Catastrophic Exceptions
By Gary J. Bass
Torture and Democracy
by Darius Rejali
AMERICA, UNDER George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t.” It is not just that the president’s words are demonstrably false, as evidenced by the sworn congressional testimony of the director of Central Intelligence and the horrific photographs from Abu Ghraib. What is most pernicious about Bush’s lie is that almost everyone would desperately want to believe it. Torture is so profoundly incompatible with modern liberalism that it took just six weeks after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 for France’s deputies to abolish judicial torture. So how can democracies torture today?
The answer is, in their own special way. As Darius Rejali explains in a sprawling, essential book, Torture and Democracy, the kind of torture depends on the political landscape. He is clear that authoritarian governments have a worse record on torture than democratic governments do. For a dictator, the use of torture—like other spectacular exercises of coercive state power—is meant not just to break the victim, but to cow all the other people. Mutilated victims are a hobbled reminder not to mess with the big man. Acid torture, for example, leaves victims either dead or scarred; it was showily used in Nazi-occupied France, Iran in the 1960s, Brazil and Argentina in the 1970s, and El Salvador and Syria in the 1980s.
Democratic torture, on Rejali’s account, goes on in a much different political arena. The torturers have to be worried about the interference of judges, lawyers, reporters, activists, and voters. To evade them, the democratic torturer has to turn to “electric prods and electroshockers, tortures by water and ice, drugs of sinister variety, sonic devices—and also by methods that are less technical, but no less sophisticated or painful; the modern democratic torturer knows how to beat a suspect senseless without leaving a mark.” Democratic publics, according to Rejali, also might be more willing to overlook torture when they think it is necessary for national security, or if it is done to different kinds of people, or in wars or colonialism. As an example of almost all of those dynamics, in 1902, during the war in the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt coolly noted, “The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure. Nobody was seriously damaged.” Democracies torture; they just do it evasively.
The bulk of Rejali’s book is a massive dictionary of the unspeakable: the electric bath, the electrified prod, paddling, sleep deprivation, stress positions (the British Empire pioneered the Gag, the Wooden Collar, and the Whirligig; the French Empire used to discipline its troops with the silo and the crapaudine), crucifixion (used, incredibly, as a British punishment during World War I), dorsiflexing, eyeball pressing, sweatboxes, waterboarding. Among these horrors, he documents a democratic preference for the refinements of cruelty that do not leave marks—what he calls “clean torture.”
For instance, if you smash someone where flesh meets bone, it leaves bruises, which could tell the tale to investigating authorities. But Japanese police would beat prisoners in the midriff, hips, thighs and buttocks; the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland beat Irish captives in the genitals and with straight finger prods to the abdomen; and an American interrogator noted that he could beat Vietnamese prisoners senseless with an open hand and not leave reddened skin. More recently, Americans have not been quite as adept at “clean torture.” In the first major medical examination of former detainees in American military jails, Physicians for Human Rights assessed eleven men, four of whom had spent an average of three years in custody in Afghanistan or Guantánamo and seven of whom had been detained in Iraq for an average of six months. Most of them suffered psychological damage, which could be considered invisible. But according to a June 2008 report, the medical examiners found scars and injuries that fit the men’s own stories of beating and electric shocks, as well as at least one case of sodomy.
When democracies did not fear public monitoring, they were more brazen in their use of torture—as in colonial wars, or when the victims were from a group marginalized or despised by the public. Even so, Rejali argues, the prospect of oversight pushed colonial powers toward non-visible forms of torture. British colonial police were more likely to use visible torture in Kenya in the 1950s than in Mandatory Palestine fifteen years prior. He cautiously suggests that this is because of British fears of getting caught out in Palestine by the watchful eye of the Anglican Church. Given the scientific pretensions of torturers, it turns out that doctors play a major role in finding them out. In Turkey in the 1990s, torturers gave up on the falaka—beating the soles of the feet with a rod—as doctors figured out how to detect it in victims up to six months after the assaults.
Once the techniques of clean torture had been pioneered by democracies, they were adopted by dictatorships later in the twentieth century. Rejali explains this as mostly the result of monitoring too. Early in the twentieth century, dictatorships had little need to hide their tortures. There was scant international monitoring of their internal coercion. During the cold war, the Soviet Union spread torture know-how in East Germany, and the United States in Brazil. But by the 1970s, that had all changed. Many authoritarian governments found themselves embarrassed by new international human rights groups like Amnesty International, founded in 1961. AI issued its first global overview of torture in 1973. By the latter part of the last century, it was only the most isolated and extreme authoritarian states (such as North Korea) that could afford to ignore the international costs of torturing. Rejali argues that “clean torture” picked up substantially in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in authoritarian governments with close ties to powerful democracies like America, Britain, and France. Given the willingness of governments to turn a blind eye to their own abuses or those of their allies (Rejali points to British cover-ups in Northern Ireland and French whitewashes in Algeria), this is somewhat less convincing. Still, today, governments that would torture have to figure out ways to do so under the nose of monitors like the United Nations, the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and so on.
Rejali, an expert on Iranian torture, writes, “When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky.” They also get lawyers. It is impossible to read this book without hearing the echoes of the August 2002 memorandum signed by Jay Bybee and chiefly written by John Yoo at the Justice Department, held up as a “golden shield” against potential prosecutions of the Americans who harshly interrogated senior Qaeda suspects such as Abu Zubaydah. Trying to skirt the American domestic law that implements the Convention Against Torture, Bybee and Yoo wrote, “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” In other words, Bybee and Yoo are trying to redefine torture mostly as the visible kinds of torture, while winking at the more common democratic ways of “clean torture.” Jack Goldsmith, the former Justice Department lawyer who withdrew this memo, called it “legally flawed, tendentious in substance and tone, and overbroad and thus largely unnecessary.” In the light of Rejali’s book, it is also exactly what you would expect.
Slippery Slopes
As a matter of law, of course, none of this should happen. The United States has signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture and accepted without reservation Article 2(2): “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” This flat prohibition is implemented in title 18 of the United States code—the law that Bybee and Yoo had to try to circumvent.
But the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has given us real-world situations that make it miserably unnecessary to ponder law school hypotheticals like the ticking time-bomb scenario. If a nuclear weapon were to go off in Los Angeles or other cities, it is almost unimaginable what the American government would do. It is vital to interrogate A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear-bomb maker, to try to discover the ins and outs of his network of proliferation profiteering that extended to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Khan is protected in Pakistan by his status as a national hero, but with the potential death toll from his commerce in the millions, other states could not be expected to show the same deference.
THIS IS the terrifying domain of maximum emergency, leading to such proposals as Charles Fried’s “catastrophe exception” (to use Sanford Levinson’s term) and Bruce Ackerman’s plans for declaring a state of emergency while still restraining presidential power. No less a defender of basic liberties than Ackerman writes that, after a big terrorist attack, “early dragnets may well be functional,” even though he is painfully aware that they will throw many innocent people into detention.
Worse, governments have been tempted to let slip the leash for much less than maximum emergency. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter said, “We need to remove unwarranted restraints on America’s ability to collect intelligence.” As Jack Goldsmith put it, the country goes through “cycles of timidity and aggression” toward the state’s intelligence apparatus. And Rejali notes that there has been systematic torture in all sorts of democracies that were not facing grave danger: Japan, Brazil, Russia, South Africa after democratization, and the American cities of New York and Chicago. Democratic torture can grow not just from national security imperatives, but from judicial systems that are too enamored of confessions or from police trying to torture their way to safe streets.
So strict prohibitions on torture will always be under siege. And once that bright-line rule against torture is dimmed, the descent down the slippery slope has started. This, too, is anything but hypothetical. One of the most useful things about Rejali’s book is the demonstration of this process. Torturers have a way of rounding up more suspects than originally approved and using nastier methods than originally authorized. The torturers tend to innovate, and those innovations in cruelty spread. This creates distinctive national—and sometimes international—styles of torture. Torture, although an underground activity, has managed to quietly adapt itself worldwide to new political conditions.
Recent American experience bears this out. Starting in the spring of 2002, the National Security Council’s principals’ committee signed off on the CIA’s so-called “combined” interrogation techniques on hard-to-crack terrorism suspects: whether to slap them, push them, deprive them of sleep, or waterboard them. This began, according to ABC News, with Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda leader who was waterboarded with White House approval. But abuse then spread far beyond. Perhaps most strikingly, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, visited Iraq to review army prisons there from August 31 to September 9, 2003. This marked an effort to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. At Guantánamo, Mohamed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” in the September 11 plot, had been menaced by growling dogs, leashed, and forced to wear women’s underwear on his head. But Miller (whose report is available in Mark Danner’s invaluable Torture and Truth) was unimpressed with Abu Ghraib’s interrogations. He wanted the interrogators to shift from “tactical interrogation operations” to “strategic interrogation operations,” in order to provide “GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] oriented” intelligence. He notes, “The application of emerging strategic interrogation strategies and techniques contain new approaches and operational art.” Miller’s visit set the stage for the nightmare abuse at Abu Ghraib from October to December 2003: detainees deprived of sleep, menaced by dogs, in naked pyramids, forced to simulate homosexual acts, forced to wear women’s underwear, and beaten to death. So much for keeping torture limited.
But Does It Work?
For an American debate on torture that has been largely theoretical, here is a book full of facts. Richard Posner, for one, has written that there is “abundant evidence that torture is often an effective method of eliciting true information.” Judge Posner should read this book and then think again.
Whether torture works depends, first of all, on what you think it is supposed to do. Torture is a device for terrifying a populace into submission, and it can work for that. It is a device for securing false confessions, and it works for that. And finally, it could be a device for getting accurate and actionable intelligence about security threats. Here, Rejali makes a devastating case against its effectiveness. There are, of course, non-torturing ways of getting intelligence, and the advocates of torture need to prove not just that their way works, but that it works better than the more decent methods. As Stephen Holmes has pointed out, with the example of Russian operations against Chechen terrorists, the question is not just whether torture works, but what the opportunity costs were.
For torture to extract accurate information, it must somehow be made scientific. But Rejali paints torture as a kind of Clausewitzian activity, where the ostensibly rational goal of the violence is overwhelmed by confusion, friction, and escalation. In reality, torture is not so much a precise science as, in Rejali’s words, “a craft apprenticeship.” There is little formal training, leaving many torturers relying on habit or word of mouth to confront a flummoxing range of complications thrown at them by the human beings they are tormenting. Different people feel pain differently; some resist more than others; and the attempt to ratchet up the pain can lead to numbness or sensory overload. To compensate for variation in pain tolerance, torturers can aim for maximum pain early on—but this risks the victim’s passing out, being badly hurt, or dying. Although individual torturers may imagine that they have a particular knack for it, Rejali coldly writes, “Once the torture session starts, it necessarily devolves into an unrestrained hit-or-miss affair.”
Similarly, Rejali finds little evidence that professionalism can restrain torture. Instead, “torture breaks down professionalism. Professionals become less disciplined, more brutal, and less skilled while their organizations become more fragmented and corrupt.” In Algeria, torture took an awful toll on the French military, deprofessionalizing soldiers and splintering the military. Torturers ignore regulations to get past a victim’s pain threshold (as at Abu Ghraib), engage in competitive cruelty for career advancement, and deceive their own governments about what they are up to. They forget normal police skills: “Why do fingerprinting when you’ve got a bat?” Moreover, if torture is an option, then governments will be tempted to use it. Rather than develop a corps of Arabic-speaking experts on Iraq, the government could just torture detainees.
Aristotle wrote that “evidence from torture may be considered utterly untrustworthy.” As noted by both a 1963 CIA intelligence manual and an Indonesian interrogation manual found in East Timor in 1983, people being tortured will often give up junk information. (When North Vietnamese interrogators demanded the names of members of John McCain’s squadron, the captive McCain fed them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line.) This, then, wastes time and effort as the authorities go check it out. Traumatized brains may suffer amnesia, and even cooperative prisoners may, in their torment, get their facts wrong. Japanese fascists, in a 1943 manual on interrogating prisoners of war, thought torture was “most clumsy.” In contrast, Rejali points to the impressive success of public information in helping British authorities swiftly catch the men suspected of putting bombs on London buses and trains on July 21, 2005.
Depressing as Rejali’s book is, it does rest on a certain weak faith in democracy. In his account, it is democratic monitoring that drives the torturers to their evasions. But as Rejali admits, this may not hold up: “Monitoring may also collapse through political pressures and public indifference.” Since Abu Ghraib, a staggeringly public display of American torture that undermined the war effort in Iraq and tarred the country’s image, there has been not much in the way of punishment. A weak dose of criminal justice was meted out to a handful of low-ranked officers, but went no further up the chain of command. (Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the military police at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and demoted to colonel; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Centcom commander in 2003 and 2004, was pressured into retiring early, cutting short his career.) Bybee, of the torture memo, now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with lifetime tenure. He might take comfort from Michael Mukasey, the attorney general, who says he is unsure if waterboarding is torture, and recently complained of “breathtakingly casual” suggestions that “some of these lawyers should be subject to civil or criminal liability for the advice they gave.” Bush refused to accept the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, who was fired only after the Republicans lost the Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. Vice President Dick Cheney said, of criticism of Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib: “Get off his back.” And, of course, at the top of the chain of command, George W. Bush, the Abu Ghraib president, won a second term as president in 2004. Bush used the ninth veto of his presidency, in March 2008, to ensure that the CIA is not bound by the U.S. Army field manual’s interrogation techniques, which forbid physical force and thus things like waterboarding.
Gary J. Bass is associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and the author of Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf).
© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.
Friday, November 28, 2008
The Writer in Russia
The Writer in Russia
By Kirill Medvedev
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in part by some of the violent reaction elicited by his poetry, he experienced a sharp leftward turn. In 2003, he announced that, given the conditions of the Putin regime (which he read as a mutant continuation of 1990s neoliberalism rather than as a backward step toward Soviet-style statism), he would no longer participate in literary life—he would neither publish nor give readings nor participate in round tables. In the years since, Medvedev has continued to develop his stubbornly independent position, more recently joining the nascent socialist movement Forward as a contributor to its Web site and as an activist. In all his writings, he has questioned the orthodoxy of the previous generation of Russian thinkers, the vast majority of whom were programmatic free market liberals. Medvedev is at the forefront of a new generation of Russians who are beginning, very gingerly, warily, and humbly, to apply the European left’s critique of postwar capitalism to their native situation.
In this essay, Medvedev attempts to connect some tendencies he sees in current Russian art, poetry, and politics. What he finds there is “the new emotionalism,” an appeal on the part of poets and politicians alike to personal experience and authenticity. In part this apparently inward turn is a natural reaction to a situation in which all public debate (about capitalism, about Putin) has been eliminated; but it is also a necessary condition for the current regime to remain in power. Followers of the American literary scene—with its rash of memoirs (including fake ones), continued but debased identity politics, and frequent appeals by even the least memoiristic writers to their “sincerity”—as well as followers of the American blogosphere, with its shrill self-assertions and self-promotion, will find much that is familiar in the world Medvedev describes.
The essay was originally published as “Literatura Budet Proverena: Individualny proekt i ‘novaia emotsionalnost’” or “The Situation of the Writer in Russia: The Individual Project and the ‘New Emotionalism,’ ” in Medvedev’s self-published volume of essays Reaktsiya Voobshe, Moscow, 2007.
—Keith Gessen
The intelligentsia’s will, and their desire, was directed, intentionally, at isolation. This is how they thought about the government: “You are cretins, leave us alone—we will study higher math, theoretical physics, and semiotics. And everything will be fine.” They failed to understand that in fact they were violating their own political conscience. They lacked the audacity and the will to recognize themselves as a political force. And when perestroika began, they were completely disorganized, intellectually, because they could not help but feel—instead of “they” I could say “we,” it’s merely a question of style—we could not help but feel that this very isolation, this very “leave us alone”—it was the same old “intelligentsia garbage.” We need to formulate at least an approximate political ideal.
