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.