Policy of the "Stupid Pricks" (4)

"After having lunch with chinese cuisine in a well-known Chinese Food restaurant,' Peace lily went on, "our minister wanted to know, "'By the way, if this project is being implemented, who will work on it?'

'O don't worry, said our investor, 'we have abundant labors, so we will bring in workers from China to do the work.'

'But, what about the local labors?' asked the minister.

'Oh, they can take part, but on condition that they must master Chinese languages, including Beijingese, Hanyu, Putonghua, Mandarin, Cantonese, and even Tibetan.

'But, this is a local project, why does it have to be in Chinese?' asked the minister.

'That is our requirement, and that's your misery!' replied our investor.

The minister assumed, if he refused, perhaps, even 'five times of apocalypse,' there would be 'no development if no investment,' and also 'the money will be dissapeared!' he thought like a businessman managed a country.

Seeing the minister was a little tense, our investor telling a joke, 'A farm worker greets Josef Stalin at his potato farm.

'Comrade Stalin, we have so many potatoes that, piled one on top of the other, they would reach all the way to God,' the farmer excitedly tells his leader.

'But God does not exist,' replies Stalin.

'Exactly,' says the farmer. 'Neither do the potatoes.'

'Tell me what you know about Communism,' asked the minister. While putting away the plate containing Egg Foo Yung he'd finished, our investor said, 'People in 1989-91 had to pinch themselves to make sure they were not hallucinating. Something extraordinary had happened in world politics. Suddenly communism had collapsed. Until then it had been one of the most powerful and widespread types of modern state. Coming to power in the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, Lenin and his comrades established an order which was reproduced in eastern Europe, China, East Asia, Cuba and elsewhere after the Second World War. In 1989 this communist order was removed from the face of Europe. In 1991 the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. Although China still claimed to be communist, its fundamental economic reforms meant that this was no longer accurate as a comprehensive description. Communist parties clung on to office in a few countries such as North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba; their geopolitical importance was a long way short of the power and prestige of the ‘world communist movement’ in its years of pomp. Communism was fast becoming a historical relic.

If one hundred years after the October Revolution of 1917 communism has become history, it cannot simply be confined to the past. The projects and experiences of world revolution, noncapitalist economies and collectivized societies of the twentieth century are a matter for reflection in terms of historiography, memory and the legacies they left behind. The endurance of communist regimes in some Asian countries and the integration of their economies into globalized capitalism (with the exception of North Korea) have stimulated interest, analysis and questions. This is particularly the case in light of postsocialist China’s influence in the world economy and world politics.

The seeds of modern communism germinated long before the twentieth century. The word itself—communism—was invented late, gaining widespread currency in French, German and English only in the 1840s. It has consistently denoted a desire to dig up the foundations of society and rebuild. Communists have never been half hearted about their purposes. They have focused a constant hatred of the existing order on state and economy. They have suggested that only they—and not their many rivals the political left—have the doctrinal and practical potential to transform human affairs. Some kind of egalitarianism lasted in their objectives on Determination and impatience to achieve change have been permanent features. The commitment to militant organisation has endured. But communism itself has not ceased to defy attempts at definition. No final meeting of minds is likely. One communist’s communism is another communist’s anti-communism, and this is a situation unlikely to change, says Robert Service.

What became known as communism in the twentieth century was the outcome of many influences. Its principal expression was the official ideology of the USSR and other communist states. Marx and Engels themselves—the originators of the doctrines which became known as Marxism—acknowledged three main sources of inspiration. Politically they were deeply affected by what they learned about Maximilien Robespierre and other radical politicians in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. In economics they admitted to having drawn strongly on the ideas of David Ricardo and other theorists who examined the extraordinary propulsive energies in production and commerce unleashed by capitalism in the United Kingdom. Philosophically they were fascinated by the writings of Hegel. Their fellow German had, insisted that history proceeds through stages which condition the way a humankind thinks and acts and that the great changes in social life not merely of a superficial or cyclical character: Hegel regarded the historical record as a sequence of progress towards an ever better condition of people and things.

