Farooque Chowdhury
Pioneer: With heroic struggle and unforgettable sacrifice labor played a pioneering role in this sub-continent's struggle for independence from colonial rule. Labor's undeniable leading role is also there in making the society humane and democratic. In areas and at times, labor struggled alone for the causes in this land. But it's a march to progress for all.
Labor's struggle for liberation from all forms of bondage and backwardness should be inscribed bright in the pages of history. Only many epics can recite labor's historic struggle in this land. But labor's role and sacrifice goes unsung.
Contradiction between labor and capital began the moment capital enslaved labor. From Peshawar to Yangon labor had to enter into struggle for survival, and for making circumstances and situations humane and democratic. It's a part of humanity's journey to emancipation.
The struggle spanned from the loco sheds in Rawalpindi to textile mills in Ahmedabad to coal pits in Jharia to jute mills along the Hooghly River to tea gardens in the Dooars to streets in Kolkata to factories in Narayanganj andRangoon. The struggle, obscure and seemingly insignificant initially, took varying forms: composing songs, passive, peaceful, go-slow, active, forceful, desertion, going back to villages, wearing Khadi, the hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, and Gandhi cap, strike, general strike, standing by barricades, and unfurling flag of mutiny on navy ships. Labor's rising in the sub-continent led Lenin to write: “In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to conscious political mass struggle – and, that being the case, the Russian style British regime in India is doomed!” (“Inflammable material in world politics”, 1908) This conscious political mass struggle was mainstay in the sub-continent's struggle for independence from the colonial British rule.
Plundered: The colonial rule was nothing but plundering a land – about 1,800, 000 square miles or more than twenty times the area of Great Britain (Simon Commission, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, vol. I, Survey; also, James B. Alcock, Historical Atlas of the British Empire and Commonwealth); the colonial rule was nothing but chaining a people – 318,942,000, or about one-fifth of all the humans in the world at that time. (Simon Commission, op. cit.) And, with the plundering and chaining the people the colonial masters were unashamedly happy and shamelessly proud. About the land, Lord Curzon wrote in his “Problems of the Far East” in 1894: “Just as De Tocqueville remarked that the conquest and government of India are really the achievements which have given to England her place in the opinion of the world, so it is the prestige and the wealth arising from her Asiatic position that are the foundation stones of the British Empire. There, in the heart of the old Asian continent, she sits upon the throne that has always ruled the East. Her scepter is outstretched over land and sea. ‘Godlike', she ‘grasps the triple fork, and kinglike, wears the crown.'”
The land was rich in resources. Clive, as he was quoted in the Indian Industrial Commission Report 1916-'18[henceforth IICR], found Murshidabad in 1757 was “rich as the city of London,” and was “possessing infinitely greater prosperity than” London. Bernier, as he was quoted in Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems by Sir William Willcocks in 1930, found Bengal was “richer than Egypt”. The IICR said: “[T]he industrial development of this country was at any rate not inferior to that of the more advanced European nations.” In 1908, the commission's chairman Sir Thomas Holland noted in his Sketch of the Mineral Resources of India the “high quality” iron, copper and brass in the sub-continent that “gave India at one time a prominent position in the metallurgical world.” The American Technical Mission noted iron ore in Singhbhum, Bastar, areas in the Central Provinces: about 800,000,000 tons; coal reserves in Assam, Bengal, Berar, Bihar and theCentral Provinces [now, the name is changed]: about 80 billion tons; bauxite reserve: about 250,000 tons, manganese ore: about 30% of the world output. Rich soil and abundant water resource and cheap labor made the land lucrative. [Pramathanath Banerjea in his A Study of Indian Economics (1911) also provides a description of the resources.] “Civilized” imperial rulers plundered the land. Their income, profit and prosperity stand as witness to the plunder.
