The Jugnauth Regime – What is it?
14.05.2023
The Jugnauth regime has become distinctly “bonapartist”, in the sense that it has gained a certain control over allsocial classes, including the ruling class of capitalists that usually controls the bourgeois State. So, let us look today at the precise class challenges to the Jugnauth regime. Where do they come from? Where will they come from? Where must they come from?
The Bourgeoisie
Firstly, the bourgeoisie as a whole, including the most tenacious sections of the historic bourgeoisie descended from the slave owning class, the indenture employer sugar estates, and the big importers, has become a kind of “state bourgeoisie”. This would have been unimaginable a decade or so ago. When, in LALIT, we use the term “state bourgeoisie”, we are not referring to any MPs or ministers, any petty bourgeoisie, or to any nominees in state apparatus posts, but to a genuine bourgeoisie that owns capital and that is dependent upon those in political power for its growth as a bourgeoisie. In the past, the “burzwazi deta” was big planters without sugar mills, whose capital the state protected by all kinds of legislation and a whole array of parastatal bodies. It was also “import- substitution” industries that depended upon government orders, government contracts and government tenders (from pharmaceuticals to vehicle batteries, from cleaning materials to stone crushers), and it was a secondary economic power way behind the historic bourgeoisie. It included people of all creeds and colours. But, today, aggravated by the Covid pandemic, the entire bourgeoisie has begun to depend upon the State: this is not only because the State closes and opens borders, but because the State has directly subsidized the bourgeoisie so heavily. In particular, the State now subsidizes the entire bourgeoisie, the bigger the capitalist the more he gets, via its “Mauritius Investment Corporation” set up in 2020 with Rs 80 billion of capital (mainly Bank of Mauritius capital) bailing out the entire capitalist class. It is a kind of weird nationalization without government control!
Being reduced to being a “burzwazi deta”, the capitalist class has given up its political role. That is the price it pays to be “not nationalized” outright. It has even given up all its quasi-political organisms: the Mauritius Sugar Producers Association, the Mauritius Employers Federation and the Joint Economic Council, each a feisty politicized entity, have all been reduced to the spineless “Business Mauritius” run by a few functionaries. All this to say that the capitalist class in Mauritius has, for the first time in history, been reduced to political silence. It has neither a political vision of any kind, nor even a political voice. It has even lost the monopoly on horse racing through its Mauritius Turf Club control.
All this to say that the MSM-led government, the Jugnauth regime, has tamed the capitalist class, while still doing the bidding of this class: the MSM is still dishing out all the permits for selling off land, including agricultural land, on the world real estate market; dishing out permits for new hotels and other tourism projects; and all the while using MIC capital as the bait that fills their mouths so that they are silent. This is at the very heart of what is commonly called “corruption”. It is the State’s power to control the bourgeoisie. We must understand this, and this understanding will help us to see that the problem is not that capitalism is good if not corrupt: capitalism, and the inequality on which it is predicated, is the corruption of society. Corruption is often a deal between the corrupter who has money and the corrupted with the power to grant permits.
But what does the Jugnauth regime do so as to control the working class? It keeps this huge, vastly majority, class quiet by various forms of social aid – some universal, some patronizing – that acts as a safety net. We are referring to the institution of a minimum wage, the continuation of subsidized food, universal old age and disability pensions that subsidize whole families, free transport for over 60s, students and the disabled, free health care, free education, subsidized water tanks and pumps, subsidized housing. So, that brings us to look at the second class that the MSM regime has to deal with: the working class.
The Working Class
The other major class, the working class, while becoming the majority class world-wide for the first time in history, is reeling from over 30 years of world-wide neo-liberal attacks. The class struggle of the past 30 years has been reduced to a series of defensive working class struggles against the onslaught in class struggle by capital, in particular by the most corrupt of all capital, finance capital. Workers have earned an ever-diminishing part of total income, world-wide and also in the Republic of Mauritius, and now the working class owns an even smaller part of what there is to “own” on the planet.
Today, we can safely say that, while all Mauritian political parties declare that they are in favour of the working class, especially around Labour Day and around general elections, LALIT is the only active political party that represents a working class challenge to the Jugnauth regime. We are a strong political challenge but, so far, a weak electoral challenge. Ashok Subron’s Rezistans ek Alternativ, which staked claim to representing the working class, too, now rallies people around Navin Ramgoolam. That cuts him out.
And LALIT’s political clout is present and quite strong, we are not politically stronger, and not electorally strong at all precisely because the class we represent is, right now, still reeling from the class war waged by the bourgeoisie over the past 30 years. What is important is that, unlike the bourgeoisie, the working class is not without a political vision nor without a political voice. So, LALIT, and the unions are, and can further become, a voice that challenges Jugnauth’s regime from the working class point of view. The union movement gives support to some issues in LALIT’s program: food sovereignty, the Diego Garcia issue, the Palestine issue, stands in favour of universal benefits, stands in favour of fixed sum wage demands (as opposed to percentages), anti-war stands, the use of the mother-tongue in Parliament and as medium, and so on.