—Alexander Pyatigorsky
THE FEATURES ascribed to the liberal intelligentsia by the philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that all discussion of “socialism with a human face” was thrown overboard and a resurgent labor movement found itself under the heel of “democratic” reformists. This was the intelligentsia’s first capitulation. The second began in October 1993, with their almost total acquiescence to the shelling of the Duma, and it ended in 1999 with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. During this time, in the context of a politics of complete capitalist restoration, a renunciation took place: not just of any oppositional attitude to the neoliberal model, but even of a more or less critical approach to it. (There were individual voices opposing this; they were drowned in the general chorus of loyalty.) The political opposition to Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s consisted largely of the Communist Party, a decrepit left-patriotic monster incapable of doing anything on its own, which nonetheless managed to become, for many years, a conduit for various moods of protest, even as it always performed the same exact ideological function: to be a scarecrow to the liberally minded elite. In this capacity it won Yeltsin a second term in office in 1996. A few years later, Putin was anointed king. At this point the liberal intelligentsia split psychologically and socially in two: one half became directly engaged in servicing the structures of capital—banks, publishing houses, corporations, and so on—while the other decided that regardless of all the hardships—the impossibility of working in one’s field, the cultural degradation, the vulgarity and pettiness of the new overlords—it would be wrong to grumble, to express discontent, to make demands. It was futile and unattractive to go against the time. And then, early in this decade, came the rise of the national-patriotic “red-browns,” who would be “even worse” than the current rulers, just as the Communists would have been “worse” than Yeltsin. As a result, the two halves of the intelligentsia formed an ideal consensus. At that moment, any possibility for real opposition, real discussion, and real political life in Russia disappeared.
We’ve now reached another turning point, because the red-brown scare is finally fading into the past. And a task that was wholly bungled at the beginning of the nineties is once again taking center stage: the creation of a real left-wing movement, based on workers’ autonomy, on independent labor unions, on the cooperation of grassroots movements and organizations.
And how does the Russian intelligentsia confront this challenge? With another capitulation, its third in the last twenty years. Any discussion of capitalism is off limits. Capitalism is irrevocable and self-evident. The younger generation, even in its best, most artistic, intellectual manifestation, already fights tenaciously for its right to a private life, to freedom from any talk of “politics,” “ideology,” or, even worse, the “proletariat.” These words are associated with the beginning of the Nineties; today they seem hopelessly archaic, although in truth the political paralysis that destroyed Russia in the 1990s continues.
AN OLD liberal maxim still haunts the minds of the intelligentsia: it states that “everyone should mind his own business,” in a conception of the artist as a private person most lucidly articulated by Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel Prize address. Yet it is obvious that Brodsky himself, as a poet chosen and put forward by his own social circle, participated in certain bargains, had certain privileges, was published by certain houses, thus directly or indirectly supporting certain powers and ideologies. But poets like the idea of “purity,” and one is supposed to acquiesce to the fiction that the poet is alone and that his texts, his political position (or its absence), and his personal qualities are in no way interrelated. And everyone should mind his or her own business—why meddle in someone else’s private life? The person of letters should write, the politician should politic, the engineer should engineer, and so forth.
The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be fine independent of the proletariat working in its mines and oil fields, bohemia would be fine independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent of general norms and perceptions, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it—“celebrity,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth—is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.
It’s as if, within this system, the artist were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. For the people (or just a small group of them), the artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theater director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his or her work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perception is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important—it is a major stimulus to the production of art.
But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it looks suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.
Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrate this: a former star of the punk underground is honestly surprised that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; a fashionable theater director criticizes the president in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he reads lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party. [1]
The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
The theater director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky [2]
The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
, in exchange for which he receives a theater in the center of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht—ars longa, vita brevis!
I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a Kremlin-financed Web site. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them on toward direct political action(!), and he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya) but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say that I was surprised, he answered: “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it”—again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.
What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities—not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but exactly the opposite: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.
Terms like “innocence” and “sincerity” frame the current mind-set to a remarkable degree. In all its dimensions—cultural, sociopolitical, and so on—the climate is determined not so much by “money” and “celebrity” (as is widely thought), but by the “new sincerity.” It is President Putin and contemporary poetry and the broadcasters on television. It is Alexander Lukashenko admitting that his party falsified the elections—lowered Lukashenko’s numbers from 93 percent to 80 percent—because, Lukashenko very sincerely confessed, “the European Union wouldn’t have accepted the results otherwise.” This is simultaneously unbelievable and symptomatic. The new sincerity is the blogosphere, with its absolutely sincere poets in one corner and its equally sincere Nazis in the other.
The “new sincerity” emerged in the culture as a reaction to the mind-bending moribundity and abstraction of postmodern theory on the one hand and to a confused and conflicted (post-)Soviet consciousness on the other. There came a moment when direct expression—an appeal to biographical experience as a zone of authenticity—was the tool that could force open at least two discourses: the rough, ideologized Soviet one and the ascetic, bodiless, nonconformist underground one. Today, the trend toward “sincerity,” “emotionalism,” and “direct expression,” with its appeal to biography, has become more and more reactionary.
The new sincerity or, more precisely, the new emotionalism, has rejected the worst aspects of postmodernism: its unintelligible, elitist jargon and its opposition to grand narratives and global concepts. But it has also rejected its undeniably positive qualities: its irrepressible critical outlook and its intellectual sophistication. And if, in spite of its initial critical power, postmodernism in the end only gave cover to an idealized consensus between the goals of “diversity” and the interests of the global marketplace, then the new emotionalism reconciles those same market interests with the resurrected figure of the author, bringing forth today’s endless stream of ventriloquism (lyrical, essayistic, “political,” whatever), in which any effort at analysis, any possibility of differentiating positions and actions simply drowns. It’s a stream in which it’s impossible to separate sincerity from hack work, because one is in the employ of the other: emotions cover up ideological bankruptcy (and the death of rational argument), and ideology in turn excites emotions and captivates the masses. It’s not hard to influence a person filled with emotions. The authorities are afraid of this sincerity, but they feed off and take advantage of it. Let young neo-Nazis scare the peasants with their sincere hatred, simultaneously keeping them in line. Let young poets and actors scream and curse from the stage of the Polytechnic: “Do whatever you want,” the new commissars tell them. “You are free, independent artists. Just don’t worry your pretty little heads about politics; after all, you’re smart, you know yourselves that it’s a dirty business. Your art will obviously outlive us all. Just leave the politics to us.”
The new emotionalism never fully grasped the ambivalence of postmodern theory; now it rejects the idea of the death of the author and replaces the dead author with the uniquely living, all-consuming “I,” granting it the right to say anything at all, whatever strikes one’s fancy. After all, if Marx is dead, everything is permitted. If “during postmodernism” language itself (as a system) spoke through the (dead) author, and embedded within this language were “schizophrenic” (liberating) possibilities, then in the new situation, when a long-repressed freedom of expression mingles with neoliberalism, it is God again who starts to speak through the poet. And this God is nothing but the rumblings, the convulsions, the subterfuges of capitalism itself, similar to ancient Fate, which all must inevitably confront, regardless of where they try to run.
Given this context, poets’ lamentations about their condition sound touchingly naïve. Why, they ask, don’t we have normal literary criticism? I have a simple, vulgar answer to this question: because all the major critical theories of the West in the twentieth century passed, in one way or another, through Marxism. All took something from it, altered other things in it, invalidated something else. Until the same happens in Russia, there won’t be any criticism at all—not of poetry, not of the authorities.
THE AUTHOR of the most brilliant individual project of the last few decades is named Eduard Limonov. [3]
Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
Throughout the 1990s and until quite recently, it was almost impossible to find a position from which a critique of Limonov would sound convincing. To take moral issue with him for excessive “sincerity” made you a hypocrite. To incriminate him as a “fascist” meant pretending that Yeltsin was a “democrat.” Those who tried to belittle him or confront him with overt hostility were doomed to find themselves immediately in a system of coordinates created by the self-same Limonov, in which the critic invariably (by an aggregate of data: as a writer, as a politician, as a man) was found to be beneath the great poet. Limonov had charm and a heroic persona and a remarkable biography, but there was also something else in play—under conditions of the “individual project,” any criticism is automatically followed with an answer from a position of experience: live my life (that is, visit as many cities and countries, write as many books, love as many women, create an equally independent and passionate political party), and then we’ll talk. All of Limonov’s heroes, even those more famous than he (Salvador Dali, for instance), eventually become just sad and transitory characters in the brilliant, vivid novel of Limonov’s life.
Yet I think the era of Limonov’s cultural hegemony (in which, undoubtedly, together with National Bolshevism and brown-red quasi-fascism, there were also progressive elements) is coming to an end. Today his political activity plays the reactionary role of subordinating all oppositional (and leftist) politics to Limonov’s life project—his cult of personality, strategies of media-scandal, and so on. Leftist groups in Russia today work in the shadow of Limonov’s NBP and its spectacular media events. With a cocktail made up of Nietzscheanism, nationalism, and “leftism,” mixed in with autobiographical authenticity, Limonov has managed to subsume an important segment of the youth protest movement under his own banner.
Baudrillard believed that the revolution of ’68 was defeated by overexposure in the media. The narrative of art-activism, the direct action of the nineties, has either led to the spectacular, partly fascistic activism of the NBP or to today’s crossroads, where left artists choose between a job in the art market or a search for alternative strategies attempting to answer a question also faced by leftist political groups: how does one clothe the message in an adequate and legitimate form, simultaneously avoiding vulgar, spectacular excesses?
Today an artist who wishes to consider himself a leftist ends up trapped between these two positions. He wants to influence society, a fact he does not conceal, which is why he is skeptical in his approach to the concept of “pure art.” On the other hand, he does not want to transmit himself directly through the media’s mechanisms and needs to approach them carefully and critically.
For me, an important experience was a protest I staged against the Kalyagin theater during the premiere of Brecht’s Drums in the Night. [4]
Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
It was conceived as a picket (that is, a maximally democratic means of expression, accessible to all and with no pretense to artistic value or novelty) in a series of other pickets organized by the socialist movement “Forward.” It was interpreted, however, as an art action, partly because of the skirmish with the guard, partly because the reaction from right-liberal critics involved almost exclusively biographical realities—facts of Brecht’s biography, facts of my biography, and facts of the critic’s biography. What one witnessed was a characteristically nonreflexive impulse: instead of a conversation about the enterprise as an effective or ineffective civil/political gesture, truthful or half-truthful or openly false facts from one’s own or someone else’s biography were pulled in. The critic would write, for example, that, in fact, “Brecht skillfully utilized capitalist mechanisms” or, in fact, “the picketer has rich parents” or “in my youth, I myself lived in a proletarian area, and I know what the proletariat is.” OK.
I was born in 1975. My father was a journalist and a bibliophile. My mother worked as an editor at Soviet Writer, a publishing house. My father blossomed during perestroika. He conducted interviews with cultural figures in the magazine Ogoniok, which was then widely read. In 1991, he and I went to “defend the White House [against the failed Communist putsch].” At the start of the nineties, he hosted a show about culture on television. To be honest, his blossoming did not last long. My father became addicted to roulette and soon lost everything: his real estate, our apartment, his library. He ran up a huge debt to the mafia. We lived in portable apartments, under constant threat. One time, I was taken as a hostage. In 1994, running from the mafia, my mother and I spent a month in Israel. Then we returned to Moscow. In Moscow I got a job as an ice cream vendor. (Once, I came to work the morning after my birthday. I had been drinking the night before and had lost my voice. All the customers thought that I had eaten too much ice cream. It was funny.) In addition to this, at the time, I also worked as a loader and a book vendor. I would describe the Moscow of that moment through the gaze of a sleepless, almost homeless young man, a stranger to anything and everything. Sometimes I spent the night at home, more often with friends, but I basically lived on the streets because it was only on the streets—immersed in a crowd—that I felt free. Around me, on the one hand, there reigned an unhealthy, entrepreneurial chaos; on the other, poverty, hunger, cynicism, disintegration, and agony. Between 1992 and 1996, I studied history at Moscow State University. Between 1996 and 2000, I studied at the Gorky Literary Institute. During this period, I worked as a journalist and critic, wrote reviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, translated. Gradually I came to see that not only as a journalist, but even as a translator, I could not fit into this new reality, a fact I announced in the first line of my first intelligible poem, at the beginning of 2001. Now, from time to time, I do editing work, which is given to me by a publisher friend. I live on money earned by my girlfriend. Until recently, this was $700 a month; now, after an exhausting battle, they raised her salary to $1,100. The three of us—with the child—live on this money. Recently I was thinking about the boundary between what I could and couldn’t afford, and I realized that if I take a pastry as an example, then the boundary is around twenty rubles. Now, this does not depend on an actual amount that I can spend during a single day, and it does not depend on how much money is lying in my pocket. But psychologically, I’m left with this twenty-ruble pastry as the border between . . . Aye-aye-aye!!! What conclusions follow from these facts? Do they have any meaning—these occasionally amusing, occasionally incredible or tearjerking facts? Do they justify or discredit my position? Do they confirm one or the other of my grievances and do they discredit the positions of others?
It’s interesting to note that the use of gossip fits perfectly well with stale declarations about the irrelevance of Marxism, and so on. And somehow these kinds of facts are always accompanied by the fake moralism that surfaces when certain media strategies are criticized from a post-underground perspective—when people inevitably start talking about “self-promotion” (the self-promotion of the picketer) in juxtaposition to “pure art.” This position made a certain amount of sense during the 1970s and early 1980s, when working for a narrow, underground audience was actually a form of political action. But today the autonomy of the artist, by which is understood his freedom from any external ideology (he’ll contemptuously call this, appealing to the old categories, “the party line”), is the central bulwark to the myth of the bourgeois artist and his “individual project.”
The artist is connected to his environment, stratum, and community through a collective experience—bodily, historical, cultural. In the artistic act, this connection manifests itself voluntarily, which is why it is a moment of freedom. An artist can think, reflect, and deduce as much as he wants outside the artistic act. But only in the act of creation, only voluntarily, having become a kind of blind, insane vessel, can one create a form—a form that connects a person with his biography, with his experience, with those unilluminated, chaotic, power-hungry clots in which his history joins up with the collective one. Only in this way can one break through to reality—to force someone to hate you or to express solidarity, to make someone think, to make someone experience collective oppression alongside you. This is why terms like “form,” “sincerity,” and “personal, biographical experience” are still, I think, significant even in politicized art, because manipulation either of one’s own or of someone else’s personal experience (as in art, so also in politics) ultimately leads to chaos, creating a deceptive unity—that is, yet another ideology or “individual project” in which even private or cultural experience only justifies powerlessness or conformism or a set of sentimental bromides. Please don’t talk to me about your “historical experience” of Soviet oppression: It’s not your experience, it’s the experience of Mayakovsky (a Bolshevik), of Shalamov (a Trotskyist), of Mandelshtam (a Socialist-Revolutionary), of others. We must live our new, actual political experience, and if the goal of the “leftist” actionists of the 1990s [5]
This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
consisted in bringing themselves and their bodies into the media’s field of vision, then the goal of today’s left artist must be to use one or another link to the outbursts of the oppressed and their underground movements—to discover his link to history, to those artists, philosophers, and fighters who have been cast aside or castrated in the contemporary “post-political” world.
Many of the twentieth century’s “criticisms of cultural production” were based on the notion that through his stratum, class, or community, each person is connected with every other person, and having realized that his labor is expropriated and used against him and others like him, he can stop working, leave the game, and disrupt the machine. Conscious of the historical situation and, above all, intolerant of it, he can try to change that situation.
