“... the nation-State is the only instrument that third world societies can use against imperialist exploitation.”
“The crux of any revolutionary political praxis in India is the defence of parliamentary democracy.”
Willing to admire gems like these? Go get Social Scientist (January-February 2005) and go through the lead article by editor Prabhat Patnaik: “The Communists and the Present.”1 ¨ The noted CPI(M) theoretician and JNU professor has, many times in the past, enthralled us with novel ideas on the great prospects lying hidden in new situations and on the lofty tasks of the Left. Thus, last summer, he went euphoric over the just-announced Common Minimum Programme of the UPA and declared:
“ The Programme does represent a shift of direction away from neo-liberalism…The dependence of the government on support from the Left would ensure that it would not make a complete volte face on its commitments embodied in the CMP in the matter of economic policy. Even though the Left has assured support to the government for a full five year term, it is unlikely that the government would exploit this commitment to push a neo-liberal agenda.”( India : A Setback for Neo-Liberalism, 10 June, 2004 , www.macroscan.com). It is a measure of his dynamism that now he takes a diametrically opposite position and explains how the pursuit of neo-liberal policies is insulated against changes in government. We do welcome the respected theorist back to his sober senses, but find it amusing that, in the present article too, he continues with his penchant for ‘bold’ assertions and sweeping comments that turn out to be blatantly one-sided formulations.
The current issue of Social Scientist coincides with the 18 th congress of the CPI(M) and the lead article bears an unmistakable imprint of the new ideas expressed within, and also around, the party congress.
As for the political task decided in the congress, the new General Secretary put it (in the post-congress public rally) this way: while continuing to support the UPA government on the basis of the CMP, the party must try and forge an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress – a third force to be developed on the basis of a common programme. What comrade Karat did not spell out is, for this the party itself must in the first place develop a programmatic vision acceptable to non-Left allies. And that is precisely what Patnaik offers as the culminating point of his discussion. In this sense the article is a creative, if not very authentic or authoritative, exercise in enriching the party’s emergent ideological position and tactical line.
At the same time, the article reads like an indirect response to political signals emanating from the camp of foes turned friends: from the class forces represented by the Congress and its allies in the UPA.
Ever since the pro-rich, pro-imperialist, anti-people government propped up by the Left (we believe Patnaik will not find fault with us for this factual description) came to office, the cunning big bourgeoisie has been pursuing its long-term policy of pressure and persuasion with renewed vigour. One remembers the highly successful blackmailing resorted to by share brokers during the opening days of the government – which had the finance minister rushing to Mumbai to appease Dalal Street and Left leaders issuing statements to tell the world they are a reformed lot ready to play ball. Such arm-twisting, however, has its corollary in a persistent political ‘engagement’ carried on by the more farsighted among bourgeois ideologues and publicists, which naturally becomes particularly intense when the CPI(M) or the CPI holds its party congress to discuss and decide tactics and policies. Thus in April this year the national media, the English press in particular, saw a barrage of advice on how the reformed Left should take a few steps further ahead so as to integrate itself more completely with the present day realities. It would be interesting and instructive if we could present here a representative sample of such friendly suggestions. With space constraints, however, we shall have to make do with just one specimen. The piece we have chosen is Indian Social Democratic Party?appearing in EconomicTimes, 21 April, 2005 .
In this op-ed write-up, the author recounts how Lassalle and Eisenacher in the late 18 th century, after testing great electoral success, defied Marx to abandon revolutionary class struggle and espouse the peaceful parliamentary path (which was later re-advocated by Khruschev in 1956), how Marx himself recognised the possibility of a non-violent path to socialism under certain conditions and how the communist parties of East Europe made an unhesitant and complete shift to social democracy, both politically and formally, after the fall of Berlin Wall. Using these as relevant contexts, the author points out that “The CPI(M) and CPI have, like Lassalleans in Germany , become an integral part of our electoral (read bourgeois) democracy. They have even captured power through the ballot box in various states and most dramatically in West Bengal …” He then calls upon “the young and erudite leadership” of these parties to devise “a bedrock of a new set of principles” that would allow the party “to function within the once castigated system, without contradictions.” He explains,
“As important stakeholders in the Indian democracy they would not only have to change their names but they would have to restructure their ideological perspectives and rhetoric… If the young leadership of CPI(M) and CPI are able to steer the party in this direction, they would produce a true democratic left in competition with the democratic right and the democratic centre in India ’s polity. If they ignore this option, it will be at their peril. The common cadre will remain confused and the ideological vision will remain blurred.”