But, in general the MSM manages to draw in some trade union leaders, on the one hand, and the opposition extra-parliamentary populists draw in others from time to time (like Bruneau Laurette did with the late Rashid Imrith and with Ashok Subron). Other unions (like the GSA, and to some extent the CTSP) become partly “ONG-ized” and in favour of “civil society”, as opposed to creating independent working class political action in order to further their union aims.
And the working class often watches as the petty bourgeoisie goes berserk, hit as it is, by a series of crises.
The Petty Bourgeoisie
Over the past three or four years, the most active class in opposition, politically speaking, is the petty bourgeoisie. It is in discontent. Huge swathes of it are being hurled into the proletariat. The capitalists are being bailed out, and the working class given a safety net, while the petty bourgeoisie is in the winter of its discontent.
And it has coalesced behind two different, contradictory, challenges against the MSM regime – which sometimes act like scissors, politically speaking, in a two-pronged attack on the regime, and sometimes act in a way that, electorally speaking, is likely to operate in favour of the regime. Let us explain this.
The MSM is relatively weak in most urban areas, and the combined opposition forces are strong – but they are not, in practice, in any form of electoral alliance. Put in another way, the extra-parliamentary forces, at one and the same time, weaken the Jugnauth regime politically, which is why Jugnauth uses repression against them, and yet these extra-parliamentary forces help the Jugnauth regime electorally, which is why Jugnauth has constantly worked so as to sabotage the already-well-nigh-impossible unification of all the petty bourgeois opposition forces. The petty bourgeoisie is not able, as a class, to agree upon any “projet de société”, as the bourgeoisie and the working class can and often do.
So, while the Jugnauth regime has nothing to worry about from the bourgeoisie, which it has tamed, nor, at least for the moment, from the working class that is in a state of grass-roots relative passivity, it has two contradictory challengers in the petty bourgeoisie: the Labour, PMSD, MMM Parliamentary Opposition, trying to coalesce in time for elections, and a series of populist extra-parliamentary challenges, based on urban petty-bourgeois discontent, a discontent which is so rife that it lives on the edges of the mass hysteria of populism and even sometimes fascist tendencies produced by the phenomenon of the “petty bourgeoisie run amok”.
All this to explain why the Jugnauth regime uses repression against people like former attorney general, Rama Valayden, who is leader of the Linion Pep Moris, even though Valayden may serve MSM regime interests, electorally speaking. The same goes for Bruneau Laurette, the Avengers, Roshi Bhadain and so on. Laurette even states it as his intention to take the MMM and PMSD’s electoral bases from them. And yet he mobilizes people against the MSM, so that Jugnauth turns to repression against him. The regime even uses repression against the the press and radio journalists that pump up these forces.
Jugnauth Regime reduced to using repression
The Jugnauth Regime uses three different forms of inter-related “repression” to deal with the constant challenges it faces from the petty-bourgeoisie.
Police as a Political Tool
The MSM regime uses the police force, quite openly, as a political tool against its political adversaries. This is open repression of the most patent kind. It uses arrests, when a simple summons would do. It uses summons when there is no offense at all. It uses provisional charges for abusive arrests. And it may even resort to using the police to plant drugs on political opponents, as the police are known to have planted on others.
MBC TV News as a Political Tool
The Jugnauth regime uses the MBC TV news bulletin as a way of promoting its party and the regime, and opposing all political challenges. It is so blatant as to make people watching it cringe. Yet, we urge everyone to watch it, study it, so as to be able to criticize it. Public funds should not be used this way.
Organized Religion as a Political Tool
The MBC has begun to use organized religion and even religious symbols and rituals as a rather blunt political weapon. In terms of sheer time, there are long bits of non-news recounting religious narratives accompanied by Bollywood or Hollywood music, depending. Interminable explanations of religious myths – including long descriptions of who is a supposed reincarnation of whom, mythical heroes birth dates and places, and details of the relics of some saint’s supposed bones being carted around the country as a kind of lucky charm, and so on. All this the MBC treats as if it were science. It is accompanied by endless interviews of people saying, as if it were unusual, “Nu ti leve granmatin, pran enn bin ...” And so on.
Conclusion
The only way to replace the Jugnauth regime with something less repressive, less abusing public TV, and less reliant on religiosity, is to organize the whole of the working class behind a proper working class program. We have done it before, in the 1930s and the 1970s. We can do it again.
LALIT
(Based on discussion in LALIT Central Committee today 14 May 2023).
