(The revised version of article on "Some critical questions on left practice" written by Arup Baisya has appeared in the online page of Frontier Weekly. So this has now been replaced by the article appeared in Frontier Weekly. You may also visit www.frontierweekly.com)
Capitalist crisis and statist outlook
Defeatist mindset of the left
The skewed vision developed within the garb of
revolutionary activism and revolutionary zeal to complete the imminent
revolution in third world left many questions out of the purview of left
discourse within the practicing left circles. After the disintegration of
Soviet Russia, and when the facts, hitherto remained unnoticed or discarded
being treated as the conspiracy of the capitalist roaders, started pouring out
abundantly in a neo-liberal environ from within the Chinese society confirming
its reversal from socialist trend, the most of the practicing left became
puzzled and started questioning Leninist position on imperialism and Mao’s path
of revolution. Instead of dwelling on the ‘really existing capitalism’ and the
mistakes in the socialism building process and thus improving the concept of ‘theory
and practice’ behind the revolutionary success story to fit in a new set of
existing parameters, they preferred to go for a paradigm shift from the
Leninist and Mao’s position. The defeatist tendency instilled in the minds of
millions of left activists has actually provoked some left intellectuals to
delineate the present situation in such a way that being far from Leninist
position justifies the left inactivity or activity without agenda to defeat
imperialism and to transcend capitalism. This, at least for the time being,
suits the activists to cope with the argument of eternal capitalism.
The basic premises on which the aberrant and skewed
vision have its fall out can be identified as (1) the question of imperialist rivalry (2) the Indian caste-class question (3) the democracy in a socialist state (4) the revolutionary organization.
The question of imperialist
rivalry
On the first question of imperialist rivalry, a
section of the left intellectuals want to describe the current phase of
capitalist competition as ‘collaborative competition’ that nullifies the
Leninist formulation on imperialist rivalry and war. Aizaz Ahmad asserts an
element of fundamental novelty of present situation by stating “the first
specificity of this regime (in the United Sates) lies in the fact that,
thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, this is the first time in human
history that a single imperial power is so dominant over its rival that it
really has no rival, near or far, precisely at the time when it has the
greatest capacity to dominate the globe”.1 He further asserts that
Lenin’s conception of ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ arose in the course of a
conjunctural analysis required by an intense debate on whether a world war was
imminent or not. He also points out, “the specificity of the conjuncture in the
imperialism of our time, as different from Lenin’s, is that its core –
consisting of advanced capitalist countries – is comprised of neither rivals
nor equals”.2 He even rules out the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry
being shifted from the Atlantic zone to Pacific zone as less plausible and more
or less futuristic. Evidently any form of ‘imperialist rivalry’ in Leninist
sense of the term does not hold good in his scheme of things depicting the
present time. In the cold war phase, one camp of the left squarely put the
difference of ideological convictions as the main driving force behind the
rivalry between the U.S. and erstwhile Soviet Union and other camp emphasized
the difference of material interests. As
in the present neo-liberal phase of capitalism, there does not exist a powerful
state that bears an ideology polar opposite to bourgeois liberalism and a state
or group of states powerful enough to challenge the scheme of planetary
domination of Pax Americana, it is concluded that the imperialistic rivalry in
Leninist sense of the term does not hold good. The overemphasis on external phenomena
rather than the internal dynamism of capitalism where the material interests
and ideological convictions are intertwined obscures the underlying reality.
