P. Sainath's jejune idea of Justice

P.Sainath wrote an amusing book called 'Everybody loves a good drought'. Then he got a Magsaysay Award and his brains turned to shit. Clearly, if Society could turn him into a Champion of the Poor, then Society could also decide to turn every poor person into a greatly venerated Artist earning big bucks. Consider the following interview with him which has been excerpted in Scroll.in.

How do we keep the skills associated with traditional livelihoods alive, even while dismantling the caste hierarchies that kept them going for so long?

We don't want to keep skills which are useless alive. Caste hierarchies kept alive the skill of chanting Vedas and compiling Astrological charts for Sainath's & my ancestors. But the thing was very badly paid which is why me and Sainath have not kept up those skills.

Sainath, however, takes a different view-

It’s a very difficult question. There is no simple answer to it.

Yet Sainath and my great grandfathers didn't find this a difficult question at all. They found a very simple answer- viz. acquire a useful skill and tell 'caste hierarchy' to go fuck itself. Sometimes this was more safely done after migrating. But migration was a good thing in itself coz our agraharams were smelly shitholes.

Destroying the caste hierarchies, to my mind, takes precedence over everything else.

But Sainath is powerless to do so. Thus being an impotent fuckwit, for Sainath, takes precedence over saying or doing anything useful.

That said, caste in many ways represented the feudal relations of production.

Rubbish! Feudalism was found in many parts of the globe without any caste system existing. Thus caste could not represent something which was wholly different and independent from it.

That’s how they formed caste around occupations.

But occupation based caste groups existed in periods and places where there was no feudalism. In India, it is likely that caste took hold during the period of Tribal Republics. In ancient Greece and Rome, we notice a distinction between the aristocracy and the plebeians with metics and slaves occupying a yet lower position.

That makes it uniquely different and negatively different from many other relations of production, like capitalist relations of production.

Sheer nonsense! Only some senile Marxists pretend that 'capitalist relations of production' are not almost infinitely multiply realizable. All that matters is whether factors of production are allocated through a more or less open market.

For instance, a leather worker in Milan, Italy – for many Europhiles the centre of the fashion universe – would be recognised as a master leather worker, earning more than the CEOs of some of the smaller companies there.

The best craftsmen working in niche luxury segments in India earn more than CEOs of smaller companies- many of whom go bust soon enough. However, the average wage in the ateliers of Milan is stagnating and young people are not being recruited because the Chinese in Prato work harder for much less money.

He would have a client list of some of the great names across the world. But his son or daughter would not be compelled to be a leather worker. They could be a rocket scientist or pizza baker or whatever.

It is more likely that he will be unemployed or forced to migrate to Germany or- in the old days- the UK.

But should the child choose to take it up, they have a tremendous advantage and a great deal of respect that they earn from being part of a family that is so highly esteemed in that field.

The child won't go into leather because his Daddy will tell him that the future lies with the Chinese.

The son of a mochi in an Indian village leads, as his father and sisters and brothers do, a wretched and miserable life stripped of any dignity, condemned to untouchability.

Because the product he makes looks like shit. He needs to get the fuck out of the village and find a more remunerative occupation. But so should the son of a purohit because you can't eat dignity.

And if he wants to try and be something different, there are powerful forces in the village that will teach him why that cannot be.

Fuck off! Nobody can stop you walking to the nearest bus stop or train station. Sainath and my ancestors would be as poor as shit right now if they had stayed in the agraharam. They got the fuck out of the village and then got the fuck out of the towns coz the grass is always Green Card holder.

Even today, it often leads to that person migrating out of the village, the countryside; but what does the person meet in the city?

The chance to save up money and move to a better neighborhood and educate the kids so that if not one's kids then their kids or their kids get a shot at emigrating.

Class contempt. (Not that caste is absent – that is there, too). And not having other skills needed to bring them a life of dignity and fulfilment.

The thing about class contempt is that it motivates you to change your ways in accordance with 'Tardean mimetics'. Sainath and my ancestors met a lot of 'class contempt'- and also racial contempt- when they first attempted to speak or write in English. But they stuck with the program and that's why no one now sneers at the Tambram whereas the rustic Bihari Brahman has to struggle.

So what we need to do is not just destroy the caste hierarchy but simultaneously create respect for the work and labour that people do, for what they produce.

Sainath can't destroy anything because he has no power or influence. Nor can he 'create respect' for his own work. How is he going to get us to start venerating mochis? Even if he personally distributes Magsaysay Awards to every cobbler we will still think of his oeuvre as utter cobblers.