Path with Steel: Following predecessor Lord Hardinge's 1848 minute on construction of railways in India, as Madan Mohan Malaviya tells, Lord Dalhousie prepared his Railway Minute in 1853. (Speeches and Writings, 2013 (1918)) In the minute, the Lord, the father of telegraph in India, foresaw commercial and social advantages. With railways, Dalhousie's biographer William Hunter says, the Lord planned not only to “consolidate the newly annexed territories of India by his railways, and immensely increase the striking power of his military forces at every point of the Empire,” but also to use the “railway construction as a bait to bring British capital and enterprise to India on a scale which had never entered the imagination of any previous Governor- General.” In the plan, adds Hunter, “Dalhousie had from the outset a vigilant eye to the mercantile aspects of his railway routes.” The rulers knew “[g]reat tracts [were] teeming with produce they cannot dispose of. … England is calling aloud for the cotton which India does already produce in some degree, and would produce sufficient in quality, and plentiful in quantity, if only there were provided the fitting means of conveyance for it from distant plains, to the several ports adopted for its shipment. Every increase of facilities for trade has been attended … with an increased demand for articles of European produce in the most distant markets of India; (Sir W. W. Hunter, The Marquess of Dalhousie and His Work in India, Rulers of India Series) Sir Rowland Macdonald Stephenson's Report upon the Practicability and Advantages of the Introduction of Railway into British India was published in 1845, 12 years prior to the First Indian War for Independence, and the formation of railway companies followed. The colonial rulers, England, “the unconscious tool of history”, as Marx described in “The British Rule in India”, began stretching railways: Howrah to Hooghly, a 24 miles of rails; to Raniganj, a coal county, a 121 miles of steel path. Railway and telegraph lines began their journeys in Kolkata and Mumbai in 1856. By 1858, rails rolled from Howrah: 200 miles. It jumped to 5,000 miles by 1869 in the sub-continent, to 25,000 miles by 1900, and to 35,000 miles as the World War II began ravaging the world. The 1880s saw the construction of the Jubilee Bridge over the Hooghly River. “The railway system”, Marx assessed in his “The future results of British rule in India”, “will … become in India truly the forerunner of modern industry”. And, with modern industry, a new class emerged: the industrial workers.
Fund allocation for construction of roads in the northern parts of the sub-continent was started from 1830. The total length of roads reached 9,000 miles by 1852. The roads increased capacity to transport commodities, about 10 times.
In 1861, the colonial rulers issued an order on reclamation of degraded land. It was issued to encourage cotton cultivation. Cotton supply to the British Isles from America decreased due to American civil war. Mumbai textile mills made wide expansion in 1863-1866. Bailing, shipping, marine insurances companies, 46 in number, came up in Mumbai during the period.
The East India Company exported the first consignment of jute in 1793: 100 tons. The first jute mills came into existence in 1855, and by 1869, 5 jute mills were operating with 950 looms. By 1910, 38 companies exported more than a billion yards of clothes and more than 450 million bags. By 1939, the number of looms increased to 68,377. (Samita Sen, Women and Labor in Late Colonial India, The Bengal Jute Industry, 1999, and WorldJute.Com)
In 1834, Lord Bentinck submitted a proposal to the East India Company Council of Directors on the possibilities of tea industry in the sub-continent. The first tea consignment from Assam sent as a sample to London in 1837 found a ready market. Tea plantations began journey in the Brahmaputra valley in 1859, and the tea industry expanded. Tea plantation in Sylhet was established in 1857, the year the First War for Independence began, and in the Dooars, it was in 1874. By 1868, the area under tea plantation in Sylhet went up to 2,050 acres, and it expanded to more than 71,000 acres by 1900. Tea export to Britain went up to 13 crore and 70 lakh (10 million = 1 crore and 1 hundred-thousand = 1 lakh) pounds by 1900. Speculation with land suitable for tea plantation began during the latter half of the 1800.
The 1894-1914 was the period of establishment of mining industry in the subcontinent. In 1895, 3 million tons of coal was extracted. Railways, jute and textile industries, engineering and foundry workshops, rice mills and brick kilns increased the extraction of coal. Extractable and exploitable all areas were exploited only to enrich the colonial masters. And, massive hunger was visiting the land.