Readers would be eager to know who the author is. Well, he is Amit Mitra. Not just one Amit Mitra, but the secretary general of FICCI.
We do not know if Patnaik has read Mitra. But he must be abreast of the winds blowing in the camp of capital and to a large extent he has skilfully accommodated the essential concern of the FICCI office bearer within the CPI(M) framework. That is to say, unlike Mitra he is for retaining the communist signboardwhile further developing social democratic theory and practice. This he does by portraying a novel situation (“for the first time….” etc.) and novel opportunities for communists at “the present”.
How the editor of Social Scientist accomplishes this remarkable feat of bridging the CPI(M) and the FICCI, we will see at the close of this rejoinder.
“With decolonization, the bourgeoisie made compromises with its erstwhile enemies, metropolitan capital … and domestic landlords, … to consolidate its position and keep its erstwhile allies, the workers and peasants, in check” – says Patnaik at the start of his essay.
Did the big bourgeoisie, even before independence, at all consider landlords to be their enemies or workers and peasants to be their allies? And can we forget all those threads of collusion between British imperialism and the pre-independence bourgeoisie – threads which later developed into the clear compromise Patnaik speaks of – and portray the latter simply as a fighter against the former? Does Patnaik, or the CPI(M) for that matter, wish to revert to the CPI’s assessment of the bourgeoisie as the leader of anti-colonial, anti-feudal struggle?
After independence, Patnaik tells us, the dominant bourgeoisie compromised with imperialism, but its state went in the opposite direction! The bourgeoisie was weak, but the state strong enough, to “take on the might of metropolitan capital”! He explains this paradox by reference to “the rooting of the state in a process of national struggle”. So for the first few decades after 1947, the big bourgeoisie pursues a path of “economic nationalism” and therefore remains a part of the nation, from which it “secedes” only in the 1990s when it shifts to “the neo-liberal trajectory”. Thereupon, moreover, the “nation-state” gets transformed into the “collaborationist state”. And since the former, as Patnaik tells us later on, is “the only instrument” of anti-imperialist struggle, naturally the central task of the Left becomes, as we are told towards the end of the article, re-transforming its character into a higher type of nation-state.
What is conspicuously missing in this portrayal of dramatic shifts is the other aspect of essential continuity in the complex interrelationships among imperialism, big bourgeoisie and the state. Comprador in origin and dependent in nature, the monopoly capitalists in India have, ever since the negotiated transfer of power in 1947, consistently used the agency of the state to subserve the interests of, and at the same time bargain with, imperialist powers in various ways depending upon the options and compulsions of different periods. Thus during the Nehru-Indira era marked by the “autonomous trajectory of development”, there was a lot of dependence on western technology and capital, including in the case of the green revolution – which, according to Patnaik, was achieved “in the teeth of fierce opposition from imperialism” but actually entailed a new, dangerous and even growing dependence of the Indian farmer and Indian nation on international agro-giants. Similarly, during the present period of increasing collaboration with or surrender to foreign finance, one finds at least some instances of hard bargaining: witness Cancun during the NDA regime, the current diversification of defence deals with several countries including Russia , and so on. As for the “hiatus” between the dominant bourgeoisie (plus lackeys) and the bulk of the people, it was not “introduced”, as Patnaik claims, in the 1990s but was always there – resulting as it did from a series of bourgeois betrayals during pre- as well as post-independence periods.
Patnaik’s refusal to take cognisance of these facts and his thesis of “introduction of a hiatus” is not without a purpose. It supplies the theoretical foundation on which he builds his political project, as we discuss below.
“The Communists and the other Left Parties are the only political force opposed to this attempt at an unfettered integration of the national economy with world capitalism…By contrast, all bourgeois political formations are fundamentally in favour of such integration.” As a result, “For the first time in the history of the country’s anti-imperialist struggle, the Communists and their Left allies are in a position to seize the initiative for providing political leadership to this struggle” and this becomes one of their most important tasks.
One would agree with much of the above analysis, but the phrase “for the first time in the history…” is historically incorrect and politically harmful. Did not the years 1946-47, marked as they were by Tebhaga, Telengana, RIN (Royal Indian Navy) revolt, mass agitation against INA trials and other great upheavals, provided the communists such an opportunity? Or the late 1960s and early 1970s? Another point on which one would like to seek Patnaik’s clarification is: when anti-imperialism is the main task of the Left and when both the NDA and the UPA follow exactly the same set of pro-imperialist economic policies, how far is the Left justified in extending total support to one of these formations? But he skirts round this most pertinent question of communist tactics at the present juncture and goes on to further explain his main argument.