At a time when aspirations are at odds with availability of jobs, how can livelihoods absorb and employ the workforce?
Millions of people have been driven out of agriculture and agriculture-related livelihoods, in the name of development, in the name of capitalist society’s claim that those removed from agriculture would be shifted to industry.

Sheer nonsense! Nobody drove anyone out of agriculture. People ran away from it of their own accord. People who wanted Development in India did not want their own neighborhoods to be choked by millions of dehatis fleeing agricultural involution.

A marginal farmer dislocated in Mandya, Karnataka is unlikely to get absorbed in the Infosys workforce even though it is an hour’s drive away.

This is not true. The marginal farmer may gain employment as a groundsman because he has the right skill set.

Does Sainath have his tongue in cheek? Why does he speak of Infosys being 'an hour's drive away'? Does he think 'marginal farmers' have SUVs and commute to work after dropping the kids off at School? Perhaps he also thinks they go bowling and do their shopping at Walmart.

So, we have systematically destroyed existing occupations and livelihoods without creating any alternatives.fffdSaigghhccupations. This was very naughty of him, I'm sure. But I don't really believe him. Agricultural involution occurred precisely because population growth was unchecked. 

This has happened to farmers, weavers, to the agrarian society at large, in some stupid illusion that industry will absorb them.

It happened because, under involution, farmers couldn't feed themselves- let alone the weavers and mochis and purohits who supplied their simple needs. India, an almost entirely agricultural country, was dependent on PL480 to stave off wide-spread Famine.

It is true that when we hear of a new hi-tech industry opening in our area, we assume we can't get a job there. But we can. They need sweepers and receptionists and security guards and canteen staff same as any other industry. Sainath does not know this.

No such industry exists. What manufacturing jobs have you created in the last twenty-five years of the neoliberal economic policies ruling this country?

Point to any manufacturing unit established since 1996 and its entire work-force, represents jobs which have been created. Growth in ancilliaries including 'informal tradables' are even more substantial. The alternative to modest liberalization was bankruptcy for the Government and a proliferation of illegal enterprises.

Second, there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the kind of development we have undertaken. On the one hand, a lot of jobs are automated, robotised. And on the other, Artificial Intelligence is going to wipe out, on a scale we cannot imagine today, even many middle class occupations. Not just those of workers. In banks, ATMs have replaced so many jobs.

Yes, yes. Steam engine was very evil. It created mass unemployment coz machines replaced human beings. Almost everybody died of starvation.

But earlier, they destroyed you in one area, because they needed you in another. Now, they’re going to have people they don’t need anywhere. Huge sections will be completely dispossessed. You haven’t a hope in hell in addressing this question within the current policy framework.

But, if 'they' can do anything they like- they'll just kill us all off. There's nothing we can do about it.

You cannot address it when you’re grooming and nurturing inequality.

Sainath may have been grooming inequality because he wanted to fuck it in the ass when it reached the age of consent. But I have not done anything similar.

Inequality is the womb of violence, the cradle of fundamentalism, the playground of unelected power, and the graveyard of secularism and democracy.

So is equality. People knife others and steal their stuff so as establish their superiority. Fundamentalist religions arose coz Prophets wanted to be seen as greatly superior to the common ruck. If equality obtains there are no elections. Why? Because an elected representative has a higher status than the ordinary voter. Power may still exist, but its holders would be unelected. There can be no equality in a democracy because it is a form of government in which a few exercise power on behalf of the many. Secularism soon dies where perfect Equality obtains because people gang up to kick in the heads of its boring and stupid exponents.

So there’s no chance for any of the aspirations to be met when all that ordinary people do is destroyed or discredited.

There is no chance of anything worthwhile happening from Sainath's perspective. But this is because he is a cretin.

Why are time and skills never factored into any calculation of profit and loss, for most traditional livelihoods?

Because the product is shit compared to something mass manufactured to a higher quality and lower price.
I employ a lot of time and skill writing my poems. They yield me nothing because a superior substitute is available.

Skills that involve the mind/head always factor that in; but rarely those that involve the hand.

Sainath is wrong. Hand jobs, too, command a price albeit a lower one than giving head.

Also, it’s not just time and skills, it’s labour itself that they will not respect, because they’ve got to make their money out of the product of that labour – by exploiting that labour, by keeping the wages down.

The self-employed too have that problem because it is difficult to respect yourself after you have yourself a handie.

Untouchability itself is such a weapon to perpetuate a permanently demoralised gene pool of labour, whom we can exploit at will and command.

But a lot of people with whom people had no economic relationship were still treated as 'untouchable'. The opposite was also true. The millionaire Dalits whom Ambedkar sought to convert to his cause knew that their own employees would hesitate to accept food or water from their hands.