In Russia right now, the intelligentsia’s old default position—the “unextended hand,” the supreme gesture of liberal impatience, based on the notion that any political/ideological opponent (in other words, a “Communo-fascist”) was just a scoundrel (or, at best, crazy)—is falling further and further into disrepute. The new default position is a flaccid tolerance: Why make a choice at all? Why divide people into “reds,” “whites,” or what have you, if there’s something familiar and interesting in everyone? Thus “postmodern sensitivity” lives on in the new era. In the face of private human feelings (love, loneliness, the fragility of relationships), any act of “debunking” or criticism, any pretensions toward truth, “objectivity,” and “meaning” resemble blasphemy. Don’t ask the artist what he meant to say and whom he works for—he shouldn’t think about that! What talk can there be about analysis or theory if it’s a question of feelings—love, happiness, understanding—all so hard to attain in this world? How can you blame an artist for making people feel good? How can you blame a director who entertains people who are tired after a hard day’s work? However false and deceptive the “national ideology,” regardless of whose interests are behind it, what’s wrong if it gives people at least an illusory feeling (but a feeling nonetheless) of confidence and community? Finally, can one blame “sovereign democracy” if it alone allows us to retain a fragile balance, quieting real hypocrisy and thus avoiding even more serious catastrophes?
Taken to its extreme, it comes down to a single question that today hangs over our country and our world: What does it matter that a fraud took place if everyone’s happy?!
But far from everyone is happy, and that means the final fraud hasn’t happened yet.
IN THE Woody Allen film Match Point, a kind of remake of Crime and Punishment, the main character gets away with murder: he kills his mistress and an elderly neighbor who witnessed the crime. The detective on the case sees the truth, but only in his dreams. The murderer goes on with his life, and his wife finally gives birth to their long-awaited child.
With great clarity and subtlety, Allen compares Dostoevsky’s era to our own. In Dostoevsky, madmen and grand inquisitors kill each other, but the world is ruled by a higher, divine justice that can only be deferred for so long before it reasserts itself with frightening force. However well everything goes for the criminal, sooner or later truth, verity, and justice break the chain of accidents and enter the world, restoring balance; in the Christian Dostoevsky’s version, balance takes the form of a plea for forgiveness, not a punishment. The detective becomes a mediator of this higher, God-like fairness. In Woody Allen’s postmodern world, there is no higher justice, only a game where everything depends on happenstance, on where the ball will fall (thus, “match point”). This sense of a fragile reality on the edge undoubtedly dominates today’s world and makes up what is called the “neoliberal” consciousness, with its—for the moment—almost complete political paralysis.
For the last few years, prophesies of an upcoming catastrophe have lingered in the Russian ether: the collapse of the country; a possible all-out civil war; a foreign intervention; the appearance of a violent, repressive force; and so forth. Many recent novels feature some form of violent shock. A characteristic example is Sergei Dorenko’s 2008, in which, in the midst of a triumphant, stable, and governable political landscape (there are three loyal forces in parliament: United Russia, “social democrats,” and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party), Chechen terrorists blow up a nuclear power plant outside Moscow, the capital empties, and Limonov and his cohort slide seamlessly into the Kremlin and establish a bizarre dictatorship. The consciousness of the writer reflects—fantastically and dismally—the myth of revenge that has haunted the minds of many Russian citizens since the 1990s. Translated into more or less intelligible terms, it sounds like this: For the past fifteen years, reality has been broken and stomped on; so many legal, moral, and human commandments have been violated; so many people were involved in so many hideous deeds (using their intellect, their power, their knowledge, or simply their stupidity, their uselessness, their cynicism) that NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF IT. And the longer the day of reckoning is delayed, the harder it will hit when it arrives. That’s why even today’s relative happiness looks threatening. The authorities, the Kremlin, whoever, can of course postpone the inevitable and prolong the illusion with the help of oil money and a pliant media—but not forever. In the context of this myth (which is not all that far from the truth), the “fascists”—for example, Dorenko’s Chechens—become a unique weapon of reckoning, of the restoration of justice. They suggest that you can use the people and lie to them as much as you want—but not forever. The truth will out, and it may be a lot worse than the lie. For today’s loyal intelligentsia, these perceptions are channeled into yet another capitulation: let things remain as they are, they say, so long as we keep at bay the “red-browns,” or the “fascists” (or Muslims, Chinese, and so forth).
But today, an alternative to both “wise” capitulationism and somber, epic “retaliation” can only be a demand for “truth” in its totally concrete, everyday meaning—a fight for it, and for the formation of distinct political demands.
At the turn of the century, the mass antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, which wounded neoliberalism, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, put an end to the cultural hegemony of the postmodern. Once again, a question was posed to capitalism, and a new era of critique began. At the same time a new reaction emerged—the conception of civilizational conflict, the axis of evil, and so forth. In this way, the opposition between metaphysics (the idea of “the eternal”—ethnic, national, confessional, civilizational values) and dialectics (the ideas of fluidity, interdependence, and the interchangeability of things) became relevant again.
THERE IS a very heavy imprint of metaphysics on Russian life and thought. The metaphysical consciousness of the artistic intelligentsia is based, as I’ve said, on the idea that any product of nonmaterial labor exists outside its context and speaks for itself. Today, such ideas unite the majority of active politicians and successful artists, who have nothing against participating in official art projects, presuming that one can and should negotiate with the authorities. Of course you can try to fool them, taking their money and promoting something oppositional. These ideas percolate in the consciousness of even very enlightened people, and, added to the authorities’ penchant for sponsoring oppositional political figures, they lead to the absence of real competition within the political field.
The opposite position argues that a civil society does not emerge from any “mutually beneficial” agreement with the authorities, even the most sympathetic authorities. It emerges only from the bottom, only as a call, a resistance, a demand. And culture—as a reflexive field—also only emerges in this way. Because action, production, and thought are determined to a large degree by circumstances, conditions, and context. You cannot critique the Putin regime without assessing your own place in it, whether as critic or artist.
It’s impossible to criticize an authoritarian Russian democracy without also assessing the role of the United States and its allies, without mentioning the worldwide division of labor, without recognizing the extent to which the situation here is a continuation of worldwide processes. It’s impossible not to understand the extent to which your own consciousness determines your social existence, forces you to accept as “obvious” one or another set of perspectives. “It’s impossible to be free from politics”: this is the banal truth that one must now grasp anew. Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible.
The liberal intelligentsia, which has claimed for half a century that the subject of civil society is the quiet owner of his private life, is now confronted with a situation where the private life of the conformist and apolitical middle class is blooming in a previously unimagined array of colors in Russia while political life exists in a state of total nullity. All that’s left here of the liberal-Western project are empty, wordy frills—complaints about “this country,” our “bloody regime,” and our forgotten “universal values.” In truth, the general rejection of the 1990s unites the entire loyal electorate, and those same liberal 1990s reforms (privatization, monetization of benefits, and so on) pass much more successfully under the banner of moderate patriotism and soft authoritarianism than under the slogans of inclusion in the “civilized world.” Today, part of the intelligentsia shifts to the right, leaning toward ideas of a “clash of civilizations,” trying to rely on “eternal”—national, ethnic, confessional, civilizational—values. Another part still insists that Russia has again turned from the path of civilized, Western capitalism.
THE REAL need now is for the emergence of a new stratum of leftist intellectuals who have mastered the history of leftist thought, leftist politics, leftist art of the twentieth century and who have, through Western Marxism and neo-Marxism, recognized their participation in the international socialist project. This is, undoubtedly, the cultural and political goal of humanity—because it is precisely a participation in self-government on as broad a scale as possible—and not the possibility of a career, pure art, or a private life—that is that next step, without which humanity is doomed to moral and physical degeneration. The old slogan “socialism or barbarism” has become unbelievably relevant. Because in order to keep open the possibility of remaining a private citizen, more victims will have to be brought forth; we will have to move further to the “right,” become more embroiled in our individual projects, private territories, and narrow specializations demanded by the market. More protections once won by the Enlightenment and civil society will have to be sold to corporations, media conglomerates, and political marketing. We will have to fear the “radical” Chinese and Muslims more intensely and further insist on the totality of capitalism, the end of the working class, the end of class warfare, the end of politics (all concepts that envelop a person in a long, dreary sleep, in which he sees himself simultaneously a hero of cultural resistance, the last item up for sale, and an independent private person). Only roused from this sleep can a person realize what the world looks like shorn of any glamour, where again and again people who did not read Marx or Benjamin answer the call to resistance, to action, to an understanding of the shared interests of the collective, of the class. Whereas capitalism’s violent reaction to every collective demand, every independent union, seems irrational, it is actually completely logical and justified—because the frontline is right here: the most narrow point where something happens that rarely occurs in poems, novels, or movies: a fight for reality. Only having realized the reality of this battle will we be able to speak of separation, of individualism, of the possibility of genuine diversity, of a civil society, of a competition of ideas, forms, poetics. Only then can we believe in “apoliticism” and “privatism” as risky and culturally productive personal demands and not as banal projections of individualism, apathy, and lunacy. Only then will we be able to use the blogosphere, which undoubtedly possesses much progressive, even socialist potential, but which for now is a mechanism emerging directly from current conditions (which, we should notice, are entering back into it), meaning that in the best case it will be a way to spend some leisure time and in the worst it will become (like “direct democracy” as a whole) a weapon in the hands of the most highly ideologically active strata—neo-Nazis, for example.
I am convinced that without understanding the aforementioned things, the Russian intelligentsia too will remain, indirectly and directly, an agent of dark reaction.
Translated from the Russian by Mark Krotov. Edited and annotated by Keith Gessen.
Kirill Medvedev is a Russian poet and author.
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FOOTNOTES:
* [1] The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
* [2] The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
* [3] Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
* [4] Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
* [5] This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.
By Kirill Medvedev
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in part by some of the violent reaction elicited by his poetry, he experienced a sharp leftward turn. In 2003, he announced that, given the conditions of the Putin regime (which he read as a mutant continuation of 1990s neoliberalism rather than as a backward step toward Soviet-style statism), he would no longer participate in literary life—he would neither publish nor give readings nor participate in round tables. In the years since, Medvedev has continued to develop his stubbornly independent position, more recently joining the nascent socialist movement Forward as a contributor to its Web site and as an activist. In all his writings, he has questioned the orthodoxy of the previous generation of Russian thinkers, the vast majority of whom were programmatic free market liberals. Medvedev is at the forefront of a new generation of Russians who are beginning, very gingerly, warily, and humbly, to apply the European left’s critique of postwar capitalism to their native situation.
In this essay, Medvedev attempts to connect some tendencies he sees in current Russian art, poetry, and politics. What he finds there is “the new emotionalism,” an appeal on the part of poets and politicians alike to personal experience and authenticity. In part this apparently inward turn is a natural reaction to a situation in which all public debate (about capitalism, about Putin) has been eliminated; but it is also a necessary condition for the current regime to remain in power. Followers of the American literary scene—with its rash of memoirs (including fake ones), continued but debased identity politics, and frequent appeals by even the least memoiristic writers to their “sincerity”—as well as followers of the American blogosphere, with its shrill self-assertions and self-promotion, will find much that is familiar in the world Medvedev describes.
The essay was originally published as “Literatura Budet Proverena: Individualny proekt i ‘novaia emotsionalnost’” or “The Situation of the Writer in Russia: The Individual Project and the ‘New Emotionalism,’ ” in Medvedev’s self-published volume of essays Reaktsiya Voobshe, Moscow, 2007.
—Keith Gessen
The intelligentsia’s will, and their desire, was directed, intentionally, at isolation. This is how they thought about the government: “You are cretins, leave us alone—we will study higher math, theoretical physics, and semiotics. And everything will be fine.” They failed to understand that in fact they were violating their own political conscience. They lacked the audacity and the will to recognize themselves as a political force. And when perestroika began, they were completely disorganized, intellectually, because they could not help but feel—instead of “they” I could say “we,” it’s merely a question of style—we could not help but feel that this very isolation, this very “leave us alone”—it was the same old “intelligentsia garbage.” We need to formulate at least an approximate political ideal.
—Alexander Pyatigorsky
THE FEATURES ascribed to the liberal intelligentsia by the philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that all discussion of “socialism with a human face” was thrown overboard and a resurgent labor movement found itself under the heel of “democratic” reformists. This was the intelligentsia’s first capitulation. The second began in October 1993, with their almost total acquiescence to the shelling of the Duma, and it ended in 1999 with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. During this time, in the context of a politics of complete capitalist restoration, a renunciation took place: not just of any oppositional attitude to the neoliberal model, but even of a more or less critical approach to it. (There were individual voices opposing this; they were drowned in the general chorus of loyalty.) The political opposition to Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s consisted largely of the Communist Party, a decrepit left-patriotic monster incapable of doing anything on its own, which nonetheless managed to become, for many years, a conduit for various moods of protest, even as it always performed the same exact ideological function: to be a scarecrow to the liberally minded elite. In this capacity it won Yeltsin a second term in office in 1996. A few years later, Putin was anointed king. At this point the liberal intelligentsia split psychologically and socially in two: one half became directly engaged in servicing the structures of capital—banks, publishing houses, corporations, and so on—while the other decided that regardless of all the hardships—the impossibility of working in one’s field, the cultural degradation, the vulgarity and pettiness of the new overlords—it would be wrong to grumble, to express discontent, to make demands. It was futile and unattractive to go against the time. And then, early in this decade, came the rise of the national-patriotic “red-browns,” who would be “even worse” than the current rulers, just as the Communists would have been “worse” than Yeltsin. As a result, the two halves of the intelligentsia formed an ideal consensus. At that moment, any possibility for real opposition, real discussion, and real political life in Russia disappeared.
We’ve now reached another turning point, because the red-brown scare is finally fading into the past. And a task that was wholly bungled at the beginning of the nineties is once again taking center stage: the creation of a real left-wing movement, based on workers’ autonomy, on independent labor unions, on the cooperation of grassroots movements and organizations.
And how does the Russian intelligentsia confront this challenge? With another capitulation, its third in the last twenty years. Any discussion of capitalism is off limits. Capitalism is irrevocable and self-evident. The younger generation, even in its best, most artistic, intellectual manifestation, already fights tenaciously for its right to a private life, to freedom from any talk of “politics,” “ideology,” or, even worse, the “proletariat.” These words are associated with the beginning of the Nineties; today they seem hopelessly archaic, although in truth the political paralysis that destroyed Russia in the 1990s continues.
AN OLD liberal maxim still haunts the minds of the intelligentsia: it states that “everyone should mind his own business,” in a conception of the artist as a private person most lucidly articulated by Joseph Brodsky in his Nobel Prize address. Yet it is obvious that Brodsky himself, as a poet chosen and put forward by his own social circle, participated in certain bargains, had certain privileges, was published by certain houses, thus directly or indirectly supporting certain powers and ideologies. But poets like the idea of “purity,” and one is supposed to acquiesce to the fiction that the poet is alone and that his texts, his political position (or its absence), and his personal qualities are in no way interrelated. And everyone should mind his or her own business—why meddle in someone else’s private life? The person of letters should write, the politician should politic, the engineer should engineer, and so forth.
The idea that follows is that in a “normal” society, various strata would get along independently of one another: large corporations would be fine independent of the proletariat working in its mines and oil fields, bohemia would be fine independent of the large corporations whom it serves, and so forth. At the same time, nearly every person (especially every artist) wants to be considered unique, separate, independent of general norms and perceptions, disconnected from conditions of, God forbid, “the relations of production.” And the most important idea of all: that the current situation, whatever you wish to call it—“celebrity,” “capitalism,” “the Putin regime,” and so forth—is total, that there is no escaping it. These ideas, which seem natural, but which date back to concrete historical conditions, explain the almost absolute hegemony of the “right” in Russian culture and politics today. These are a set of specific, deeply metaphysical ideas about the unshakable foundations of human nature. In their extreme-right, reactionary form, they are manifest in perceptions of the eternal characteristics of ethnic groups, races, nations; in their more or less liberal variant: of the irrevocable expansion of the market, which is impossible to wholly describe, to which one can only resign oneself, and within which the best one can do is find a tiny little niche.