“As long as the struggle was against the fascist Hindutva forces, there was a common meeting ground between the Left and the liberal bourgeoisie, where the Left’s influence could be contained, and the scope for its exercising any hegemony because of its specificity did not arise. But when that phase is over, and a liberal bourgeois government has assumed office…which is solicitous towards the whims of international finance capital, and which sounds in its economic pronouncements every bit like the NDA government it has replaced, it is the Left alone which stands in opposition to these policies.” And hence, much to the chagrin of bourgeois commentators,now arisesthe potential or “possibility of the nation standing up to reject these policies explicitly when the camouflage of the Hindutva ideology no longer exists.”
The “scope” “did not arise” so long as the (parliamentary) Left was united with the Congress against the ruling BJP; it arose only after. The Congress replaces the BJP in power– on this condition are predicated the Left’s great prospects which, logically, would vanish again if the BJP regains power. And even at present, “the Left cannot afford to take a confrontationist stance vis-à-vis the liberal bourgeoisie in the presence of a fascist threat.” In a word, the Left should fight for hegemony, but conditions apply! Compare this opportunist framework of restrained struggle with our political line of independent movemental assertion of the Left in all circumstances, i.e., irrespective of which bourgeois coalition is in power, and the bankruptcy of the CPI(M)’s tactical line, to the defence and elaboration of which this commentary is devoted, becomes clear as daylight.
To proceed. The optimistic picture Patnaik draws in this essay rests on the premise that the Left is unflinchingly opposed to neo-liberal policies. He must defend this position by any means, and this he does by dismissing as bourgeois propaganda the widely held view that “the bulk of the Left… is for neo-liberalism.” Interestingly, the 18 th party congress of the CPI(M) did not treat the matter in such a light vein. There was a lot of debate on the way the LF government in West Bengal was wooing foreign capital and implementing all the attendant neo-liberal policies (on the labour front for instance) and none less than Prakash Karat said, during the party congress before the electronic media, “We will discuss policy issues and clarify why we do certain things in West Bengal and something else in Delhi like the FDI”. Also there was much controversy on the way the party and the LF ensured the passage of the patent bill and on whether the party was actually putting up effective resistance to the NDA policies pursued by the UPA government. For the first time in the party’s history, a separate document to clarify these questions was to be adopted at the congress. However, this could not be done owing to intense debate and the matter now rests with the central committee. It is unfortunate that a theoretician of Patnaik’s calibre should show an ostrich-like attitude to all these and take cover under phrases like “rising above the empirical.”
“Defending these state governments, and the vantage position in Kerala, is the absolute taskof every communist.” We would not go into debates over the unwarranted superlative (Patnaik’s italics). We would rather ask: precisely what is to be defended, and how?
Gone are the days when the Namboodiripad government in Kerala or UF/LF governments in West Bengal were regarded as potential threats to the stability of the bourgeois order and therefore faced a constant threat of ouster by the union government. The question of defending these governments against such attacks does not arise today, for they have comfortably adjusted themselves in the bourgeois-landlord set up long ago. But there does exist a very different kind of threat. A very ingenious “carrot-and-stick” policy is being constantly applied against Left-led state governments not only by imperialism, as Patnaik observes, but also by Indian big capital and the central government to make them fall in line and tread the neo-liberal path.
Nowhere has this been more evident and effective than in the most stable among these governments. The self-styled “investment-friendly” government of West Bengal has earned kudos from the NDA and UPA governments as well as from foreign capitalists and Indian corporate giants. As a necessary adjunct of this, the TU movement has been reined in; diversification and commercialisation of agriculture including corporate and contract farming have replaced land reform and upliftment of the poor as the government’s key concerns; eviction and further marginalisation of the downtrodden for the sake of urbanisation, infrastructure development and ‘beautification’ has come to be projected as the main measure of ‘development’. In a word, the physiognomy of Left rule has changed beyond recognition, as Sumanta Banerjee has noted in a recent write-up (see below). To top it all, the state’s finance minister Asim Dasgupta, obviously with the support of his party the CPI(M), has emerged not only as the most vocal votary of VAT (Value Added Tax) but as the commander of the “Empowered Committee” constituted by the central government to make the new system operational throughout the country. The state’s former finance minister Ashok Mitra is leading a campaign against VAT and many others including Prabhat Patnaik (not in this article) have opposed it, while big industrialists and international multilateral agencies have thrown in their full weight in favour of the proposal. It is clearly at the behest of the latter forces, and to earn their trust, that the CPI(M) state unit is trying to push through this vital part of second-generation reforms.