By the way, no matter what the theory on paper, one shorthand definition you can take of “unskilled” in Indian society – anything that a woman does is unskilled.

Which is why Priyanka Chopra and Kiran Shaw are on minimum wage. Still, it's good to know Sainath is an unreconstructed patriarchalist who thinks women spend all their time cleaning and cooking and engaging in manual labor.

In agriculture, everything that the woman does is unskilled.

Because there are no female agronomists or irrigation engineers or plant geneticists.

Problem is, women do more work. If you’re going to start paying fair, civilised, living wages, your costs are going to go up incredibly.

I am not paying any wages. Very few people are. Sainath may be exploiting women but, I'm sure, he gives himself handies.

It’s to do with labour as a whole; their work isn’t respected, and increasingly, we’ll use weapons to break that down further.

The work of drug dealers is not respected. We may use weapons to break them down. However, they may have superior weapons and better lawyers than we do. Ultimately, what matters is not 'respect', nor 'weapons'. There will be drug dealers so long as the market for illegal drugs exists.

You broke that down by destroying their collective bargaining power and smashing all their unions, which did them a great deal of good.

But countries where Unions weren't smashed saw the same outcome. Some blame Trade Liberalization. The truth, however, is that consumers have more votes than organized workers. Indeed, they too prefer to vote as consumers because their kids aren't going to join them on the shop-floor.

You did all that and now you suffer.

Who is suffering? Billionaire CEOs?

What’s factored in the calculation, in the capitalistic framework, is profit. And profit depends on how much you can push your costs down. You’re going to do everything you can to see that those costs go down.

Profits don't depend on costs. They depend on price and volume. That's why loss making start-ups can turn their promoters into billionaires. Everybody understands that costs can be brought down once volume is achieved and, moreover, that there will be lucrative ancilliary markets to tap down the road. Economies of scope matter as much as those of scale.

Why are the 70 per cent of Indians living outside the great metros so poorly represented in the media?

Why are film stars and sports heroes so over-represented in the media? Why are there hardly any articles about middle class urban people? The 'lifestyle' articles aimed at us are written by people of a superior social class. I watch Nigella Lawson's programs and, much to the discomfiture of my dinner guests, have taken to grinning lasciviously and making orgasmic noises as I put the finishing touches to my biryani.

Why are their stories not recorded?

Why is my story not recorded? The answer is- because it is as boring as shit.

Not only the poor living outside the great metros, even the poor living within are not represented in the media.

Nor are the not so poor or those doing quite well or even those who are quite comfortably off thank you- unless, their son or daughter hits the big time in Sports or the Entertainment industry.

National dailies publishing from Delhi devote, on average, 0.67 per cent of their front page to rural India, where 69 per cent of the population lives. Why do they do this? Because corporations have reduced journalism to a revenue stream in the last thirty years.

The sort of journalism which people pay to read can give rise to a wealthy Corporation- ask Rupert Murdoch. Shite journalism which concentrates on miserabilist accounts of shit-holes has to be subsidized. The Guardian- supported by a wealthy trust- may be able to get away with it. But, even people who read it, ignore its policy prescriptions. The thing is merely an exercise in 'virtue signalling'.

For me, paid news, fake stuff, is not an aberration.

Because you are in the same biz.

It’s entirely true to the characteristic and logic of profit-seeking corporate media.

It is also what happens when you have a senile hack banging the same drum from decade to decade for a wholly careerist reason.

It’s a very different media from what emerged in the freedom struggle – the Indian Press was the child of the freedom struggle.

The Indian Press was an imitation of the British owned Press with which it wasn't entirely competitive because of the lower editorial standards and greater partisanship with respect to caste and regional issues which had little salience for the White Man.

It was idealism-driven.

No. It was corrupt, sycophantic, and abysmally written.

Its owners, its editors, were in and out of prison much of their lives.

Only if they were primarily politicians- in which case, their papers were a bit shite. The Times of India and the Calcutta Statesman were head and shoulders above any native outfit. Dalmia acquired the former in 1947 but had to go to jail for fraudulent conversion in this connection.  Perhaps this is what Sainath is getting at.

The existing media has converted itself into prisons for employees and re-education camps for their audiences.

No! The existing media has converted itself rape-camps for employees who are forced to shit into each others mouth in between being sodomized in the eye sockets. As for the audience of the existing media, everyone knows that their skin is peeled off slowly while they are forced to listen to the shrieks of their little children as they are fed to alligators.

The richest man in your country is the biggest media owner. It is a continent-sized conflict of interest.