People Starved: Famines, as is cited in Romesh Chunder Dutt's Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India, The Cambridge Economic History of India, B M Bhatia's Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India With Special Reference to Food Problem, 1860–1990, Mike Davis'Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, David Hardiman's “Usury, Dearth and Famine in Western India” (Past and Present, 152), ravaged the land: the Great Bengal Famine (1769-'70), the Chalisha Famine (1783-'84), the Skull Famine (1791-'92), the Upper Doab Famine (1860-'61), the Orissa Famine (1865-'67), the Rajputana Famine (1868-'70), the Bihar Famine (1873-'74), the Great/South Indian Famine (1876-'78), the Indian Famines (1896-'97 and 1899-1900), the Bengal Famine (1943-'44). These were only a few among many others. The famines claimed their toll: millions of lives. Dutt mentioned “sad record of twenty-two famines within a period of 130 years of British rule in India.” (op. cit.) And, citing C. Walford's “The famines of the world: past and present” (Journal of the Statistical Society, 41(13) 1878) Mike Davis mentioned “31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule” (“The Origin of the Third World”, Antipode 32:1, 2000)
However, there was an opposite reality. Citing D. Rothermund's An Economic History of India (1988) and Dutt'sOpen Letters … Davis finds, “[b]etween 1875-1900 — a period that included the worst famines in Indian history — annual grain exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons; … this quantity equaled the annual nutrition of 25 million people.” (ibid.) Davis adds: “[B]y the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's wheat consumption at the cost of its own food security.” (ibid.)
Payment: And, the imperialism was extracting its avania, tribute: dividends, interests, commissions. The sub-continent, writes Marx in Capital (vol. III), had to pay millions of pounds “in tribute for ‘good government,' interest and dividends of British capital, etc., not counting the sums sent home annually by officials as savings of their salaries or by English merchants as part of their profit …” The imperial filch had “noetic” causes: financing imperial expeditions, invasions, wars, and payments for mutiny! “Already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, India also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, the subcontinent's masses also subsidized such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the occupation of Egypt, the invasion of Ethiopia, and the conquest of the Sudan. As a result, military expenditures never comprised less than 25 percent (34 percent including police) of India's annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the Army from other sections of the budget, even the Famine Fund.” (Mike Davis, “The Origin …”)
And, massacres and killings including the Amritsar massacre led by General Dyer were frequent while the sahibs and memsahibs were busy with playing polo and having picnics.
And, there were incarceration and banishment of and gallows for freedom fighters. Many they were. There were Bhagat Singh and Surja [mostly spelled Surya] Sen, and Khudiram, one of the youngest revolutionaries in India, a youth of 18 years 8 months and 8 days, and Bagha Jatin and many Bhagat Sings and many Surja Sens. There were Pritilata and Matangini Hazra. Netaji, our Subhas Bose was there. There were the Kayur comrades. They “consulted none but own conscience, conspired with none but own duty.” (Note of Madan Lal Dhingra, quoted in J C Ker,Political Trouble in India, 1973)
Precedent: And, there was the poverty-stricken people, pauperized population, and laboring multitude, an emerging class of working people interacting with capitalist production in the sub-continent. It's, as Marx sarcastically coins in Theories of Surplus-Value “another wonderful prospect”. (Part II, vol. IV of Capital) “[T]he labouring class has to bear all the ‘temporary inconveniences' – unemployment, displacement of labour and capital …” (ibid.) The laboring class in the sub-continent bore all the “temporary inconveniences” capital was “gifting”. “If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947” (Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, 1998, quoted in Mike Davis, “The Origin …”) An imperial “great success” story it was. And, now, the former masters without sense of honor shamelessly preach the people in the sub-continent! They claim it's their duty to democracy! And, pitifully, they have dependents and disciples! Masters have sense of humor.