Does Patnaik wish to defend these ‘deviations’ from what he calls an autonomous path of development?
But it is not just “communist governments” that must be defended. “An essential task”, in fact “the crux of revolutionary praxis”, is “authentic, and not just the transitional, defence of parliamentary democracy”. This may sound “paradoxical”, but is justified by the fact that “in a country characterized by a degree of social inequality and oppression, manifested above all in the phenomenon of “untouchability”, which is unmatched anywhere in the world, the institution of parliamentary democracy and the principle of “one person one vote” constitutes perhaps the most powerful revolution in its entire history”.
Now, “Social inequality and oppression” are to be seen in many countries in various forms; even “untouchability” has its counterparts in racism, anti-Semitism etc. Yet Patnaik suddenly discovers in these something so special as to render the Indian parliament tremendously revolutionary. It is pitiable that our eminent theoretician could not think of a better justification for eulogising universal suffrage (“one man one vote”) and the parliamentary system, for projecting its defence as “the crux” of revolutionary praxis. This, to be frank is a direct and shameless attack on all that Marx, Engels and Lenin taught us on “State and Revolution”. In the classic work with that title, Lenin showed that even the very best of parliamentary democracy can only be a form of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and that communists should participate in parliaments solely with the object of propagating their views and preparing the masses for revolution, i.e. for ultimately destroying it from within. Quoting Engels and Marx, he wrote:
“We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German Social-Democracy, is ‘the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state.’
The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, … expect just this ‘more’ from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage ‘in the present-day state’ is really capable of revealing the will of the working people and of securing its realisation…. Engels’ perfectly clear, precise and concrete statement is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the ‘official’ (i.e., opportunist) socialist parties.”
And further:
“Marx knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the “pigsty” of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.
To decide once every few years which member is to repress and crush the people through parliament – this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
This is how Lenin presented the question. It is in view of this “essence”, which is as true in our country as elsewhere, that revolutionary communists from the time of Marx and Engels have always insisted on total revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and destruction of the bourgeois state form as a precondition for building a higher social order. Unable or unwilling to see this essence, Patnaik presents a thoroughly revisionist perspective. “… parliamentary democracy”, says he, “has to be surpassed in two ways: first, there must be a progressive change in the nature of property relations starting from the framework of parliamentary democracy itself. .… Secondly, a deepening of democratic structures, which strengthens the people’s capacity for intervention, which makes possible collective action, and which overcomes the immanent tendency of bourgeois democracy towards fragmentation of the people and empiricalization of perception, is of course necessary, but it can come not by abolishing or dismantling the existing structures of parliamentary democracy but by embedding them in other structures that carry democracy deeper”, such as panchayati raj institutions.
Patnaik goes on to declare that “party dictatorship, which may pave the way for a more meaningful democracy, Soviet democracy, in the future” cannot be a valid option because “by restricting the scope for people’s action, [it] curtails the sweep of the anti-imperialist struggle. Democracy is the most powerful means of fighting imperialism.”
So this is what “authentic, not just transitional’ defence means. The parliamentary system has to defended not merely against fascist onslaughts by the bourgeoisie, regarding which no Marxist would differ, but also against revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Patnaik calls the latter, following bourgeois critics of Marxism, “party dictatorship” and makes the extremely a-historical statement that it is inferior to (parliamentary, i.e. bourgeois) “democracy” in resisting imperialism.
This is not the place to revisit the long and bitter debate on dictatorship of the proletariat. On point of fact, however, one should note that (a) both Marx and Lenin regarded it as a necessary transition point to socialism, (b) various forms/approximation of it (e.g. revolutionary democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants) has been, and will be, tried out in different countries depending on different historical contexts and prevailing conditions and (c) it has always meant broadest democracy for the people and dictatorial rule only over the ousted ruling classes. In a chapter titled “Abolition of Parliamentarism” in The state and Revolution, Lenin writes,
“The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies. “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.”2 ¨ …
“We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us, if the desire to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our earnest and sincere desire, and not a mere “election” cry for catching workers’ votes…”
Patnaik gives us a very good account of the true face of neo-liberal regimes working under imperialist globalisation and correctly calls for intensification of the anti-imperialist movement. But he goes wrong with the choice of weapons and means for this struggle and neglects other, no less vital, tasks of the communist movement.