Why? The guy has an interest in the country growing rapidly. After all, his competition is outside the country.

There are lots of independent journalists in those institutions; increasingly, they’re being weeded out and thrown out.

Weeded out means the same thing as 'thrown out'. If they can write well and have something interesting to say, they could make money using the internet. Barkha Dutt no longer has a job in TV because Kapil Sabil won't put any more money into his pro-Congress channel. But she is pod-casting like crazy. If these so called independent journalists really have a burning desire to serve the public, they can do so by starting a blog or YouTube channel.

The fundamental feature of the media of our time is the growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality.

No. The fundamental feature is new technology permitting 'unbundling' of content. There was never any connection between mass media and mass reality coz the latter was boring and miserable whereas the former had to peddle dreams and distractions to make a profit.

Occasionally, there will be times like the Gujarat earthquake or the Kerala floods that forces them to cover things.

Stuff that is new is news. Earthquakes don't happen everyday- if they did, they wouldn't be news and nobody would cover them.

Once in five years – we still happen to be an electoral democracy – they have to cover poor people. That’s what makes the average 0.67 per cent. You remove the election year, it falls to 0.24 per cent.

Which telling statistic proves that the Mass Media will cease to interest the Masses if it concentrates on miserabilist accounts of their lives. Lot of elderly people like me suffer from constipation. We don't want to read about our struggles with going potty. I don't want to see scantily clad pictures of fat, balding, cunts like myself contorting their faces in the hope of squeezing out a turd. That may be my reality and the reality of millions like me, but that's not how I see myself. I do like to read articles about Jennifer Aniston, however, because my man-boobs are bigger than hers and so Brad Pitt would never have dumped me.

The media is the most exclusionist institution of Indian democracy, caste-wise, class-wise, gender-wise.

It is not an institution. It is a phenomenon of the market.

And the kind of corporations that own them are rent-seeking, profit-seeking.

Which is why they can't be a Public institution.

There’s a huge need for diversity in the media, for democratisation of the media.

There is a need for less shite journalists. Why did Sainath himself go from writing amusingly to ranting like a Mahatma Gandhi who is using Karl Marx as a suppository.

The only genuine efforts that can happen are if there are major non-corporate, non-status media houses which can cover the poor and enable them to find their place in it.

Sure. Omidyar or some such billionaire could hire a bunch of starving people and get them tech assistance and they could put together content a thousand times better than shitheads like Sainath. The trouble is, they would be writing truthfully. This would help the BJP do a better job on 'last mile delivery'. But in that case Sainath would lose his 'obligatory passage point status. He could no longer claim to speak for the very poor. Instead, poor women would be able to lay into him for saying stupid, patriarchalist, shite like 'women's work is unskilled'.

When that happens, it also has a forced impact on the corporate media. That they have to suddenly broaden a few things in order to meet the challenge.

Actually, the corporate media will have to double down on Sports and Entertainment and fluff 'lifestyle' pieces.

That’s how some of it gets into the corporate media as well.
When or how do you think traditional livelihoods can be made appealing/aspirational for the younger lot? 
I think it’s not enough to make just the livelihood appealing; you have to make the idea of justice appealing.

Very true! To get people to be chimney sweeps or cobblers or agricultural laborers, you need to convince them that they are Batman on an undercover mission to bring the Joker to justice.

I believe it’s there in every young child and among young people, and we spend a lifetime socialising them into losing that value.

Yes! Young kids want to destroy their health doing boring, badly paid, jobs in rural shitholes. We are wrong to let them go to School or watch Movies or listen to the Radio. This causes them to see that they could have a better life if the got the fuck out of a condition of miserabilist agricultural involution.

Growth cannot be only in terms of output and figures. Economists who place people at the centre of their thinking tell you that you have to get your growth through justice.

But these Economists are completely shit. They become Chancellors of White Elephants like Nalanda University which took land away from poor farmers so as to create a Post Grad English medium College teaching wholly worthless subjects. The people of Rajgir wanted a Degree College. What they got instead is a place they would not want their own kids to attend because they would become less not more employable as a result.

Not with justice, not justice as an afterthought, but growth itself has to come through justice.

The problem here is that Sainath's idea of Justice, like Sen's, is some adolescent fantasy which holds that there is some locus of Power 'up there' which creates Poverty and Inequality and so forth. Kids may lap it up- more particularly if they smoke a lot of dope. But the thing is the moral equivalent of blaming Mummy for the fact that you aint a Rock & Roll star- the bitch should just have bought me that Electric guitar like I told her to!- instead of a job delivering Pizza to pay your alimony and child support.