Friday 17 July 2009

Rainbow - religion and mythology


The rainbow has a place in legend owing to its beauty and the historical difficulty in explaining the phenomenon.
In Greek Mythlogy, the rainbow was considered to be a path made by a messenger between Earth and Heaven. In Chinese mythology, the rainbow was a slit in the sky sealed by Goddess "Nuwa" using stones of five different colours. In Hindu mythology, the rainbow is called "Indradhanush", meaning the bow of Indra, the God of lightning, thunder and rain. Another Indian mythology says rainbow is the bow of Kama, the God of love. It is called Kamanabillu in Kannada, billu meaning bow. In Norse mythology, a rainbow called the "Bifrost" Bridge connects the realms of Asgard and Midgard, homes of the gods and humans, respectively. The Irish leprechaun's ecret hiding place for his pot of gold is usually said to be at the end of the rainbow. This place is nearly impossible to reach, because the rainbow is an optical effect which depends on the location of the viewer. When walking towards the end of a rainbow, it will move further away.
After Noah's Flood, the Bible relates that the rainbow gained meaning as the sign of God's promise that terrestrial life would never again be destroyed by flood I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.
Another ancient portrayal of the rainbow is given in the Epic of Gilgamesh the rainbow is the "jewelled necklace of the Great Mother Ishtar" that she lifts into the sky as a promise that she "will never forget these days of the great flood" that destroyed her children. people."

Swine Flu in India


Twenty-two new cases of swine flu, highest in a day so far, were reported on Wednesday in India taking to 251 the number of total confirmed cases of the influenza A(H1N1), which the WHOon (WHO) has declared as "unstoppable" virus. According to the health ministry, the new laboratory confirmed cases were reported from Delhi (7), Jalandhar (4), Cochin (2), Thiruvananthapuram (2), Mumbai (2), Pune (2), Hyderabad (1), Ahmedabad (1) and Bangalore (1). According to the union health ministry, so far 1,293 persons have been tested, of whom 251 were positive for Influenza A(H1N1). Of these 251 positive cases, 141 have been discharged. The remaining 110 of them are admitted to the identified health facilities. Five of the seven freshly confirmed cases in Delhi belong to one family and were among the group who returned from Malaysia. Another case from the group is a 45-year-old man and the seventh case is a 38-year-old man who travelled from Bangkok to New Delhi, a health ministry statement said. The four cases from Jalandhar are from one family - a 45-year-old man, his wife and their eight-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. They had returned from San Francisco, US. The four Kerala cases include two sisters who returned from Manchester, Britain, a 39-year-old man who travelled from Germany via Dubai, and a 60-year-old woman who contracted the disease through secondary infection. The two cases from Mumbai are a seven-year-old old boy who travelled from Hong Kong and the second is a 26-year-old man who travelled from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Mumbai. The two cases from Pune - a boy of 12 and a girl of the same age - are indigenous cases who contracted the disease in their school from other students who returned from the US and tested positive. A 24-year-old man from Hyderabad who travelled from San Francisco has also tested positive. From Bangalore, a 17-year-old girl who travelled from New York has tested positive and the solitary case reported from Ahmedabad is a 14-year-old girl, without any travel history.

THE ELEMENTS OF FEMINISM IN "GOD OF SMALL THINGS"

Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of “Third World Feminisms” must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic “Western” feminisms and the formulation of autonomous feminist concerns and strategies that are geographically, historically and culturally grounded. The first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second is one of building and constructing. While these projects appear toe be contradictory, the one working negatively and the other positively, unless these two tasks are addressed simultaneously, third world feminisms run the risk of marginalization or ghettoization from both mainstream (right and left) and Western Feminist discourses.The woman writer hemmed in by the patriarchal structure of language and culture finds herself compelled to get along with it and give into it sufficiently in order to make it give into her at least some of the time. The sense of a woman’s peripheral yet invested position within a male-dominated culture leads her to thematic and stylistic experimentations and innovations, so as to make herself heard. Yet women writers, in general, do not exploit the potential of humour which can act as a vehicle of protest and assertion, since it is perceived as a masculine prerogative and as an aggressive, unfeminine mode.In Indian women’s writing in English, the attempt to explore the possibilities of humour is rarity which often ends up with the use of typical feminine tools of expression such as self-deprecation, lady-like language, and female stereotypes. Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God Of Small Things’, hence becomes significant in this context. In a novel which eliminates sentimentality and remains realistic in all its essential features, there exists the essential prerequisites of the flowering of humour. Arundhati Roy twins to this mode with the case of an experienced practitioner and exploits its malleability to register the protest against patriarchal systems of oppression and exploitation. The novel strikes a balance between feminist and female humour, and resorts to many of the conventional devices such as irony, exaggeration, sarcasm and wit.The focus in Arundhati Roy’s novel is on the irrationalities and injustices of domestic and social life. She attacks the double standard that one sex is to be sheltered, and judged and kept from power-while the other, regardless of its behaviour, runs the world Arundhati’s assaults, on the lopsided values of a male dominated society, are characterised by their humour seasoned with irony and sarcasm which tend to avoid extremities of aggression and hospitality. Most of the male characters in this family chronicle exhibit chauvinistic tendencies which vary in degrees. Male aggression obviously gets suggested in a laugher evoking scene which depicts the loyalty of Aleyooty Ammachi, Rahel’s great-grandmother: (In the photograph) “She looked in the direction that her husband looked (while) with her heart she looked away (30)”. Instances such as these become rare as the narrative moves further and records the sadistic traits of Pappachy and Chacko, the grandfather and uncle of Rahel. Cast in the mould of the typical Western feminist stereotype of 1970s, these characters project male chauvinism prevalent in our part of the world in its extreme form. Pappachy, the “Imperial Entomologiat”, is “Charming and urban with visitors…. donated money to orphanages and leprosy clinics……. worked hard on his public profile as a sophisticated, generous, moral man. But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning”. In “the photograph that lent an underlying chill to the warm room in which it hung”. “He was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. He had a little fleshy knob on the centre of his upper lip that dropped down over his lower lip in a sort of effeminate pout… He wore Khaki Jodhpurs though he had never ridden a horse in his life” (51). This description blends the chilling aspects of Pappachi’s personality with carefully chosen incongruities and absurdities so as to create a caricature of remarkable subtlety and impact.Aurndhati Roy uses a slightly different register to draw the caricature of the absurd and priggish Chacko, ‘the Rhodes Scholar’ with “his Oxford Moods”. Petted by a doting mother, this “prime ministerial material” comes to Ayemenem “with his Balliol Oar and his Pickle Baron Dreams”. His managerial ‘skills’ destroy a profitable business enterprise and reduce the family’s resources to shambles. Chacko’s intellectual superiority and masculine vanity care cast with great measure of exaggeration. “Chacko’s room was stacked from floor to ceiling with books. He had read them all and quoted long passages from them for no apparent reason. Or at least none that anyone else could fathom”. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the ludicrousness of Chacko’s idealism. In a scene which reminds one of an absurd play, Chacko speaks at length about “The War Of Dreams” to the confused twins and attempts to give them “a scene of historical perspective” which he himself lacks. His self-proclaimed Marxist learnings in addition to being another extention of his impractical idealism, are also ruses to flirt with and exploit the pretty women who worked in the factory. The narrative which guides the reader through the absurdity, ludicrousness and exaggerated idealism of Chacko now swings on to fix him sarcastically on the pedestal of a male aggressor: “An Oxford avatar of the old- Zamindar mentality- a landlord forcing his attention on women who depended on him for their livelihood”. Ultimately it is this image of a “Male Chauvinist Pig” which gets concretized when Chacko proudly informs his divorced, defenseless sister: “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is also mine”. Deftly delivered strokes of irony such as these, along with the incongruity – rich build-up, help Arundhati Roy to expose some of the hypocrisies and irrationalities of patriarchy.“The God Of Small Things” has a narrative sprinkled with flashes of caustic humour which artfully throws male aggression into relief. Arundhati Roy’s erasure of sentimentality from the narrative perhaps enables her to look objectively at situations which arouse extreme indignation. In a scene which is disgusting and comical at the same time, Ammu’s father-in-law drives off, in the new Fiat which he himself had gifted to the young couple, carrying “all the jewellery and most of the other presents that they had been given”. At another point, after their nocturnal trip into the sanctified world of puranas and epics which ought to purge them off baser instincts, “The Kathakali man took off their make-up and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts”. The novelist seems to suggest that tyrannizing over women is so common a phenomenon that it is uniformly seen among the rich as well as the poor.The subaltern male and the subordinated female in ‘The God Of Small Things’, become comrades-in-arms in a losing battle against the forces of oppression. Several passages tinged with scathing irony and humour highlight the political, social and religious conspiracies against the subaltern. The novel portrays the seemingly exaggerated yet real predicament of the untouchables who had to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints during the pre-colonial days, in order to prevent the upper castes from defiling themselves by accidentally stepping into their footprints. Arundhati Roy gives a graphic picture of the humiliating experiences of the under privileged men branded by the elite as ‘Rice Christians’:“They had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were made to have separate churches, with separate services, and separate priests. As a special favour they were even given their separate Pariah Bishop. After Independence they found they were not entitled to any Government benefits…. Because officially, on paper, they were Christians, and therefore casteless. It was a little like having to sweep away your footprints without a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all”. (74)The social ostracism verbalized in this passage is characterised by a significant dose of irony, bitterness and silent protest. This perhaps supplies the rationale for the subsequent coming together of Velutha and Ammu, the subaltern male and the subordinated female, who are victims of the same dominant power structure. This what is easily spelt out as a clandestine relationship between a sex hungry female and a virile male goes beyond the constructs of eroticism owing to the subtle operative dynamics of humour.“The God Of small Things”, despite its preoccupation with personal trauma, horror and impending tragedy, allows natural and spontaneous wit to supersede sentimentality. Such a supersession of wit appears to take after Nancy Walker’s conclusion. According to her: “……. Sentimentality in literature is a result of powerlessness, wit may be seen as its opposite: an expression of confidence and power”. Arundhati Roy’s wit is characterised by a direct and open expression of perceptions, taking for granted a position of strength and insight. She shocks and delights her audience by confounding traditional expectations, especially the ones which are related to the myths of patriarchy. The masculine complacency, which stems from the overestimation of feminine expectations, gets shattered in the novel when marriage and its offer of anchorage become deromanticised. Ammu’s marriage with a Bengali, after a period of courtship which lasted for five days, best exemplifies this. As the narrator points out:“Ammu didn’t pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She thought that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem.” (39)Arundhati Roy achieves the same effect again, with remarkable verbal economy and sharpness, while describing Rahel’s marriage: “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge with a sitting down sense. She returned with him to Boston.”Among the male-imposed taboos broken by Arundhati Roy, the significant one is the mocking of the male anatomy, particularly the genitals. In a hilariously comical scene, she punctures the male vanity by lampooning comrade K.N.M.Pillai for his indecorous dress habit which makes him prefer “a graying Aertex Vest, his balts silhouetted against his soft white murder”. What ultimately gets mocked here is not male anatomy – as men have mocked the female body. Rather Arundhati Roy mock the norm: the belief that viewing the genitals of the opposite sex is an instant turn-on for the woman as it is for the man.In “The God Of Small Things” the stinging edge of Arundhati Roy’s humour unmasks masculine insensitivity. It becomes atrociously farcical when Ammu on recalling the day of her wedding “realized that the slightly ferverish glitter in her bedroom’s eye had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whisky. Straight. Neat”. In a subsequent scene when the husband accepts Mr.Hollick’s proposal to send Ammu to his bunglow to be ‘looked after’, the same effect gets created by shifting the focus to Ammu’s using of ‘The Reader’s Digest World Atlas’ to hit her husband “as hard as she could. On his head. His legs. His back and shoulders”.Arndhati Roy’s occasional employment of what could be termed as situational female humour is also equally effective. While the non-acceptance of oppression characterises feminist humour, female humour may ridicule a person or a system from a point of view of acceptance. Mammachi, the uncomplaining wife of Pappachi, accepts bad marriage as a norm. She is a typical entrapped female who regards her husband as the inevitable oppressor. She is powerless to change things, and she cannot express her resentment. The authorial voice, frilled with irony dwells on the wife’s maintenance of decorum after Pappachi’s death:“Mammachi pasted in the family photograph album, the clipping from the ‘Indian Express’ that reported Pappachi’s death…. At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses sled around in her eyes…. Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him”. (50)This passage exposes obliquely the discrepancies between the realities of women’s lives and the images of women promoted by culture.Women’s humour down the ages has been dictated by variance in cognitive construction of experience and constraints of cultural and social reception. In a context when the culturally dominant in group (the mainstream / male humour) monopolises the traditionally held constituents of empowered humour such as aggressiveness, dominance and assertiveness, the marginal outgroup (women’s humour) remains on the defensive, regarding themselves weak or vulnerable to attack with impunity, the forces that oppress them. Arundhati Roy’s “The God Of Small Things” with its sharply functional and vibrant band of humour, cast in the feminist mould, falsifies and shakes the foundations of the culturally dominant ingroup’s complacent domain. Her achievement becomes creditable since she initiates, empowers and solidifies a tradition which is capable of articulating and confronting social and political issues from vantage point which is exclusively female in orientation.There was a lot of contradiction concerning feminism. There is sufficient evidence supporting the theme, however there is always a contradicting twist present. For example, Chacko views Margaret Kochamma as his “trophy wife”. Here, it is possible that Margaret Kochamma is nothing but an object, in return creating the idea that women are inferior to men. On the other hand, Margaret Kochamma can be seen as un amazing woman that Chacko is proud to have been married to. Margaret corrects him when she said, “ex-wife Chacko”.Ammu for instance, acts against the feminist views. She tells Rabel and Estha that they do not need a Baba because she acts as both a mother and a father. Here Ammu is equal to that of men.Although Mammachi is the true factory owner or operator, Chacko, the male, gets credit for her work. Again feminism is present: the male figure is credited for Ammu’s actions.Ammu, the tragic heroine of the novel, is the most conspicuous representative of the fourth generation who died at a young age of thirty-one which is described as “not old, not young” and “viable die-able age”. Her suffering started at a very young age. Her father Pappachi insisted that college education was unnecessary for a girl, so she had to leave Delhi after schooling, she had nothing to do at Ayemenem other than waiting for marriage proposals. But no proposals came her way because her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry. She dreamed of escaping from Ayemenem, from her ill-tempered father and bitter, long suffering mother. Finally, she was let to spend the summer with a distant aunt who lived in Calcutta. There she met her future husband at someone else’s wedding reception there.She had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. But very soon things began to take a very bad shape. Her husband was really a misfit to her. He was an alcoholic and he made her smoke. Twins were born to her and by the time they were two years old, drinking had driven him into an alcoholic stupor. Meanwhile, Mr.Hollick, the bungalow to tell him that he should resign. He referred Ammu as “An extremely attractive wife” (P.41) clearly the manager had an eye on her. He suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be ‘looked after’. The only choice left before her was to return, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem and she did so.Greater misery awaited her at Ayemenem on her arrival with her children there. Her world, there, was confined to the front and back verandah of Ayemenem. Somehow the well-built Velutha, the paravan carpenter created ripples in her. Ammu was drawn to Velutha and this was, in fact, the beginning of the end. Very soon this developed into physical relations between them. Vellya Paapen, Velutha’s father, was a mute witness to whatever went on near his house and he rushed to Ayemenem house to give a full factual report. Ammu was locked in a room and meanwhile as a coincidence Sophie Mol got drowned. Then we hear about her death in a grimy room in the Bharat Lodge in Alleppey, where she had gone for a job interview. Ammu went away without anyone there even to bid goodbye to her.The church refused to bury Ammu. So Chacko had to take the body to the electric crematorium. He had her wrapped in a dirty bed sheet and laid out on a stretcher. Finally she became a number; Receipt No. Q 498673. That was the number of the pink receipt the crematorium ‘In-Charge’ gave them. That entitled Chacko and Rahel to collect Ammu’s remains.Ammu’s story is more than a tragedy. She is made to suffer even from a very young age and continues to suffer throughout her life. She would have liked to study in a college if she had got a chance. She did have the dreams of a young girl about marriage and married life. But the hope was believed when she came to know that nobody was there to provide her dowry to get her married off. Her escape to Calcutta invited fresh troubles. What she achieved if at all it was an achievement, was only a married life which lasted for less than a couple of years. Hopes were once again shattered when she returned to Ayemenem to discover that nobody was interested in her. Later as fate would have it, she was drawn to Velutha and that marked the beginning of the ultimate tragedy. She was humiliated at the hands of the police, her near and dear ones and also the public at large. In short Ammu, without her knowledge becomes an instrument in the hands of the patriarchal society.Women who constitute half of the human population but paradoxically not treated on par with man in all spheres of human activity. They are oppressed, suppressed and marginalized in the matter of sharing the available opportunity for fulfillment of their lives, despite the fact that every woman slaves for the development of her family, her husband and children. This is predicament of women all over the world. Simone de Beauvoir says that :A free and autonomous being like all creatures, a woman finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of other”. In Arundhati Roy’s novel we can see the compulsion faced by women in the male dominant society. From a theoretical point of view, the complicity between feminist commitment and post colonial theory is obvious. During colonial regimes women were doubly colonized: as the object of racist, abusive behaviour carried out by colonizers, and at the same time, by traditional sexist role models that tended to assign to women subaltern positions inside their own family and local community. The fact that countries were decolonized does not mean that women’s position as marginal figures in relation to power and hegemony has changed, nor is their position as members of a dependent, impoverished society necessarily altered. In both the colonial and post colonial processes, women have particular histories of oppression and appropriation.

Peter Pan syndrome


Peter Pan syndrome is a pop-psychology term used to describe an adult who is socially immature. The term has been used informally by both laypeople and some psychology professionals in psychology since the 1983 publication of The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, by Dr. Dan Kiley. Peter Pan syndrome is not listed in the Diagnostic and Manual of Mental Disorders, and is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder.
Musician Jackson may have had Peter Pan Syndrome. In a 2003 interview, Jackson told interviewer Martin Bashir, "I am Peter Pan". Bashir said, "No, you're Michael Jackson". Jackson then stated, "I'm Peter Pan in my heart". Jackson named his former home "Neverland Ranch". Neverland is the fantasy island in the story of Peter Pan, where children never grow up.