The average income in the sub-continent was “just enough”, write Professor K T Shah and K J Khambata in The Wealth and Taxable Capacity of India, “either to feed two men in every three of the population, or give them all two meals in place of every three meals they need, on condition that they all consent to go naked, live out of doors all the year round, have no amusement or recreation, and want nothing else but food, and that the lower, the coarsest, and the least nutritious.” From 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by 20 percent, writes K. Davis inPopulation of India and Pakistan (1951), and Mike Davis comments on the “development”: “[A] deterioration in human biology probably without precedent in the subcontinent's long history”. (“The Origin …”)
The population, to survive on that income, had to “forget” health care and education. The Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budget in Bombay [Mumbai] compared budgets of Bombay jail inmates and Bombay working class member: 1.42 lbs.-1.69 lbs. of salt, cereals, pulse, etc. and 1.51 lbs. respectively. The annual cost of maintaining an Indian prisoner was about three times the Indian agriculturist's income, estimated the Banking Enquiry Commission. “[I]n most industrial centres [in the sub-continent]”, the Royal Commission on Labor in India (1929) [also known as Whitley Commission] found, “the proportion of families and individuals who are in debt is not less than two-thirds of the whole. … [I]n the great majority of cases the amount of debt exceeds three months' wages and is often far in excess of this amount.” In Mumbai, the Textile Inquiry Committee (1937) found, “91.24 per cent live in one room tenement and the average number of persons residing in each such tenement is 3.84. The approximate floor space available per person and tenement is 26.86 and 103.23 sq. ft. respectively.” The Whitley Commission Report found: About one-third of the Karachi population lives in a room at the rate of 6-9 persons while 73 per cent of the Ahmedabad working class population lives in one-room tenements. Other industrial centers were no exception. An investigation by the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Union found: 5,660 of the 23,706 tenements had no provision of water. “Indian labour is content with a very low standard of comfort.” The IICR found: “The worst type of chawl [workmen's dwellings] consists of a two-, three-, or four-storeyed building, with single-room units either placed back to back or separated by a narrow gulley two or three feet wide, usually traversed by an open drain. The rooms, especially those on the ground floor, are often pitch dark and possess very little in the way of windows; and even the small openings which exist are closed by the inhabitants in their desire to secure privacy and to avoid the imaginary evils of ventilation. The ground floors are usually damp owing to an insufficient plinth; the courtyards between the buildings are most undesirably narrow and, therefore, receive insufficient sun and air. They are also very dirty. Water arrangements are insufficient and latrine accommodation is bad, though the latter is being steadily improved. A most insanitary smell hangs round those buildings. … (There were cases of] three families occupying a single room …” The commission exposed the fact: “The cheapness of living in India is a powerful weapon in international competition”. It was capital's competition at the cost of human souls hundreds of thousands in number.
“[B]ut”, the commission found, “it is of little avail if the labour is inefficient and unorganised.” So, there is a great opportunity – organize these limbs and muscles in an efficient way – to have a higher profit! And, to organize the limbs is to regiment labor, shackle it.
The colonial crown's acts were nothing but savage. “There is no end”, Lenin wrote, “to the acts of violence and plunder which goes under the name of the British system of government in India. Nowhere in the world – with the exception, of course, of Russia – will you find such abject mass poverty, such chronic starvation among the people. The most liberal and radical personalities of free Britain, men like John Morley … become regular Genghis Khan when appointed to govern India, and are capable of sanctioning every means of ‘pacifying' the population in their charge, even to the extent of flogging political protesters.” (op. cit.) In the face of the savage power, labor in Indiastood firm. “In India lately,” wrote Lenin, “the native slaves of the ‘civilised' British capitalists have been a source of worry to their ‘masters'. (op. cit.) It was the “native slaves”, unorganized, unaware, inexperienced in its initial days.
The wage “slaves” were coerced or allured out of their villages with the power of starvation. “[B]etween the years 1921 and 1931 the number of industrial workers employed in establishments of more than 10 workers rose from 2.6 million to 3.5 million. In the intervening decade, and especially in the last two and a half years of the war with the large increase in heavy war industry, this number has rocketed by leaps and bounds. … [T]he industrial proletariat numbers [were] far more than the 5 million estimate of 1931. To this core of true industrial workers must be added about 20 million handicraft workers who work in places employing less than 10 people. These are wage workers and constitute a reserve for the industrial working class. … In addition to this there [was] an agricultural proletariat … approximately 130 million.” (Ted Grant & Andrew Scott, “The road to India's freedom”, Workers' International News, vol. 5 nos. 3&4, presumably June 1942) A part of the “slaves” were being mobilized by capital in newly established factories and mills with regimentation and rule.
Children of these “slaves” were not even allowed to stay beyond the tentacles of capital. “If the children of workers are provided with education under tolerable conditions of life, a new generation of workers will grow up, who will learn to regard mill work as their fixed occupation.” (IICR) So, there's arrangement for perennial supply of labor! And, they were already there. “Children between the ages of 9 and 14, generally known as half-timers, are employed in mills for six hours a day …” (ibid.) Long ago, Marx found the fact in the home of the imperial masters as he quoted the 17thJanuary, 1860 issue of Daily Telegraph: “Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate….” (Capital, vol. I) The sub-continent was chained by capital. So, why should capital spare children of wage slaves in the sub-continent? Yet, capital teaches “civility” and “humanity”!
