"Neoliberal"
Leninism In India
And Its Class Character
By Pratyush Chandra
21 February, 2007
Radical
Notes
"Criticism - the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism
- should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary
activities, but against those leaders who are unable - and still more
against those who are unwilling - to utilise parliamentary elections
and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner.
Only such criticism-combined, of course, with the dismissal of incapable
leaders and their replacement by capable ones-will constitute useful
and fruitful revolutionary work that will simultaneously train the "leaders"
to be worthy of the working class and of all working people, and train
the masses to be able properly to understand the political situation
and the often very complicated and intricate tasks that spring from
that situation." (Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism:
an Infantile Disorder", Chapter 7)
1. Lenin and the CPIM's Leninism
The Communist Party of India-Marxist
(CPIM)-led Left Front government in its endeavour to industrialise West
Bengal, admittedly within the larger neoliberal framework of the Indian
state's economic policies, is ready to scuttle every act of popular
vigilance in the manner which Lenin would have called "bureaucratic
harassment" of workers-peasants' self-organisation. India's official
left position on neoliberal industrialisation and its potentiality to
generate employment is very akin to what Lenin characterised "Narodism
melted into Liberalism", as the official left "gloss[es] over
[the] contradictions [of industrialisation] and try to damp down the
class struggle inherent in it."(1)
In fact, the mass organisations
of the official left in West Bengal have for a long time been the main
bulwarks of the state government to pre-empt any systematic upsurge
of the workers and peasants. They have become increasingly what can
be called the ideological state apparatuses to drug the masses and keep
them in line. And in this, Leninism has been reduced to an ideology,
an apologia for the Left Front's convergence with other mainstream forces
on the neoliberal path, giving its "steps backwards" a scriptural
validity and promoting an image that in fact this is the path towards
revolution - all in the name of consolidation and creating objective
conditions for revolution. For justifying their compromises locally
in West Bengal, CPIM leaders have found handy innumerable quotations
from Lenin, and sometimes from Marx too. Contradictory principles and
doctrines can easily be derived from their statements, if read as scriptures
and taken out of contexts. Hence, as a popular saying in India confirms,
baabaa vaakyam pramaanam, which loosely means, you can prove
anything on the basis of scriptures.
Of course, this can be a
variety of Leninism, as there are varieties mushrooming like religious
sects, but such was not Lenin. Lenin himself never treated Marx's writings
as scriptural for justifying his every tactical move. Furthermore, especially
after the defeat of other European revolutions, on many occasions he
was ready to acknowledge Russia's "steps backwards", even
during the formulation and implementation of the New Economic Policy.
His defence of the independence of working class organisation and power
beyond state formation in his attack on Trotsky's advocacy of the regimentation
of trade unions was especially for countering the counter-revolutionary
potential in the Russian state's "steps backwards" by ever-stronger
working class vigilance. Lenin had the guts to say, "We now have
a state under which it is the business of the massively organised
proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use
these workers' organisations to protect the workers from their state,
and to get them to protect our state. Both forms of protection are achieved
through the peculiar interweaving of our state measures and our agreeing
or "coalescing" with our trade unions."(2; emphasis mine)
Such was Lenin even as the
leader of the Soviet State, unlike the CPIM-led Left Front's leadership,
which seeks to stabilise its rule in a tiny part of India, where, it
admits, its government can have no sovereignty.
The CPIM's energetic peasant
leader Benoy Konar (who rails against Naxal conspiracy in every disturbance
in West Bengal), a major stalwart in the present debate on repression
and agitation in the state, says, "West Bengal is a federal state
in a capitalist feudal country. What its government has done is just
a miniscule step compared to what Lenin was forced to do, even after
the revolution. If this is what upsets these "true" Marxists
so much, we request them to stop living in their imaginations and step
into the real world."(3) This logic is very instructive, indeed.
It is precisely the case - Lenin could afford to do what he was forced
to do because the revolution had taken place. Also, the "steps
backwards" were essentially for the sustainability of the state,
without changing its basic character - workers-peasants state, taking
the risk of further bureaucratisation and distortion, which he thought
the independent assertion of the working class would weed out eventually.
If Konar and his gurus are forcing themselves to do the same in a "capitalist
feudal country", then it is for whose sustainability - of the "capitalist
feudal" state?
2. CPIM and its Self-Criticisms
Throughout its thirty years
of continuous rule, the West Bengal government's main concern has been
to stabilise its local rule within the parameters set by India's state
formation, and the hegemonic political economic set-up in the country.