THE POST COLONIAL ASPECT OF ARUNDATIROY'S GOD OF SMALL THINGS

POST COLONIAL ELEMENTS IN THE NOVEL“To enter the Hybrid state exhibit on Broadway, you enter the passage. Instead of a gallery, you find a dark antechamber, where one white word invites you forward: COLONIALISM. To enter Colonial space, you stop through a low door, only to be closetted in another black space – a curatorial reminder, however fleeting, of Fanon: “The native is a being hemmed in”. But the way out of colonialism, it seems, is forward. A second word, POST COLONIALISM, invites you through a slightly larger door into the next of history, after which you emerge, fully erect, into the brightly lit and noicy HYBRID STATE”.-Anne Mc ClintockContemporary intellectual realm has been encompassed by some ‘posts’; post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-coldwar, post-Marxism, post-aparthied, post-historic, even post-contemporary. Among them post-colonialism and post-modernism along with an economic term, Globalisation are undergoing severe discussions, debates and criticisms. The term post-colonialism is fully depending on colonialism, the old ‘modus operandi’ of capitalism to exploit the world population upto the end of decolonization on Globalisation, the new ‘modus operandi’ of capitalism to do the same. Now a days, the post colonialism reached at a stage in which it is recognized as a perspective or metre to understand every cultural segments.The field of post-colonial studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some other scholars date its rise in the western Academy from the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism in 1978. Nomenclatures like, Colonialism, De-colonialism, post-colonialism, Colonizee, Colonized, Hybridity etc. are included in the vocabulary of post colonial studies. The terms “Colonialism” and “Imperialism” are actually, highly interrelated economic terms which characterises some stages of Capitalism, the socio-economic world system in which we are living. If we examine the history of Capitalism we can understand that there are two stages; the stage of the Laissiez- fair and Laissiez-aller Capitalism and the stage of Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism in which the ‘finance capital’ implies it hegemony over the world. From the beginning of capitalism since 1600s to the end of the second world war Colonialism was the modus operandi of the capitalism. So the imperialist capitalism adopted the colonialism for exploiting the world population even though it can do the same without direct colonialism just like the present day American Imperialism does. But by the early decades of the twentieth century, the earstwhile secure colonial structure began to manifest cracks and slow but definite signs of collapse. Thus the “Empire” had slipped into the decolonisation process.What is meant by decolonisation is that the earstwhile colonies had started their liberation movements and got freedom from the colonial yoke. This was happened by the strong wave of nationalism and self-determination. So the ideas ‘self-determination’ and ‘nationalism’ were pregnented with the seed of decolonization. So decolonization process involves the nationalistic liberation movement, in different forms, of the colonized countries against colonial masters [or ‘colonisers’, according to post-colonial vocabulary]. By the middle of the 20th century the process of decolonization was well underway. The end of the second world war is an convenient historical mark to place the decolonizing process.A world situation in which the colonization cannot be possible has been created by the end of the mid-twentieth century. “The British accepted”, Eric Hobsbawn says, “because ultimately they understood that there are limits on what can be achieved on the world. Equally they never attempted to establish a form of supremacy within Europe.”In this historical background we can define post colonialism as a discourse of those countries who were once colonized with those who were once colonizers. In this context we can see a shift from the special contradiction to the time contradiction. In this sense the post-colonialism is that state or condition which comes after the colonisation process has come to an end. From this perspective, it is possible to formulate the ideal of a ‘post-colonial state’ after the end of the empire, after the colonies under foreign occupation have been restored to the people who consider it their own. As a term ‘post-colonial state’ is usually used to refer those state which have got their independence following a period of subjugation. According to Asheroft et al; the post-colonial state’s formation after independence is the earliest signal of the separation of the colonized from the colonizer.One of the implication of this post colonial study was the tendency to revisit and revise the history of the state’s past and more so to undo the damage wrought by long years of colonial possession. Post-colonialism in this sense, includes the endeavour to workout an ‘image change over’. This process involves re-reading of colonial documents which were made for justifying the colonial subjugation. But Frantz Fanon, one of the props of the post colonialism exhorts that this process may be affected by a danger of over-read and read position that would not have be in focus otherwise.Post-colonial critics will argue that all situation relating to the colonial past of a country involve the politics of reading which they are only trying to unmask. Such an argument, no doubt, lies at the base of re-reading process, but it also a political cast and any rescue, restoration or revival of a nations past is, like the others that it seeks to replace, merely provisional. Thus the term post colonial addresses itself to the historical, political, cultural and textual ramification of the colonial encounter between the west and non west, dating from the sixteenth century to the present day. To Ashcroft, post colonial covers all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonialism to the present day. Post colonialism is, thus, a name for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies, but it also, as importantly designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across the twentieth century and beyond. This study now-a-day is commonly associated with names such as Edward W.Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.The Literature in English language from the Europe’s former colonies were known as “Commonwealth Literature” or “Third World Literature” in 1950s. India’s Arundhati Roay and R.K.narayan, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe etc. were famous in this literature.Post colonialism has moved from the struggle against oppressor cultures to the struggle against oppressive native culture.Therefore neo-colonial discourse vibrates with the revolt against the binding native culture. Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things’ can be taken as a neo-colonial text highlighting the struggle for liberation not from the colonial hegemony but from ones own oppressive neo-cultural set-up. The Indian Society built on class, caste and patriarchal consciousness forms a bondage to all the characters in the novel. Arundhati Roy presents three generations of women as a protest against the double marginalization of the Indian women, on the one had by her own binding native culture and on the other by patriarchy. The first generation of women presented by Mammachi and Baby Kochamma are complacent of their subordinate existences and silently approve male sovereignty. Mammachi is the traditional subjugated Indian woman, engrossed in a monolithic ideology. She accepts female subordination most willing by bearing with “Mute resignation’ her husband’s physical violence. In Ammu’s version it is “Father Bear beat mother Bear” (180). Ammu is also so accustomed to Pappachi’s cold calculating cruelty, that she develops “a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish reckless streak that develops in someone small who has been bullied all their lives by someone Big” (181-82).Surprisingly enough, Mammachi exhibits partiality in her attitude towards her son, Chacko and daughter, Ammu. The bitterlong suffering mother fails to show any empathy to Ammu when she is forced to return to Ayemenem. On the contrary Chacko, also a divorcee finds himself in a comfortable situation in Ayemenem. Natured in an androcentric society, Mammachi is able to advocate only an unbalanced educational policy by denying higher education to Ammu as “a college education was unnecessary expense for a girl” (38), whereas Chacko is sent to Oxford. The second generation presented by Ammu and Maragret Kochamma dissipate Roy’s anger against the native faith in patriarchy. So we find them crossing all limits of sexual codes imposed by patriarchal an socio-cultural norms. Ammu’s marriage seems a savior to her after her tortuous life at Ayemenem, but to her great distress her marriage proves to be equally disastrous. Therefore she returns to Ayemenem only to be regarded as a “wretched Man-less woman” (45). Margaret Kochamma, the English wife of Chacko puts aside her meaningless relationship with him, as she gets fed up with his domineering attitude. Unfortunately her second marriage also has a disastrous end, so she returns to Ayemenem “to heal her wounded world”, but becomes “shattered like glass” like any other Indian widow. The third generation represented by Rabel, the representative of the present generation inherits the rebellion’s attitude of her mother, but like any ‘female’ in a patriarchal society, she too “drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge” (18). She is married off to Larry and taken to Boston. But the marriage ends in a divorce, as she is just ‘a gift’ for her husband. She returns to Ayemenem with no regrets over her unhappily ended marriage. She represented the non-traditionalist, nonconservative, liberated woman.Not being fettered by the oppressive native culture, Rahel, the new woman, makes can attempt to break the shackles of the established code. She exhibits non-conformity by throwing aside her relationship with her husband, when it proves to be futile.In a patriarchal society, the woman is subjugated to mere existence with no clear identity, individuality or self-will. The woman is acknowledged for being passive timid and conventional. None of her unconventionality is applauded but regarded atrocious in an ‘andocentric’ society. A victim of the patriarchal society, ‘The God Of Small Things’ tells the story of the sufferings of Ammu, the second generation woman of the Ayemenem house. The whole narration revolves around Ammu’s sufferings which made Mohit Kumar Ray, analyzing the multiple approaches to TGST comment that it is a “feminist novel in the pity and terror that it evokes for the condition of women in a particular cultural milieu” (Dhawan 49). But Arundhati, like many other post-colonial woman, intellectuals follow a hegemonic narrativization with Subaltern being made mute, silenced and ‘disarticulated’ (Parry, 36) in the decolonized ‘Empire’. If the post-colonial discourse itself was a breakdown domination and equalize subordination, neo-colonial discourse involves a new subordination, as Spivak points out, “The subaltern cannot speak” and “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (Parry, 36).The silence of the doubly oppressed subaltern woman is heard from the pickle factory where they work. The whole narrative revolves round the elite women, who become the centre and the factory women moved into the margins – The “Other”. Mammachi accommodates and adjusts to the “liberatine relationships”, Chacko has with the women in the factory and regards them as “Man’s Needs”. In the post colonial view, the victimized Mammachi, in the hands of her husband, when became powerful factory owner she victimizes the oppressed subaltern women who worked in her factory. Chacko’s clandestine relationships receive a silent approval from the mother as she constructs a separate entrance for his room, “So that the objects of his ‘Needs’ wouldn’t have to go traipsing through the house”.The passage continues thus:She secretly slipped them money to keep them happy. They took it because they needed it. They had young children and old parents or husbands who spent all their earnings in toddy bars. The arrangement suited Mammachi, because in her mind, a fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from feelings. (169)If the elite women in a neo-colonial society are subjugated, the subaltern women are double subjugated. They are designated to mere sex objects. The atrocity showered on women due to class and caste discrimination takes on immense proportions as these ‘objects’ submit to the meanderings of the affluent man for the money received from Mammachi to carry on their day to day expense as their own husbands, “spent all their earnings in toddy bars”. The narrative focuses on the subjugation of three generation of elite women, whereas the subaltern women form just a minor intrusion to the whole narrative.Arundhati Roy had herself claimed that:Perhaps it’s because I’m sort of living out a feminist goal. I am a woman who has choices, who decides and then takes responsibility for the decisions. Whatsoever they are. (75)It is little wonder that Arundhati Roy, “a woman who has choices”, as she claimed, was able to present the predicament, of only elite women and unfortunately, silences the subaltern. As Spivak points out:“Sexual difference is doubly effected. If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has not history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.”Therefore, the subaltern female, as Spivak strongly believes, “is positioned on the boundary between human and animal” (Parry, 39).The subaltern male in the narrative is the low caste ‘paravan’ Velutha. It is not surprising to hear of Velutha from Mammachi’s description. She recalls her days in the past when,“Paravan like other untouchables were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to carry umbrellas. They had to put their hands over their mouths when they spoke, to divert their polluted breath away from those whom they addressed. They were expected to crawl backwards with broom sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a paravan foot-print.” (74)Velutha is supposed to have ‘a particular smell’ but he is given permission to “touch things that touchables touch” (73) because of his extraordinary skill with machines. Mammachi “with impenetrable Touchable logic” comments, “if he hadn’t been a Paravan, he might have become an engineer” (75). Ammu’s tender feelings of Velutha is not approved by Syrian Christian kin because of his paravan birth. Velutha is the subaltern male marginalized for his low-caste origin. Although a communist party worker, his low birth hinders K.N.M.Pillai’s judgement. Ultimately Velutha and not the elite Ammu, is tortured to death by the police, the “history’s henchman” (308) who see to it that he is punished for his attempt to make an upward social mobility from his existing ‘untouchable’ social status.The voice of the subaltern cannot be heard. Within the neo-colonialist narrative the master-slave dialectic still becomes an essentialist agenda. Here the elite neo-colonial intellectuals have failed to touch the consciousness of the subaltern an the neo-colonial discourse maintains absolute power in constituting and disarticulating the subaltern. Roy’s TGST can be taken as a neo-colonial text dismantling the canonical text of the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the subaltern male and female. In the silence of the subaltern in neo-colonial discourse, we can hear the inauthentic voice of the neo-colonial intellectual’s attempt to undress the subaltern.Many celebrated the novel’s story telling inventiveness and post colonial historical revisionism, the narrative seen as implicating British imperialism and Christianity as deepening the oppressive caste system. For Yogesh Sinha and Sandhya Tripathi, the novel’s blurring of fact and fiction, its play with language and its sense of truth as a “hall of mirrors” (154), both convey a post modernist sensibility and express the “experimental type of knowledge” which typify the post colonial narrative that “outwits” an “imposed western colonial impression