Look at the quotation we have started this rejoinder with. The state may be one instrument (not “the only”) and that too potentially, i.e., if and to the extent it ceases to be collaborationist. There can be no two opinions on the need to agitate and bring pressure to bear on the government to stand up against imperialist machinations. But surely there are other weapons such as mass movements against MNCs like Union Carbide, Enron, Monsanto and Coca Cola, against multilateral agencies like the WTO and of course against the US warmonger. Most important, you cannot fight imperialism without fighting the persistent feudal remnants that hold back agrarian development and ensure the availability of cheap labour and raw materials for metropolitan capital as well as Indian big capital. Unless this supply line is cut off, you cannot strike a real hard blow to imperialism. But this is something Prabhat Patnaiks will always neglect, for they move within a narrowly conceived anti-imperialist frame akin to the CPI’s national democratic front perspective. For the CPI(M), agrarian revolution is something only to be mentioned in theoretical documents – not a basis of, or orientation for, everyday practice. Patnaik therefore does not hesitate to declare:
“The communist movement can grow only to the extent that it fulfils its historical task of defending the nation against imperialism in the present context.”(Our italics)
We would not have considered this single sentence an indication of one-sided emphasis, were it not for the fact that it actually encapsulates the whole thrust of Patnaik’s article, his whole idea about the tasks of communists at the present juncture. In the penultimate paragraph he talks of “a new internationalism”, but consistent with his parliamentarist-statist framework he visualises this as “a number of nation-States coming together to fight the tyranny of international finance” – a mere wishful thinking in today’s conditions, exceptions like Cuba and Venezuela notwithstanding. Thanks to this distorted vision, the real motive forces of an emerging internationalism fails to catch his attention: the Iraqi and Palestinian resistances, struggles of peasants and indigenous communities including armed guerrilla wars in some countries, workers’ movements against MNCs and their domestic partners, various international assemblies, marches and demonstrations, and so on.
What is the immediate alternative to neo-liberalism and globalisation? Not socialism, nor people’s democracy, but a “national mixed economy”. There would be ‘substantial private enterprise” in all forms, but “to call this path of development “capitalist” would be a misnomer”. The state sector will play a key role, but don’t call it “Nehruvian mixed economy” either. Why? Because this model will have many unique characteristics: national economic planning; eschewal of financial liberalisation; imposition of appropriate trade regulations; “egalitarian land reforms… with payment of compensation where necessary so as not to jeopardize the anti-imperialist front”; legal measures to ensure a “national minimum in terms of education, health, employment” etc.; the state sector to “be used as a check on capitalist aggrandizement rather than providing a field for such aggrandizement” as in the past. In other words, the “national mixed economy” would be “controlled by a nation-State under the hegemony of the workers and peasants.”
All this is to be achieved, clarifies Patnaik more than once, not through revolution but along the parliamentary path. The objective should be “a strong national economy but concerned fundamentally with the people’s welfare” as in China, “but the political counterpart to this must be a parliamentary democracy with a multi-party system over which the Communists earn hegemony through their correctness of perception and analysis…”
In this entire framework, does the reader find anything un-acceptable to the “third force’ envisaged by the CPI(M) (and also the CPI) congress(es)? Well, hegemony of workers and peasants is definitely not acceptable, but who cares when such hegemony sans revolution is obviously an empty phrase to satisfy the last few Mohicans? Similarly, nobody is afraid of land reforms with compensation. One irritant might be the proposed curb on financial liberalisation, but this is nothing very serious when FDI is welcome. Besides, within the bourgeoisie itself there is a certain opposition to thoughtless liberalisation (which is why India is yet to introduce full capital account convertibility).
Acceptable to the whole lot of ‘secular and democratic forces’ the CPI(M) is trying to align with, this trajectory also fits Amit Mitra’s bill well enough, does it not? And the Mitras, if they are really smart, should not grudge the formal retention of the communist banner: just as parliamentary democracy conceals and thus protects bourgeois dictatorship, that banner still serves, given the glorious tradition of communism in this country, as the best cover for social democracy to flourish.