It boasts of its successes, but at what cost? The exigencies of the
parliamentarist integration reinforced the accommodation and consolidation
of a "supra-class" ideology within the communist political
habits imbibed during its appendage to the nationalist movement, throughout
India in general, and West Bengal in particular. This explains a less
radical approach towards land reforms in the region.(4) The CPI-CPIM's
role became limited to controlling and policing the radicalisation of
its own mass base, as in the 1960s-70s, especially with regard to the
Naxal movement. It is interesting to note today how every attempt to
form an organisation of the rural proletarians and small peasantry,
independent of the rich and middle peasant (who benefited from the movements
on tenancy rights and against the Bargadari system) dominated Kisan
Sabhas, is systematically repressed by Bengal's state machinery and
party.
When the CPIM capitulated
to electoral politics resorting to tactical measures and strategic sloganeering,
because of the so-called popular mandate in its parliamentarist pursuit,
militancy became a thing to be repeated only in speeches and slogans
as its practice can alienate few votes, precious votes. This is not
to say that it was only a subjective transition or a matter of conscious
choice, rather, it represented the latent politics of the party leadership's
class character. In fact, the only thing lacking was a conscious and
consistent opposition within, despite the fact that the party was aware
of this from the very beginning. In one of its early documents, it noted:
"The struggle against
revisionism inside the Indian Communist movement will neither be fruitful
nor effective unless the alien class orientation and work among the
peasantry are completely discarded. No doubt, this is not an easy task,
since it is deep-rooted and long-accumulated and also because the bulk
of our leading kisan activists come from rich and middle peasant origin,
rather than from agricultural labourers and poor peasants. Their class
origin, social links and the long training given to them give a reformist
ideological-political orientation which is alien to proletarian class
point and prevent them from actively working among the agricultural
labourers, poor and middle peasants with the zeal and crusading spirit
demanded of Communists. Hence the need and urgency to rectify and remould
the entire outlook and work of our Party in the kisan movement."(5)
To this P. Sundarayya adds
in 1973 (when he was the party's general secretary), "the same
old reformist deviation is still persisting in our understanding and
practice", which frequently leads to "the repudiation of the
Party Programme formulations." (6)
This was all before the concern
for stabilising its rule and building social corporatism - "peace",
"harmony", etc., in West Bengal became the party's prime agenda.
Today, the state government's industrialisation and urbanisation policies
express the needs of the neo-rich gentry, a considerable section of
which is the class of absentee landowners, dominating the bureaucratic
apparatuses and service sector, who legitimately want a share in India's
corporate development. When the Kolkata session of the All India Kisan
Council held on January 5-6, 2007 asks "the state government to
forge ahead on the path of industrialisation based on the success of
land reforms and impressive agricultural growth" (7), it is simply
expressing the interests of all those who have benefited the most from
the success of limited agrarian reforms.
The party is aware that if
they alienate these class forces, it will not be possible to remain
in power in "a constitutional set-up that is not federal in nature"
and which reproduces their ideological hegemony through various identitarian
and legal relations influencing the voting pattern of the electorate.
As the present party general secretary Prakash Karat, notes:
"It was clear then as
now that the policies implemented by Left-led governments would always
be circumscribed by the fact that State power vests with the centre
while state governments have very limited powers and resources. This
is the reality of a constitutional set-up that is not federal in nature.
This understanding was further clarified when Left-led governments began
to rule in the three states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura for longer
periods of time. Within all the constraints and limitations of office,
these governments have to take steps to fulfil their commitments to
the people and offer relief to the working people. While there are urgent
issues before Left-led governments, including those of protecting livelihoods
in agriculture, creating jobs by means of industrial development, and
improving the quality of people's lives, alternative policies in certain
spheres can be implemented only within the constraints imposed by the
system."(8)
If this is not the Third
Way, the there-is-no-alternative (TINA) syndrome, then one wonders what
it can be. Zizek defines the Third Way as "simply global capitalism
with a human face, that is, an attempt to minimize the human costs
of the global capitalist machinery, whose functioning is left undisturbed."(9)
It is an old disease that inflicts all social democratic parties, once
they start talking about consolidation within the bourgeois framework.
Compare:
"Let no one misunderstand
us"; we don't want "to relinquish our party and our programme
but in our opinion we shall have enough to do for years to come if we
concentrate our whole strength, our entire energies, on the attainment
of certain immediate objectives which must in any case be won before
there can be any thought of realising more ambitious aspirations."