Pack: From the very beginning the property owning classes related to industry and commerce were organized: the British Chamber of Commerce – in 1834 in Bengal, the Bombay Mill Owners' Association – in 1875, the Duars Planters' Association by the European tea planters – 1878, the Indian Jute Mills Association (during formation, it was Indian Jute Manufacturers' Association, and the renaming was done in 1902) – in 1884, Ahmedabad Textile Mills' Association – 1891, Indian Tea Planters' Association – 1918. Sugar, mining, engineering, paper, etc. found similar organizations within a short period. The Indian Chambers of Commerce was in close relations with the Indian political leadership dependable to the colonial rulers. Deep impact of the relations between this political leadership and economic interests, writes C B Kumar in The Development of Industrial Relations in India, by these types of organizations were felt at latter stage. During the World War I, the British colonial rulers got assistance from the Tata's iron, steel, cement and hydro-power establishments. It was a business of mutual benefit – comprador serving its master and the master blessing the comprador. “Only moneylenders, urban merchants, and a handful of indigenous industrialists seemed to have benefited consistently from India's renewed importance in world trade.” (Mike Davis, “The Origin …”)
Pathfinders: At the same time, new industrial centers were turning into centers of protest and resistance. The industrial workers in the sub-continent waged struggles in its economic and political interests, and for the country's freedom from colonial chains. For more than a century, the struggle, part of class struggle, was waged in waves. The working people, it's found:
(1) On occasions, established command over situation. Working people, in one such occasion, smashed colonial administration in Sholapur, an industrial center, in May 1930, and established their administration for days. It, the Sholapur Commune, was crushed only with imposition of martial law there. Thousands of textile mills workers stood there in barricades. Mallappa Dhanshetty, Shrikisan Sardar, Qurban Husain and Jagannath Shinde, four leaders of the commune were hanged on January 12, 1931. Bombay [now, Mumbai] experienced similar rising after mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy. Workers were in control of the city. The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny in Mumbai on February 18, 1945 that spread from Karachi to Kolkata involving 78 ships, 20 shore establishments and 20,000 members of the navy was an example of the working people's struggle that put them in command of a situation although the initiative was lost due to failures of varying types. Mumbai went into total strike with the initiative of the working people, andfrom February 18 to 22, the imperialist British government gunned down more than 400 workers.
(2) Set examples of peaceful protests. In Peshawar, soldiers – peasantry, as Lenin found, in uniforms – defied command and didn't open fire on people, deserted their rank, joined protesting people, and suffered rigorous imprisonment. It was during the Peshawar Uprising in 1900 that witnessed blood of hundreds of commoners. And, it was M K Gandhi, who repudiated the rebel soldiers although the armed rebels followed Gandhi's ahimsa, non-violence and the path of peaceful protest. The rebel soldiers, workingmen, didn't use their arms, and suffered rigorous imprisonment.
(3) Never resorted to terrorism, conspiratorial approach, individualistic adventurism although a part of enlightened middle class temporarily practiced the method. The labor's non-resorting to conspiratorial work is a show of its strength. Resorting to conspiratorial work, it should be mentioned, is an infantile approach. Resisting/defying capital was begun by the emerging class itself since its very early days, and that was not through conspiracy and terrorism. The emerging class gradually resorted to collective resistance.
On the contrary, it was the capital owning classes and their political cohorts and suppression-machine that were ceaselessly resorting to conspiracy, terror, violence, armed assault. Laws and courts of law were used against the working classes although it was unremittingly propagated that law and its court were impartial. There's instance of court of law fined trade union, which was trying only to raise and realize justified demands of its members – industrial workers, and thus the court stood against labor. The position compelled the working masses to resort to forceful resistance. Labor always resorted to collective resistance after only a few resistances at individual level at its initial days. The practice – collective approach – was praxis of democracy within its sphere, and in its struggle for survival.