Marxism’s co-founders were never uncritical admirers of Robespierre, Ricardo and Hegel. Indeed, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel upside down; and, of course, he neither accepted Robespierre’s specific political analysis nor condoned Ricardo’s advocacy of private enterprise.

Marx and Engels thought of themselves as working to synthesise the crucial discoveries of those who had influenced them; and they went on developing this synthesis through their middle and late careers. Both wished to be taken seriously as propagators of ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ and ‘contemporary’ communism. Their ideas were not to be sullied by association with most previous and contemporary thinkers. They were men in a hurry; they thought they were living at the end of the capitalist era and that the communist era was nigh. Neither had an introspective personality—and, apart from Marx’s brief comment on Robespierre, Ricardo and Hegel, they seldom enquired about the influences which had shaped their world-view.

Crucial to Marxism was the dream of apocalypse followed by paradise. This kind of thinking existed in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Marx had been brought up in a Jewish family which converted to Christianity; the Engels family were Protestants. Marx and Engels as atheists later in their lives denied that true believers would be rewarded by eternity in heaven; instead they contended that they and their supporters would create the perfect society down here on earth. Christian doctrine predicted that unbelievers would meet a miserable end at the return of the Messiah. Likewise, according to the founders of Marxism, those who obstructed the advance of communism to supremacy would be trampled underfoot. The ruling classes of the day would come to rue their lordship over humankind.

Politics and economics were not the only matter exercising the minds of the radicals. By the early nineteenth century a strong trend had emerged among many thinkers. Physics, biology and chemistry made strides forwards greater than any achieved in the previous two millennia, For most thinking people—at least those who were not hewing coal, working weaving machines or digging canals—a positive excitement was in the air. They gulped it down. Then along came Darwin. Origin of the Species oxygenated intellectual life around the planet. Darwin’s achievement was to link the natural and human sciences. His theory of evolution postulated that the various animal species derived over millions of years from crude, simple-life forms which adapted themselves to their physical environment in a struggle which ended in the 'survival of the fittest.' Higher forms of life supplented lower ones. This way of thinking had enormous appeal for radical militants who eulogised the need for political battle and asserted that one specific group—the working class—would win it.

Marx and Engels thought in terms of stages of transformation which involved ruptures of a macroscopic nature. Despite their admiration for Darwin, they were drawn to notions of sharp breaks between one kind of political and social ‘order’ and another. A preoccupation with historical stages from the beginning of recorded time to the present was not new. The Greeks since the poet Hesiod, if not before, had believed that the golden age had yielded to the silver and then to the bronze. Hesiod was a pessimist: each age was worse than the one before. Later thinkers contended that big changes were inevitable but that deterioration was not inevitable. Down to Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century, they argued that transformations were of a cyclical kind. Things underwent alteration but after time reverted to their original condition—and then, needless to say, they moved further round the old circle. Not everyone accepted such ways of thinking.

The founders of Marxism put class struggle at the forefront of their analysis; they said the working class (or the proletariat ) would remake the politics, economics and culture of the entire world. Messianism had crept in again here. Judaism and Christianity projected the arrival on earth of a Saviour who would strike down the enemies of God and raise up a community of perfection. Salvation according to Marx and Engels would come not through an individual, but through a whole class. The proletariat’s experience of degradation under capitalism would give it the motive to change the nature of society; and its industrial training and organisation would enable it to carry its task through to completion. The collective endeavour of socialist workers would transform the life of well-meaning people—and those who offered resistance would be suppressed.

Politics, they suggested, would cease to exist. This was no new idea. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century had suggested that public affairs ought to be guided by what he called the General Will. Marx and Engels followed Machiavelli in rejecting morality principle for action. They wanted to focus a glacial eye on their situation. They embraced scientific principles of analysis and recommendation. This was a legacy of the European Enlightenment. Scottish, French and English thinkers exercised a huge impact on them. David Hume and Voltaire had taken a scalpel to the fat of superstition and prejudice.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided the inspiration for twentieth century communism. No one else so effectively captivated minds on the political far left or drew other minds to that standpoint. The gusto of their writings and their politicking was tremendous. Few other variants of communist ideology any longer came under consideration outside the rarefied atmosphere of scholarly or sectarian groups. Marxism and communism for most people were co-extensive. The kind of Marxism which they knew about was to a greater or lesser extent linked to the interpretation offered by Lenin and the makers of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.

