Technical Students' Politics in Orissa: Problems and Prospects

Technical Universities(which include about a hundred colleges in private sector and only three in public sector) in Orissa are not allowed to have any official students’ Unions. There were, and still are, long debates on whether students should “enter” politics or not among the bourgeois intellectuals and politicians. This, ridiculous notion of “entering” politics is popular among the masses in front of whom, the State, through its Ideological Apparatuses, has been able to pose politics as something external to the very being of the masses, creating an impasse for many issues to be interiorised and keeping in-tact the politics of re-presentation.

The months of January and February are months of ‘festivals’ in Universities. Students organize and participate in cultural events. What is seen there clearly, is a domination of bourgeois hegemony. Capital articulates dissent so as to atomise individuals lending them the spirit of capitalism – competition. Consciousness of class is, through various means, attempted to be de-limited. The less articulated finds its expression in the totality of cultural formation in these Universities which include alcoholism and dope.

‘Primitive accumulation of capital’ at the moment of reproduction of labour-power is the subsumption of labour by capital at these concrete instances. Labour’s cry against this subsumption cannot be articulated by the morality of the working class at other subaltern locations but this cry is being commodified and sold at other loci of capital’s extraction of surplus value. (Several companies fund these Jan-Feb events in order to get advertised and consumerise the University more and more). The media also does the dual task – extraction of surplus value from the cry of labour and fragmenting labour into sociological antagonists.

There have been, but, attempts by groups to form associations in these Universities and these attempts crop up every now and then. There have been the Technical Students’ Federation by students of Biju Pattanayak University of Technology and most recently, students of Siksha ‘o’ Anusandhan University tried to associate (with leaders of former movement against the Government’s declaration to withdraw deemed University status taking the lead) and had their elections. In the light of re-presentative democratic politics, these can be seen as being infiltrated by political parties and individual aspirations of leaders of the movements – something that the bourgeois Ideology has as its problematic; but to see through the prism of politics of class, these are spontaneous anti-capitalist outbursts of labour. These

“engender(s) splendid shoots of idealism, comradely solidarity and self-sacrifice but at the same time individual struggle for existence[…]and the corrupting influence of the bourgeois parties do not permit these splendid shoots to develop fully. For all that, in spite of his remaining philistinely egoistic, and without exceeding in ‘human’ worth the average representative of the bourgeois classes, the average worker knows from experience that his simplest and natural desires can be satisfied only on the ruins of the capitalist system. ”[1]

[1] Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Aakar Books, 2005, New Delhi, Pp. 76. 

School Culture and Capitalism in Orissa

When in my teens, I was a part of the National Cadet Corps(NCC) in which we were taught how to use some of army skills including the use of rifle. NCC was an extra-curricular activity offered in all schools in India. Textbooks don’t say of ‘class divisions’ and speak of National unity and its diversity (not heterogeneity and hierarchy). It is obvious that hundreds enroll themselves as Nationalists into this organization of counter-revolutionary despair, a term I have borrowed from Trotsky to use for the NCC now. The despair to express individuality, atomized in anti-dialogic education, that existed in school students was properly articulated by the educational apparatus without their getting any hint of being instrumentalised. School students still sing with heads high, “Hum sab Bharatiya hain.”

Probably, the instrument is visible in popular cultural formation that is Indophilic. When capital confronts the working class in its three forms – commodity, money and labour-power, in both urban and rural regions, anti-capitalist movements are not allowed to move or be internalised as progressive, beyond their local rural spaces where they majorly exist. The agrarian tribal movement largely known as the Naxalite movement is posed as a threat to National security by the same larger apparatus which has kept in hiding from its masses the fundamental contradiction in India, that between capital and the working class.

Being sympathetic or apathetic to Naxalism appears as a matter of mere choice offered by capitalism in urban areas which are not ‘infiltrated’ by Maoists. If one discerns through this appearance one will find the ‘generalising drive of capital’ that forges itself through the popular cultural formation. The urban working class, largely, is under the hegemony of Indian capitalism, and this is something that both communists and workers have as a problem to be faced, if not fought immediately, when fascism will come up with large masses of proletariat in the times of crises. For the ongoing struggles in rural regions there are two choices, either to allow history to later romanticise their defeat or to understand and fight back Indian capitalism that is equally rooted in urban locations.

   

'Elite' Students: a view from within

Institute of Technical Education and Research is an engineering college based in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. It is one of those colleges, which in popular communist theoretical discourse in Orissa, known to be ‘elitist’. Students pay from around Rs.1,10,000 to Rs.1,65,000 as their per annum tuition fees. Of course they are from an ‘elite background’. In a recent interaction with students they come up and say: “We want a job for a good living though we are not interested in technology. The most fertile labour-market welcomes B.Tech pass outs. We can pursue our interests after we are stable.” This, of course, is ‘consumerism’. One student says, “My father works in a bank and I have taken loans so that I can complete my B.Tech and take a job. I love literature but that, I can keep, as a hobby to be pursued later.” ‘Petty bourgeois tendency’ of course.

What would Marx say! Maybe this:

“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”[1] 

And this he would, probably, say to the students and maybe 'staff.'

Notes: 

1. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Pp. 112, Progress Publishers, Moscow