It’s as if, within this system, the artist were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence: this is his social role. For the people (or just a small group of them), the artist represents the idea of timeless, “apolitical” categories, of great masterpieces, of existential freedom. A poet is even freer than others, because unlike the artist, musician, or theater director, the poet doesn’t need any capital to create works. The conditions of production are so cheap that a poet can believe his or her work is connected directly to the fabric of life, that it prevails over its context and circumstances. On an individual level this perception is perfectly reasonable and can be productive. In truth, the belief that your work can escape the stagnant social fabric is very important—it is a major stimulus to the production of art.
But when one idea comes to be shared by all poets, it looks suspicious. Right now, not only is the idea of the “private project” shared by all poets, it is also the rallying cry of artists, critics, and other intellectuals.
Some examples of the touching innocence that characterizes our leading cultural figures illustrate this: a former star of the punk underground is honestly surprised that he should be criticized for performing at a rally for “Nashi,” the Putin youth brigade; a fashionable theater director criticizes the president in Aesopian language and is simultaneously the main guide of the Kremlin’s cultural politics: he reads lectures under the aegis of the United Russia party. [1]
The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
The theater director Alexander Kalyagin signs a letter against the imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky [2]
The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
, in exchange for which he receives a theater in the center of Moscow, where he will, of course, stage his incorruptible oeuvres, where he will even stage Brecht—ars longa, vita brevis!
I recently found myself puzzled by one poet and critic who wrote a sympathetic article on “leftist poets” for a Kremlin-financed Web site. He even expressed a kind of solidarity with the leftist poets, cheerily urging them on toward direct political action(!), and he did this not only from the right (it would not be notable if this were in the pages of the liberal journal Znamya) but from a space that was created by the Kremlin expressly to strengthen its power via the smokescreen of “parliamentary polyphony.” When I wrote to say that I was surprised, he answered: “What difference does it make where the article is published; what matters is what is written in it”—again confirming my worst fears regarding the condition of the minds of even the most advanced and talented representatives of the intelligentsia.
What motivates these people is irrelevant: whether it’s really political naïveté or just ordinary cynicism and prudence. It’s impossible to separate one from the other, and I’m not posing a question of moral judgment. Russian culture as a whole has acquired (very much at the wrong time) the possibility of palpable autonomy, and now each individual artist sincerely defends his or her innocence and independence. But it is precisely through this kind of “innocence” and “sincerity” that works of art become commodities—not because the artist believes himself a spineless, prostituted insect, ready to do anything for publicity, but exactly the opposite: because he values himself and his work very highly and believes that media appearances won’t do him any harm.
Terms like “innocence” and “sincerity” frame the current mind-set to a remarkable degree. In all its dimensions—cultural, sociopolitical, and so on—the climate is determined not so much by “money” and “celebrity” (as is widely thought), but by the “new sincerity.” It is President Putin and contemporary poetry and the broadcasters on television. It is Alexander Lukashenko admitting that his party falsified the elections—lowered Lukashenko’s numbers from 93 percent to 80 percent—because, Lukashenko very sincerely confessed, “the European Union wouldn’t have accepted the results otherwise.” This is simultaneously unbelievable and symptomatic. The new sincerity is the blogosphere, with its absolutely sincere poets in one corner and its equally sincere Nazis in the other.
The “new sincerity” emerged in the culture as a reaction to the mind-bending moribundity and abstraction of postmodern theory on the one hand and to a confused and conflicted (post-)Soviet consciousness on the other. There came a moment when direct expression—an appeal to biographical experience as a zone of authenticity—was the tool that could force open at least two discourses: the rough, ideologized Soviet one and the ascetic, bodiless, nonconformist underground one. Today, the trend toward “sincerity,” “emotionalism,” and “direct expression,” with its appeal to biography, has become more and more reactionary.
The new sincerity or, more precisely, the new emotionalism, has rejected the worst aspects of postmodernism: its unintelligible, elitist jargon and its opposition to grand narratives and global concepts. But it has also rejected its undeniably positive qualities: its irrepressible critical outlook and its intellectual sophistication. And if, in spite of its initial critical power, postmodernism in the end only gave cover to an idealized consensus between the goals of “diversity” and the interests of the global marketplace, then the new emotionalism reconciles those same market interests with the resurrected figure of the author, bringing forth today’s endless stream of ventriloquism (lyrical, essayistic, “political,” whatever), in which any effort at analysis, any possibility of differentiating positions and actions simply drowns. It’s a stream in which it’s impossible to separate sincerity from hack work, because one is in the employ of the other: emotions cover up ideological bankruptcy (and the death of rational argument), and ideology in turn excites emotions and captivates the masses. It’s not hard to influence a person filled with emotions. The authorities are afraid of this sincerity, but they feed off and take advantage of it. Let young neo-Nazis scare the peasants with their sincere hatred, simultaneously keeping them in line. Let young poets and actors scream and curse from the stage of the Polytechnic: “Do whatever you want,” the new commissars tell them. “You are free, independent artists. Just don’t worry your pretty little heads about politics; after all, you’re smart, you know yourselves that it’s a dirty business. Your art will obviously outlive us all. Just leave the politics to us.”
The new emotionalism never fully grasped the ambivalence of postmodern theory; now it rejects the idea of the death of the author and replaces the dead author with the uniquely living, all-consuming “I,” granting it the right to say anything at all, whatever strikes one’s fancy. After all, if Marx is dead, everything is permitted. If “during postmodernism” language itself (as a system) spoke through the (dead) author, and embedded within this language were “schizophrenic” (liberating) possibilities, then in the new situation, when a long-repressed freedom of expression mingles with neoliberalism, it is God again who starts to speak through the poet. And this God is nothing but the rumblings, the convulsions, the subterfuges of capitalism itself, similar to ancient Fate, which all must inevitably confront, regardless of where they try to run.
Given this context, poets’ lamentations about their condition sound touchingly naïve. Why, they ask, don’t we have normal literary criticism? I have a simple, vulgar answer to this question: because all the major critical theories of the West in the twentieth century passed, in one way or another, through Marxism. All took something from it, altered other things in it, invalidated something else. Until the same happens in Russia, there won’t be any criticism at all—not of poetry, not of the authorities.
THE AUTHOR of the most brilliant individual project of the last few decades is named Eduard Limonov. [3]
Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
Throughout the 1990s and until quite recently, it was almost impossible to find a position from which a critique of Limonov would sound convincing. To take moral issue with him for excessive “sincerity” made you a hypocrite. To incriminate him as a “fascist” meant pretending that Yeltsin was a “democrat.” Those who tried to belittle him or confront him with overt hostility were doomed to find themselves immediately in a system of coordinates created by the self-same Limonov, in which the critic invariably (by an aggregate of data: as a writer, as a politician, as a man) was found to be beneath the great poet. Limonov had charm and a heroic persona and a remarkable biography, but there was also something else in play—under conditions of the “individual project,” any criticism is automatically followed with an answer from a position of experience: live my life (that is, visit as many cities and countries, write as many books, love as many women, create an equally independent and passionate political party), and then we’ll talk. All of Limonov’s heroes, even those more famous than he (Salvador Dali, for instance), eventually become just sad and transitory characters in the brilliant, vivid novel of Limonov’s life.
Yet I think the era of Limonov’s cultural hegemony (in which, undoubtedly, together with National Bolshevism and brown-red quasi-fascism, there were also progressive elements) is coming to an end. Today his political activity plays the reactionary role of subordinating all oppositional (and leftist) politics to Limonov’s life project—his cult of personality, strategies of media-scandal, and so on. Leftist groups in Russia today work in the shadow of Limonov’s NBP and its spectacular media events. With a cocktail made up of Nietzscheanism, nationalism, and “leftism,” mixed in with autobiographical authenticity, Limonov has managed to subsume an important segment of the youth protest movement under his own banner.
Baudrillard believed that the revolution of ’68 was defeated by overexposure in the media. The narrative of art-activism, the direct action of the nineties, has either led to the spectacular, partly fascistic activism of the NBP or to today’s crossroads, where left artists choose between a job in the art market or a search for alternative strategies attempting to answer a question also faced by leftist political groups: how does one clothe the message in an adequate and legitimate form, simultaneously avoiding vulgar, spectacular excesses?
Today an artist who wishes to consider himself a leftist ends up trapped between these two positions. He wants to influence society, a fact he does not conceal, which is why he is skeptical in his approach to the concept of “pure art.” On the other hand, he does not want to transmit himself directly through the media’s mechanisms and needs to approach them carefully and critically.
For me, an important experience was a protest I staged against the Kalyagin theater during the premiere of Brecht’s Drums in the Night. [4]
Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
It was conceived as a picket (that is, a maximally democratic means of expression, accessible to all and with no pretense to artistic value or novelty) in a series of other pickets organized by the socialist movement “Forward.” It was interpreted, however, as an art action, partly because of the skirmish with the guard, partly because the reaction from right-liberal critics involved almost exclusively biographical realities—facts of Brecht’s biography, facts of my biography, and facts of the critic’s biography. What one witnessed was a characteristically nonreflexive impulse: instead of a conversation about the enterprise as an effective or ineffective civil/political gesture, truthful or half-truthful or openly false facts from one’s own or someone else’s biography were pulled in. The critic would write, for example, that, in fact, “Brecht skillfully utilized capitalist mechanisms” or, in fact, “the picketer has rich parents” or “in my youth, I myself lived in a proletarian area, and I know what the proletariat is.” OK.
I was born in 1975. My father was a journalist and a bibliophile. My mother worked as an editor at Soviet Writer, a publishing house. My father blossomed during perestroika. He conducted interviews with cultural figures in the magazine Ogoniok, which was then widely read. In 1991, he and I went to “defend the White House [against the failed Communist putsch].” At the start of the nineties, he hosted a show about culture on television. To be honest, his blossoming did not last long. My father became addicted to roulette and soon lost everything: his real estate, our apartment, his library. He ran up a huge debt to the mafia. We lived in portable apartments, under constant threat. One time, I was taken as a hostage. In 1994, running from the mafia, my mother and I spent a month in Israel. Then we returned to Moscow. In Moscow I got a job as an ice cream vendor. (Once, I came to work the morning after my birthday. I had been drinking the night before and had lost my voice. All the customers thought that I had eaten too much ice cream. It was funny.) In addition to this, at the time, I also worked as a loader and a book vendor. I would describe the Moscow of that moment through the gaze of a sleepless, almost homeless young man, a stranger to anything and everything. Sometimes I spent the night at home, more often with friends, but I basically lived on the streets because it was only on the streets—immersed in a crowd—that I felt free. Around me, on the one hand, there reigned an unhealthy, entrepreneurial chaos; on the other, poverty, hunger, cynicism, disintegration, and agony. Between 1992 and 1996, I studied history at Moscow State University. Between 1996 and 2000, I studied at the Gorky Literary Institute. During this period, I worked as a journalist and critic, wrote reviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, translated. Gradually I came to see that not only as a journalist, but even as a translator, I could not fit into this new reality, a fact I announced in the first line of my first intelligible poem, at the beginning of 2001. Now, from time to time, I do editing work, which is given to me by a publisher friend. I live on money earned by my girlfriend. Until recently, this was $700 a month; now, after an exhausting battle, they raised her salary to $1,100. The three of us—with the child—live on this money. Recently I was thinking about the boundary between what I could and couldn’t afford, and I realized that if I take a pastry as an example, then the boundary is around twenty rubles. Now, this does not depend on an actual amount that I can spend during a single day, and it does not depend on how much money is lying in my pocket. But psychologically, I’m left with this twenty-ruble pastry as the border between . . . Aye-aye-aye!!! What conclusions follow from these facts? Do they have any meaning—these occasionally amusing, occasionally incredible or tearjerking facts? Do they justify or discredit my position? Do they confirm one or the other of my grievances and do they discredit the positions of others?
It’s interesting to note that the use of gossip fits perfectly well with stale declarations about the irrelevance of Marxism, and so on. And somehow these kinds of facts are always accompanied by the fake moralism that surfaces when certain media strategies are criticized from a post-underground perspective—when people inevitably start talking about “self-promotion” (the self-promotion of the picketer) in juxtaposition to “pure art.” This position made a certain amount of sense during the 1970s and early 1980s, when working for a narrow, underground audience was actually a form of political action. But today the autonomy of the artist, by which is understood his freedom from any external ideology (he’ll contemptuously call this, appealing to the old categories, “the party line”), is the central bulwark to the myth of the bourgeois artist and his “individual project.”
The artist is connected to his environment, stratum, and community through a collective experience—bodily, historical, cultural. In the artistic act, this connection manifests itself voluntarily, which is why it is a moment of freedom. An artist can think, reflect, and deduce as much as he wants outside the artistic act. But only in the act of creation, only voluntarily, having become a kind of blind, insane vessel, can one create a form—a form that connects a person with his biography, with his experience, with those unilluminated, chaotic, power-hungry clots in which his history joins up with the collective one. Only in this way can one break through to reality—to force someone to hate you or to express solidarity, to make someone think, to make someone experience collective oppression alongside you. This is why terms like “form,” “sincerity,” and “personal, biographical experience” are still, I think, significant even in politicized art, because manipulation either of one’s own or of someone else’s personal experience (as in art, so also in politics) ultimately leads to chaos, creating a deceptive unity—that is, yet another ideology or “individual project” in which even private or cultural experience only justifies powerlessness or conformism or a set of sentimental bromides. Please don’t talk to me about your “historical experience” of Soviet oppression: It’s not your experience, it’s the experience of Mayakovsky (a Bolshevik), of Shalamov (a Trotskyist), of Mandelshtam (a Socialist-Revolutionary), of others. We must live our new, actual political experience, and if the goal of the “leftist” actionists of the 1990s [5]
This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
consisted in bringing themselves and their bodies into the media’s field of vision, then the goal of today’s left artist must be to use one or another link to the outbursts of the oppressed and their underground movements—to discover his link to history, to those artists, philosophers, and fighters who have been cast aside or castrated in the contemporary “post-political” world.
Many of the twentieth century’s “criticisms of cultural production” were based on the notion that through his stratum, class, or community, each person is connected with every other person, and having realized that his labor is expropriated and used against him and others like him, he can stop working, leave the game, and disrupt the machine. Conscious of the historical situation and, above all, intolerant of it, he can try to change that situation.
In Russia right now, the intelligentsia’s old default position—the “unextended hand,” the supreme gesture of liberal impatience, based on the notion that any political/ideological opponent (in other words, a “Communo-fascist”) was just a scoundrel (or, at best, crazy)—is falling further and further into disrepute. The new default position is a flaccid tolerance: Why make a choice at all? Why divide people into “reds,” “whites,” or what have you, if there’s something familiar and interesting in everyone? Thus “postmodern sensitivity” lives on in the new era. In the face of private human feelings (love, loneliness, the fragility of relationships), any act of “debunking” or criticism, any pretensions toward truth, “objectivity,” and “meaning” resemble blasphemy. Don’t ask the artist what he meant to say and whom he works for—he shouldn’t think about that! What talk can there be about analysis or theory if it’s a question of feelings—love, happiness, understanding—all so hard to attain in this world? How can you blame an artist for making people feel good? How can you blame a director who entertains people who are tired after a hard day’s work? However false and deceptive the “national ideology,” regardless of whose interests are behind it, what’s wrong if it gives people at least an illusory feeling (but a feeling nonetheless) of confidence and community? Finally, can one blame “sovereign democracy” if it alone allows us to retain a fragile balance, quieting real hypocrisy and thus avoiding even more serious catastrophes?
Taken to its extreme, it comes down to a single question that today hangs over our country and our world: What does it matter that a fraud took place if everyone’s happy?!
But far from everyone is happy, and that means the final fraud hasn’t happened yet.
IN THE Woody Allen film Match Point, a kind of remake of Crime and Punishment, the main character gets away with murder: he kills his mistress and an elderly neighbor who witnessed the crime. The detective on the case sees the truth, but only in his dreams. The murderer goes on with his life, and his wife finally gives birth to their long-awaited child.