"IAGO" THE KINGOF DARKNESS

Evil has been embodied nowhere in such intensity as Iago has. Among the famous villain of fiction ,Iago leads :the others merely follow. “eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere’’ .Even Milton’s satan at times sheds tears such as angels weep:Lachimo,Richard 111 and Edmund all are mere children before Iago.The secret of Iago’s villainy is that to others he does not appear to be a villain at all. Just as perfect art conceals itself. People call him ‘ honest Iago”.He shows an eager desire to help others. He is everybody’s friend, guide and philosopher. Othello ,Cassio, Roderigo and even Desdemona ask for the advise of Iago when in trouble. Emilia alone seems to have suspicion about the nature of her husband.But even Emilia never plumbed the depth of his villainy.How does Iago manage to be a wretched sepulcher ? First of all , he was prodigiousPiowers of dissimulation and self control.Superficially , he has a good nature. His powers of self control are combined with high intellectual powers. All this intellect and self control are used to advance the ambitions of an egotism which has no parallel.Iago lives only for himself. He scoffs at all ideas of morality, honour and softer emotions. He has no sympathy ,no social feeling.He is a cynic par excellence considering himself the general enemy of the world. His only ambition in life seems to have been to spread unhappiness and ruin all round.There are two broad interpretations of Iago’s character .One view considers that Iago’s villainy was fully motivated, while the other view believes in the “Motiveless malignity” of Iago.Shakespeare was the creator of the gretest Heroes and the greatest villains and Iago was the finest among them.

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

Ann Frank kept a diary from 12 june 1942 to 1 august 1944. Initially ,she wrote it strictly for herself. Then ,one day in 1944 ,Geritt Bolkestein ,a member of the Douch government in exile ,announces in a radio broadcaste from London that after the war he hoped to collect eyewitness account of the suffering of the douch people under the German occupation,which could be made available to the public.As an example, he specifically mentiojned lettersa and diaries.Impressed by this speech, Anne Frank decided that when the war was over she would publish a book based on her diary. She began rewriting and editing her diary , improving on the text, omitting passagesshe didn’t think were interesting enough and adding others from memory. At the same time , she kept up her original diary .In the scholarly work “the diary of Ann Frank : The critical Edition (1989) Ann’s first , unedited diary is referred to as a version a, to distinguish it from her second ,edited diary , which is known as version b.The last entry in Ann Franks diary is dated 1 august 1944.On 4 august 1944 , the eight people hiding in the secret Annexe were arrested .Miep Gies and Bep Voskunjil, the two secretaries working in the building, found Ann’s diaries strewen all over the floor.Miep Gies tucked them away in a desk drawer for safekeeping . After the war , when it became clear that Anne was dead, she gave the diaries ,unread,to Anne’s father,Otto Frank.After long delebration , Otto Frank decided to fulfill his daughter’s wish and publish her diary.In making his choice, Auto Frank had to bear several points in mind.The diary shows the real feelings of a young girl in the nasi rule

GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is the latest fashionable term used to describe the all pervasive forces of a rampant capitalism. It suggests a new stage of capitalism in which multinational companies and financial institutions, attached to no particular nation state, move their capital around the world in search of the highest returns, and in so doing create a truly global market and global capital. In fact, as DAVID YAFFE argues, the degree of internationalization of capital is only now approaching the apex levels[3] since the birth of modern imperialism in the outset of 20th century. And far from being new, we are seeing a return to those unstable features of capitalism which characterized imperialism before the First World War.Globalization in its literal sense is the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, socio-cultural and political forces. But this meaning cannot be accepted in the whole circle of scholars. They are varying one another in their views. Here in this paper an attempt has been made to analyze the history of the origin and development of Globalization as a contemporary episode of Imperialism. In this juncture when the world imperialism led by ‘mighty American Imperialism’, as we are witnessing, is fallen down to severe crises, it is highly necessary to understand Globalization and its exploiting nature and its failure to save the moribund Capitalism form its inevitable death for the comprehensive understanding of present world situation.DEFINITIONS OF GLOBALISATIONTom G. Palmer of Cato Institute defines "globalization" as "the diminution or elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result."According to Thomas L. Friedman "examines the impact of the 'flattening' of the globe", and argues that globalized trade, outsourcing, supply-chaining, and political forces have changed the world permanently, for both better and worse. He also argues that the pace of globalization is quickening and will continue to have a growing impact on business organization and practice. Noam Chomsky argues that the word globalization is also used, in a doctrinal sense, to describe the neo-liberal form of economic globalization.Herman E. Daly’s argument is that sometimes the terms internationalization and globalization are used interchangeably but there is a slight formal difference. The term "internationalization" refers to the importance of international trade, relations, treaties etc. International means between or among nations. "Globalization" means erasure of national boundaries for economic purposes; international trade (governed by comparative advantage) becomes inter-regional trade (governed by absolute advantage).BACKGROUND OF GLOBALISATIONThe term "globalization" has been used by economists since the 1980s although it was used in social sciences in the 1960s; however, its concepts did not become popular until the latter half of the 1980s and 1990s. The earliest written theoretical concepts of globalization were penned by an American entrepreneur-turned-minister Charles Taze Russell who coined the term 'corporate giants' in 1897. Globalization is viewed as a centuries long process, tracking the expansion of human population and the growth of civilization, that has accelerated dramatically in the past 50 years. Early forms of globalization existed during the Roman Empire, the Parthian empire, and the Han Dynasty, when the Silk Road started in China, reached the boundaries of the Parthian empire, and continued onwards towards Rome. The Islamic Golden Age is also an example, when Muslim traders and explorers established an early global economy across the Old World resulting in a globalization of crops, trade, knowledge and technology; and later during the Mongol Empire, when there was greater integration along the Silk Road. Globalization in a wider context began shortly before the turn of the 16th century, with two Kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula - the Kingdom of Portugal and the Kingdom of Castile. Portugal's global explorations in the 16th century, especially, linked continents, economies and cultures to a massive extent. Portugal's exploration and trade with most of the coast of Africa, Eastern South America, and Southern and Eastern Asia, was the first major trade based form of globalization. A wave of global trade, colonization, and enculturation reached all corners of the world. Global integration continued through the expansion of European trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Portuguese and Spanish Empires colonized the Americas, followed eventually by France and Britain. Globalization has had a tremendous impact on cultures, particularly indigenous cultures, around the world. In the 17th century, globalization became a business phenomenon when the British East India Company, which is often described as the first multinational corporation, was established. Because of the high risks involved with international trade, the British East India Company became the first company in the world to share risk and enable joint ownership of companies through the issuance of shares of stock: an important driver for globalization. Globalization was achieved by the British Empire (the largest empire in history) due to its sheer size and power. British ideals and culture were imposed on other nations during this period.The 19th century is sometimes called "The First Era of Globalization." It was a period characterized by rapid growth in international trade and investment between the European imperial powers, their colonies, and, later, the United States. It was in this period that areas of sub-Saharan Africa and the Island Pacific were incorporated into the world system. The "First Era of Globalization" began to break down at the beginning of the 20th century with the First World War. Said John Maynard Keynes,“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea, the various products of the whole earth, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep. Militarism and imperialism of racial and cultural rivalries were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper. What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914.”The "First Era of Globalization" later collapsed during the gold standard crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s.GLOBALISATIONThe strongest supporters of the globalization standpoint are the neo-liberal right. A recent convert to their free market orthodoxy it is said in order to save itself from the chop[4] has been the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), an organization set up 32 years ago to provide reports on trade and development from the perspective of developing countries. World Investment Report 1995 (WIR 1995) reads like an eulogy on globalization."Enabled by increasingly liberal policy frameworks, made possible by technological advances, and driven by competition, globalization more and more shapes today's world economy. Foreign direct investment (FDI) by transnational corporations (TNCs) now plays a major role in linking many national economies, building an integrated international production system the productive core of the globalizing world economy”.[5]However its own report produces a wealth of statistical material which shows a very different picture emerging.TNCs and MNCsThroughout its report UNCTAD uses the term transnational companies. In fact transnational companies are relatively rare. Most companies are nationally based, are controlled by national shareholders, and trade and invest multinationally with the large majority of their sales and assets in their home country.A recent study of the world's 100 largest companies taken from the Fortune Global list showed that in 1993 only 18 companies maintained the majority of assets abroad. The internationalisation of shares was even more restricted. 2.1% of the board members of the top 500 US companies were foreign nationals with only 5 of the top 30 US companies listed having a foreigner on their boards. All the companies seemed to have benefited from industrial and trade policies of their own countries and at least 20 would not have survived if they had not been saved in some way by their governments.[6]UNCTAD's own index of transnationality based on shares of foreign assets, foreign sales and foreign employment shows 40 of top 100 multinational companies in 1993 have more than half of their activities abroad, with the average for the whole group at 41 per cent, falling to 34 per cent for US Multinationals, which comprise nearly onethird of the total. Even these figures are misleading as Nestle, which tops the list with 92 per cent, limits non-Swiss voting rights to 3 per cent of the total. In addition most research and development (R&D) takes place in the home country. For US multinationals, the share of research and development performed by majority owned foreign affiliates was only 12 per cent in 1992 .[7]Finally a recent study by Hirst and Thompson (H&T), based on company data for 500 MNCs in 1987 and 5000 MNCs in 1992-3, assessed the relative importance for MNCs of home and foreign sales and assets of particular countries, mainly US, UK, Germany and Japan. They found that between 70 and 75 per cent of MNC value added was produced in the home nation. They conclude that international businesses remain heavily 'nationally embedded' and continue to be MNCs rather than TNCs.[8] However, that international companies are nationally based and trade and invest multinationally tells us little about the overall strategic importance of the 25 30 per cent activity conducted abroad a point that we shall return to below.An integrated production system?Foreign direct investment is linking many national economies but, but far from this leading to an 'integrated production system', it is reinforcing the economic domination of the vast majority of the world by a small number of imperialist countries. Multinational companies have become the principle vehicle of imperialism's drive to redivide the world according to economic power.Since 1983 FDI has grown five times faster than trade and ten times faster than world output.[9] This process is being reinforced with recession and stagnation continuing to afflict the major imperialist economies. From 1991 to 1993, worldwide FDI stocks grew about twice as fast as worldwide exports and three times as fast as world GDP. MNCs FDI in 1995 was estimated at $230bn, producing a worldwide FDI stock of $2,600bn (1995) with worldwide sales of foreign affiliates at $5,200bn (1992) and up to $7,000bn, if subcontracting, franchising and licensing are taken into account.Investment stocks and flows, inwards and outwards, are concentrated in the imperialist countries and particularly in the competing power blocs, the 'Triad' of the European Union, Japan and the United States and their regional cluster of countries.[10] 70 per cent of the outflows from the imperialist countries (60-65 per cent of total world flows) come from only five countries, France, Germany, Japan, UK and US. Continual repositioning has taken place among them and in the recent period the US has reasserted its lead accounting for one quarter of the world's stock and one fifth of world flows (see Tables 1 and 2).The relative change in the balance of economic power since the end of the postwar boom is highlighted by US share of the world outward stock of FDI falling from 52.0 per cent in 1971 to 25.6 per cent in 1994, while Japan's share rose from 2.7 per cent to 11.7 per cent. The European Union is the dominant imperialist bloc and Britain, a rapidly declining industrial power, still retains a formidable imperialist presence.Over the last 10 years FDI outflows from Third World countries have more than doubled growing from 5 per cent of world FDI outflows in 1980-84 to 10 per cent in 1990-94, reaching 15 per cent in 1994. However this does not represent a significant step towards a more integrated system since most of the capital flow comes from a small number of the socalled newly industrialising countries (NICs), mainly in Asia, with Hong Kong alone contributing 64 per cent of the total. Hong Kong outflows seriously distort the overall figures. A lot of the other outward investment results from companies in NICs forced by rising wages to move labourintensive FDI to lower wage countries in the same region. Of real significance is the fact that only 6 per cent of FDI outward stock is accounted for by Third World countries. It is a great deal lower than their share of exports in world exports, and GDP in world GDP, at 23 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.The recession which hit most imperialist countries in 199092 and the stagnant economic growth of the following years, while reducing overall FDI outflows from the imperialist nations, saw a much greater share of them go into the Third World, and, in particular, China. FDI inflows into Third World countries increased from $35bn (17 per cent of the total) in 1990 to $84bn (37 per cent) in 1994, and is estimated to reach $90bn in 1995, nearly 40 per cent of total FDI outflows (Table 3).The flows into the Third World were however very concentrated. 79 per cent of FDI inflows into Third World countries in 1993 went to only ten countries including China. With nearly $28bn, China was the second largest recipient of FDI (after the United States) taking 37 per cent of the total going to Third World countries. FDI outward stock was likewise highly concentrated with 67 per cent of Third World stock in just ten countries in 1993. Asia accounted for 70 per cent of total flows into Third World countries in 1994. Latin America and the Caribbean received 24 per cent with two countries, Mexico and Venezuela, accounting for 71 per cent of the region FDI inflows. On the other hand FDI into Africa has declined from 11 per cent of Third World inflows in 1986-90 to 6 per cent in 1991-93 and to 4 per cent in 1994. Finally privatization was the main reason for the $6.3bn flows into the ex-socialist countries of central and eastern Europe in 1994, turning former domestic companies into foreign affiliates of multinational companies.Our argument can be further substantiated by looking at FDI in terms of its distribution among the worlds population. The Triad countries comprising 14 per cent of the world's population attracted some 75 per cent of FDI flows. If we add to this the population of the ten highest recipients of FDI in the Third World, then 43 per cent of the world's population received 91.5 per cent of FDI between 1981-91. This includes all of China with a population of 1.2bn. If we only include China's population in the coastal regions where most FDI is concentrated then only 28 per cent of the world's population receive 91.5 per cent of FDI. On this basis between 57 and 72 per cent of the world's population receive only 8.5 per cent of total world FDI.