They died in exile in the United Kingdom. Marx expired on 14 March 1883 in his family house in north London. Engels lived a dozen years more; he passed away on 5 August 1895. Both were Germans. They were bright students. They were well schooled; they read voraciously in European literature and contemporary public debates—Marx was especially expert in ancient Greek philosophy. They quickly rejected the staid bourgeois life projected for them.

They had declared in The Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German policespies. They declared, with more than a little exaggeration: ‘Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.’

The future was specified. Marx and Engels predicted a final struggle between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’ under capitalism. The outcome, they said, was inevitable: the supremacy of the proletariat. The proletariat was the name used increasingly by socialist intellectuals for the working class. Marx and Engels saw employed workers as the future saviour of mankind. They gave little mind to the unemployed. They, like most bourgeois of the period, had no time for those people at the very base of society who had no regular occupation; they despised the so-called lumpenproletariat as a bunch of thieves and indolent ne’erdo-wells. The great revolution, they believed, required an active force of organised, skilled and literate industrial labourers.

The ultimate objective for Marx and Engels was the creation of a worldwide communist society. They believed that communism had existed in the distant centuries before ‘class society’ came into being. The human species had supposedly known no hierarchy, alienation, exploitation or oppression. Marx and Engels predicted that such perfection could and inevitably would be reproduced after the overthrow of capitalism. ‘Modern communism’, however, would have the benefits of the latest technology rather than flint-stones. It would be generated by global proletarian solidarity rather than by disparate groups of illiterate, innumerate cavemen. And it would put an end to all forms of hierarchy.

Politics would come to an end. The state would cease to exist. There would be no distinctions of personal rank and power. All would engage in self-administration on an equal basis. Marx and Engels chastised communists and socialists who would settle for anything less. They were maximalists. No compromise with capitalism or parliamentarism was acceptable to them. They did not think of themselves as offering the watchword of ‘all or nothing’ in their politics. They saw communism as the inevitable last stage in human history; they rejected their predecessors and rival contemporaries as ‘utopian’ thinkers who lacked a scientific understanding.'"

"You might say, 'Why talk about Communism, they have already disbanded anyway!'" said Peace lily. "But let's observe, forty-five years after democracy apparently triumphed over communism without a final struggle, nearly thirty years on, the anti-communist victory of 1989 seemed more problematic. Authoritarianism without a mass party has recovered in Russia, and even in countries earlier designated as 'the West'. The communist regime in China, of course, did not yield: 1989's demonstrations in Beijing were crushed. Still Chinese communism was on its way to developing a new hybrid authoritarian structure that allowed for capitalism without democracy.

We'll continue our investor story in the next session, bi 'idhnillah."

Then Peace lily sang a song,

Deep in the dark, I don't need the light

There's a ghost inside me

It all belongs to the other side

We live, we love, we lie ***)

[Session 5]
[Session 3]

Bahasa

Policy of the "Stupid Pricks" (3)

"Enjoying the minister's treat of warm asparagus soup in a classy hotel, which, according to our Chinese investor, he had never tasted in his own country—and indeed, there was something interesting in the Land of Archipelago, sometimes, a news was typed in a hurry, so a 'poor guy' might be possibly typo as a 'cool guy'—then investor told a story, 'In a never never time, which was of course different from today, where now man can only 'talk to the walls,' whereas on that time, man could talk to trees.

Well, there was a man, walking languidly among the trees. He had walked here and there, begging the trees for help, but he was always rejected. Talking to the sugar cane tree, rejected; talking to Bougainvillea flowers, rejected, talking to Patchouli leaves, rejected, even talking to cacti, rejected. Finally, he sat under an apple tree. He was tired, he slept in her shade.

When he awoke, the tree greeted him, 'O come, son of man. Come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my sshadow and therefore, be happy!'

'I'm too big to climb and play,' said the man. 'I want to buy things and have fun. I want some money. Can you give me some money?'

'I'm sorry,” said the tree, 'I have no money.'