Whatever our differences with Patnaik, his article does a good job in promoting new debates on the present role of the Left. This is most welcome, and happily many activists, theorists and friends of the communist movement are coming up with fresh ideas and debates. Thus Sumanta Banerjee raises some very interesting points in “Hobson's Choice for Indian Communists” (Economic And Political Weekly, May 7, 2005 ). He begins with “Engels’ last political statement”. In his ‘Introduction’ to the 1895 edition of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, Engels observed that “rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades...was to a considerable extent obsolete” and that, therefore, the stress should now be placed on “utilising the suffrage, of winning all posts accessible to us”. Banerjee holds that at present, as at the end of the 19th century, “neoliberal capitalism has emerged as the decisive force in a unipolar global system under US hegemony” and “capitalism today has been able to harness powerful technology to expand its tentacles”, particularly in the information and military sectors. This has “rendered the tools used by the opponents of capitalism today – in the words of Engels – ‘to a considerable extent obsolete.’ His followers today will have to invent new tools – both politically and logistically functional – to match and defeat their opponents.”
Well, we should not be blind to the crisis of neo-liberalism, the trends of multipolarity and other week points of imperialism. Nor should we forget the fact that Engels was writing in the specific context of Western Europe . Decades after he wrote these lines, “street fighting with barricades” proved immensely successful in Russia and other forms of direct armed confrontation in China , Vietnam etc.; and to this day extra-parliamentary mass militancy remains the main and most effective form of resistance against the oppressive world order. So we must “invent new tools”, but not from a defensive or parliamentary cretinist position. We must pay attention to emerging forms and fronts of struggle, combine these with relevant ‘old’ ones, (belonging to defensive and aggressive, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary categories) and be good at skillful transition from one form to another so as to steadily enhance the consciousness of the masses and march towards the decisive battle without drawing a boundary between ‘the present’ and ‘the future’.
But to return to Sumanta Banerjee. He recounts the successes of CPI and CPI(M) in three states and currently at the center and comes to their dilemma: “ But it is this arithmetical luck of occupying sixty odd seats in a hung parliament which has hoisted the Indian Left to a position that they now find difficult to cope with. It is the position of a back seat driver, some of whose advice is reluctantly accepted by a government which has to depend on their support, but some is also rejected by the same government which knows that the communists cannot afford to withdraw support to it… The most crucial area of economic decision-making remains outside the control of the communist standbys, who are supporting a government which believes that it has no option but to adhere to the dictates of the World Bank. …
It is the shadow of this uncomfortable reality that has loomed large over the discussions at the CPI(M) Congress in New Delhi , and its CPI counterpart in Chandigarh – held at around the same time. Behind the public pose of triumphant king-makers, there lurked the realisation that they could do little to reverse the trend of neoliberal capitalism that had taken roots in India . Despite issuing threats to unleash mass movements to oppose it, deep down within themselves they know well that they would have to drift with the trend. Their leader in West Bengal , chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has already set the ball rolling… The West Bengal Left Front government’s recent shift of stress from agrarian concerns to urban infrastructural development is a significant pointer in this direction. The neglected poor living in the interior of the countryside are already getting increasingly pauperised. There is a rise in the trend of landlessness, and reports of starvation deaths (in backward tribal areas) have come as a source of embarrassment for CPI(M) leaders….
Given this state of affairs in West Bengal – the showpiece of communist parliamentary experiment – how long can the CPI(M) and CPI national leaders manage to reconcile the policies being adopted by their comrades in that state with the anti-capitalist rhetoric being indulged in by them in New Delhi ? Whether it is on the issue of FDI, or the patents bill, or telecom or privatisation – the communists in parliament will have to willy-nilly remain content only with raising loud protests that are bound to fade away in whimpers. However much their leaders might resort to declamatory speeches against the present government’s economic policies, and issue periodically rhetorical threats that they can also ‘bite’, both Sitaram Yechuri and A B Bardhan – the most vocal spokesmen of the CPI(M) and CPI respectively – know well that their parties do not have the teeth to bite….
In order to acquire the teeth, the two parties are now falling back on the old slogan of building up a ‘Third Front’.” Banerjee, however, recalls the old Janata experiment and strongly suggests that instead of “knocking up yet another rickety alliance bound by a flaccid programme, with characters like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Yadav, Mayawati, Shibu Soren and their ilk,… the two communist parties should rather seek natural allies in the various alternative movements … as well as the Naxalites – whom the parliamentary communists still regard as pariahs, but who undeniably have a large following among the rural poor in vast stretches of the country.”
A good suggestion from an old friend, but are comrades in the parliamentary Left camp in any mood for listening?
Footnotes:
¨ All quotations are from this text unless otherwise stated. We have retained spellings as in the original; emphases are in the original unless otherwise mentioned.
¨ Here Lenin quotes from The Civil War in France, where Marx gives us a detailed analysis of the experience of Paris Commune.