[11] This is hardly a picture of an integrated production system but one that is highly concentrated and very unequal.Highly concentrated and very unequal'...a fall in the rate of profit connected with accumulation necessarily calls forth the competitive struggle. Compensation of a fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the mass of profits applies only to the total social capital and to the big, firmly placed capitalists.'--K MarxUNCTAD's support for countries opening up their economies to FDI shows quite brazenly its neoliberal sympathies:'In today's increasingly open and competitive global economic environment, the performance of countries best measured in terms of per capita income (as a proxy measure for welfare) and growth depends significantly on the links they establish with the world economy'.Unusually, we are provided with a definition of a competitiveness as the ability of firms 'to survive and grow while obtaining their ultimate objective of maximising profits'[12] which helps to explain today's increasingly unequal and monopolistic global environment.Growing competition for profits creates an inexorable tendency towards monopolisation as it is only the 'big firmly placed' companies which can survive in a world where capital accumulation is stagnating. Growing monopolisation of markets for goods, investment, technology and raw materials, through mergers, acquisitions and FDI, are the result of multinational companies relentless search for ever greater profits to compensate for a general fall in the rate of profit. This creates a very different 'global environment' than that promoted by the UNCTAD report.We have already showed how FDI by predominantly nationally based multinational companies is concentrated within a number of competing power blocs. It is also controlled by a small number of multinational companies within those blocs. There are in the region of 40,000 multinational companies having some 250,000 foreign affiliates. However the largest 100 multinational corporations (excluding those in banking and finance) had an estimated $3.7 trillion worth of global assets with $1.3 trillion outside their respective home countries. This accounted for a third of the combined FDI stock of their countries of origin. The world's 500 largest industrial corporations employ 0.05 per cent of the world's population and control 25 per cent of the world's economic output; and a mere one per cent of all multinationals own half the global stock of FDI. Twothirds of world trade is controlled by multinational companies with half of this trade, or $1.3 trillion exports, intrafirm trade between multinational companies and their affiliates. In the case of US multinationals, $4 out of $5 received for goods and services sold abroad by US multinationals are actually earned from goods and services produced by their foreign affiliates or sold to them.The concentration for a certain range of products is even greater. In the case of consumer durables the top five firms control nearly 70 per cent of the world market in their industry. In automotive, airline, aerospace, electrical components, electrical and electronics and steel industries, five firms control more than 50 per cent of output. In oil, personal computer and media industries the top five firms have more than 40 per cent of sales. [13]The total sales by foreign affiliates of 23 multinational companies accounted for 80 per cent of the total world sales in electronics. 70-80 per cent of global R&D expenditure and 80-90 per cent of technology payments are within MNC systems. Far from this presenting a picture of an 'open and competitive' environment we have one that is increasingly controlled and increasingly monopolistic.The same principles which lead to the concentration of capital in the hands of a few large corporation determine the extent and direction of FDI. The forces of monopoly consolidate at a global level. Most FDI going into the imperialist nations is 'ownershipswitching' for mergers, acquisitions and privatizations as opposed to new establishment or 'greenfield' investment. In the case of FDI going into the United States in 1993, 90 per cent in value was for acquisitions of existing companies. For US outward FDI the ratio of the number (data on values are not available) of new establishments to acquisitions was 0.96 in other imperialist countries compared to 1.8 in Third World countries.In a classic piece of understatement UNCTAD informs us 'FDI is not a panacea to break from the vicious circle of underdevelopment' in the Third World. That is certainly true. For the strategic importance for MNCs lies in its ability to generate adequate profits through the access it provides to essential markets and productive resources throughout the world.MNCs FDI inflows to Third World countries accounted for only 7 per cent of Third World domestic investment in 1993. As we have discussed earlier, it is mainly is concentrated in only 10 countries. These countries have an average GDP per capita of $6,610 and come into the top sector of middle income countries. MNCs are looking for high, guaranteed profits, relatively large domestic markets or easy access to such markets, good social and industrial infrastructure, a skilled workforce at low cost, political and economic stability, open economies and easy repatriation of profits. Africa, for example, is now of limited importance, in spite of high rates of return, because of widespread poverty and political and economic instability. Not surprisingly, FDI in Africa is concentrated in countries with important raw materials, particularly oil.Official rates of return to US FDI in Third World countries in 1993 at 16.8 per cent were nearly twice the level in imperialist countries at 8.7 per cent. The rate of return in the primary sector in Africa was a massive 28.8 per cent. Actual rates in Third World countries are probably even higher once transfer pricing and other tax avoidance devices are taken into account.MNCs use Third World countries as a low cost, profitable location for export-oriented industries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the shares of foreign affiliates in exports were as high as 57 per cent in Malaysia (all industries), 91 per cent in Singapore (nonoil manufacturing). In 1990, 44 per cent of total manufactured exports in Brazil and 58 per cent in Mexico were by foreign affiliates of MNCs.The trend is accelerating for many MNCs to move manufacturing and services industries out of high labor cost countries to ever cheaper ones in the Third World as competition for markets and demands on profits from shareholders intensifies. Morgan Crucible, the UK specialty materials group, is typical. It is shifting production to low wage economies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Average labor costs are $1.50 an hour in eastern Europe compared to $26 an hour in Germany. At its new Shanghai plant workers were paid $1 a day compared with $31 an hour in Japan. It was doing this despite a 20 per cent increase in profits. Similarly British Polythene industries (BPI), Europe's largest polythene film producer, reported an increase of pretax profits from £8.61m to £11.5m. It closed its plant in the Midlands where workers were paid £15,000 a year, to move to China where workers are paid $1,000 (£670) a year. BPI chairman said that: 'We had to go there or see our business disappear'.[14] Such trends will reinforce and extend existing inequalities in all countries concerned.UNCTAD ignores such realities when in promoting FDI, it highlights the rapid increase of inflows into India as a result of its governments recent neoliberal economic policies. 'By the turn of the century it is estimated that India's middle class will include over 9.4m households earning over $9,000 per annum.' This is in a country with a population of over 800m people, the vast majority of whom live in dire poverty. Similarly Asia is seen as an area with a growing and potentially high spending middle class. If present day growth rates continue, 'the middle class in Asia could top 700m by the year 2010, having $9 trillion spending power 50 per cent more than the size of the US economy today.' This in an area where 180m urban dwellers and 690m rural people lack safe drinking water and access to proper sanitation and overall 675m people live in absolute poverty.Finally, FDI inflows into the Third World have been used by imperialist countries to export environmentally polluting industries and factories. Japan, in what UNCTAD refers to as 'housecleaning' its domestic industrial structure, has financed and constructed a copper smelting plant run by PASAR in the Philippines. Gas and water emissions from the plant contain high concentrations of boron, arsenic, heavy metals, and sulphur compounds that have contaminated water supplies, reduced fishing and rice yields, damaged forests and increased the occurrence of respiratory diseases among local residents.[15] It is not just the low wages $1.64 an hour compared to an average $16.17 in the United States which make the Mexican maquiladora zones attractive to MNCs but also their loose environmental regulations. Studies have shown evidence of massive toxic dumping polluting rivers, groundwater and soils and causing severe health problems among workers and deformities among babies born to young women working in the zone. The workers are housed in dwellings in shanty towns that stretch for miles with no sewer systems and mostly without running water.[16]The specter of 1914The rapid internationalization of capital since the mid-1970s has, to a significant extent, brought the capitalist system closer to pre-First World War conditions. The openness of capitalist economies today is no greater than before 1914. The main players are the same but the balance of economic power between them has changed. Merchandise trade (exports plus imports) as a percentage of GDP is close to the levels of 1913 (Table 4). FDI stock has been estimated at 9 per cent of world output in 1913 compared to 8.5 per cent in 1991. But there are differences which in fact add to the growing instability of the capitalist system.$1,230bn a day flows through the foreign exchange system as financial institutions and multinational corporations hedge, gamble and speculate on the movement of national currencies. The financial system has now an unprecedented autonomy from real production and represents an ever present threat to economic stability as it rapidly redistributes 'success and failure' throughout the system. Third World debt at a record $1,714bn in 1994, continues to grow despite massive debt repayments which bleed those countries dry. Labour migration is far more restricted than in before the First World War leaving whole populations imprisoned in untenable social conditions. Inequalities between rich and poor countries and between the rich and poor in all countries have reached unprecedented levels and are still growing.CONCLUSIONThe globalization as a new modus operandi of Imperialism, first of all, intensifies the internationalization of capital. Now a day the imperialist forces cry aloud “global village”. This is nothing but the division of the world, as Lenin envisaged, among the big imperialist monopolies, contemporarily, represented by TNCs and MNCs for the un-hindered penetration of their capital for squeezing the wealth of the commonwealth (popularly known as 3rd world) countries. They are imposing several tariffs on the trade of these peripheral countries.Far from being a beacon of capitalist progress 'globalization' is a sign of economic decay and increasing instability in a world of obscene and growing inequality. The present crises proves the Marxist theory of capitalism, inevitable collapse of capitalism, as Karl Marx scientifically prophesied. It remembers us about the scientific conclusion of Lenin that Imperialism.1. Globalization of Capital, An Outline of Recent Changes in the Modus Operandi of Imperialism, Lal Parcham – Lok Dasta Publication, 1997.2. MICHEL BEAUD, A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, Aakar books, Delhi,2004.3. V.I.LENIN, Against Imperialist War, Progress Pub. Moscow, 1978.4. V.I.LENIN, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Selected works, Vol. I, Progress Pub. Moscow, 1976.5. World Investment Report 1995: Transnational Corporations and Competitiveness, United Nations, New York and Geneva, 1995. Most of the statistics are taken from this and earlier reports unless otherwise indicated.6. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson Globalisation in Question, Polity Press 1996.7. David C Korten When Corporations Rule the World, Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1995.8. Globalization and its Limits: The Continuing Economic Importance of Nations and Regions IDS, Sussex University, May 95.NOTES[2] KITTY MENON, “Imperialism and Export of Capital in the Contemporary Period”, Social Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 3, Mar. 1982, p. 19.[3]“GLOBALISATION A Re-division of the World by Imperialism ”, http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk/marxism/articles/glob131.htm[4] The Guardian, 20 May 1996.[5] The Guardian 20 May 1996[6] Financial Times 5 January 1996, The Economist 24 June 1995.[7] WIR 1995 pp xxvi-xxx, and Wade p19.[8] Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question, Polity Press 1996, pp. 76-9.[9] The Economist, 24 June 1995[10] see FRFI 111 p7[11] Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Op. cit., p67-68.[12] WIR, pp. x-xvii, p. 150.[13] David C Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1995, p. 223.[14] Financial Times, 12 September 1995.[15] David C Korten, Op.cit., p. 31.[16] Ibid. p. 131-2.