Lenin locates the nature of imperialism in the modes
of behaviour of monopoly capitalism to protect and increase their profit. Among
the essential features of the imperialist stage, according to Lenin, are the
economic struggle (or alliances) among sectors of finance capital for division
of markets and investment opportunities in the advanced as well as the
underdeveloped nations, and the military and diplomatic struggle among the
imperialist powers for control and influence over weaker nations,
industrialised as well as
non-industrialised. Lenin emphasises imperialism as the culmination of inherent
dynamism of capitalism and imperialist rivalry as the extension of the logic of
this inherent dynamics rather than as formulation evolving from conjunctural
analysis of Lenin’s time. The imperialist rivalry is the basic tenet of
capitalism in monopoly phase, the only difference is that at a certain point of
time, one power-center may be economically and politically much more powerful
than others who may strive to avoid full-blown conflict as a tactical move. But
this armistice among the imperialist powers is not the principal feature of the
time, rather the intrinsic crisis as well as monopolistic interest set the
trend to face one another as rivals to combat. The basic premise of Lenin’s
theorisation of imperialism as monopoly stage of capitalism, during which
finance capital is in the ascendancy and the imperialists rivalries do hold
good provides us the necessary framework to analyse the situation unfolding at
this juncture. Harry Magdoff describes the features of the post-World War II
years as the integration of military production with the dominant industrial
sectors, the drive of multinational corporation toward worldwide control of the
most profitable and newest industries in both the periphery and advanced
countries and the priority of the interest of military-multinational industry
on the affairs of the state. He is right when he states, “true, this describes
primarily the situation in the united states, but at the same time it outlines
the path now being followed in rival imperialist powers – a process that may
well be speeded up in view of the weakness now being revealed in the internal
and external position of U.S. capitalism”.3 But the strange situation of apparent non-death of neo-liberal capitalism
and the fall of “really existing socialism” has retarded the process Magdoff
envisaged. In the first Gulf War and subsequent Yugoslav conflict United States
asserted its hegemony through its traditional policy of multilateralism. But
from the Nineties in the vacuum created by the collapse of Soviet Union, the
features of unilateralism in American foreign policy started emerging. But
after the Iraq occupation the policy of planetary domination of Pax-Americana
and the atavistic American attitude has soon started retreating under the
unforeseen political, military, and economic difficulties arisen from rival
powers and in the backdrop of deep crisis of capitalism. So it can be said that
there are transitory phases unilateralism, multilateralism and full blown
conflict within the ambit of underlying imperialistic rivalries after the
emergence of monopoly capitalism as Lenin envisaged and this basic tenet of
Leninism has not been changed in the present phase of neo-liberalism except the
fact that the finance capital has overwhelming sway over industrial capital and
the oligopolistic corporate giants have become more powerful than the
nation-states whose interests are sometimes downplayed by the global interests
of the corporate, but these surface phenomena in the monopoly phase of
capitalism whose internal dynamics is to ensure the wheels of capitalist
machine running, and to produce and reproduce the relations of production
brings the imperialistic rivalry back in the centre stage.
Sustainability of neo-liberal
capitalism
In the present phase of neo-liberalism, the rules of
the market are set by the state on behalf of the large corporation in
globalising India in the name of economic development. The twentieth century
post-war capitalism developed through a complex process of conflict and
cooperation between state and market. The state furthered the market’s interest
but at times also regulated it in favour of the labour. But in the current
phase of capitalism after 1980, the state is under the complete sway of giant
corporate oligopolies, and the role of the state is completely determined by
the motive of profit-maximisation of the financial and other corporate gulags.
Neoliberalism departs from both the political and economic legacy of liberalism
in not seeing any problem in a close relationship between firms and the state,
provided the influence runs from firms to state and not vice versa. The first
error of this position is not to realise that firms try to influence the state
precisely because they then want that influence to turn back onto the economy,
to grant them favours. The occasional ruptures of financial bubbles in the
World’s largest economy of America like dot com or sub-prime bubbles blown by
the multi-faceted and skillfully designed debt structure causing abundance of
toxic financial assets to surface has been handled by the state to bail out the
farms which are considered “too big to fail” following the prescription of the
powerful corporate lobby. Thus the precise meaning of neo-liberalism is getting
clearer to everyone.
Karl Marx considered that at certain moments of
historical crisis a social class would emerge whose concerned became the
international proletariat and thus there would be an end to the process,
because the proletariat was the generality of society and not just a particular
interest within it. The Keynesian model that guided economic policy in the
first thirty years after the Second World War did represent a temporary
coincidence between the interests of the industrial working class in the global
northwest and a general interest of the politico-economic system. This had been
the class likely to threaten political and social order. It was also
potentially the class whose mass consumption could fuel economic growth of a
kind unprecedented in human history. The Keynesian model, combined with mass
production, was a response to these demands that reconciled workers with a
capitalist system of production. The opposing set of neoliberal ideas that
leapt to prominence during the 1970s stagflationary crisis of the Keynesian
model was also carried by a class, the class of finance capitalist,
geographically grounded primarily in the USA and the UK, but extending across
the globe. By the 1980s the process generally known as globalisation, both a
producer and product of deregulation of financial market set the only actor capable of rapid action at global level were
giant TNCs, which preferred their own private regulation over that by
governments. Does the strange situation of non-death of capitalism appear to be
prevailingly due to the creation of demand in the financial market by series of
financial bubbles do away with the imperialist war for supremacy over
neo-colonial states? Does the global scenario represent homogeneity of market
regulated under single capitalist centre regulated by oligopolistic cartel instead
of imperialistic-capitalist pattern of multilayered centre-periphery structure
and thus bring the capital-labor contradiction as the principal contradiction
in the global stage? Rather the converse is perhaps true and the facts reveal
that the gap between diverse centers and peripheries are widening with the
gradual strengthening of multiple centers more and more backed by the policy
makers who are advocating strong states amid deepening and unmanageable financial crisis.
