A spectre is haunting the media world of India – the spectre of communism. All the media moghuls of electronic, print, audio and visual variety have assembled to exorcise this spectre. These at least belong to the realm of fact. The rest is shadowboxing, but shadowboxing with a purpose.Why this purpose has been invented when it is almost twenty years Soviet Union has collapsed after more than seventy years of existence, when the Peoples Republic of China has turned all its attention to a massive accumulation of capital and resource building quietly burying all the blistering rhetoric about revolutionism and reformism? China is on the threshold of becoming one of the mightiest powers of the world. Russia is now becoming rapidly a powerful modern state on bourgeois democratic line. Now, what is the hurry of the Indian anti-communists to finish off whatever that is still left of the Indian communists?
There is a hurry. India is also becoming quite an attractive capitalist country in a democratic garb notwithstanding the terrible load of poverty and squalor. And there are numerous denominations of communists thriving here upon fast increasing disparity in possessing wealth. To permit this to grow is to jeopardize India’s capitalist growth. To stamp out this danger state’s punitive power is being increased at an incredible pace. We are almost becoming a police state .On the other hand, media manipulations have become a mighty weapon .In fact, press, TV channels etc. those that really matter are an extension of very big business empires. To circulate the garbage of lies, unreality, porno, messages of innumerable godmen, obscurantism, cynicism etc., skilled hands are required – skilled editors, authors, scriptwriters, filmmakers, camera wizards and all that. They are hired at fabulous prices. Idealism, ethics etc. have become merely beautiful ancient words. Such an ambiance has to be seriously built.
Smart growth of capitalism demands a price, a cost input. Mere trickling down will not serve the purpose, as Joseph Stiglitz (see pic above and BIO below with a link to Wikipedia) has put it. If capitalism grows in a massive form its benefits to the citizens of society should also be massive. Other alternatives only would make this business of capitalism forbiddingly costlier. As Stiglitz has pointed out, the European or American Left rather has a more sustainable programme for this than the rightwing of these continents. Perhaps, more mature bourgeois content of these societies is responsible for this. Indian anticommunist columnists are mere reflections of this immature bourgeois content of Indian capitalism.
Now Stiglitz is a world famous Noble Prize-winning economist, not a card-holding member of any communist party. And Marx remains Marx and becomes more entrenched and relevant with the progress of capitalism. Marxian methodology of economic determinism is constantly gathering strength, for the simple reason that course of history is not affected by appearance or disappearance of Karl Marx. And Karl Marx was fully aware of it.
STIGLITZ BIO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiglitz)
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal (1979) and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In 2000 Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has held the rank of University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz is the most cited economist in the world, as of June 2008
