Saturday, May 4, 2013

Editorial, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, DIVIDE!?, in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 30 April 2013 issue, Vol. 9, Part 1, No. 8.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, DIVIDE!?

 On the eve of the glorious festival cum fighting day of the world working class, we are quite sad to thus parody the clarion call of Karl Marx, evolved in the course of generations of intrepid working class struggles for socio-economic justice and humanist liberation. However, the existing sad state of affairs in the country and the world over is that workers are sought to be, and in reality also are, divided on sundry categories – of race, gender, country and region – and tend to quarrel with sections among themselves than putting up a united struggle against corporate plunderers. This disease has widely spread to Andhra Pradesh also or else it would be difficult to understand the rabid opposition to the allotment of captive iron ore mining rights to the prestigious Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited [of ‘Navaratna’ status], a wholly Government of India owned undertaking, running one of the largest integrated steel plants in the world at Visakhapatnam, which by the way has also thereby expressed its intent “to set up commensurate value addition facilities such as Beneficiation Plant, Pelletisation Plant, Steel Mill, depending on the quantum of iron ore  reserves available at Bayyaram (Khammam District) and other proposed allotment of mines in Warangal and Karimnagar districts.” And the sadder part is the participation of misguided workers of the region in, and the espousal by the ‘left’ parties/groups of, this unjust agitation which hurts more the interests of the working people at large than in any way contributing to the progress of the region/state. We endorse the view that any labor movement worth its name must be multiracial, multi-gender, multi-aged, skilled/non-skilled, …… LGBT-inclusive, and so on…” and as such strongly condemn such anti-people, anti-labor moves by vested interests and misguided parties/persons and call for broad and harmonious unity and struggle of working persons irrespective of all divides. In contrast, we really appreciate the campaign by Manda Krishna Madiga espousing the just causes of all old persons and widows, many of whom may be present or former workers, which good effort has also drawn applause from all right-thinking persons cutting across all sectional/political divides. §§§