With great clarity and subtlety, Allen compares Dostoevsky’s era to our own. In Dostoevsky, madmen and grand inquisitors kill each other, but the world is ruled by a higher, divine justice that can only be deferred for so long before it reasserts itself with frightening force. However well everything goes for the criminal, sooner or later truth, verity, and justice break the chain of accidents and enter the world, restoring balance; in the Christian Dostoevsky’s version, balance takes the form of a plea for forgiveness, not a punishment. The detective becomes a mediator of this higher, God-like fairness. In Woody Allen’s postmodern world, there is no higher justice, only a game where everything depends on happenstance, on where the ball will fall (thus, “match point”). This sense of a fragile reality on the edge undoubtedly dominates today’s world and makes up what is called the “neoliberal” consciousness, with its—for the moment—almost complete political paralysis.
For the last few years, prophesies of an upcoming catastrophe have lingered in the Russian ether: the collapse of the country; a possible all-out civil war; a foreign intervention; the appearance of a violent, repressive force; and so forth. Many recent novels feature some form of violent shock. A characteristic example is Sergei Dorenko’s 2008, in which, in the midst of a triumphant, stable, and governable political landscape (there are three loyal forces in parliament: United Russia, “social democrats,” and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party), Chechen terrorists blow up a nuclear power plant outside Moscow, the capital empties, and Limonov and his cohort slide seamlessly into the Kremlin and establish a bizarre dictatorship. The consciousness of the writer reflects—fantastically and dismally—the myth of revenge that has haunted the minds of many Russian citizens since the 1990s. Translated into more or less intelligible terms, it sounds like this: For the past fifteen years, reality has been broken and stomped on; so many legal, moral, and human commandments have been violated; so many people were involved in so many hideous deeds (using their intellect, their power, their knowledge, or simply their stupidity, their uselessness, their cynicism) that NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF IT. And the longer the day of reckoning is delayed, the harder it will hit when it arrives. That’s why even today’s relative happiness looks threatening. The authorities, the Kremlin, whoever, can of course postpone the inevitable and prolong the illusion with the help of oil money and a pliant media—but not forever. In the context of this myth (which is not all that far from the truth), the “fascists”—for example, Dorenko’s Chechens—become a unique weapon of reckoning, of the restoration of justice. They suggest that you can use the people and lie to them as much as you want—but not forever. The truth will out, and it may be a lot worse than the lie. For today’s loyal intelligentsia, these perceptions are channeled into yet another capitulation: let things remain as they are, they say, so long as we keep at bay the “red-browns,” or the “fascists” (or Muslims, Chinese, and so forth).
But today, an alternative to both “wise” capitulationism and somber, epic “retaliation” can only be a demand for “truth” in its totally concrete, everyday meaning—a fight for it, and for the formation of distinct political demands.
At the turn of the century, the mass antiglobalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, which wounded neoliberalism, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, put an end to the cultural hegemony of the postmodern. Once again, a question was posed to capitalism, and a new era of critique began. At the same time a new reaction emerged—the conception of civilizational conflict, the axis of evil, and so forth. In this way, the opposition between metaphysics (the idea of “the eternal”—ethnic, national, confessional, civilizational values) and dialectics (the ideas of fluidity, interdependence, and the interchangeability of things) became relevant again.
THERE IS a very heavy imprint of metaphysics on Russian life and thought. The metaphysical consciousness of the artistic intelligentsia is based, as I’ve said, on the idea that any product of nonmaterial labor exists outside its context and speaks for itself. Today, such ideas unite the majority of active politicians and successful artists, who have nothing against participating in official art projects, presuming that one can and should negotiate with the authorities. Of course you can try to fool them, taking their money and promoting something oppositional. These ideas percolate in the consciousness of even very enlightened people, and, added to the authorities’ penchant for sponsoring oppositional political figures, they lead to the absence of real competition within the political field.
The opposite position argues that a civil society does not emerge from any “mutually beneficial” agreement with the authorities, even the most sympathetic authorities. It emerges only from the bottom, only as a call, a resistance, a demand. And culture—as a reflexive field—also only emerges in this way. Because action, production, and thought are determined to a large degree by circumstances, conditions, and context. You cannot critique the Putin regime without assessing your own place in it, whether as critic or artist.
It’s impossible to criticize an authoritarian Russian democracy without also assessing the role of the United States and its allies, without mentioning the worldwide division of labor, without recognizing the extent to which the situation here is a continuation of worldwide processes. It’s impossible not to understand the extent to which your own consciousness determines your social existence, forces you to accept as “obvious” one or another set of perspectives. “It’s impossible to be free from politics”: this is the banal truth that one must now grasp anew. Political passivity also participates in history; it too is responsible.
The liberal intelligentsia, which has claimed for half a century that the subject of civil society is the quiet owner of his private life, is now confronted with a situation where the private life of the conformist and apolitical middle class is blooming in a previously unimagined array of colors in Russia while political life exists in a state of total nullity. All that’s left here of the liberal-Western project are empty, wordy frills—complaints about “this country,” our “bloody regime,” and our forgotten “universal values.” In truth, the general rejection of the 1990s unites the entire loyal electorate, and those same liberal 1990s reforms (privatization, monetization of benefits, and so on) pass much more successfully under the banner of moderate patriotism and soft authoritarianism than under the slogans of inclusion in the “civilized world.” Today, part of the intelligentsia shifts to the right, leaning toward ideas of a “clash of civilizations,” trying to rely on “eternal”—national, ethnic, confessional, civilizational—values. Another part still insists that Russia has again turned from the path of civilized, Western capitalism.
THE REAL need now is for the emergence of a new stratum of leftist intellectuals who have mastered the history of leftist thought, leftist politics, leftist art of the twentieth century and who have, through Western Marxism and neo-Marxism, recognized their participation in the international socialist project. This is, undoubtedly, the cultural and political goal of humanity—because it is precisely a participation in self-government on as broad a scale as possible—and not the possibility of a career, pure art, or a private life—that is that next step, without which humanity is doomed to moral and physical degeneration. The old slogan “socialism or barbarism” has become unbelievably relevant. Because in order to keep open the possibility of remaining a private citizen, more victims will have to be brought forth; we will have to move further to the “right,” become more embroiled in our individual projects, private territories, and narrow specializations demanded by the market. More protections once won by the Enlightenment and civil society will have to be sold to corporations, media conglomerates, and political marketing. We will have to fear the “radical” Chinese and Muslims more intensely and further insist on the totality of capitalism, the end of the working class, the end of class warfare, the end of politics (all concepts that envelop a person in a long, dreary sleep, in which he sees himself simultaneously a hero of cultural resistance, the last item up for sale, and an independent private person). Only roused from this sleep can a person realize what the world looks like shorn of any glamour, where again and again people who did not read Marx or Benjamin answer the call to resistance, to action, to an understanding of the shared interests of the collective, of the class. Whereas capitalism’s violent reaction to every collective demand, every independent union, seems irrational, it is actually completely logical and justified—because the frontline is right here: the most narrow point where something happens that rarely occurs in poems, novels, or movies: a fight for reality. Only having realized the reality of this battle will we be able to speak of separation, of individualism, of the possibility of genuine diversity, of a civil society, of a competition of ideas, forms, poetics. Only then can we believe in “apoliticism” and “privatism” as risky and culturally productive personal demands and not as banal projections of individualism, apathy, and lunacy. Only then will we be able to use the blogosphere, which undoubtedly possesses much progressive, even socialist potential, but which for now is a mechanism emerging directly from current conditions (which, we should notice, are entering back into it), meaning that in the best case it will be a way to spend some leisure time and in the worst it will become (like “direct democracy” as a whole) a weapon in the hands of the most highly ideologically active strata—neo-Nazis, for example.
I am convinced that without understanding the aforementioned things, the Russian intelligentsia too will remain, indirectly and directly, an agent of dark reaction.
Translated from the Russian by Mark Krotov. Edited and annotated by Keith Gessen.
Kirill Medvedev is a Russian poet and author.
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FOOTNOTES:
* [1] The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
* [2] The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
* [3] Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
* [4] Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
* [5] This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.
Monday, November 17, 2008
"INDIA NEEDS MANAGERS NOT MANDARINS" PRIME MINISTER DR MANMOHAN SINGH TO INDIA'S BUREAUCRATS
The India Model
By Gurcharan Das
From Foreign Affairs , July/August 2006
Summary: After being shackled by the government for decades, India's economy has become one of the world's strongest. The country's unique development model -- relying on domestic consumption and high-tech services -- has brought a quarter century of record growth despite an incompetent and heavy-handed state. But for that growth to continue, the state must start modernizing along with Indian society.
GURCHARAN DAS is former CEO of Procter & Gamble India and the author of India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution From Independence to the Global Information Age.
AN ECONOMY UNSHACKLED
Although the world has just discovered it, India's economic success is far from new. After three post independence decades of meager progress, the country's economy grew at 6 percent a year from 1980 to 2002 and at 7.5 percent a year from 2002 to 2006 -- making it one of the world's best-performing economies for a quarter century. In the past two decades, the size of the middle class has quadrupled (to almost 250 million people), and 1 percent of the country's poor have crossed the poverty line every year. At the same time, population growth has slowed from the historic rate of 2.2 percent a year to 1.7 percent today -- meaning that growth has brought large per capita income gains, from $1,178 to $3,051 (in terms of purchasing-power parity) since 1980. India is now the world's fourth-largest economy. Soon it will surpass Japan to become the third-largest.
The notable thing about India's rise is not that it is new, but that its path has been unique. Rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy -- exporting labor-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West -- India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing. This approach has meant that the Indian economy has been mostly insulated from global downturns, showing a degree of stability that is as impressive as the rate of its expansion. The consumption-driven model is also more people-friendly than other development strategies. As a result, inequality has increased much less in India than in other developing nations. (Its Gini index, a measure of income inequality on a scale of zero to 100, is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil.) Moreover, 30 to 40 percent of GDP growth is due to rising productivity -- a true sign of an economy's health and progress -- rather than to increases in the amount of capital or labor.
But what is most remarkable is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India is in many ways rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the center of India's success story. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. And since 1991 especially, the Indian state has been gradually moving out of the way -- not graciously, but kicked and dragged into implementing economic reforms. It has lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broken state monopolies, unshackled industry, encouraged competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. The pace has been slow, but the reforms are starting to add up.
India is poised at a key moment in its history. Rapid growth will likely continue -- and even accelerate. But India cannot take this for granted. Public debt is high, which discourages investment in needed infrastructure. Overly strict labor laws, though they cover only 10 percent of the work force, have the perverse effect of discouraging employers from hiring new workers. The public sector, although much smaller than China's, is still too large and inefficient -- a major drag on growth and employment and a burden for consumers. And although India is successfully generating high-end, capital- and knowledge-intensive manufacturing, it has failed to create a broad-based, labor-intensive industrial revolution -- meaning that gains in employment have not been commensurate with overall growth. Its rural population, meanwhile, suffers from the consequences of state-induced production and distribution distortions in agriculture that result in farmers' getting only 20 to 30 percent of the retail price of fruits and vegetables (versus the 40 to 50 percent farmers in the United States get).
India can take advantage of this moment to remove the remaining obstacles that have prevented it from realizing its full potential. Or it can continue smugly along, confident that it will get there eventually -- but 20 years late. The most difficult reforms are not yet done, and already there are signs of complacency.
A 100-YEAR TALE
For half a century before independence, the Indian economy was stagnant. Between 1900 and 1950, economic growth averaged o.8 percent a year -- exactly the same rate as population growth, resulting in no increase in per capita income. In the first decades after independence, economic growth picked up, averaging 3.5 percent from 1950 to 1980. But population growth accelerated as well. The net effect on per capita income was an average annual increase of just 1.3 percent.
Indians mournfully called this "the Hindu rate of growth." Of course, it had nothing to do with Hinduism and everything to do with the Fabian socialist policies of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his imperious daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who oversaw India's darkest economic decades. Father and daughter shackled the energies of the Indian people under a mixed economy that combined the worst features of capitalism and socialism. Their model was inward-looking and import-substituting rather than outward-looking and export-promoting, and it denied India a share in the prosperity that a massive expansion in global trade brought in the post-World War II era. (Average per capita growth for the developing world as a whole was almost 3 percent from 1950 to 1980, more than double India's rate.) Nehru set up an inefficient and monopolistic public sector, overregulated private enterprise with the most stringent price and production controls in the world, and discouraged foreign investment -- thereby causing India to lose out on the benefits of both foreign technology and foreign competition. His approach also pampered organized labor to the point of significantly lowering productivity and ignored the education of India's children.
But even this system could have delivered more had it been better implemented. It did not have to degenerate into a "license-permit-quota raj," as Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari first put it in the late 1950s. Although Indians blame ideology (and sometimes democracy) for their failings, the truth is that a mundane inability to implement policy -- reflecting a bias for thought and against action -- may have been even more damaging.
In the 1980s, the government's attitude toward the private sector began to change, thanks in part to the underappreciated efforts of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Modest liberal reforms -- especially lowering marginal tax rates and tariffs and giving some leeway to manufacturers -- spurred an increase in growth to 5.6 percent. But the policies of the 1980s were also profligate and brought India to the point of fiscal crisis by the start of the 1990s. Fortunately, that crisis triggered the critical reforms of 1991, which finally allowed India's integration into the global economy -- and laid the groundwork for the high growth of today. The chief architect of those reforms was the finance minister, Manmohan Singh, who is now prime minister. He lowered tariffs and other trade barriers, scrapped industrial licensing, reduced tax rates, devalued the rupee, opened India to foreign investment, and rolled back currency controls. Many of these measures were gradual, but they signaled a decisive break with India's dirigiste past. The economy returned the favor immediately: growth rose, inflation plummeted, and exports and currency reserves shot up.
To appreciate the magnitude of the change after 1980, recall that the West's Industrial Revolution took place in the context of 3 percent GDP growth and 1.1 percent per capita income growth. If India's economy were still growing at the pre-1980 level, then its per capita income would reach present U.S. levels only by 2250; but if it continues to grow at the post-1980 average, it will reach that level by 2066 -- a gain of 184 years.
PECULIAR REVOLUTION
India has improved its competitiveness considerably since 1991: there has been a telecommunications revolution, interest rates have come down, capital is plentiful (although risk-averse managers of state-owned banks still refuse to lend to small entrepreneurs), highways and ports have improved, and real estate markets are becoming transparent. More than 100 Indian companies now have a market capitalization of over a billion dollars, and some of these -- including Bharat Forge, Jet Airways, Infosys Technologies, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Motors, and Wipro Technologies -- are likely to become competitive global brands soon. Foreigners have invested in over 1,000 Indian companies via the stock market. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 125 now have research and development bases in India -- a testament to its human capital. And high-tech manufacturing has taken off. All these changes have disciplined the banking sector. Bad loans now account for less than 2 percent of all loans (compared to 20 percent in China), even though none of India's shoddy state-owned banks has so far been privatized.
For now, growth is being driven by services and domestic consumption. Consumption accounts for 64 percent of India's GDP, compared to 58 percent for Europe, 55 percent for Japan, and 42 percent for China. That consumption might be a virtue embarrasses many Indians, with their ascetic streak, but, as the economist Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley puts it, "India's consumption-led approach to growth may be better balanced than the resource-mobilization model of China."
The contrast between India's entrepreneur-driven growth and China's state-centered model is stark. China's success is largely based on exports by state enterprises or foreign companies. Beijing remains highly suspicious of entrepreneurs. Only 10 percent of credit goes to the private sector in China, even though the private sector employs 40 percent of the Chinese work force. In India, entrepreneurs get more than 80 percent of all loans. Whereas Jet Airways, in operation since 1993, has become the undisputed leader of India's skies, China's first private airline, Okay Airways, started flying only in February 2005.
