the media even
when this government has not taken any examination.
Given the impact of media fed and media bred, `popularity' it is little
wonder that major corporates are making a scramble to own media companies.
Corporate takeover of media is an attempt to earn credibility. But when the
corporates run their control over media to serve their ends of sycophancy,
then it is the media's credibility that is at stake.
May be this is what explains the dichotomy between the blazing front page
banner headlines lauding the first anniversary of this government and the
lead editorials in the same print media. Let us look at a sample. The same
Times of India editorially comments, "..it's difficult to tell, one year
into the NDA government, whether the Indian economy has really turned the
corner. Exports and industrial output are flat, the sensex which soared in
2014 has plummeted again, not enough jobs are being created. The last is
critical to hopes for achche din as ten million new workers enter the job
market every year" and so on.
The Indian Express says, "The government doesn't seem to be working to any
systematic or long term plan". Further it says that the government must use
statecraft to bring a consensus in parliament, "instead of seeking to
vault over critics and opponents by making direct appeals to the people
through one way communication campaign".
The Asian Age says, ".after high sounding promises raised expectations sky
high in every section of society, delivery has been lackluster for and the
government has come under critical scrutiny even from some key supporters
who accuse it of lacking in direction." Further it says, "The farm sector is
in acute distress across India. The corporate sector, especially big
business that the government is desperately seeking to please has begun to
grumble." Even The Economic Times says, "Dissent has acquired shades of
treason, instead of being treated as inputs to broadbased decision making.
The opposition needs to be engaged, not merely confronted. These should
figure in the agenda for the next four years. Voters don't care about
anniversary tallies."
The Business Standard editorial echoing similar sentiments ends its
editorial saying that this government's ministers "will be better served
learning from the past year, so as to ensure that no publicity blitzes will
be necessary on May 26, 2016." The Hindu says: "On the first anniversary,
some of the promises remain as proposals and many others appear too remote
with little and no chance of coming to fruition in the next four years". It
ends by saying, "All told and added up on the political ledger, the debit
column has certainly ended up being longer than the credit column".
These venerable editors have tried to salvage some credibility. This,
however, appears to little with the credibility of `fourth estate' heavily
suffering under the barrage of handsomely paid advertisements.
This BJP-led NDA government must be told forcefully by the strength of
popular people's mobilizations that propaganda does not and has never filled
stomachs. Since the current reality is not filling the stomachs either,
this government must be forced to reverse its anti-people policies and
refrain from patronizing the sharpening of communal polarization negating
the very secular democratic foundations of our Republic.

KARL MARX : A TRIBUTE !!!!!!