To this Marx and Engels answered
back in 1879:
"The programme is not
to be relinquished, but merely postponed - for some
unspecified period. They accept it - not for themselves in their own
lifetime but posthumously, as an heirloom for their children and their
children's children. Meanwhile they devote their "whole strength
and energies" to all sorts of trifles, tinkering away at the capitalist
social order so that at least something should appear to be done without
at the same time alarming the bourgeoisie."(10; emphasis original)
This is the state of a self-acclaimed
"revolutionary" party caught up in an existential struggle
- "tinkering away at the capitalist social order"! Why not,
"the journey towards socialism would begin only after the accomplishment
of the task of the bourgeoisie democratic revolution. If the bourgeois
did not join the democratic revolution, it would be easier for the working
class to establish its leadership in it which would help in the next
stage of socialist revolution."(11) So friends, nothing to worry
about, on behalf of the working class, the CPIM is actually taking a
time out for accomplishing the 'democratic revolutionary' tasks. If
the working classes - rural and urban - are being forced to shut up,
it is all for ensuring their leadership! So, "the programme is
not to be relinquished, but merely postponed - for some unspecified
period..."
The CPI(M)'s capitulation
to an alien class-ideological orientation is stark in its continuous
effort to de-radicalise the left trade union politics. Parallel to Sundarayya's
self-criticism, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya too has been time
and again indulging in his own variety of self-criticism. His statements
are very straight-forward, as he seldom minces words in his pandering
to corporate interests. In one of his interviews to The Hindu (November
16, 2005), he says: "We did commit certain wrong things in the
past. There were investors really afraid of trade unions here. But things
have changed... I am in constant touch with our senior trade union leaders
and keep telling them that it is now a different situation. ...I tell
[trade union leaders] they must behave. If you do not behave companies
will close, you will lose your jobs."(12)
The combination of subjective
and objective factors determines the tenor of the official left politics
everywhere in India today. So the repression of strikers at the Kanoria
jute mill in 1993-94 and Singur/Nandigram incidents are not something
unexpected. They are expressions of the Left Front's stable rule in
West Bengal for thirty years. These are the imperatives rising from
the limitations, about which the Front and CPIM never tire to talk,
and in which their existential politics is embedded. They do so, as
there-is-no-alternative.
3. No "Doublespeak",
but the "Narodnik-like Bourgeois" speaks
Unsurprisingly, the CPIM's
present general secretary Prakash Karat whom some of us used to admire
for his strong positions uncomfortable for the parliamentarian lobbies
within the party has come out strongly in defence of the same parliamentarianism.
His general secretaryship demands that. In India, the days are gone
when within these communist parties, a general secretary used to be
the voice of a particular programmatic tendency. The designation has
been increasingly reduced to a 'post' in the permanent hierarchy, where
the post-holder like a civil servant voices whichever tendency dominates
in the party.
Prakash Karat accuses the
'left opposition' to the Left Front's industrialisation policies of
Narodism, which too is not very surprising. It is one of our standard
abuses, along with 'infantile disorder', 'revisionism', etc… However,
Karat in his defence really means it, when he says: "The CPIM will
continue to refute the modern-day Narodniks who claim to champion the
cause of the peasantry", as he appends this with a note on the
Narodniks.(13)
It seems Karat is ignorant
- either he feigns it, or it is real - about Lenin's analysis of Narodism.
Lenin's criticism of the Narodnik revolutionaries was mainly centred
on their faulty understanding of Russian reality; unlike the Narodniks
he saw a slow, but definite evolution of capitalism and capitalist market.
He stressed strategising on the basis of this new reality. On the other
hand, the Narodniks saw capitalism still simply as a possibility, and
thus like true petty bourgeois revolutionaries dreamt of evading the
ruthlessness of capitalist accumulation, while often lauding bourgeois
freedom and democracy. Lenin in his diatribes obviously underlined the
utopianism of this programme, but only on the basis of a critique of
the political economy of capitalism in Russia. His fundamental stress
was to describe the processes of capitalist accumulation, the ruthlessness
of which was compounded by its impurity, its 'incompleteness'. Definitely,
an important component of Lenin's programme was embedding the democratic
struggle against feudal remnants in the unfolding of the socialist revolution:
"Thus the red banner
of the class-conscious workers means, first, that we support with all
our might the peasants' struggle for full freedom and all the land;
secondly, it means that we do not stop at this, but go on further.
We are waging, besides the struggle for freedom and land, a
fight for socialism. The fight for socialism is a fight against the
rule of capital. It is being carried on first and foremost by the wage-workers,
who are directly and wholly dependent on capital. As for the small farmers,
some of them own capital themselves, and often themselves exploit workers.