What has been peculiar about India's development so far is that high growth has not been accompanied by a labor-intensive industrial revolution that could transform the lives of the tens of millions of Indians still trapped in rural poverty. Many Indians watch mesmerized as China seems to create an endless flow of low-end manufacturing jobs by exporting goods such as toys and clothes and as their better-educated compatriots export knowledge services to the rest of the world. They wonder fearfully if India is going to skip an industrial revolution altogether, jumping straight from an agricultural economy to a service economy. Economies in the rest of the world evolved from agriculture to industry to services. India appears to have a weak middle step. Services now account for more than 50 percent of India's GDP, whereas agriculture's share is 22 percent, and industry's share is only 27 percent (versus 46 percent in China). And within industry, India's strength is high-tech, high-skilled manufacturing.
Even the most fervent advocates of service-based growth do not question the desirability of creating more manufacturing jobs. The failure of India to achieve a broad industrial transformation stems in part from bad policies. After India's independence, Nehru attempted a state-directed industrial revolution. Since he did not trust the private sector, he tried to replace the entrepreneur with the government -- and predictably failed. He shackled private enterprise with byzantine controls and denied autonomy to the public sector. Perhaps the most egregious policy was reserving around 800 industries, designated "small-scale industries" (SSI), for tiny companies that were unable to compete against the large firms of competitor nations. Large firms were barred from making products such as pencils, boot polish, candles, shoes, garments, and toys -- all the products that helped East Asia create millions of jobs. Even since 1991, Indian governments have been afraid to touch this "SSI holy cow" for fear of a backlash from the SSI lobby. Fortunately, that lobby has turned out to be mostly a phantom -- little more than the bureaucrats who kept scaring politicians by warning of a backlash. Over the past five years, the government has been pruning the list of protected industries incrementally with no adverse reaction.
In the short term, the best way for India to improve the lot of the rural poor might be to promote a second green revolution. Unlike in manufacturing, India has a competitive advantage in agriculture, with plenty of arable land, sunshine, and water. To achieve such a change, however, India would need to shift its focus from peasant farming to agribusiness and encourage private capital to move from urban to rural areas. It would need to lift onerous distribution controls, allow large retailers to contract directly with farmers, invest in irrigation, and permit the consolidation of fragmented holdings.
Indian entrepreneurs also still face a range of obstacles, many of them the result of lingering bad policies. Electric power is less reliable and more expensive in India than in competitor nations. Checkpoints keep trucks waiting for hours. Taxes and import duties have come down, but the cascading effect of indirect taxes will continue to burden Indian manufacturers until a uniform goods-and-services tax is implemented. Stringent labor laws continue to deter entrepreneurs from hiring workers. The "license raj" may be gone, but an "inspector raj" is alive and well; the "midnight knock" from an excise, customs, labor, or factory inspector still haunts the smaller entrepreneur. Some of these problems will hopefully diminish with the planned designation of new "economic zones," which promise a reduced regulatory burden.
Economic history teaches that the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the West was usually led by one industry. It was textile exports in the United Kingdom, railways in the United States. India, too, may have found the engine that could fuel its takeoff and transform its economy: providing white-collar services that are outsourced by companies in the rest of the world. Software and business-process outsourcing exports have grown from practically nothing to $20 billion and are expected to reach $35 billion by 2008. The constraining factor is likely to be not demand but the ability of India's educational system to produce enough quality English-speaking graduates.
Meanwhile, high-tech manufacturing, a sector where India is already demonstrating considerable strength, will also begin to expand. Perhaps in a decade, the distinction between China as "the world's workshop" and India as "the world's back office" will slowly fade as India's manufacturing and China's services catch up.
RISING DESPITE THE STATE
It is an amazing spectacle to see prosperity beginning to spread in today's India even in the presence of appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy, Indians despair over the lack of the simplest public goods. It used to be the opposite: during India's socialist days, Indians worried about economic growth but were proud of their world-class judiciary, bureaucracy, and police force. But now, the old centralized bureaucratic Indian state is in steady decline. Where it is desperately needed -- in providing basic education, health care, and drinking water -- it has performed appallingly. Where it is not needed, it has only started to give up its habit of stifling private enterprise.
Labor laws, for example, still make it almost impossible to lay off a worker -- as the infamous case of Uttam Nakate illustrates. In early 1984, Nakate was found at 11:40 AM sleeping soundly on the floor of the factory in Pune where he worked. His employer let him off with a warning. But he was caught napping again and again. On the fourth occasion, the factory began disciplinary proceedings against him, and after five months of hearings, he was found guilty and sacked. But Nakate went to a labor court and pleaded that he was a victim of an unfair trade practice. The court agreed and forced the factory to take him back and pay him 50 percent of his lost wages. Only 17 years later, after appeals to the Bombay High Court and the national Supreme Court, did the factory finally win the right to fire an employee who had repeatedly been caught sleeping on the job.
Aside from highlighting the problem of India's lethargic legal system, Nakate's case dramatizes how the country's labor laws actually reduce employment, by making employers afraid to hire workers in the first place. The rules protect existing unionized workers -- sometimes referred to as the "labor aristocracy" -- at the expense of everyone else. At this point, the labor aristocracy comprises only 10 percent of the Indian work force.
No single institution has come to disappoint Indians more than their bureaucracy. In the 1950s, Indians bought into the cruel myth, promulgated by Nehru, that India's bureaucracy was its "steel frame," supposedly a means of guaranteeing stability and continuity after the British raj. Indians also accepted that a powerful civil service was needed to keep a diverse country together and administer the vast regulatory framework of Nehru's "mixed economy." But in the holy name of socialism, the Indian bureaucracy created thousands of controls and stifled enterprise for 40 years. India may have had some excellent civil servants, but none really understood business -- even though they had the power to ruin it.
Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance -- the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system -- but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.
The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy's perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.
The government's most damaging failure is in public education. Consider one particularly telling statistic: according to a recent study by Harvard University's Michael Kremer, one out of four teachers in India's government elementary schools is absent and one out of two present is not teaching at any given time. Even as the famed Indian Institutes of Technology have acquired a global reputation, less than half of the children in fourth-level classes in Mumbai can do first-level math. It has gotten so bad that even poor Indians have begun to pull their kids out of government schools and enroll them in private schools, which charge $1 to $3 a month in fees and which are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India. (Private schools in India range from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in markets.) Although teachers' salaries are on average considerably lower in private schools, their students perform much better. A recent national study led by Pratham, an Indian nongovernmental organization, found that even in small villages, 16 percent of children are now in private primary schools. These kids scored 10 percent higher on verbal and math exams than their peers in public schools.
India's educational establishment, horrified by the exodus out of the public educational system, lambastes private schools and wants to close them down. NIIT Technologies, a private company with 4,000 "learning centers," has trained four million students and helped fuel India's information technology revolution in the 1990s, but it has not been accredited by the government. Ironically, legislators finally acknowledged the state's failure to deliver education a few months ago when they pushed through Parliament a law making it mandatory for private schools to reserve spots for students from low castes. As with so many aspects of India's success story, Indians are finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the government.
The same dismal story is being repeated in health and water services, which are also de facto privatized. The share of private spending on health care in India is double that in the United States. Private wells account for nearly all new irrigation capacity in the country. In a city like New Delhi, private citizens cope with an irregular water supply by privately contributing more than half the total cost of the city's water supply. At government health centers, meanwhile, 40 percent of doctors and a third of nurses are absent at any given time. According to a study by Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer, of the World Bank, there is a 50 percent chance that a doctor at such a center will recommend a positively harmful therapy.
How does one explain the discrepancy between the government's supposed commitment to universal elementary education, health care, and sanitation and the fact that more and more people are embracing private solutions? One answer is that the Indian bureaucratic and political establishments are caught in a time warp, clinging to the belief that the state and the civil service must be relied on to meet people's needs. What they did not anticipate is that politicians in India's democracy would "capture" the bureaucracy and use the system to create jobs and revenue for friends and supporters. The Indian state no longer generates public goods. Instead, it creates private benefits for those who control it. Consequently, the Indian state has become so "riddled with perverse incentives ... that accountability is almost impossible," as the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta reported. In a recent study of India's public services, the activist and author Samuel Paul concluded that "the quality of governance is appalling."
There are many sensible steps that can be taken to improve governance. Focusing on outcomes rather than internal procedures would help, as would delegating responsibility to service providers. But what is more important is for the Indian establishment to jettison its faith in, as the political scientist James Scott puts it, "bureaucratic high modernism" and recognize that the government's job is to govern rather than to run everything. Government may have to finance primary services such as health care and education, but the providers of those services must be accountable to the citizen as though to a customer (instead of to bosses in the bureaucratic hierarchy).
None of the solutions being debated in India will bring accountability without this change in mindset. Fortunately, the people of India have already made the mental leap. The middle class withdrew from the state system long ago. Now, even the poor are depending more and more on private services. The government merely needs to catch up.
REFORM SCHOOL
India's current government is led by a dream team of reformers -- most notably Prime Minister Singh, a chief architect of the liberalization of 1991. Singh's left-wing-associated National Congress Party was swept into power two years ago even though the incumbent BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) had presided over an era of unprecedented growth. The left boasted that the election was a revolt of the poor against the rich. In reality, however, it was an anti-incumbent backlash -- specifically, a vote against the previous government's poor record in providing basic services. What matters to the rickshaw driver is that the police officer does not extort a sixth of his daily earnings. The farmer wants a clear title to his land without having to bribe the village headman, and his wife wants the doctor to be there when she takes her sick child to the health center. These are the areas where government touches most people's lives, and the sobering lesson from India's 2004 elections is that high growth and smart macroeconomic reforms are not enough in a democracy.
Still, the left saw the Congress victory as an opportunity. Unfortunately, it stands rigidly against reform and for the status quo, supporting labor laws that benefit 10 percent of workers at the expense of the other 90 percent and endorsing the same protectionist policies that the extreme right also backs -- policies that harm consumers and favor producers. Thus, Singh and his reformist allies often seem to be sitting, frustrated, on the sidelines. For example, the new government has pushed through Parliament the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which many fear will simply become the biggest "loot for work" program in India's history. Although some of the original backers of the bill may have had good intentions, most legislators saw it as an opportunity for corruption. India's experience with job-creation schemes is that their benefits usually do not reach the poor; and they rarely create permanent assets even when they are supposed to: the shoddy new road inevitably gets washed away in the next monsoon. There is also the worry that the additional 1 percent of GDP borrowed from the banks to finance this program will crowd out private investment, push up interest rates, lower the economy's growth rate, and, saddest of all, actually reduce genuine employment.
Singh knows that India's economic success has not been equally shared. Cities have done better than villages. Some states have done better than others. The economy has not created jobs commensurate with its rate of growth. Only a small fraction of Indians are employed in the modern, unionized sector. Thirty-six million are reportedly unemployed. But Singh also knows that one of the primary reasons for these failures is rigid labor laws -- which he wants to reform, if only the left would let him.
Singh's challenge is to get the majority of Indians united behind reform. One of the reasons that the pace of reform has been so slow is that none of India's leaders has ever bothered to explain to voters why reform is good and just how it will help the poor. (Chinese leaders do not face this problem, which is peculiar to democracies.) Not educating their constituents is the great failure of India's reformers. But it is not too late for Singh and the reformers in his administration -- most notably finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and the head of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia -- to start appearing on television to conduct lessons in basic economics. If the reformers could convert the media and some members of Parliament, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary to their cause, Indians would be less likely to fall hostage to the seductive rhetoric of the left. If they were to admit honestly that the ideas India followed from 1950 to 1990 were wrong, people would respect them. If they were to explain that India's past regulations suppressed the people and were among the causes of poverty, people would understand.
PEOPLE POWER
Shashi Kumar is 29 years old and comes from a tiny village in Bihar, India's most backward and feudal state. His grandfather was a low-caste sharecropper in good times and a day laborer in bad ones. His family was so poor that they did not eat some nights. But Kumar's father somehow managed to get a job in a transport company in Darbhanga, and his mother began to teach in a private school, where Kumar was educated at no cost under her watchful eye. Determined that her son should escape the indignities of Bihar, she tutored him at night, got him into a college, and, when he finished, gave him a railway ticket for New Delhi.
Kumar is now a junior executive in a call center in Gurgaon that serves customers in the United States. He lives in a nice flat, which he bought last year with a mortgage, drives an Indica car, and sends his daughter to a good private school. He is an average, affable young Indian, and like so many of his kind he has a sense of life's possibilities. Prior to 1991, the realization of these possibilities was open only to those with a government job. If you got an education and did not get into the government, you faced a nightmare that was called "educated unemployment." But now, Kumar says, anyone with an education, computer skills, and some English can make it.
India's greatness lies in its self-reliant and resilient people. They are able to pull themselves up and survive, even flourish, when the state fails to deliver. When teachers and doctors do not show up at government primary schools and health centers, Indians just open up cheap private schools and clinics in the slums and get on with it. Indian entrepreneurs claim that they are hardier because they have had to fight not only their competitors but also state inspectors. In short, India's society has triumphed over the state.
But in the long run, the state cannot merely withdraw. Markets do not work in a vacuum. They need a network of regulations and institutions; they need umpires to settle disputes. These institutions do not just spring up; they take time to develop. The Indian state's greatest achievements lie in the noneconomic sphere. The state has held the world's most diverse country together in relative peace for 57 years. It has started to put a modern institutional framework in place. It has held free and fair elections without interruption. Of its 3.5 million village legislators, 1.2 million are women. These are proud achievements for an often bungling state with disastrous implementation skills and a terrible record at day-to-day governance.
Moreover, some of the most important post-1991 reforms have been successful because of the regulatory institutions established by the state. Even though the reforms have been slow, imperfect, and incomplete, they have been consistent and in one direction. And it takes courage, frankly, to give up power, as the Indian state has done for the past 15 years. The stubborn persistence of democracy is itself one of the Indian state's proudest achievements. Time and again, Indian democracy has shown itself to be resilient and enduring -- giving a lie to the old prejudice that the poor are incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that make for effective self-government. To be sure, it is an infuriating democracy, plagued by poor governance and fragile institutions that have failed to deliver basic public goods. But India's economic success has been all the more remarkable for its issuing from such a democracy.
Still, the poor state of governance reminds Indians of how far they are from being a truly great nation. They will reach such greatness only when every Indian has access to a good school, a working health clinic, and clean drinking water. Fortunately, half of India's population is under 25 years old. Based on current growth trends, India should be able to absorb an increasing number of people into its labor force. And it will not have to worry about the problems of an aging population. This will translate into what economists call a "demographic dividend," which will help India reach a level of prosperity at which, for the first time in its history, a majority of its citizens will not have to worry about basic needs. Yet India cannot take its golden age of growth for granted. If it does not continue down its path of reform -- and start to work on bringing governance up to par with the private economy -- then a critical opportunity will have been lost.
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Copyright 2002--2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
By Gurcharan Das
From Foreign Affairs , July/August 2006
Summary: After being shackled by the government for decades, India's economy has become one of the world's strongest. The country's unique development model -- relying on domestic consumption and high-tech services -- has brought a quarter century of record growth despite an incompetent and heavy-handed state. But for that growth to continue, the state must start modernizing along with Indian society.
GURCHARAN DAS is former CEO of Procter & Gamble India and the author of India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution From Independence to the Global Information Age.
AN ECONOMY UNSHACKLED
Although the world has just discovered it, India's economic success is far from new. After three post independence decades of meager progress, the country's economy grew at 6 percent a year from 1980 to 2002 and at 7.5 percent a year from 2002 to 2006 -- making it one of the world's best-performing economies for a quarter century. In the past two decades, the size of the middle class has quadrupled (to almost 250 million people), and 1 percent of the country's poor have crossed the poverty line every year. At the same time, population growth has slowed from the historic rate of 2.2 percent a year to 1.7 percent today -- meaning that growth has brought large per capita income gains, from $1,178 to $3,051 (in terms of purchasing-power parity) since 1980. India is now the world's fourth-largest economy. Soon it will surpass Japan to become the third-largest.
