Saturday 3 August 2019
by Sunil Ray
The massive electoral defeat
of the Leftist parties in India in the recent Lok Sabha election seems to have
pushed many to despair and left nothing to hope for its revival. While
commoners are increasingly feeling its gradual disappearance in India, scholars,
especially those who are from the non-Marxist persuasion, find some reason to
reaffirm their claim that it has lost its relevance in Indian politics.
However, Marxist scholars continue to retain their position that it can never
lose its relevance so long as the material conditions of survival of the people
in India continue to be worse. This is what has been the position of the
Marxist scholars ever since India gained freedom. But the question that was
raised by Nikhil Chakravartty way back in 1983 (more than three-and-a-half
decades ago) is equally important even today. He observed “The basic question
that comes to one’s mind is: after sixty years of tireless works, why is it
that the communist movement in this country has not become a national force? No
doubt, they have strongholds here and there; they have regional influence as,
for instance, in West Bengal and Kerala, but these do not make them a national
force.” (“Marx and Marxism, A personal Testament” was first published in Mainstream, April
2, 1983. Reproduced from N.C.’s writings Mainstream, May 18, 2019)
Not to talk about the States that had strongholds but are now almost extinct in
the parliamentary election. While self-introspection may be of some help, my
purpose here is not advise or caution those who are practising Left politics
led by the Marxist Leftist parties in India. My purpose here is to develop a
critique against the rootless thought of ‘Left-politics’ having lost its
relevance to India.
Let me begin my argument with
what I mean by ’Left-politics’ on the basis of my comprehensive understanding
about it. The Left-politics then must not necessarily stem from the political
engagement of only those who are practising politics under the banner of the
political parties with Marxist persuasion. Of course, there are several
political parties with Marxist persuasion in India that have been putting a
great deal of efforts for decades to justify how one is comparatively more
relevant than others in respect of understanding and analysing the concrete
conditions of India. It has been a competitive expedition, as it were, to reach
the intellectual height of perfect blending between theory and practice that
none has touched so far. I first learnt about it when I was an undergraduate
student doing Economics in a college in Calcutta. Once a friend of mine took me
to the party office of Marxist persuasion of his choice. He along with the
members of the party office relentlessly tried to convince me how relevant was
the understanding of his political party of Marxist political philosophy to
Indian conditions as compared to the other Marxist political parties. Once I
was getting ready to move out from the same party office, I was immediately
cautioned not to do so for some time because two Marxist political parties were
fighting on the streets for each other’s blood.
I was completely confused.
More so, I came from a poor middle-class family of a remote village of West
Bengal where I had seen how the impoverished men, women and children had been
struggling to survive with dignity. My exposure to politics of the Left in
Calcutta in those days was fresh but I was curious to know how impoverishment
of the people of my village could be banished once and for all. I was unable to
relate my experience of my village with all that I was observing. Without
almost no deeper understanding of great Leftist thinkers of all ages at that
point of time, the only questions that used to invade my mind in those days
were: (1) Why were there many Marxist political parties when the purpose of
each one was the same? (2) Why were they after each other’s blood? (3) Why was
there no development of the rural areas in general and of the poor, the largest
majority, in particular?
Only in respect of the land
reforms programme implemented by the Left Front Government of West Bengal, I
felt I was able to relate myself to the deprived poverty-stricken people of my
village and, of course, rural Bengal. It touched me not as a politically
conscious individual, nor as an intellectual with an edge over deep theoretical
understanding, but as a human being, a young student who dreamt of a new India.
The emergence of a new India, I was convinced, was possible only through
decolonising itself from the abuse of humanism that manifest in the form of
massive deprivation, perpetual backwardness and undignified life. And, no such
decolonisation project, I increasingly felt over time, can succeed without
transforming its basic socio-economic and political structure. No doubt feudal
autocracy was crushed in West Bengal as a result of land reforms, but I
wondered why the voice that grew against injustice and call for empowering the
powerless disappeared subsequently.
The objective of empowering
the powerless is never denied by the non-Marxist political party either. If so,
why is it pushed to the back-burner in real-life situation? May be that it was
not politically feasible. For, to make it happen it has to seek structural
transformation that, in all likelihood, peripheralises the vested interest.
What was, however, actually politically feasible, as it unfolded gradually, was
the welfare dose of neo-liberalism. A great substitute to structural
transformation and the route to empowering the powerless! While this is no less
than a mockery of both, political feasibility of ‘real’ structural
transformation that can create the conditions for empowering the powerless went
on haunting my mind. It compounded when I learnt that the complex caste
structure, in which Dalits primarily comprised of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes, was yet to enter the discourse of ‘standardised’ Left politics.