Hence not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism;
only those do so who resolutely and consciously side with the workers
against capital, with public property against private property."(14;
emphasis mine)
Lenin's analysis of capitalism
in agriculture showed a growing peasant differentiation. This led him
to stress on the heterogeneity of proletarian attitude towards diverse
peasant classes. He criticised the populism of the Narodniks and also
the liberals who put forward a homogenised notion of "narod"
(people). The same notion is found in the Indian official left's attitude
towards the peasantry and its assessment of the land reform efforts
in the left-ruled states. When it calls upon consolidating the gains
from land reforms achieved in a "capitalist feudal" society
and pursuing industrialisation on their basis, it consistently evades
the question of peasant differentiation. Such evasion is a reflection
of the consolidation, within the left leadership, of the hegemonic interests
that necessarily rose after the limited land reforms measures. As Sundarayya
indicated, this lobby had already congealed within the CPIM and been
affecting its work in the rural areas, much before it enjoyed the cosiness
of the state power. Its consistent success in undermining the rise of
the rural proletarians and their organisation in West Bengal is indicative
of the strength of this lobby. When Benoy Konar and the All India Kisan
Sabha speak for industrialisation based on the gains in agriculture,
they speak on the behalf of the rising kulaks and upper middle class
in West Bengal who would like to invest and profit on the peripheries
and as local agencies of the neoliberal industrialisation - in real
estate, in outsourcing and other businesses which are concomitant appendages
to the neoliberal expansion.
While differentiating the
agrarian programme of the Social Democrats (when the revolutionary Marxists
still identified themselves with this name) from that of the liberals,
Lenin criticised the latter's "distraught Narodism" - "Narodism
melting into Liberalism", which represented the Narodnik-like bourgeoisie,
and explained:
"Firstly, the Social-Democrats
want to effect the abolition of the remnants of feudalism (which both
programmes directly advance as the aim) by revolutionary means
and with revolutionary determination, the liberals-by reformist
means and half-heartedly. Secondly, the Social-Democrats stress
that the system to be purged of the remnants of feudalism is a bourgeois
system; they already now, in advance, expose all its contradictions,
and strive immediately to extend and render more conscious the class
struggle that is inherent in this new system and is already coming to
the surface. The liberals ignore the bourgeois character of the
system purged of feudalism, gloss over its contradictions and try to
damp down the class struggle inherent in it."(15; emphasis mine)
Here Lenin clearly states
that "distraught Narodism" lies, firstly, in its reformist
means, and secondly, in not recognising that the system is already a
bourgeois system, hence the basic struggle is against the rule of capital.
As Lenin indicated and as it is clear in the case of the CPIM in West
Bengal, the ideology of "distraught Narodism" is an ideology
of the class of Narodnik-like local bourgeoisie, which is necessarily
Janus-headed. On the one hand, it feels insecure before its established
competitors and their 'bigness', thus consistently calls upon the state
to protect its interests. On the other, it is mortified when it feels
the presence of its impoverished twin - the growing number of proletarians
- as a result of capitalism in agriculture and also due to neoliberal
"primitive accumulation". Most dangerous is the faithlessness
and weariness that this class of rural and urban proletarians displays
towards the neoliberal euphoria - since it has already experienced more
than 150 years of ups and downs of capitalist industrialisation, and
its increasingly moribund nature. The Bengali political elites' "doublespeak"
vocalised by the CPIM is actually the reflection of the "Narodnik-like"
character of the local bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, torn between
the ecstatic possibility of their neoliberal integration, on the one
hand, and the rising competition and class struggle, on the other. However,
the ideology of homogeneous Bengali interests, along with the "communist"
organisations and pretensions come handy in controlling these volatile
segments, at least temporarily. It is interesting to note, how the CPIM
leadership evades recognising the class character of "land reforms",
"impressive agricultural growth" and industrialisation as
far as possible in its discourse, while overstressing their virtues.
It is similar to the discursive habits of the Russian liberals - "distraught
Narodniks", which Lenin thus noted, while criticising "Mr
L.":
"Depicting the beneficent
effect of the French Revolution on the French peasantry, Mr. L. speaks
glowingly of the disappearance of famines and the improvement and progress
of agriculture; but about the fact that this was bourgeois progress,
based on the formation of a "stable" class of agricultural
wage-labourers and on chronic pauperism of the mass of the lower strata
of the peasantry, this Narodnik-like bourgeois, of course, says never
a word."(16)
Conclusion
When enthusiasm for neoliberal
industrialisation is not well received, as a last resort in defence
of the neoliberal policies in West Bengal, 'vanguards' like Prakash
Karat and his associates have a ready apologia that "in a constitutional
set-up that is not federal in nature", the left government policies
"would always be circumscribed by the fact that State power vests
with the centre while state governments have very limited powers and
resources." (It does not matter that the CPIM's other leader, Benoy
Konar, talks of the same constraints by admitting West Bengal as "a
federal state in a capitalist feudal country.")