Class-Caste struggle
The militancy of the industrial workers in 1970s,
though this section never constituted a majority of the working population
anywhere, had been the growing class, but now they are declining. Workers in
the main growth sectors of the new economy, private services, were usually not
organized and had developed no autonomous political agenda, no organization to
articulate their specific grievances. So as the class interest of workers and
peasant being contingent to the community interest in the developing countries
like India, the community struggles are steered under the leadership of the
class or group of people who benefited from the first spell of neo-liberal
economy. This development in this neo-liberal phase of capitalism has been
hitherto ignored by the dominant section of the left forces. After 1947 in the
post British period, though Indian communists advocated linguistic states, but
it tragically failed to comprehend the overlapping & multi-dimensional
identity & consciousness of the Indian people due to their adherence to the
Russian legacy of deterministic approach and in this context there remained a
curious inconsistency in their position on nationality question and
subsequently they even bade farewell to the idea of “right to self
determination”. Lenin always advocated right to self-determination. But though
in the case of Georgian invasion Lenin envisaged the danger of “Great Russian
bully” over Georgian revolution, Lenin’s
agreement with the invasion in the first instance is also questionable and
seems to be guided by the deterministic approach of overemphasizing the
external factors rather than complete reliance on the dynamics of internal
forces. This deterministic approach also moulded the ideological mindset
of the Indian first generation communists like Dange to overlook the caste
reality of India to suggest that Brahman was the ‘commune of Aryan Man’ which
was ridiculed by eminent Marxist historian D.D.Kosambi. The religious doctrines
that are so venerated by Indian Castes, minimized the need for internal
violence, thereby leading all social manifestations of the class-struggle in India
Democracy in a Socialist
state
The discourse on democracy is based on Stalinist
theoretical enunciation that withering away of state would occur through its
reinforcement and leading role of the party. These two ideas combined give rise
to strengthen state-power with the communist party at its overwhelming control.
Going by the Stalinist conception, they believe that this state cannot exercise
‘function of repression’ because in the socialist state, exploitation is
suppressed, the exploiters no longer exist, there is no one to be suppressed.
As the democracy and politics get withered away with the withering away of
state as the instrument of suppression and dominance, there cannot be any
socialist democracy. So only task on the question of democracy is to attain
purest form of bourgeois democracy in a bourgeois state and as a result, the
struggle for democracy is limited to rectify the aberration in bourgeois
democracy in a bourgeois state, not to extend and surpass it in a socialist
state. The task of simultaneously weakening the state power and strengthening
the social power under the leadership of working class gets obliterated from
communist proggramme that revolves around the reformist act of taking
corrective measures to attain purest form of bourgeois democracy and then
discard the essence of this democracy altogether instead of extending it in the
futuristic project of socialism building. Charles Bettelheim writes, “the
Stalinist ideology of the state and of its relationship with citizens thus enunciates
a double discourse : a “democratic discourse” which is in contradiction with
facts and an absolutist and repressive discourse which is a commentary on
actual practice. This duality is an expression of a social schizophrenia. It
reflects the deep contradictions of an economic and political system which
oppresses this masses, subjects them to repression and exploits them with an
intensity rarely attained in history”.4 So for evolving a futuristic project for socialism building, the question
of democracy has the paramount importance.