I felt I was besieged by the
bewilderment on the question of political feasibility in parliamentary
democracy at two levels. The first one was which Marxist political party was
more relevant to fall in line with the idea of a new India that I once dreamt
and the second one was which were the non-Marxist political parties to do the
same. However, an important turn came as a result of my encounter during the
last few years with the people living in the villages, including farmers,
agricultural labourers, petty traders and school teachers from different social
groups and development professionals from several civil society organisations.
It taught me how to liberate myself from the intellectual imprisonment of the
kind of ideological fixation that tends to destroy the dialectical process of
arriving at the truth of doing justice to the humanity and its progress. In
fact, they only spoke about a set of simple actionable agendas for development.
I have mentioned them below. However, once I tried to examine them in relation
to each other, I found that they were actually hinting at deep structural
transformation both at the levels of the society and economy. What needs to be
seen is how the state designs its intervention mechanism to make it happen and
achieve what has never been achieved so far.
• Creation of Productive
Employment
• Access to natural resources
including land, water etc. to all equally
• Agriculture as a source of
livelihood and income and employment generation
• Availability of basic
minimum facilities to provide quality health-care and education for all
• Ensuring dignified living
with peace for every human species through creation of the culture of
reciprocity and solidarity
• No environmental
degeneration
• Triggering off local forces
of change instead of trying to ‘catch-up’ with the capitalist developed
countries
• Systemic accountability to
development.
These are nothing new. One may
claim that no political party will ever antagonise any of these agendas. One
may even go a step further to claim that this actionable agenda has been
figuring for decades in all parliamentary political parties. If so, then where
does the problem lie? Immediately somebody may jump to point out that that the
problem lies with the bureaucracy associated with the faulty intervention
mechanism. Somebody else will say, no, it is political will that matters,
nothing else. If I take a cue from the second one, while leaving aside the
first one for the time being, it is definitely not an over-statement. For
instance, I have never heard anybody agonising why natural resources like land
should not be made available to all equally. But many political leaders,
especially from the non-Marxist tradition, may choose to remain quiet if land
reforms as a means to gain access to land by the landless as a part of the
fulfilment of the constitutional obligation is pushed forward for
implementation. It is precisely here that the problem lies. Land reforms
transforms the power structure of the rural economy and opens up the route to
economic and social empowerment of the vast majority of the people living in
the rural hinterlands. They are the landless and powerless poor. However, it is
the vested interest, as mentioned earlier, of the powerful that works on the
ground against such transformation to take place. In other words, it is the
power relations architected by the powerful to perpetuate its hegemony in all
fields of activity. It is this again that has designed the systemic order
through which, needless to mention, power relations mediate. What is true in
respect of providing access to land through land reforms is equally true for
other actionable agenda as mentioned above
The logical corollary is that
no development paradigm that antagonises such a systemic order through which
power relations of the powerful mediates is acceptable to the existing system.
What, however, the latter wants is that they must complement each other. The
development story of India ever since it became an independent nation clearly
shows how this complementarity has been producing development aberrations. It
is in this relational context that one may have reasons to see why no ‘real’
structural transformation that has a bearing on the actionable agenda, as spelt
out, could come about leading to implementation of desirable change. Even if
one finds such transformation has taken place based on the parameters of market
economics and has impacted economic growth positively, it is immiserating
growth since no sustainable positive impact could it make on the growing
incidence of impoverishment of the people in India.
In order to expand the scope
for creation of productive employment, if we continue to depend on corporate
(monopoly) capital-led structural transformation as it happens, it is not the
one that country like India is looking for. For, it creates limited scope for
employability. The real structural transformation that could create employment
can take place through construction of a niche structure that creates larger
scope for employment that the country needs now. The construction of the niche
structure may give rise to innumerable associated producers’ self-organisations
in all lines of activities including processing, marketing, servicing,
producing, trading etc. to be spread over rural to peri-urban to urban areas.
Similarly, when one talks
about agricultural development and farmers’ endless distress one zeros in on
productivity rise and availability of easy credit as the way out. No doubt
these are important but their minimal impact, both long and short term, on the
farmers’ distress never speaks high of market rationality. They can never
substitute structural transformation also. However, if the market rationality
is preceded by the non-market rationality such as land reforms and market
reforms (institutional) that entail real structural transformation, farmers’
distress can be eliminated. It may then trigger off agricultural prosperity.
