British left

So Andy “Socialist Unity” Newham and Louis “Unrepentant Marxist” Proyect have gotten in an online cat fight, after Louis objected to what he saw as Andy’s glorification of Winston Churchill. In Louis’ view, and I’m inclined to partially agree with him, Andy praised Churchill too much, gave him too much credit in what circumstances forced him to do and neglected to mention the dark side of how he led the war, as for example with the starvation in India:

When I brought up the topic of 6 to 8 million Bengalis dying because of British wartime policies that caused a famine, I was treated like a skunk at a garden party by Newman and his supporters, including Paul Fauvet, a signer of the Euston Manifesto who wrote: “Louis Proyect’s tactic is to change the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Churchill’s role in World War II, so he talks about the Bengal famine instead.” Meanwhile, Newman also chastised me for “prioritising the entirely secondary issue of India…”

To which Andy responded angrily. I’m not so much interested in the wider disagreement between the two and whether or not Andy was slandered by Louis or is too defensive, but in the argument Andy makes in the comments about the Bengali famine:

The bengal famine actually killed roughly two million people. There is no mileage to be gained by exagerating.

In Eastern Europe tens of millions of people died due to the war, including widespread famine.

To select one incident of famine being used as a deliberate wespon of murder, remember that in 1944 the Nazis deliberatly blocked all foodstuffs being transported to Western Holland as a form of collective punishment for a rail strike, and this left some 18000 dead.

The Bengal famine was not deliberate, but the result of callous incompetence, and an inaccurate model of economic understanding. Small consolation to the dead, but an important moral and political difference. My own maternal grandmother died of malnutrition in England in 1936, due to similar faulty economic theories. She was 26 years old. That dodn’t mean that the British tory government was as bad as Hitler, although I am sure it seemed like it to my granddad, my mum and her siblings.

Nor is it as straight forward as you make out in your simplistic statement that the rice went to British soldiers.

There was the loss of Burma to Japan, which had been a major rice exporter to Bengal, and then a major cyclone, and an outbreak of a disease in the rice plants. The crop was down, and there were less imports.

The British and Indian armies did buy a lot of rice, but the main cause of the famine seems to have been an unregulated market, so that the percieved drop of rice availability led to hoarding, price rises, putting rice out of reach of the poorest. the hoarding was mainly carried out by more prosperous bengalis.

There was undoubtedly racism and incompetence in the government that led to a slow administrative response; but the famine was arguably more due to faulty economic theory, which made the government slow to intervene to lower prices.

In the post itself Andy had justified his own omittance of the famine by saying that well respected histories of the Second World War, including Angus Calder’s, The People’s War often omit it as well, which doesn’t strike me as a particularly strong argument. That at the time people in England rarely cared or thought much about India is understandable, but more than sixty years onward and in the context of the war as a “People’s War”, things like the Bengali famine need to be mentioned and evaluated, as it shows how some peoples mattered more than others.

Moving on to the meat of Andy’s argument about the famine itself, what struck me was that, while he agrees with Louis on the reality of it (though not its importance, as mentioned), he (unconsciously) seems to want to lessen the crime of it, by coming up with all sorts of reasons as to why it wasn’t a crime as much as an accident. He compares it to deliberate acts of nazi terrorism (though the famine in Holland was due more to the liberation of most of its agrarian parts before the densely population of western Holland than to deliberate starvation), worse tragedies in Eastern Europe and finally argues it was caused by “callous incompetence” and “faulty economic theories” rather than design. These phrases may sound harsh, but their main effect is still to remove responsibility for the famine from those who administered Bengal and those who profited from the panic.

This idea that atrocities like the Bengali famine taking place under (imperialistic) capitalism are unintended side effects for which nobody can be held responsible is a widely used excuse for the crimes of capitalism, which are not tolerated when used to diminish responsibility for similar atrocities taking place under Stalinism, say. The famine in Bengal is like the famines in the Ukraine in the thirties, a foreseeable consequence of deliberate policies introduced without the consent of the people they affected; at best both these atrocities were treated as acceptable costs, at worst these were the intended outcomes of these policies. Let’s not forget that part of English colonial rule in India was the deliberate destruction of the old local, village based support networks that used to prevent or alliviate famine earlier and its replacement by a nation wide free market. It was in this context that the deliberate decision was made by the government to divert part of the harvest to English soldiers, to not interfere in the free market and let speculation continue that priced what was available out of reach of much of the population. The famine was not a tragic accident, but the unavoidable outcome of these decisions and hence as much a crime as if these people had been gunned down instead.

Capitalism as a system has avoided much of the guilt for its crimes because we are trained to only look at the goals the bosses in business and government want to achieve and to see the negative consequences of achieving those goals either as a natural part of the system or at worst as regrettable accidents. What we need to realise instead is that these consequences cannot be decoupled. If a water company is privatised and then raises its prices beyond the reach of the poorest third of the population, this means that deaths due to cholera caused by drinking unsafe water are as much a goal of the company as the increased profits, as the latter is not realisable without the former. Socialists should know this and not make excuses.