The notable thing about India's rise is not that it is new, but that its path has been unique. Rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy -- exporting labor-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West -- India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing. This approach has meant that the Indian economy has been mostly insulated from global downturns, showing a degree of stability that is as impressive as the rate of its expansion. The consumption-driven model is also more people-friendly than other development strategies. As a result, inequality has increased much less in India than in other developing nations. (Its Gini index, a measure of income inequality on a scale of zero to 100, is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil.) Moreover, 30 to 40 percent of GDP growth is due to rising productivity -- a true sign of an economy's health and progress -- rather than to increases in the amount of capital or labor.
But what is most remarkable is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India is in many ways rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the center of India's success story. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. And since 1991 especially, the Indian state has been gradually moving out of the way -- not graciously, but kicked and dragged into implementing economic reforms. It has lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broken state monopolies, unshackled industry, encouraged competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. The pace has been slow, but the reforms are starting to add up.
India is poised at a key moment in its history. Rapid growth will likely continue -- and even accelerate. But India cannot take this for granted. Public debt is high, which discourages investment in needed infrastructure. Overly strict labor laws, though they cover only 10 percent of the work force, have the perverse effect of discouraging employers from hiring new workers. The public sector, although much smaller than China's, is still too large and inefficient -- a major drag on growth and employment and a burden for consumers. And although India is successfully generating high-end, capital- and knowledge-intensive manufacturing, it has failed to create a broad-based, labor-intensive industrial revolution -- meaning that gains in employment have not been commensurate with overall growth. Its rural population, meanwhile, suffers from the consequences of state-induced production and distribution distortions in agriculture that result in farmers' getting only 20 to 30 percent of the retail price of fruits and vegetables (versus the 40 to 50 percent farmers in the United States get).
India can take advantage of this moment to remove the remaining obstacles that have prevented it from realizing its full potential. Or it can continue smugly along, confident that it will get there eventually -- but 20 years late. The most difficult reforms are not yet done, and already there are signs of complacency.
A 100-YEAR TALE
For half a century before independence, the Indian economy was stagnant. Between 1900 and 1950, economic growth averaged o.8 percent a year -- exactly the same rate as population growth, resulting in no increase in per capita income. In the first decades after independence, economic growth picked up, averaging 3.5 percent from 1950 to 1980. But population growth accelerated as well. The net effect on per capita income was an average annual increase of just 1.3 percent.
Indians mournfully called this "the Hindu rate of growth." Of course, it had nothing to do with Hinduism and everything to do with the Fabian socialist policies of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his imperious daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who oversaw India's darkest economic decades. Father and daughter shackled the energies of the Indian people under a mixed economy that combined the worst features of capitalism and socialism. Their model was inward-looking and import-substituting rather than outward-looking and export-promoting, and it denied India a share in the prosperity that a massive expansion in global trade brought in the post-World War II era. (Average per capita growth for the developing world as a whole was almost 3 percent from 1950 to 1980, more than double India's rate.) Nehru set up an inefficient and monopolistic public sector, overregulated private enterprise with the most stringent price and production controls in the world, and discouraged foreign investment -- thereby causing India to lose out on the benefits of both foreign technology and foreign competition. His approach also pampered organized labor to the point of significantly lowering productivity and ignored the education of India's children.
But even this system could have delivered more had it been better implemented. It did not have to degenerate into a "license-permit-quota raj," as Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari first put it in the late 1950s. Although Indians blame ideology (and sometimes democracy) for their failings, the truth is that a mundane inability to implement policy -- reflecting a bias for thought and against action -- may have been even more damaging.
In the 1980s, the government's attitude toward the private sector began to change, thanks in part to the underappreciated efforts of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Modest liberal reforms -- especially lowering marginal tax rates and tariffs and giving some leeway to manufacturers -- spurred an increase in growth to 5.6 percent. But the policies of the 1980s were also profligate and brought India to the point of fiscal crisis by the start of the 1990s. Fortunately, that crisis triggered the critical reforms of 1991, which finally allowed India's integration into the global economy -- and laid the groundwork for the high growth of today. The chief architect of those reforms was the finance minister, Manmohan Singh, who is now prime minister. He lowered tariffs and other trade barriers, scrapped industrial licensing, reduced tax rates, devalued the rupee, opened India to foreign investment, and rolled back currency controls. Many of these measures were gradual, but they signaled a decisive break with India's dirigiste past. The economy returned the favor immediately: growth rose, inflation plummeted, and exports and currency reserves shot up.
To appreciate the magnitude of the change after 1980, recall that the West's Industrial Revolution took place in the context of 3 percent GDP growth and 1.1 percent per capita income growth. If India's economy were still growing at the pre-1980 level, then its per capita income would reach present U.S. levels only by 2250; but if it continues to grow at the post-1980 average, it will reach that level by 2066 -- a gain of 184 years.
PECULIAR REVOLUTION
India has improved its competitiveness considerably since 1991: there has been a telecommunications revolution, interest rates have come down, capital is plentiful (although risk-averse managers of state-owned banks still refuse to lend to small entrepreneurs), highways and ports have improved, and real estate markets are becoming transparent. More than 100 Indian companies now have a market capitalization of over a billion dollars, and some of these -- including Bharat Forge, Jet Airways, Infosys Technologies, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Motors, and Wipro Technologies -- are likely to become competitive global brands soon. Foreigners have invested in over 1,000 Indian companies via the stock market. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 125 now have research and development bases in India -- a testament to its human capital. And high-tech manufacturing has taken off. All these changes have disciplined the banking sector. Bad loans now account for less than 2 percent of all loans (compared to 20 percent in China), even though none of India's shoddy state-owned banks has so far been privatized.
For now, growth is being driven by services and domestic consumption. Consumption accounts for 64 percent of India's GDP, compared to 58 percent for Europe, 55 percent for Japan, and 42 percent for China. That consumption might be a virtue embarrasses many Indians, with their ascetic streak, but, as the economist Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley puts it, "India's consumption-led approach to growth may be better balanced than the resource-mobilization model of China."
The contrast between India's entrepreneur-driven growth and China's state-centered model is stark. China's success is largely based on exports by state enterprises or foreign companies. Beijing remains highly suspicious of entrepreneurs. Only 10 percent of credit goes to the private sector in China, even though the private sector employs 40 percent of the Chinese work force. In India, entrepreneurs get more than 80 percent of all loans. Whereas Jet Airways, in operation since 1993, has become the undisputed leader of India's skies, China's first private airline, Okay Airways, started flying only in February 2005.
What has been peculiar about India's development so far is that high growth has not been accompanied by a labor-intensive industrial revolution that could transform the lives of the tens of millions of Indians still trapped in rural poverty. Many Indians watch mesmerized as China seems to create an endless flow of low-end manufacturing jobs by exporting goods such as toys and clothes and as their better-educated compatriots export knowledge services to the rest of the world. They wonder fearfully if India is going to skip an industrial revolution altogether, jumping straight from an agricultural economy to a service economy. Economies in the rest of the world evolved from agriculture to industry to services. India appears to have a weak middle step. Services now account for more than 50 percent of India's GDP, whereas agriculture's share is 22 percent, and industry's share is only 27 percent (versus 46 percent in China). And within industry, India's strength is high-tech, high-skilled manufacturing.
Even the most fervent advocates of service-based growth do not question the desirability of creating more manufacturing jobs. The failure of India to achieve a broad industrial transformation stems in part from bad policies. After India's independence, Nehru attempted a state-directed industrial revolution. Since he did not trust the private sector, he tried to replace the entrepreneur with the government -- and predictably failed. He shackled private enterprise with byzantine controls and denied autonomy to the public sector. Perhaps the most egregious policy was reserving around 800 industries, designated "small-scale industries" (SSI), for tiny companies that were unable to compete against the large firms of competitor nations. Large firms were barred from making products such as pencils, boot polish, candles, shoes, garments, and toys -- all the products that helped East Asia create millions of jobs. Even since 1991, Indian governments have been afraid to touch this "SSI holy cow" for fear of a backlash from the SSI lobby. Fortunately, that lobby has turned out to be mostly a phantom -- little more than the bureaucrats who kept scaring politicians by warning of a backlash. Over the past five years, the government has been pruning the list of protected industries incrementally with no adverse reaction.
In the short term, the best way for India to improve the lot of the rural poor might be to promote a second green revolution. Unlike in manufacturing, India has a competitive advantage in agriculture, with plenty of arable land, sunshine, and water. To achieve such a change, however, India would need to shift its focus from peasant farming to agribusiness and encourage private capital to move from urban to rural areas. It would need to lift onerous distribution controls, allow large retailers to contract directly with farmers, invest in irrigation, and permit the consolidation of fragmented holdings.
Indian entrepreneurs also still face a range of obstacles, many of them the result of lingering bad policies. Electric power is less reliable and more expensive in India than in competitor nations. Checkpoints keep trucks waiting for hours. Taxes and import duties have come down, but the cascading effect of indirect taxes will continue to burden Indian manufacturers until a uniform goods-and-services tax is implemented. Stringent labor laws continue to deter entrepreneurs from hiring workers. The "license raj" may be gone, but an "inspector raj" is alive and well; the "midnight knock" from an excise, customs, labor, or factory inspector still haunts the smaller entrepreneur. Some of these problems will hopefully diminish with the planned designation of new "economic zones," which promise a reduced regulatory burden.
Economic history teaches that the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the West was usually led by one industry. It was textile exports in the United Kingdom, railways in the United States. India, too, may have found the engine that could fuel its takeoff and transform its economy: providing white-collar services that are outsourced by companies in the rest of the world. Software and business-process outsourcing exports have grown from practically nothing to $20 billion and are expected to reach $35 billion by 2008. The constraining factor is likely to be not demand but the ability of India's educational system to produce enough quality English-speaking graduates.
Meanwhile, high-tech manufacturing, a sector where India is already demonstrating considerable strength, will also begin to expand. Perhaps in a decade, the distinction between China as "the world's workshop" and India as "the world's back office" will slowly fade as India's manufacturing and China's services catch up.
RISING DESPITE THE STATE
It is an amazing spectacle to see prosperity beginning to spread in today's India even in the presence of appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy, Indians despair over the lack of the simplest public goods. It used to be the opposite: during India's socialist days, Indians worried about economic growth but were proud of their world-class judiciary, bureaucracy, and police force. But now, the old centralized bureaucratic Indian state is in steady decline. Where it is desperately needed -- in providing basic education, health care, and drinking water -- it has performed appallingly. Where it is not needed, it has only started to give up its habit of stifling private enterprise.
Labor laws, for example, still make it almost impossible to lay off a worker -- as the infamous case of Uttam Nakate illustrates. In early 1984, Nakate was found at 11:40 AM sleeping soundly on the floor of the factory in Pune where he worked. His employer let him off with a warning. But he was caught napping again and again. On the fourth occasion, the factory began disciplinary proceedings against him, and after five months of hearings, he was found guilty and sacked. But Nakate went to a labor court and pleaded that he was a victim of an unfair trade practice. The court agreed and forced the factory to take him back and pay him 50 percent of his lost wages. Only 17 years later, after appeals to the Bombay High Court and the national Supreme Court, did the factory finally win the right to fire an employee who had repeatedly been caught sleeping on the job.
Aside from highlighting the problem of India's lethargic legal system, Nakate's case dramatizes how the country's labor laws actually reduce employment, by making employers afraid to hire workers in the first place. The rules protect existing unionized workers -- sometimes referred to as the "labor aristocracy" -- at the expense of everyone else. At this point, the labor aristocracy comprises only 10 percent of the Indian work force.
No single institution has come to disappoint Indians more than their bureaucracy. In the 1950s, Indians bought into the cruel myth, promulgated by Nehru, that India's bureaucracy was its "steel frame," supposedly a means of guaranteeing stability and continuity after the British raj. Indians also accepted that a powerful civil service was needed to keep a diverse country together and administer the vast regulatory framework of Nehru's "mixed economy." But in the holy name of socialism, the Indian bureaucracy created thousands of controls and stifled enterprise for 40 years. India may have had some excellent civil servants, but none really understood business -- even though they had the power to ruin it.
Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance -- the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system -- but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.
The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy's perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.
The government's most damaging failure is in public education. Consider one particularly telling statistic: according to a recent study by Harvard University's Michael Kremer, one out of four teachers in India's government elementary schools is absent and one out of two present is not teaching at any given time. Even as the famed Indian Institutes of Technology have acquired a global reputation, less than half of the children in fourth-level classes in Mumbai can do first-level math. It has gotten so bad that even poor Indians have begun to pull their kids out of government schools and enroll them in private schools, which charge $1 to $3 a month in fees and which are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India. (Private schools in India range from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in markets.) Although teachers' salaries are on average considerably lower in private schools, their students perform much better. A recent national study led by Pratham, an Indian nongovernmental organization, found that even in small villages, 16 percent of children are now in private primary schools. These kids scored 10 percent higher on verbal and math exams than their peers in public schools.
India's educational establishment, horrified by the exodus out of the public educational system, lambastes private schools and wants to close them down. NIIT Technologies, a private company with 4,000 "learning centers," has trained four million students and helped fuel India's information technology revolution in the 1990s, but it has not been accredited by the government. Ironically, legislators finally acknowledged the state's failure to deliver education a few months ago when they pushed through Parliament a law making it mandatory for private schools to reserve spots for students from low castes. As with so many aspects of India's success story, Indians are finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the government.
The same dismal story is being repeated in health and water services, which are also de facto privatized. The share of private spending on health care in India is double that in the United States. Private wells account for nearly all new irrigation capacity in the country. In a city like New Delhi, private citizens cope with an irregular water supply by privately contributing more than half the total cost of the city's water supply. At government health centers, meanwhile, 40 percent of doctors and a third of nurses are absent at any given time. According to a study by Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer, of the World Bank, there is a 50 percent chance that a doctor at such a center will recommend a positively harmful therapy.
How does one explain the discrepancy between the government's supposed commitment to universal elementary education, health care, and sanitation and the fact that more and more people are embracing private solutions? One answer is that the Indian bureaucratic and political establishments are caught in a time warp, clinging to the belief that the state and the civil service must be relied on to meet people's needs. What they did not anticipate is that politicians in India's democracy would "capture" the bureaucracy and use the system to create jobs and revenue for friends and supporters. The Indian state no longer generates public goods. Instead, it creates private benefits for those who control it. Consequently, the Indian state has become so "riddled with perverse incentives ... that accountability is almost impossible," as the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta reported. In a recent study of India's public services, the activist and author Samuel Paul concluded that "the quality of governance is appalling."
There are many sensible steps that can be taken to improve governance. Focusing on outcomes rather than internal procedures would help, as would delegating responsibility to service providers. But what is more important is for the Indian establishment to jettison its faith in, as the political scientist James Scott puts it, "bureaucratic high modernism" and recognize that the government's job is to govern rather than to run everything. Government may have to finance primary services such as health care and education, but the providers of those services must be accountable to the citizen as though to a customer (instead of to bosses in the bureaucratic hierarchy).
None of the solutions being debated in India will bring accountability without this change in mindset. Fortunately, the people of India have already made the mental leap. The middle class withdrew from the state system long ago. Now, even the poor are depending more and more on private services. The government merely needs to catch up.
REFORM SCHOOL
India's current government is led by a dream team of reformers -- most notably Prime Minister Singh, a chief architect of the liberalization of 1991. Singh's left-wing-associated National Congress Party was swept into power two years ago even though the incumbent BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) had presided over an era of unprecedented growth. The left boasted that the election was a revolt of the poor against the rich. In reality, however, it was an anti-incumbent backlash -- specifically, a vote against the previous government's poor record in providing basic services. What matters to the rickshaw driver is that the police officer does not extort a sixth of his daily earnings. The farmer wants a clear title to his land without having to bribe the village headman, and his wife wants the doctor to be there when she takes her sick child to the health center. These are the areas where government touches most people's lives, and the sobering lesson from India's 2004 elections is that high growth and smart macroeconomic reforms are not enough in a democracy.