(4) Stood against imperialist power. On occasions, it was the working class that raised the banner of resistance against imperialism before any other class in the sub-continent could initiate the job. It opposed unjust war. The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in its Lahore session in March 1923 adopted a resolution calling on not to participate in unjust wars. And, the class paid for the resistance. In this stand, and in opposing capital, labor was not waiting for leadership from other classes. At later stages, other classes, especially the local bourgeoisie felt its urgent need to win over the labor, and took initiative to sit on the leadership of labor movement. Gandhi got involved with labor strike in Ahmedabad in 1918. He later took part in directing trade union that, at later stage, evolved into Gandhite TU. Congress in its Nagpur and Kanpur sessions adopted resolutions and program asking its provincial committees, other organs, leaders and workers to organize labor into TUs and to send Congress propagandists and organizers among the labor. It took vigorous steps to take hold of leadership of the AITUC. C R Das said in Congress'Gaya session: We, the Congress, are already too late about labor; workers and peasantry will get detached from us, build up their organization, and will bring class struggle if we fail to reach them. The labor and peasantry have to be brought to our control if Congress likes to stay free of this situation.
(5) Stood by national struggle for independence. Swadeshi movement found labor by its side. Native rulers in princely states, Marx observed, were most formidable obstacle on the path to advancement of the sub-continent. (“The native states”, July 25, 1853, New York Daily Tribune) Labor struggled for democracy in the princely states. Labor was in solidarity with broader society as it took active participation in the broader society's political struggle for independence. Labor raised its banner of resistance during the Red Fort Trial of Indian National Army (INA) members in 1945. Its role and participation along with students and other sections of the mass in Kolkata protesting the trial was heroic. At its initial days, labor lacked political program, a natural consistency. The political program developed gradually as labor was gaining knowledge from political developments and from its fights against capital. At the Kolkata Congress, 50,000 workers demonstrated with the slogan: An independent socialist republic of India.
(6) Established alliance with peasantry. It was established, among other places, in Jalpaiguri by tea plantation workers in the 1920s. Labor expressed solidarity with the revolting peasantry during its Chouri Choura trial although Congress leadership abandoned the Chouri Choura-peasantry that followed Congress' call for mass upsurge.
(7) Stood against communalism although capital and its politicians tried to spread poison of communalism in the camp of labor.
(8) Stood for dignity. On occasions, labor struggled for recognition of its union as its representative, which is identified by a number of labor historians as question of dignity.
(9) On occasions and in areas, organized it on its own. Organizations and leadership from among the ranks of labor emerged, on occasions, through its fights in factories and mills.
(10) With its struggles, confirmed class struggle as the key to social advancement. With its struggle, thus, labor carried forward the historic task of advancement in the sub-continent. It carried on the task since its days of inception. No other class in the land has embarked on this task as labor. In this task, labor held high the banner of equity, equality, equitable distribution, people's control over all public resources, and the task of smashing of capitalism, imperialism and remnants of feudalism.
Power Unleashed: On the contrary, labor had to face all the adversaries and force capital and the state in its command could unleash and heinous tact these could adopt:
(1) Brutal force, murder, killing, massacre, treachery, coercion, threat, surveillance. State resorted to its freedom in using firearms in the face of labor's justified collective protests/resistance/demands. At those moments, labor had nothing but gravels, bricks pieces, and on one or two occasions, parts broken from machines to protect it. Even, labor's minimum demands for a better working condition, an essential for regeneration of capital, were initially denied, brushed out, unheeded, gagged down. Capital and state felt scared with labor's most primary moves, with labor's search for recourse in its roots in village life and in its spiritual practices, with slightest signs of labor's very primary initiative for education (organizing library) and amusement or spiritual practices (organizing puja, prayer). The state, as is claimed by revolutionary theoreticians of proletariat, was always faithful to its duty: serve capital, and very naturally, administrative machine, law and courts of law were nothing but drumbeaters although a lot of theoreticians always propagate and demand non-partisan administrative machine, which is not only an illusion, but a damn lie also.
(2) Spreading of confusion and communalism in the ranks of labor, forcefully keeping labor isolated from broader society, collaboration between capital and its political representatives that posed as leader of the masses, taking hold of leadership. On occasions, political leadership tried to keep labor away from participating in political activities. But labor thwarted those ill-efforts.
(3) Unemployment, competition, burden of decreased profit, illiteracy, uncertainty, starvation, indignity. Capital was always using hunger to force labor capitulate. Capital was reducing wages while its profit was rising. During boom in economy, capital intensified its exploitation of labor, and burdened it during period of bust. Capital increased working hours as it got hold of electricity. Kolkata jute mills workers had the experience. Holidays on occasions of religious festivals including eid, rathjatra and Annapurna puja of followers of Islam and Hindu religions respectively were not allowed by capital. Labor had to struggle for full day's leave with pay on the occasions of these festivities. The Kolkata labor repeatedly had the experience for years.
