Column

Two profound historical processes that started much earlier had their outcomes converging in the most pronounced manner in 2011.

The first had to do with the changed global power balance ushered in with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While this was naturally recognised as an essentially positive development, there was not much of a public discourse on what this should lead to. It was implicit that the gigantic level of resources committed during the Cold War in militarising the global economy would now be available for the collective creative development of the humanity as a whole. But instead of taking that direction, the lone surviving superpower saw this as an opportunity and license to force a unilateral and often a violent course of exercising hegemony over global resources, particularly energy resources.

This approach opened up the dangers of a new phase of military invasions which has not only shattered the prospects of enduring peace but is also hurting the people of that very perpetrator superpower.

The other dimension was the vigour and aggression with which the superpower and its capitalist allies pushed for a new global order of neoliberal globalisation.

This entailed short term speculative financial investment for quick return and profit. Such a course has led to the growth of inequality, poverty and unemployment. And it is this eventuality that makes the second historical process relevant.

The second process is in a way connected to and a culmination of the finance driven globalisation and expressed itself through the meltdown of 2008.

The choice was either to bolster the repayment capacities and purchasing power of the people to restore the growth impulse or continue on the same beaten path of pumping in fresh state support to rescue them. Finance suggested a ‘bail out’ for themselves and ‘austerity’ for the people. In absence of state support and further squeezes on their incomes, people languish and despair.

This despair propels the people ‘on the streets.’ The situation is most pronounced across the Euro Zone. It is most acute in Greece. Groaning under the harshest ‘austerity’ package, the Greeks are coming out in the streets in their thousands. The situation in Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain is not very different. In France, the popular opinion has already resulted in the Left gaining majority in the Senate for the first time in the last 57 years.

The situation in the US has also become extremely volatile. What started with the gathering of a few hundreds with the slogan of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ is making waves across the country.

People’s unrest had different dimensions in the Arab world. Starting with Tunisia and spreading most significantly to Egypt, these popular uprisings, culminating in the most significant million strong gathering in Al Taharir Square in Cairo, have come to be described under a sweeping category — ‘Arab Spring’. Clearly these protests were against the international finance capital driven policies pursued by dictatorial regimes which were pliant to US machinations. This process has progressed along a chequered course — US and its NATO allies, using these new war cries of democracy used this as a cover for military intervention in Libya and Syria, hoping it will eventually lead to regime change in Iran. On the other hand, the same process fired the imagination of the common man in Israel and ended up in triggering an unprecedented series of social protests.

The situation has been slightly different in India. Due to the constant intervention of the Left during UPA-1, the objective of integrating the Indian financial system with the global finance remained incomplete. To the extent it was insular, the Indian economy escaped the first hurricane of global financial meltdown. Yet the unbridled persuasion of neoliberal paradigm domestically has resulted in major problems for the people. Natural resources have been opened up for corporate takeover. Rewriting of policies to facilitate this has unfolded scams of an order unheard earlier. Food prices have ruled high to finance a highly skewed pattern of growth, which sharply accentuated inequality. This has created the background of restlessness of large sections of Indian people against growing corruption and prices.

This New Year, therefore, places us - a large section of the people in different parts of the world — at crossroads.

What this will eventually herald is not yet absolutely clear.

“On the streets” people come out to assert and change the course of those historical processes which have dominated on a global scale. These processes obviously have reached a critical threshold which the aam admi of the world can no longer take.