Still, the left saw the Congress victory as an opportunity. Unfortunately, it stands rigidly against reform and for the status quo, supporting labor laws that benefit 10 percent of workers at the expense of the other 90 percent and endorsing the same protectionist policies that the extreme right also backs -- policies that harm consumers and favor producers. Thus, Singh and his reformist allies often seem to be sitting, frustrated, on the sidelines. For example, the new government has pushed through Parliament the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which many fear will simply become the biggest "loot for work" program in India's history. Although some of the original backers of the bill may have had good intentions, most legislators saw it as an opportunity for corruption. India's experience with job-creation schemes is that their benefits usually do not reach the poor; and they rarely create permanent assets even when they are supposed to: the shoddy new road inevitably gets washed away in the next monsoon. There is also the worry that the additional 1 percent of GDP borrowed from the banks to finance this program will crowd out private investment, push up interest rates, lower the economy's growth rate, and, saddest of all, actually reduce genuine employment.
Singh knows that India's economic success has not been equally shared. Cities have done better than villages. Some states have done better than others. The economy has not created jobs commensurate with its rate of growth. Only a small fraction of Indians are employed in the modern, unionized sector. Thirty-six million are reportedly unemployed. But Singh also knows that one of the primary reasons for these failures is rigid labor laws -- which he wants to reform, if only the left would let him.
Singh's challenge is to get the majority of Indians united behind reform. One of the reasons that the pace of reform has been so slow is that none of India's leaders has ever bothered to explain to voters why reform is good and just how it will help the poor. (Chinese leaders do not face this problem, which is peculiar to democracies.) Not educating their constituents is the great failure of India's reformers. But it is not too late for Singh and the reformers in his administration -- most notably finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and the head of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia -- to start appearing on television to conduct lessons in basic economics. If the reformers could convert the media and some members of Parliament, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary to their cause, Indians would be less likely to fall hostage to the seductive rhetoric of the left. If they were to admit honestly that the ideas India followed from 1950 to 1990 were wrong, people would respect them. If they were to explain that India's past regulations suppressed the people and were among the causes of poverty, people would understand.
PEOPLE POWER
Shashi Kumar is 29 years old and comes from a tiny village in Bihar, India's most backward and feudal state. His grandfather was a low-caste sharecropper in good times and a day laborer in bad ones. His family was so poor that they did not eat some nights. But Kumar's father somehow managed to get a job in a transport company in Darbhanga, and his mother began to teach in a private school, where Kumar was educated at no cost under her watchful eye. Determined that her son should escape the indignities of Bihar, she tutored him at night, got him into a college, and, when he finished, gave him a railway ticket for New Delhi.
Kumar is now a junior executive in a call center in Gurgaon that serves customers in the United States. He lives in a nice flat, which he bought last year with a mortgage, drives an Indica car, and sends his daughter to a good private school. He is an average, affable young Indian, and like so many of his kind he has a sense of life's possibilities. Prior to 1991, the realization of these possibilities was open only to those with a government job. If you got an education and did not get into the government, you faced a nightmare that was called "educated unemployment." But now, Kumar says, anyone with an education, computer skills, and some English can make it.
India's greatness lies in its self-reliant and resilient people. They are able to pull themselves up and survive, even flourish, when the state fails to deliver. When teachers and doctors do not show up at government primary schools and health centers, Indians just open up cheap private schools and clinics in the slums and get on with it. Indian entrepreneurs claim that they are hardier because they have had to fight not only their competitors but also state inspectors. In short, India's society has triumphed over the state.
But in the long run, the state cannot merely withdraw. Markets do not work in a vacuum. They need a network of regulations and institutions; they need umpires to settle disputes. These institutions do not just spring up; they take time to develop. The Indian state's greatest achievements lie in the noneconomic sphere. The state has held the world's most diverse country together in relative peace for 57 years. It has started to put a modern institutional framework in place. It has held free and fair elections without interruption. Of its 3.5 million village legislators, 1.2 million are women. These are proud achievements for an often bungling state with disastrous implementation skills and a terrible record at day-to-day governance.
Moreover, some of the most important post-1991 reforms have been successful because of the regulatory institutions established by the state. Even though the reforms have been slow, imperfect, and incomplete, they have been consistent and in one direction. And it takes courage, frankly, to give up power, as the Indian state has done for the past 15 years. The stubborn persistence of democracy is itself one of the Indian state's proudest achievements. Time and again, Indian democracy has shown itself to be resilient and enduring -- giving a lie to the old prejudice that the poor are incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that make for effective self-government. To be sure, it is an infuriating democracy, plagued by poor governance and fragile institutions that have failed to deliver basic public goods. But India's economic success has been all the more remarkable for its issuing from such a democracy.
Still, the poor state of governance reminds Indians of how far they are from being a truly great nation. They will reach such greatness only when every Indian has access to a good school, a working health clinic, and clean drinking water. Fortunately, half of India's population is under 25 years old. Based on current growth trends, India should be able to absorb an increasing number of people into its labor force. And it will not have to worry about the problems of an aging population. This will translate into what economists call a "demographic dividend," which will help India reach a level of prosperity at which, for the first time in its history, a majority of its citizens will not have to worry about basic needs. Yet India cannot take its golden age of growth for granted. If it does not continue down its path of reform -- and start to work on bringing governance up to par with the private economy -- then a critical opportunity will have been lost.
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Saturday, November 15, 2008
Robert Reich: The Mini Depression and the Maximum-Strength Remedy
9 November 2008
Robert Reich: The Mini Depression and the Maximum-Strength Remedy
by RR
Robert Reich
This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but nor is it turning out to be merely a bad recession of the kind we've experienced periodically over the last half century. Call it a Mini Depression. The employment report last Friday shows job losses accelerating, along with the number of Americans working part time who'd rather be and need to be working full time. Retail sales have fallen off a cliff. Stock prices continue to drop. General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy. The rate of home foreclosures is mounting.
When Barack Obama takes office in January, he will inherit a mess. (Because I'm an informal economic adviser, I should remind anyone who reads this blog that it reflects only my thoughts and therefore should not be attributed to him or to anyone else advising him.) What to do?
First, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit.
First, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit. Yes, Wall Street is paralyzed at the moment because the bursting of the housing and other asset bubbles means that lenders are fearful that creditors won't repay loans. But even if credit were flowing, those loans wouldn't save jobs. Businesses want to borrow now only to remain solvent and keep their creditors at bay. If they fail to do so, and creditors push them into reorganization under bankruptcy, they'll cut their payrolls, to be sure. But they're already cutting their payrolls. It's far from clear they'd cut more jobs under bankruptcy reorganization than they're already cutting under pressure to avoid bankruptcy and remain solvent.
This means bailing out Wall Street or the auto industry or the insurance industry or the housing industry may at most help satisfy creditors for a time and put off the day of reckoning, but industry bailouts won't reverse the downward cycle of job losses.
The real problem is on the demand side of the economy.
Consumers won't or can't borrow because they're at the end of their ropes. Their incomes are dropping (one of the most sobering statistics in Friday's jobs report was the continued erosion of real median earnings), they're deeply in debt, and they're afraid of losing their jobs.
Introductory economic courses explain that aggregate demand is made up of four things, expressed as C+I+G+exports. C is consumers. Consumers are cutting back on everything other than necessities. Because their spending accounts for 70 percent of the nation's economic activity and is the flywheel for the rest of the economy, the precipitous drop in consumer spending is causing the rest of the economy to shut down.
I is investment. Absent consumer spending, businesses are not going to invest.
Exports won't help much because the of the rest of the world is sliding into deep recession, too. (And as foreigners -- as well as Americans -- put their savings in dollars for safe keeping, the value of the dollar will likely continue to rise relative to other currencies. That, in turn, makes everything we might sell to the rest of the world more expensive.)
Government is the spender of last resort. Government spending lifted America out of the Great Depression. It may be the only instrument we have for lifting America out of the Mini Depression.
That leaves G, which, of course, is government. Government is the spender of last resort. Government spending lifted America out of the Great Depression. It may be the only instrument we have for lifting America out of the Mini Depression. Even Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is now calling for a sizable government stimulus. He knows that monetary policy won't work if there's inadequate demand.
So the crucial questions become (1) how much will the government have to spend to get the economy back on track? and (2) what sort of spending will have the biggest impact on jobs and incomes?
The answer to the first question is "a lot." Given the magnitude of the mess and the amount of underutilized capacity in the economy-- people who are or will soon be unemployed, those who are underemployed, factories shuttered, offices empty, trucks and containers idled -- government may have to spend $600 or $700 billion next year to reverse the downward cycle we're in.
The answer to the second question is mostly "infrastructure" -- repairing roads and bridges, levees and ports; investing in light rail, electrical grids, new sources of energy, more energy conservation. Even conservative economists like Harvard's Martin Feldstein are calling for government to stimulate the economy through infrastructure spending. Infrastructure projects like these pack a double-whammy: they create lots of jobs, and they make the economy work better in the future. (Important qualification: To do this correctly and avoid pork, the federal government will need to have a capital budget that lists infrastructure projects in order of priority of public need.)
Government should also spend on health care and child care. These expenditures are also double whammies: they, too, create lots of jobs, and they fulfill vital public needs.
Expect two sorts of arguments against this. The first will come from fiscal hawks who claim that the government is already spending way too much. Even without a new stimulus package, next year's budget deficit could run over a trillion dollars, given the amounts to be spent bailing out Wall Street and perhaps the auto industry, and providing extended unemployment insurance and other measures to help those in direct need. The hawks will argue that the nation can't afford giant deficits, especially when baby boomers are only a few years away from retiring and claiming Social Security and Medicare.
They're wrong. Government spending that puts people back to work and invests in the future productivity of the nation is exactly what the economy needs right now. Deficit numbers themselves have no significance. The pertinent issue is how much underutilized capacity exists in the economy. When there's lots of idle capacity, deficit spending is entirely appropriate, as John Maynard Keynes taught us. Moving the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.
The second argument will come from conservative supply-siders who will call for income-tax cuts rather than spending increases. They'll claim that individuals with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, for three reasons. First, income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people who tend to save rather than spend. Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Second, even if a rebate could be fashioned, people tend to use those extra dollars to pay off their debts rather than buy new goods and services, as we witnessed a few months ago when the government sent out rebate checks. Third, even when individuals purchase goods and services, those purchases tend not to generate as many American jobs as government spending on the same total scale because much of what consumers buy comes from abroad.
Fiscal hawks and conservative supply siders notwithstanding, a major stimulus is in order. Government is the spender of last resort, and the nation is coming close to its last resort.
Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books (including his most recent, Supercapitalism, which is now out in paperback). Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio’s "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people. This entry appeared on his blog.
Copyright 2008 Robert B. Reich
Robert Reich: The Mini Depression and the Maximum-Strength Remedy
by RR
Robert Reich
This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but nor is it turning out to be merely a bad recession of the kind we've experienced periodically over the last half century. Call it a Mini Depression. The employment report last Friday shows job losses accelerating, along with the number of Americans working part time who'd rather be and need to be working full time. Retail sales have fallen off a cliff. Stock prices continue to drop. General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy. The rate of home foreclosures is mounting.
When Barack Obama takes office in January, he will inherit a mess. (Because I'm an informal economic adviser, I should remind anyone who reads this blog that it reflects only my thoughts and therefore should not be attributed to him or to anyone else advising him.) What to do?
First, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit.
First, understand that the main problem right now is not the supply of credit. Yes, Wall Street is paralyzed at the moment because the bursting of the housing and other asset bubbles means that lenders are fearful that creditors won't repay loans. But even if credit were flowing, those loans wouldn't save jobs. Businesses want to borrow now only to remain solvent and keep their creditors at bay. If they fail to do so, and creditors push them into reorganization under bankruptcy, they'll cut their payrolls, to be sure. But they're already cutting their payrolls. It's far from clear they'd cut more jobs under bankruptcy reorganization than they're already cutting under pressure to avoid bankruptcy and remain solvent.
This means bailing out Wall Street or the auto industry or the insurance industry or the housing industry may at most help satisfy creditors for a time and put off the day of reckoning, but industry bailouts won't reverse the downward cycle of job losses.
The real problem is on the demand side of the economy.
Consumers won't or can't borrow because they're at the end of their ropes. Their incomes are dropping (one of the most sobering statistics in Friday's jobs report was the continued erosion of real median earnings), they're deeply in debt, and they're afraid of losing their jobs.
Introductory economic courses explain that aggregate demand is made up of four things, expressed as C+I+G+exports. C is consumers. Consumers are cutting back on everything other than necessities. Because their spending accounts for 70 percent of the nation's economic activity and is the flywheel for the rest of the economy, the precipitous drop in consumer spending is causing the rest of the economy to shut down.
I is investment. Absent consumer spending, businesses are not going to invest.
Exports won't help much because the of the rest of the world is sliding into deep recession, too. (And as foreigners -- as well as Americans -- put their savings in dollars for safe keeping, the value of the dollar will likely continue to rise relative to other currencies. That, in turn, makes everything we might sell to the rest of the world more expensive.)
Government is the spender of last resort. Government spending lifted America out of the Great Depression. It may be the only instrument we have for lifting America out of the Mini Depression.
That leaves G, which, of course, is government. Government is the spender of last resort. Government spending lifted America out of the Great Depression. It may be the only instrument we have for lifting America out of the Mini Depression. Even Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is now calling for a sizable government stimulus. He knows that monetary policy won't work if there's inadequate demand.
So the crucial questions become (1) how much will the government have to spend to get the economy back on track? and (2) what sort of spending will have the biggest impact on jobs and incomes?
The answer to the first question is "a lot." Given the magnitude of the mess and the amount of underutilized capacity in the economy-- people who are or will soon be unemployed, those who are underemployed, factories shuttered, offices empty, trucks and containers idled -- government may have to spend $600 or $700 billion next year to reverse the downward cycle we're in.
The answer to the second question is mostly "infrastructure" -- repairing roads and bridges, levees and ports; investing in light rail, electrical grids, new sources of energy, more energy conservation. Even conservative economists like Harvard's Martin Feldstein are calling for government to stimulate the economy through infrastructure spending. Infrastructure projects like these pack a double-whammy: they create lots of jobs, and they make the economy work better in the future. (Important qualification: To do this correctly and avoid pork, the federal government will need to have a capital budget that lists infrastructure projects in order of priority of public need.)
Government should also spend on health care and child care. These expenditures are also double whammies: they, too, create lots of jobs, and they fulfill vital public needs.
Expect two sorts of arguments against this. The first will come from fiscal hawks who claim that the government is already spending way too much. Even without a new stimulus package, next year's budget deficit could run over a trillion dollars, given the amounts to be spent bailing out Wall Street and perhaps the auto industry, and providing extended unemployment insurance and other measures to help those in direct need. The hawks will argue that the nation can't afford giant deficits, especially when baby boomers are only a few years away from retiring and claiming Social Security and Medicare.
They're wrong. Government spending that puts people back to work and invests in the future productivity of the nation is exactly what the economy needs right now. Deficit numbers themselves have no significance. The pertinent issue is how much underutilized capacity exists in the economy. When there's lots of idle capacity, deficit spending is entirely appropriate, as John Maynard Keynes taught us. Moving the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.
The second argument will come from conservative supply-siders who will call for income-tax cuts rather than spending increases. They'll claim that individuals with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, for three reasons. First, income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people who tend to save rather than spend. Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Second, even if a rebate could be fashioned, people tend to use those extra dollars to pay off their debts rather than buy new goods and services, as we witnessed a few months ago when the government sent out rebate checks. Third, even when individuals purchase goods and services, those purchases tend not to generate as many American jobs as government spending on the same total scale because much of what consumers buy comes from abroad.
Fiscal hawks and conservative supply siders notwithstanding, a major stimulus is in order. Government is the spender of last resort, and the nation is coming close to its last resort.
Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books (including his most recent, Supercapitalism, which is now out in paperback). Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio’s "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people. This entry appeared on his blog.
Copyright 2008 Robert B. Reich
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