The tree felt sorry for the man. Just imagine, who wouldn't feel sorry for him, whose face looked like a 'bumpkin—when in fact, and the tree hadn't realized it yet, the man, by borrowing and combining expressions of a reformer and a philosopher, was nothing but a 'stupid prick'. Wise men said, 'Only fools rush in, so don't judge a book just by its theatrical action!'

'I have only leaves and apples,' said the tree. 'Take my apples, and sell them in the city. Then you will have money and you will be happy.'

And so the man gathered the apples and the leaves, then carried them away. The apple tree was amazing, her fruits had many colors, , from red, which was dominant, yellow, green, and recently, there was also blue. Are there any apples that are blue? Maybe bluish, like a blue spruce.

The man made the leaves into a crown and put it on his head. He looked like a theatrical play King of the forest. While leaving, he said to the tree, 'Don't worry, I'll be back! And when I come to you, all of this land, will have a right of ownership.'

The apple tree proved to be true, with the apple and its leaves, the man became rich and was chosen to be the village chief. The festive party lasted seven days and seven nights. Food was served and dancing was held. The party was so magnificent that a guest from abroad commented about the meal, '...almost beyond anything Hollywood could've pulled together...' rendering our Chieftain looked blushing.

While our Chieftain was busy with, 'The way of Ninja!', that's his son's slogan, the apple tree, waiting and waiting, the man didn't come. Whether it was forgotten, or deceived, certainly, the apple tree was crying. It was so sad as a storm came to hit her, causing her leaves fall, in an instant, she turned into a barren tree. Tomorrow, the days will start to get longer, but the storm, has just begun. Thus, is it possible for the apple tree will be 'Homelessness'?'"

"Let's pause our Investor's story for a moment," Peace lily interrupted. "Allow me to tell you about 'Homelessness.'

There is nothing new about homelessness, says David Levinson. There have been homeless people for some 10,000 years—from the time when humans built their first permanent homes in the first towns of the Fertile Crescent. The historical record, novels and poems, and sacred texts tell us the stories of beggars, wandering ascetics, penniless friars, displaced peasants, lost soldiers, street youths, vagrants, new arrivals in the city, and displaced workers.

Homelessness [the state of having no home or permanent residence. Whereas 'Homeless' (of a person) without a home or permanent residence, and therefore typically living on the streets] when viewed cross-culturally, is a complex issue. In many developed nations, homeless families, many of them immigrants, are the major issue. In the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the homeless are often women and their children, youths, and migrants from rural areas who have come to cities looking for work and opportunity. The emergence of many cities in developing nations as major regional or global commercial centers has made the problem even worse, by increasing the appeal of cities as employment centers to the rural poor while at the same time providing less and less affordable housing and support services for immigrants.

Homelessness is one of the least understood social issues. The public image of homelessness and public perceptions of the nature and causes of homelessness have little relation to the reality of the situation. Experts have yet to agree on a single definition or criterion to measure homelessness. The homeless experience high levels of social, emotional, and physical problems.

It's not easy to understand what the causes of Homelessness, because the factors that explain contemporary homelessness are so complex and intertwined. Several quantitative studies have sought to determine what factors are most associated with increased homelessness. Martha Burt found that homelessness was associated with increased unemployment, single parenthood, reduced public benefits, and high housing and living costs.

One of the causes of Homelessness in India, Indonesia and Puerto Rico, is Forced eviction. Katherine Brickell, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, and Alex Vasudevan (2017) wrote that Forced eviction, claims UN-Habitat, is a ‘global phenomenon’ and ‘global crisis’. Figures published by the agency indicate that during the 2000s, at least 15 million people globally were forcibly evicted. According to Amnesty International (2012), between 2007–2009 alone, over 4.5 million people were affected. Forced evictions are, ‘when people are forced out of their homes and off their land against their will, with little notice or none at all, often with the threat or use of violence’. On 2017, forced evictions in the name of ‘progress’ are attracting attention as growing numbers of people in the Global South are ejected and dispossessed from their homes, often through intimidation, coercion and the use of violence. At the same time, we have also witnessed the intensification of a ‘crisis’ urbanism in the Global North characterized by new forms of social inequality, heightened housing insecurity and violent displacement. These developments have led to an explosion of forced evictions supported by new economic, political and legal mechanisms, and increasingly shaped by intensifying environmental change. As UN-Habitat & UNHRP have recently concluded, ‘accelerating urbanization, climate change and globalization, financial and other global crises have contributed to making forced evictions even more acute and complex’.