It is tempting to interpret
this demand for more federalism in India as representative of "the
demand made in certain circles that local self-governing institutions
should also be given the autonomy to borrow and to negotiate investment
projects with capitalists, including multinational banks and corporations",
as Prabhat Patnaik, a foremost Indian political economist, known for
his allegiance to the CPIM and who has been lately appointed as Kerala's
State Planning Board Vice-Chairman, puts it. He continues, "this
will further increase the mismatch in bargaining strength between the
capitalists and the state organ engaged in negotiating with them, and
will further intensify the competitive struggle among the aspirants
for investment... This can have only one possible result which is to
raise the scale of social 'bribes' for capitalists' investment. This
increase in the scale of social "bribes" is an important feature
of neo-liberalism."(17)
Particularly relevant in
this regard are the CPIM leadership's and the West Bengal government's
statements on Singur, in which they consistently fetishise the Left
Front's ability to win away the Tata project from a poorer state of
Uttarakhand - an example of its competency in 'social bribery'! Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya again and again with all his frankness
defended his Singur sale to Tata - "We showed them various sites,
but they settled for Singur. We could not say no to such a project,
otherwise it would have gone to Uttarakhand."(18)
This is symptomatic of the
extent to which the official Indian left has re-trained itself in the
competitive culture of neoliberal industrialisation. Of course, it does
not have any parliamentary stake in Uttarakhand. Or does the party leadership
want to entice the Uttarakhand people to choose CPIM, for its efficiency
in negotiating or 'bribing' for neoliberal projects? It is obvious that
in order to remain the sole contender of the nationalising and globalising
interests of the West Bengal hegemonic classes, the CPIM leadership
has been giving vent to Bengali parochialism of the local "Narodnik-like
bourgeoisie".
Notes:
(1) V.I. Lenin, The Narodnik-Like Bourgeoisie and Distraught Narodism,
1903. http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive
/lenin/works/1903/nov/05a.htm
(2) V.I. Lenin, The Trade Unions. The Present Situation and Trotsky's
Mistakes, 1920. http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TUTM20.html
(3) Benoy Konar, Left Front Govt And Bengal's Industrialisation, People's
Democracy, October 08, 2006. http://pd.cpim.org/2006/
1008/10082006_benoy%20konar.htm
(4) See Dipankar Basu, Political
Economy of 'Middleness': Behind Violence in Rural Bengal, Economic &
Political Weekly, April 21, 2001. http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?
root=2001&leaf=04&filename=2411&filetype=pdf
(5) P Sundarayya, Central
Committee Resolution on Certain Agrarian Issues and An Explanatory Note,
CPIM Publications, 1973.
(6) Ibid.
(7) All India Kisan Council,
Resolution: Unite To Fight And Defeat All Moves To Stop The Industrialisation
Of West Bengal, People's Democracy, January 14 2007.
http://pd.cpim.org/2007
/0114/01142007_aiks%20meeting.htm
(8) Prakash Karat, "Double-Speak"
Charge: Maligning The CPI(M), People's Democracy, January 28 2007. http://pd.cpim.org/2007/0128/01282007_prakash.htm
(9) Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile
Absolute, Verso, 2000, p.63.
(10) Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm
Bracke and Others, 1879.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/18.htm
(11) Benoy Konar, West Bengal:
Rationale For Industrialisation, People's Democracy, November 06, 2005.
http://pd.cpim.org/2005/1106/11062005_benoy%20kumar.htm
(12) The Hindu November 16,
2005.
http://www.hindu.com/2005/11/16/stories/2005111605361100.htm
(13) See (6)
(14) V.I. Lenin, The Proletariat
and the Peasantry, 1905. http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists//
archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/12.htm
(15) See (1)
(16) Ibid.
(17) Prabhat Patnaik, An
Aspect of Neoliberalism, People's Democracy, December 24, 2006.
http://pd.cpim.org/2006/1224/12242006_eco.htm
(18) Frontline, Jan. 27-Feb.
09, 2007. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2402/stories
/20070209002911200.htm