Without agricultural market reforms how does one hope that the market will pay
remunerative prices to the farmers for their produce? The repelling effect of
the existing market structure in agriculture can be countered only through
restructuring its market relations (through institutional reforms) both forward
and backward. The myth of free market explodes when one sees how the farmers
are pushed to pay exorbitantly high prices for inputs, they buy including seed,
fertiliser, informal credit etc. It is needless to mention that prices are
higher for they are determined by the quasi-oligopoly market, not by a free
competitive market. Had the market prices been determined through competition,
average prices of these inputs would have been much lower. However, this never
happens. On the other hand, when the farmers sell their produce one knows how
the monopsony market structure operates to squeeze them. This suggests why it
is necessary to transform the market structure of agriculture at both ends.
In the absence of structural
transformation incremental changes, however positive they are, have failed to
generate declining impact on the misery of both humans and nature. Is it that
the faulty development paradigm which we follow and is rooted in the capital
system never wants the basic systemic order to dismantle? Of course, it wants
differentiation based on caste, religion and other cultural and regional traits
to continue while it continues to produce slavery in different forms in
different fields of activities. Besides, it never antagonises the systemic
order that nurtures rent-seeking behaviour (remini-scent of the crusade against
it by Anna Hazare) ranging from monetary corruption to bribery, favouritism,
appeasement politics etc. in the name of perfect democracy and competitive
market economy.
All these non-market forces
work sometimes in tandem and some other times discretely in an attempt to
constantly shift the focus from one to another so that people may find it
difficult to crystallise their understanding/opinion about the development
miscarriage. The common man then fails to establish the link between the
development miscarriage and faulty development paradigm and the systemic order
which is detrimental to human progress. She/he also fails to understand how the
actionable agendas, as elucidated earlier, is in conflict with the development
paradigm which the country is following. All these directly or indirectly
subvert the process of achieving substantive freedom leading to halting the
emancipation of the impoverished.
Hence, what are those that the
majority Indians, who are ravaged by the humanitarian crisis, looking for? They
are looking for (1) a new systemic order (2) a new development paradigm and (3)
a new synthesis in order to achieve the actionable agendas. If these
development agendas are not in conflict with the Constitution of the democratic
India, they are automatically politically feasible. Hence, structural
transformation in all spheres of activities that matters to the powerless may
find its real expression once the actionable agendas are implemented. What is,
however, needed is to counter false development priorities inherited from false
development epistemology. If the development paradigm is overhauled by way of
prioritising what the nation needs to do to overcome the humanitarian crisis
and trigger off the local development process without being dictated by the
capital system, it may not be difficult to redesign the systemic order to gain
what we failed to gain, to recover what we already lost. It is here that one
may find how the new logic of capital unlocks the possibilities for epochal
change.
The ‘Left-politics’ begins
here without having been confined to the political philosophy of any political
party as practised now in India. What it implies is that those who are seeking
the change of the systemic order and development paradigm, as explained, are
the natural harbingers of Left-politics. This must give rise to a new political
philosophy. If so, why is no unveiling of a new political era of assimilation
of ‘great’ understanding leading to sow the seeds of solidarity? Solidarity
between humans on the one hand and humans and nature on the other? It may cut
across ideological fixation and sectarianism in any form as they exist now, but
give way to the emergence of a new ideological platform based on collective
understanding for emancipation of the impoverished in particular and human
progress in general. The ideological reinvention of the political entities in
India at this historical moment may have huge transcendental effect on the
culmination of the evolving ideological platform in the 21st century.
It is this ‘Left-politics’
that simplifies the idea of living together with each other on the one hand and
with nature on the other while acknowledging the centrality of co-evolution of
humans and nature in the determination of the social metabolic order. Its
confluence with any anti-systemic movement to put an end to the growing
accumulation of misery of both humans and nature may give rise to massive
political upheaval in the Indian subcontinent in the near future. The cry for
‘cohesive development’ growing out of solidarity of all those who believe in
the change of the systemic order to implement a new development paradigm is going
to gain ground soon, no matter which political party one belongs to, which
religious sect one has chosen to ally with, what system of faith one adheres
to, what colour one is born with, whether one is female, male or transgender,
what social group one belongs to, what language one speaks and what region one
comes from. This is what I understand as Left-politics and its fundamentals of
social engineering. The birth of a new political dispensation to bring about
cohesive development based on the forces of solidarity may be a historical
necessity. Its emergence being glued to humanism may prove sooner or later that
Left-politics in India has not ended.
The author is a former
Director, A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna.
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