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was born on May 5, 1818 in the city of Trier, Germany. His father was a lawyer who came from a long line of Rabbis, but had changed his faith to Protestantism in order to keep his job. Karl Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law when he was 17 years old. Here he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, whose father, Baron von Westphalen, influenced Marx to read Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. Only a year later, Marx was moved by his father to the University of Berlin where he studied Hegelianism, influenced byLudwig Feurbach and other Hegelians. He admired G.W.F. Hegel's dialectics and belief in historical inevitability, but Marx questioned the idealism and abstract thought of philosophy and maintained his belief that reality lies in the material base of economics. In distinct contrast to G.W.F. Hegel's concentration on the state in his philosophy of law, Marx saw civil society as the sphere to be studied in order to understand the historical development of humankind. In 1841 Marx earned his doctorate at Jena with his work on the materialism and atheism of Greek atomists.
It was difficult for Marx to find publishers because of his radical political views, so he moved to Cologne, which was known to house a strong liberal opposition movement. The liberal group the Cologne Circle published a paper by Marx defending the freedom of the press in their newspaper The Rhenish Gazette (in 1842 he was made the editor of the paper). In Cologne Marx met Moses Hess, a radical who organized socialist meetings, which Marx attended. At these meetings Marx learned of the struggles of the German working-class. Based on the information he gathered from the members present at the meetings, Marx wrote an article on the poverty of the Mosel wine-farmers in which he was highly critical of the government. When the article was published in 1843, the Prussian authorities banned The Rhenish Gazette and threatened Marx with his arrest. Marx married his fiancé and they fled together to Paris. Here he took a position as editor of a political journal called Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Franco-German Annals) that was designed to connect French socialism and radicalHegelianism. Although the journal only lived as long as one issue, it was a valuable opportunity for Marx. Through it he met his life-long friendFriedrich Engels, a contributor to the journal. Other prominent contributors included his old mentor from Berlin, Bruno Bauer, and the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin.
While in Paris, Marx became a communist, and worked primarily on studying political economy and the history of the French Revolution. He wrote a series of papers known as ÷konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre(Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844), however they were not published until the 1930s. The Manuscripts are influenced by Feuerbach and outline a humanist idea of communism. Marx contrasts capitalist society, and an alienated nature of labor, with communist society, in which human beings in cooperative production develop their nature freely. In 1844 Marx reviewed Bruno Bauer's book On the Jewish Question. More than a review, Marx used the article to critique the continued influence of religion over politics, and propose a revolutionary change to the structure of European society.
In 1845 Marx was expelled from France by Guizot. He fled with Friedrich Engels to Brussels where they stayed for three years with intermittent trips to England to visit Engels' family who had cotton-spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx wrote a piece against the idealistic socialism of P.J. Proudhon called The Poverty of Philosophy. He also worked on his materialist conception of history, and developed the manuscript that would come to be named The German Ideology when it was published after his death. This paper argues that the nature of an individual is dependent upon the material conditions that determine his production. It is a historical study of modes of production through the ages, and in it Marx predicts the collapse of industrial capitalism and the advancement of communism. Marx joined the Communist League at this time, which was an organization of German émigré workers centered in London. Marx and Engels became the major theoretical force of the League, and at a conference in 1847 they were commissioned to write a declaration of the League's position. The hope was that the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) would inspire social revolution, and no sooner was it published than the 1848 revolutions broke out across Europe. This work marks a turn in Marx's writing from appealing to natural rights as justification for social reform, to indicating that the laws of history would inevitably lead to the power of the working class. TheManifesto distinguishes communism from other movements, proposes specific social reforms, and includes a description of the struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It also explicitly encourages workers to unite in revolution against the existing regimes.
The panic caused by the February revolution of 1848 caused the Belgian government to expel Marx from Brussels. He was invited by the French provisional government to return to Paris. From there, he returned to Cologne with some friends to start the newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The government there attempted to shut down the paper through legal means, and finally succeeded by finding pretexts to expel the editors. Marx and his friends were expelled after the revolts of May 1849, and the newspaper's last edition was June 1849. Marx had to return to Paris, but he was expelled again immediately, and moved on to London, which would be his final home.
In London Marx rejoined with the Communist League, confident that there would be further revolutionary action in Europe. He proceeded to write two pamphlets about the 1848 revolution in France and its effects, titled, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He felt that new revolution would only be possible if there was to be a new crisis, and he hoped to uncover what would cause this crisis. He spent a large amount of his time in the British Museum studying political economy toward this end. For the first part of the 1850s Marx, Jenny, and their four children lived in an impoverished state in a three room flat in London's Soho. The couple would have two more children, but only three in all would survive. The family survived primarily on gifts fromFriedrich Engels whose own income came from the family business in Manchester. Marx also earned a small amount from articles he wrote as the foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. In 1864 Marx and Friedrich Engels together founded the International Workingmen's Association, which would finally break up due to disagreements between Marx and the anarchist Mikhail Babuknin.
By 1857 Marx had written an 800-page manuscript which was to become Das Kapital (Capital). This is his major work on political economy, capital, landed property, the state, wage labor, foreign trade and the world market. In the early part of the 1860s he took a break from his work on Das Kapital to work on Theories of Surplus Value, a three-volume work. This text discusses specific theories of political economy, primarily those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In 1867 Marx published volume I of Das Kapital, an analysis of the capitalist process of production, with an elaboration on his version of labor theory value, surplus value, and exploitation, that he predicted would lead to a falling profit rate and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Marx continued to work on Volumes II and III of Das Kapital for the rest of his life, even though they were essentially finished in the late 1860s. Friedrich Engels would publish the last two volumes after Marx's death. By 1871 Marx's daughter Eleanor, who was 17 at the time, was helping her father with his work. She had been taught at home by Marx himself, and grew up

with a rich understanding of the capitalist system which would allow her to play an important part in the future of the British labor movement.
Marx's health rapidly declined during the last ten years of his life and he was unable to work at the same impressive pace he had set in his early years. He still paid close attention to contemporary politics, especially concerning Germany and Russia, and he often offered his comments. In hisCritique of the Gotha Programme he critiqued the actions of his admirers Karl Liebknecht and August Bebel, disagreeing with their compromises with state socialism in the interest of a united socialist party. He indicated in his letters to Vera Zasulich of this time that he imagined it could be possible for Russia to bypass a capitalist stage of development and move directly to communism by basing its economy on common ownership of land characterized by the village. In 1881 both Marx and his wife became ill. Marx had a swollen liver, and survived, but Jenny died on December 2, 1881. In January 1883 Marx was deeply saddened by the loss of his eldest daughter to cancer of the bladder. On March 14, 1883 Marx was found having passed away in his armchair. He is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London