ROLE OF MONOPOLY AND FINANCE CAPITAL IN THE ERA OF IMPERIALISM

In contemporary world struggle, the bourgeoisie still postures as the champion of the free trade. But it is not the free trade of the old, competitive stage of capitalism. It is the free trade of GAINT IMPERIALIST MONOPOLIES.”[1] --SAM MARCYIMPERIALISM HAS been continuing as being the catch-word of the present century. Several adjectives are being added to the term such as American Imperialism, Cultural Imperialism, Globalized Imperialism, etc. that manifest powerful penetration of imperialism into every nook and corner of the present-day life.Contemporary world is ruled by the ‘Uni-polar’ American Imperialism that exploits the world population at large by snatching lion’s share of “booty” surplus value squeezed by the world imperialist camp through imposing its hegemony over the world. The world imperialist powers are trying to make world as unhindered market for the penetration of their finance-capital. “The US imperialism,” says Enver Hoxha, the first president of Socialist Albania, “and other capitalist states have fought and are fighting to maintain their hegemony in the world, to defend the capitalist and neo-colonialist system, to emerge from great crisis which has them in its grip, with the fewest possible losses…….the US imperialism, which dominates its partners, politically, economically and militarily, has the main role in the struggle to achieve these aims.”[2] In this juncture of Globalization, it is highly necessary to study the role of monopoly and finance capital that differentiates the imperialist stage of capitalism from pre-imperialist capitalism.The term ‘imperialism’ has its origin in the Latin ‘imperilcm’ which is generally meant an expression employed for the aspiration to form a single, powerful empire encompassing the entire world; an aspiration which one state or another may realize by conquest, or by colonization, or by a “peaceful” political unification of existing sovereign entities, or by the simultaneous application of all these methods. In this sense, we speak of the Imperium Romanum, of the empire Julius Caesar founded in 45 BC, when he extended his personal power to all Roman countries and entrenched this power by assuming the title Imperator or of the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great or of Charlemagne’s empire, etc.[3] But when we speak of modern imperialism we should keep the imperialism that raised on the soil of a highly developed capitalism,[4] in our mind. According to Lenin, who gave a comprehensive picture of imperialism in his classical work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the glob among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”[5]This paper is trying to analyze the evolution and role of monopoly and finance capital as the mechanism of the Age of Empire[6] or Imperialism in the last decades of 19th century and early decades of 20th century since this period developed a new kind of imperialism.[7] The essence of the present study basically revolves around four central and interrelated themes. These themes are; Pre-Imperialist capitalism, a retrospect; concentration of production and emergence of monopolies; role of banks and appearance of finance capital and financial oligarchies; and export of capital as the logic of new imperialism. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is much used for making structure of this paper. In addition to this several other published works including J.A.Hobson’s Imperialism, a study, Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, Michel Beaud’s A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, etc as well as several journals are also used. Here I express my sincere gratitude toward Dr. S.Sivadasan, the Head of the Department of history in SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVRSITY OF SANSKRIT, KALADI, KERALA for giving valuable helps and suggestions for preparing this paper.
I. PRE-IMPERIALIST CAPITALISM – A Retrospect“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.[8]-- KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELSTHE CAPITALIST mode of production had emerged from the ruins of the feudalism since 1500 a key date which opens a century that can be considered as a “great turning point in the world history.”[9] The entire period of capitalism since its birth can broadly be classified into Pre-imperialist era and Imperialist era. Pre-imperialist capitalism is the capitalism that existed up to the emergence of monopoly and finance capital.The life of pre-imperialist capitalism started from mercantilism. Then it proceeded from mercantilist capitalism to manufacturing capitalism to industrial capitalism. Capitalist production grew out of individual production of the feudal times. The typical form of feudal production was production for local consumption; food, clothing and other articles were produced by the serfs for themselves and for their feudal lords.[10] But this feudal mode of production failed to fulfill the developing needs of the society. Thus the production for profit[11] i.e. production for sale which is the essential mark of capitalism[12] had been emerged since the gradual breaking up of the old feudal production, the production for consumption. Production for profit necessitated two things; someone with enough resources to buy means of production (looms, spinning-machines and so on) and, secondly, people who had no means of production themselves, no resources by which they could live. In other words, there had to be ‘capitalists’ or bourgeoisie, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor and workers or proletariat, the class who, “having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”[13]The bourgeoisie appropriates surplus value produced by the wage labor in the form of profit. The two principal forms of accumulation that existed in 16th century were a) accumulation by state (royal manufacturers, king’s highway, ports, etc.) and b) bourgeois accumulation (private fortunes, money, precious metals, real estates etc.).[14] In this century, the conditions for the future development of capitalism came into being; banking and merchant bourgeoisies having at their disposal both immense fortunes and banking and financial networks.[15] It is in this sense only that one can date the capitalist era as beginning in the 16th century. So the mercantile capitalism can be considered as the embryo of the development that later on could be called capitalism.[16]With the increase of trade, the merchants began to need more surpluses that produced by serfs and not required by their lords; they therefore began to develop organized production for the market, using the whole time labor of serfs who had been freed or had succeeded in escaping form their lords. So in a slow development, lasting hundreds of years, there grew up the production for market carried on by independent artisans and employers of the wage-labor. The independent artisans also gradually developed employers of labor with ‘journeymen’ working for them for wages.[17] Here we have seen a transition from mercantile capitalism to the emergence of manufacturing system.In the 19th century the world witnessed several bourgeois revolutions against the feudal yoke. The revolution firstly started in the first colonization,[18] i.e., America and later France in 1789 and other countries. With the American and French revolutions, and with the development of “Industrial Revolution” in the later phase of the eighteenth century, a new period opened up, characterized by the irresistible rise of capitalism,[19] i.e. Industrial Capitalism.This industrial capitalism was set up on the basis of competition or free trade. “The cry for freedom by bourgeoisie”, explains Engels, “meant nothing more than freedom of trade.”[20] So this period also known as laissez-faire and laissez-aller[21] period of capitalism.[22] But this laissez-fair capitalism could not be longer as it gave rise to the concentration of capital and emergence of monopolies what Marx foresaw, that led to another stage of capitalism, Imperialism.II. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION AND EMERGENCE OF MONOPOLIES“Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.Anti-thesis: Competition [Bourgeois competition].Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, is so far as it implies the system of completion, and negation of competition is so far as it is monopoly.”“Thus modern monopoly, bourgeois monopoly is synthetic monopoly, the negation of the negation, the unity of opposites. It is monopoly in the pure, normal, rational state.”[23]-- KARL MARXFREE TRADE as it existed before the middle of the 19th century had disappeared. Its replacement by giant, marauding monopolies represents a new era of capitalism – the era of Imperialism. Karl Marx foresaw this and the concentration of capital and production in the few capitalists called monopolists. This can be seen in his above quoted passage. In addition to this, he gives clear account of concentration of capital that led to monopoly in his famous work, Capital. According to him, the first historical transformation in the development of capitalism consists in the separation of the workers from the means of production and creation of a class of free wage laborers.[24] But once this process has been completed and “the capitalist mode of production stands on its own two feet, the further socialization of labor…… and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form. What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker, but this capitalist who exploits a large number of workers. This expropriation is accomplished through the action of immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capital…. Hand in hand with this centralization or expropriation of many capitalists by the few, other developments take place.”[25] He again explains that “monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists.”[26] Thus he proved that the free competition gave rise to the concentration of production which turns, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopolies. So, monopoly is one of the chief characteristic features of Imperialism.According to Lenin, who developed Marxism in the era of Imperialism,[27] the enormous growth of industry and remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-large enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism.[28]As an initial stage of imperialism the production concentrated in few of the big industries. For example, in Germany out of every 1,000 industrial enterprises, large enterprises that employing more than 50 workers numbered 3 in 1882, 6 in 1895 and 9 in 1907 and out of 100 workers employed these groups of enterprises employed 22, 30, and 37 respectively.[29] The following diagram (Fig. 1) also shows the concentration of production in Germany during this period.[30]Fig 1: Concentration of production in GermanyIf we examine the statistical data of the concentration of production in America from 1904 to 1909, we can get the same result not only on the basis of workers employed but also on the basis of output.