Forced evictions, according to Brickle, et al, are themselves nothing new and that the elementary brutalities associated with displacement and dispossession must be located within a much wider historical narrative. As Stuart Elden has reminded us, ‘conflict over land, at a variety of scales, is a major factor in human affairs and […] its effects have been almost entirely negative’. According to Elden, such effects are often intimately intertwined with struggles over property and ownership and have depended on historically specific forms of allocation and distribution and equally contingent expressions of control, power and violence. These tendencies have assumed an important role within the history of capitalism and many, in this context, have singled out its constitutive dependency on the logics of primitive accumulation, violence and displacement. The relationship of eviction and expulsion to the enclosure of common lands and more recent forms of land-grabbing is thus well-established. A number of scholars have also highlighted the concomitant emergence of a settler colonialism as a conspicuously violent form of domination and dispossession.

Forced evictions are far more than the result of an individual’s or an institution’s decision or action. They are also part of a larger assemblage of elements, conditions, materials and knowledges. Forced evictions are often intensely traumatic experiences, for more attention to the emotional and differentiated impacts that forced eviction brings. A critical optic is now needed that acknowledges and attends to the different affective and emotional registers of displacement and dispossession and the un-making of home spaces. As Richardson identify, ‘Although physical and economic losses are the most apparent impacts of forced land evictions, there exist serious mental health consequences for those who experience or who are at risk of losing their land.’ The violent logic contained and enacted through forced evictions is also, always, a fragile performance of power that must contend with the people and places infracted upon, before, during and after the intervention. The profound emotional and material dislocations that the loss of home produces is therefore not prefigured as a closed or final defeat, but as a generative environment for varied forms of resistance and contestation to formal organization and protest. Whether individual or collective, organized or spontaneous, any reluctance to submit to a forced eviction is continually exposed to criminalization, framed as an actual or potential security threat that must be contained.

According to UN-Human Rights, 'Forced evictions constitute gross violations of a range of internationally recognized human rights, including the human rights to adequate housing, food, water, health, education, work, security of the person, freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and freedom of movement.

Forced evictions are often linked to the absence of legally secure tenure, which constitutes an essential element of the right to adequate housing. Forced evictions share many consequences similar to those resulting from arbitrary displacement, including population transfer, mass expulsions, mass exodus, ethnic cleansing and other practices involving the coerced and involuntary displacement of people from their lands and communities.

As a result of forced evictions, people are often left homeless and destitute, without means of earning a livelihood and often with no effective access to legal or other remedies. Forced evictions intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and invariably affect the poorest, most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially women, children, minorities and indigenous peoples.

The impacts of forced evictions go far beyond material losses, leading to greater inequality, marginalization and social conflicts. In the context of development, infrastructure projects, land acquisitions, urban renewal and mega events, eviction impact assessments are needed to: consider the wide range of impacts, and argue in favour of less harmful solutions and alternatives to the foreseen project; estimate the real costs related to eviction and displacement of individuals and community that goes far beyond the mere market price of physical structures; and allow for a better quantification of claims, including in regard to compensation.'

We'll carry on our Investor's story on the next session, bi 'idhnillah."

Peace lily then sang a song,

Masih sukakah kau mendengar

[Do you still like to hear]

dengus nafas saudara kita yang terkapar?

[the sigh of our sprawling brothers?]

Masih sukakah kau melihat

[Do you still like to see]

butir keringat kaum kecil yang terjerat

[beads of sweat of entangled helpless people]

oleh slogan-slogan manis sang hati laknat?

[by the sweet slogans of the cursed heart?]

Oleh janji-janji muluk tanpa bukti? **)

[By grandiose promises without proof?]

[Session 4]
[Session 2]

Bahasa