Question of Organisation
One of the most important aspects that needs to be
discussed and debated is the question of communist organisation. The skewed
vision on the question of communist organisation can be traced back even to
Lenin’s time. Lenin’s idea of ‘Vanguardism’ is ripe with implications that can
arrest the process of working class self-consciousness. Being the vanguard, the
communist party and its activist-leaders are indoctrinated as the infallible
mass-leaders who only bear the knowledge to lead the civilization ahead. Mao’s
idea of communist activist as ‘the fish in the water’ and to educate the masses
from the conception of “from the people, to the people”, though a better
extension of vanguardist idea, is also problematic in initiating the process of
development of mass-consciousness. This metaphor that symbolises communist
organiser as ‘fish’ and society as ‘water’ is closely inter-related with the
question of being declassed. As the fish can be brought from outside and thrown
into the stagnant water, a communist activist becomes leader of the working
class from outside and it does not entail the communist who is evolved from
within the class and the mutual interaction between the activist and society to
ensure the raising of self-consciousness of working class. As the activists
constitute the basic foundation of the party-strength, the party is bestowed
with responsibility to train them who in turn repose high esteem to the party
high-ups for preparing the theoretical materials to train them. Thus the social
division of mental and physical labour starts replicating and reinforcing
within the party life itself and sets the ground for cultism. Recently the
ruminations on this question are becoming visible within the practicing left
circle, after the demise of “really existing socialism” and the loss of ground
of the main stream left forces. It is now being felt that the organisational
practice of the communists till date is not in keeping with the Marxist concept
of withering away of state and politics. So keeping in view the Lenin’s
theoretical concept of consciousness to the masses from without and proletarian
vanguard, Stalinist practice, Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectual and
Rosa Luxembourgian critiques, this organizational question needs to be
discussed & debated at length.
On the organization question, Luxemburg took an
overall organic view. Her polemics against Lenin can be understood when she
says, “let us speak plainly, historically, the errors committed by a truly
revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the
infallibility of the best of all possible central committees”.5 But over-dependence
on spontaneity may distract the party organiser from its educator role and
transform the party-leaders into quotidian activists in a sterile situation or
quixotic in a vibrant situation with a built-in ‘empiricist outlook’. That
Luxemburg was aware of this is clear from her passage that states, “On the one
hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside the
existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other,
the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction
through which the socialist movement makes its way. It follows that this
movement can best advance by taking betwixt and between the two dangers by
which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character;
the other the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the
condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois
social reform. That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience,
to hope to fix, once for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist
struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labour
movement against possibilities of opportunist digression”6. Like Lenin,
Gramsci also finds the remedy of the problem in democratic centralism. But in
his opinion, democratic centralism must be elastic, it comes alive in so far as
it is continuously interpreted and adapted to necessity. It needs continual
renewal. Democratic centralism, again, must be ‘organic’ in the sense that both
the leaders and the rank and file must obey the rule of democracy. So the
central core of the organizational problem lies on the question of organic
nature of party members and the continuously evolving and extending the party
democracy vis-à-vis overall democracy. Gramsci states “The Socialist Party is
not a sectional, but a class organization: its morphology is quite different
from that of any other party. It can only view the state, the network of
bourgeois class power, as its antagonistic likeness. It cannot enter into
direct or indirect competition for the conquest of the state without committing
suicide, without losing its nature, without becoming a mere political faction
that is estranged from the historical activity of the proletariat, without
turning into a swarm of ‘coachman-flies’ on the hunt of bowl of blancmange in
which to get stuck and perish ingloriously. The Socialist Party does not
conquer the state, it replace it; it replaces the regime, abolishes party
government and replaces free competition by the organization of production and
exchange.”7 It must be emphasized
that the evolving consciousness of the masses should transform their status
from object of history to the subject with the withering away of the party
itself and in this context, mass-action is to be given utmost importance as
Rosa Luxemburg envisaged and on this premise the concept of new left
organization needs to be developed.
Notes :
(1) Iran, Afghanistan : The Imperialism Of Our
Time, by Aijaz Ahmad, LeftWord Books, March 2005, page 239. italic words in
parenthesis are additions of the author of this article.
(2) Ibid, page 242.
(3) Imperialism : From the Colonial Age to the
Present, by Harry Magdoff, Monthly Review Press 1978. page 111.
(4) Cass Struggle in the USSR, Third Period :
1930-1941, Part 2: The Dominators, by Charles Bettelheim, T R Publication Pvt
Ltd 1996, page 17
(5) Readings in Revolution and Organization :
Rosa Luxemburg And Her Critic : Selected and Introduced by Sobhanlal
DattaGupta, Pearl Publishers, September 1994, page 139.
(6) The
Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis & Kelvin B. Anderson,
Cornerstone Publication August 2005, page 263.
(7) The Antonio Gramsci Reader, edited by David
Forgacs, NYU press, 2000, page 40.011)
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