It can be picturized as follows
Fig 2: Concentration of production in America
From the table and diagram (Fig. 2), it is easily understood that in America the concentration of production in few of companies i.e., in 0.9% companies in 1904 and 1.1% of companies in 1909 were concentrated. Almost half of the total production was concentrated in one hundredth part of these enterprises.[31]When we speak of the concentration of production, we cannot avoid the “Combination”, a very important feature of capitalism.[32] Combination means the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry. It either represented the consecutive stages in the processing of raw materials (for example, the smelting of iron ore into pig-iron; the conversion of pig iron into steel, and then perhaps, the manufacturing of steel goods) or auxiliary to one another (for example, the utilization of scrap, or of by-products, the manufacturing of packing materials etc.)According to Hilferding, an Austrian Marxist and author of Finance Capital which is used by Lenin for designing his idea on imperialism, “combination levels out the fluctuations of trade and therefore assures to the combined enterprises a more stable rate of profit. Secondly, combination has the effect of eliminating trade. Thirdly, it has the effect of rendering possible technical improvement and, consequently, the acquisition of super-profits over and above those obtained by the ‘pure’ (non-combined) enterprises.”[33] For example, in Germany in 1904, the big coal companies, producing millions of tons yearly, strongly combined or organized in their coal syndicate and big steel plants closely allied to the coal mines, having their own steel syndicate. These giant enterprises produced 400,000 tons of steel per annum, with a tremendous output of ore and coal and finished steel goods.[34]Concentration went on further and further. Individual enterprises became larger and larger. It is extremely important to note that by swallowing small industries, concentration leads to monopoly. According to Lenin, the Monopoly is exactly creating large-scale industry and eliminating small industry, replacing large-scale industry by still larger-scale industry, finally leading to such a concentration of production and capital, that monopoly has been and is the result.[35]The principal stages in the development of monopolies are as follows:i) 1860-70, the highest stage, the apex of development of free competition; monopoly is in the barely discernible, embryonic stage.ii) After the crisis of 1873, a lengthy period of development of cartels; but they are still exception. They are still a transitory phenomenon.iii) The boom at the end of 19th century and crisis of 1900-03.Cartels became one of the foundations of the whole economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into imperialism.[36] So the production was concentrated into the monopolies whose forms were “cartels, syndicates and trusts.”[37]The number of cartels in Germany was estimated at about 250 in 1896 and at 385 in 1905, with about 12000 firms participating. The half of the steam and electric power totally used in the country were consumed by these giant cartels. The then American statistics can be seen in the following diagram (Fig. 3).[38]Fig 3: Emergence of Monopolies in Germany
The big monopolies used following methods to create big monopoly “organization”:i) Stopping supplies of raw materials.ii) Stopping the supply of labor by means of alliances. (agreements imposed upon laborers)iii) Stopping deliveries.iv) Closing trade outlets.v) Agreements with the buyers, by which the latter undertake to trade only with the cartels.vi) Systematic price cutting.vii) Stopping credits andviii) Boycott.Here we see the monopolists throttling those who do not submit to them, to their yoke, to their dictation.[39] Monopoly, thus, is the last word in the latest phase of capitalist developments.[40] III. ROLE OF BANKS AND APPEARANCE OF FINANCE CAPITAL AND FINANCIAL OLIGARCHIESConcentration of Banks and Bank Capital:THE PRINCIPAL and primary function of bank is to serve as middle man in making payments that means receiving deposits and lending loans. By doing this they transform inactive money capital into active i.e. into capital yielding profit. They collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class.From this primary level banks grew to the powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of money capital of all the capitalists and small business men. This transformation of numerous modest middle men into a handful of monopolies is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism.[41] “Affiliated banks” are the most important distinguishing features of modern capitalist concentration. Following figures (Fig. 4) clearly shows the concentration of bank capital in Germany.Fig 4: Concentration of Bank Capital in Germany
The concentration of banks was going on and the final word of this concentration is monopoly. In this period the banks undertook the duties of Stock Exchanges. Oscar Stillich said that “every bank is Stock Exchange”.Simultaneously the relation between banks and industry had been appearing. It is precisely in this sphere the new role of bank was come into being. This connection between banks and industrial enterprises had a new content, new forms and new organs. Thus the 20th century marks the turning-point from the old capitalism to the new, form domination of capital to the domination of finance capital.Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchies:Early phase of the history of banks reveals that they had little or no direct interests in the industrial concerns even though they lend money to them and took share of industrial profits. But enormous growth of industry took the attention of bankers’ interest. They started to undertake the share of industrial capital at the same time the richer industrialists also undertook the shares of banks. Thus a tie of bank with industry could be appeared. This merging of industrial capital with bank capital gave birth to a new phenomenon called ‘Finance Capital’. Thus the very richest capitalists, whether they started as bankers or industrialists, became ‘banker-industrialists’.[42]“An ever greater share of industrial capital”, explains Hilferding, “ceases to belong to the industrialists who employ it. They are granted control over this capital only through the good graces of the bank, which, in relation to them, represents the owner. On the other hand, the bank must invest an ever greater share of its capital assets in industry. Thus the bank becomes to an even greater extent, an industrial capitalist. I call the bank capital, that is, capital in the form of money, which is in this manner actually transformed into the industrial capital - finance capital”. He again defined the finance capital as greater share of capital invested in industry i.e. capital controlled by the banks and operated by the industrialists.[43]Finance capital developed along with the development of the Stock companies and reaches its apex in the monopolization of industry. The industrial returns assured a more secure and more constant character. Thus possibilities for investment of banking capital in industry are increasingly expanded. But the banks retained control over bank capital.[44]“The concentration of production”, says Lenin, “the monopoly arising there from; the merging or coalescence of banking with industry – such is the history of the rise of finance-capital and what gives the term ‘finance-capital’ its content.”[45]The best illustration of the merging of banks with industries is the increasing number of directorships in industries held by the directors of the bank. In 1870 the directors of the banks which later became the ‘Big Five’ and Bank of England held 157 other directorships; in 1913 they held 329; in 1939 they held 1150.[46]One way or another, nearly the whole of the rest of the world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of the international banker countries – Great Britain, the United States, France and Germany, the four “pillars” of world finance capital.[47]IV EXPORT OF CAPITALIT IS highly necessary to examine the export of capital that plays in creating the international network of dependence on and connection of finance capital. The characteristic feature of the old capitalism was the export of goods. Typical characteristic feature of the latest stage of capitalism is the export of capital.“As export increased”, says Michel Beaud, “from the capitalist countries, international competition became still more severe; capital was exported and overseas holdings and affiliates were created.”[48] On the threshold of the 20th century, there was the formation of new type of monopoly: firstly, monopolist associations of capitalists in all capitalistically developed countries; secondly, the monopolist position of a few very rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital has reached gigantic proportions. An enormous surplus of capital has arisen in the advanced countries.[49] As the basic nature of capitalism is the profit harvest, they use these capitals for the purpose of increasing profit by exporting capital abroad. The capital has been exported mainly to the backward countries since in these backward countries profits were usually high, for capital was scarce, the price of land was relatively low, wages were low, and raw materials were cheap.[50]Sidney Pollard in his essay, ‘Capital exports, 1870-1914: Harmful or Beneficial?’ gives the following table to show the export of capital of the world.[51]Table 2
An another study is also given below.[52]Table 3
This tabulation clearly says that the principal spheres of investment of British capital are in the British colonies, which are very large in America. France’s situation is totally different. French exports of capital are invested mainly in Europe, primarily in Russia. This is mainly loan capital, government loans and not capital invested in industrial undertakings. German capital was mainly invested in both Europe and Australia.How the export of capital worked in those recipient countries is that it influences and accelerates the development of capitalism in the countries. The export of capital is also a means of encouraging the export of commodities.[53] In the export of capital the close connection between powerful banks and governments cannot be ignored.V RESULTS OF THE OPERATION OF FINANCE CAPITAL IN 20TH CENTURYThe monopoly and finance capital that appeared in the last part of the 19th century and first of the 20th century had several results – both positive and negative. The most important direct results are: the outbreak of the 1st and 2nd World Wars, the Socialistic Revolutions throughout the East that led to the emergence of a new World Socialist Camp which alarmed the Imperialist camp, Armament race and LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization).By the emergence of finance capital, the world imperialist powers divided the whole of the earth into convenient ‘spheres of influences’ for the investment of their finance capital thus the world was divided among these ‘powerful capital exporting countries’. The inherent law of capitalism, its asymmetrical development, necessitated the re-division of the already divided world market. But the finance capital groups in the wealthiest states could no longer expand the territories controlled by them except at each others expense. So, large-scale wars to re-divide the world in favor of the victorious states emerged as a common phenomenon. Large-scale wars between great powers have been the outcome of these demands for re-division of the world that had already been divided. That is why Lenin scientifically prophesied the 1st World War and called it as ‘imperialist war’. According to him, “the present war is imperialist in character. This war is the outcome of conditions in an epoch in which capitalism has reached in the highest stage in its development, in which the greatest significance attaches, not only to the export of commodities, but also to the export of capital.”[54]Another important result as above mentioned is the Socialistic Revolutions of 20th century inaugurated by the Great October Socialist Revolution of Russia in 1917. In the imperialist stage of capitalism, the inner contradictions of the imperialist countries were aggravated since the imperialist wars destroy the common life. So the class antagonism and struggle in this period became more and more acute. This ultimately led to the revolutions as 20th century witnessed. By the effort of Lenin and Stalin a third Communist International had been constituted that created the World Socialist Camp and led it. This was severe blow to the world imperialist camp. This resulted within the imperialist camp as death-knell alarm. So the world was divided into two and stood face to face. The then and ever seen socialist camp started to compete with and combat the world imperialist system which has been built upon the basis of exploitation. These struggle and competition are known as so-called “Cold War”. Unfortunately the cold war ended up with the collapse of the socialist camp.In post war period, the world saw that the imperialist camp lost their old modus operandi i.e., colonies, through de-colonization process based on the two principles – nationalism and right to self-determination. So the imperialism had to operate for several decades without direct colonization. Thus they re-articulated a new modus operandi[55], i.e. neo-colonialism or indirect colonialism through economic invasions and compulsions. Thus they compulsorily impose LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization). So the LPG is the direct result of the operations of the finance capital for making its unhindered penetrations possible.CONCLUSIONCONCENTRATION OF capital, centralization of capital, internationalization of capital – these three features are making the transition of capitalism form its competitive stage to its monopoly stage.[56] These are also the three distinct characteristics of present-day capitalism. Nowadays the world imperialism gave up its old modus operandi, i.e. colonization and re-articulated a new, i.e. indirect neo-colonialism in the form of LPG.The old cartels, syndicates and trusts have been replaced by new MNCs and TNCs in the post-war period. Nowadays the world has been divided among these gigantic imperialistic concerns. They are penetrating into the backward third world countries through LPG. The old multi-polar imperialism gave way to the US uni-polar imperialism. The core imperialist countries consist of the United States of America at the apex and its sub-partners, bent to exploiting the peripheral countries. It facilitates the entry of finance capital into every nook and corner of the world.The developments since the end of the Second World War reveal that the features of capitalism in its imperialist stage have only become more sharpened, but in their essence have remained unaltered; only their forms have changed. As Lenin envisaged, present-day capitalism has become far more internationalized.[57]Day-by-day the contradictions between rulers of the imperialist forces and working people, between imperialist powers and under developed countries and contradiction within the imperialist powers are sharpening. These were the contradictions underlined by Lenin that cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. It is obvious that Lenin’s conclusion that historically imperialism stands at the eve of proletarian revolution is also valid in the present society.BIBLIOGRAPHYBooks publishedE.J.HOBASBAWM, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, Rupa & co., Culcatta, 1992.EMILE BURNS, What is Marxism?, Peoples Publishing House, Dellhi, 1983.ENVER HOXHA, Imperialism and Revolution, Albania Edn. 1978.F.POLYANSKY, An Economic History – Age of Imperialism (1870-1917), Progress Pub. Moscow, 1985.Globalization of Capital, An Outline of Recent Changes in the Modus Operandi of Imperialism, Lal Parcham – Lok Dasta Publication, 1997.K.MARX and F.ENGELS, Capital, Vol. I, Progress Pub., Moscow, 1977., Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress pub. Moscow, 1977.MICHEL BEAUD, A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, Aakar books, Delhi,2004.RAJEN HARSHÉ, Twentieth Century Imperialism – shifting contours and changing Conceptions, Sage pub., New Delhi, 1997.STALIN, The Foundations of Leninism, Massline pub. 2000.V.I.LENIN, Against Imperialist War, Progress Pub. Moscow, 1978., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Selected works, Vol. I, Progress Pub. Moscow, 1976.JournalsANIKET ALAM, “National Interest’ Not the Issue in Nuclear Deal”, Economic and Political Weekly, September 27, 2008.JOHN.A.HOBSON, “Socialistic Imperialism”, International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 12. No, 1, Oct. 1901.JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER, “Monopoly-Finance Capital”, Monthly Review, Vol. 58, No. 7.JOHN CUNNINGHAM WOOD, “J.A.Hobson and British Imperialism”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 42, No. 4, Oct. 1983.KITTY MENON, “Export of Capital in the Contemporary Period”, Social Scientist, Vol.10. No. 3, Mar. 1982.SIDNEY POLLARD, “Capital Export, 1870-1914: Harmful or Beneficial?”, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 4, Nov. 1998.Webliography“Colonialism and Imperialism: classic Texts”, http://users.ntua.gr/jmilios/COLONIALISM-fin%20.docDAVID.N.BAALAM and MICHAEL VESETH, “Commanding Height – Lenin’s Critique of Global Capitalism”, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/ess_leninscritique.htmlGREGORY ZENOVIEV, “What is Imperialism?”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/zinoviev/works/x01/x01.htmJOHN HOBSON, “Imperialism”, 1902, http://www.marxists.org/archive/hobson/1902/imperialism/index.htmKEVIN.A.CARSON, “Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly-Capital”, http://www.mutualist.org/id10.html“Market, Monopoly and War”, http//www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/overview/war.pdfNICK BEAMS, “Marxism and Political Economy of Paul Sweezy”, The World Socialist Website, Apr. 2004. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/ps6-a13.shtml .SAM MARCY, “Free trade, Monopoly and NAFTA”, workers World, Aug. 26, 1993. http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/sambol/bolwar/bolwar03.htm#fn13Notes and References[1] SAM MARCY, “Free Trade, Monopoly and NFTA”, Workers World, August 26, 1993. http://www.workers.org/marcy/1993/sm930826.html.[2] ENVER HOXHA, Imperialism and the Revolution, Foreign Language pub., 1978, p.9.[3]GREGORY ZINOVIEV, “What is Imperialism?”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/zinoviev/works/x01/x01.htm.[4] Ibidem.[5] LENIN, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, Selected Works, Vol. I, Progress Pub., Moscow, 1976, p. 700.[6] E.J.HOBSBAWM, The Age of Empire, Rupa & co., Culcuta, 1992, pp. 11-12.[7] Ibid., p. 56.[8] K.MARX and F.ENGELS, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Progress Pub., Moscow, 1977, p. 41.[9] MICHEL BEAUD, A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2004, p. 8.