Perseverance: But no conspiracy, no threat and terror, no murder and killing, no imposition of boundary by law and force could deter labor in its fight for a better life – a life with freedom and dignity, a life with safety and security, a life with opportunities to pursue humane excellence. In waves of strikes across industry and across the land, labor spread its movement with loss of millions of working days in the sub-continent, and at times, compelled capital and its state to surrender. In areas, labor turned market places into staging ground for mobilization and resistance. There's instance that a library evolved into a TU and a typed newsletter of a few hundred copies had to be printed in larger number for distribution around the land.
It took years for a red flag to appear in a labor procession in this sub-continent; and at a time of triumph, labor was spreading its message with red flags on a locomotive engine that was moving from place to place. It was labor's moment of victory in the sub-continent-wide struggle of railway workers in 1946.
Embryos of trade union almost simultaneously came into being in more than one place in the sub-continent as it was organizing on its own although an assumption prevails that TU activities began in a single area. The pattern – simultaneous – is meaningful.
Labor's movement in the sub-continent supports the claim, to put it briefly, reality shapes ideas. In its initial days, labor in the sub-continent was tied to ideas and culture of its old home: village, and ghosts and ill-spirit, etc. Many of its faiths were ancient. To get free from exploitation, a part of labor, in its initial days, in the sub-continent sought help of gods that lived eternally somewhere in forests and hills. It even imagined Kaiser as a god, who had the capacity to free labor from the clutches of feereengee, the eengrej, the English, the British colonial rulers, and its collaborators. It should not be imagined that all old ideas and concepts evaporated the moment labor interacted with machine, with modern production process, with capitalist production. But new ideas, concepts, method, style, imaginations crept in. Those might be partial, might be mixed; but old ones were coming into conflict with new ones, and giving in to the new.
In areas, because of type of production, labor was kept isolated from broader social community/towns/villages; they had to work in small groups; even one group of workers were isolated from other groups, and the groups were smaller in number. Effective and organized forms and methods of protests, other than falling sick or deserting work place, were unknown to labor in the area. It was difficult for news of political and social developments in the broader society to reach labor in the area. Political leadership at national level, at times, even, was not taking initiative to reach the labor there. But that didn't permanently kept labor away from organizing collective struggle. It's a meaningful signal to comprehend.
But with perseverance, labor learned. On the path to learning, mistakes were there as were failures. Successes also raised their victorious flags. Successes were teachers as were mistakes and failures.
Responsibility for failures in political struggle and political development, for failures to foil onslaught by forces of reaction and retrogression, for fratricidal bloodbath engineered and instigated by capital in no way falls on labor, a young class not developed fully at that period, as at no moment in the history of this sub-continent labor was in full control of political situations, which was always developing through competition and conflicts. Labor's contending classes were older, stronger, having more interactions with science, finance, diplomacy and geopolitics, modern knowledge, and with other countries, and were politically more organized, matured and powerful. The class in collusion with imperialist rulers, and standing opposed to labor was more matured than all other classes in the sub-continent. Labor, despite its inexperience, weaker organization, and theoretical incompleteness, stood against backward, reactionary political ideas and activities, and stood for progress. A historical responsibility it was. Labor always stood for fraternity and solidarity. No other class in the sub-continent can make similar claim throughout the period.
Forms and methods of protest, resistance and struggle that emerge in spheres of society depend on prevailing reality, which is a historical growth. Politics can't escape the reality as it can't bury prospects also. Adopting appropriate strategy and tactics takes time. At times, initially obviously, resistances and barricades may crumble down as those initially can't overpower relevant process. But despite failures and temporary crumbling downs the clarion call for a humane life and humane dignity remains alive. It's one of the teachings by labor in the sub-continent. “[W]e have to work very hard to … preserve the dignity of human beings as creatures with the ability to reason and choose. Resistance lives! As we say in India, Inqilab Zindabad!” (Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “The Parameters of Resistance”,Monthly Review, vol. 55, issue 3, July-August, 2003)
