Arup Baisya
The Marxist and revolutionary praxis all
over the world had lost its vigour post-collapse of the USSR. In front of the
onslaught of neoliberal restructuring of production and labour process and the
concomitant ideological influence due to the success stories at its initial
phase led the working class to the receiving end and the revolutionary praxis
to disarray. But the great things also happen in the epistemology of changing
the world to change oneself at the time of retreat of a colourful and vibrant
process of building a world beyond capitalism. The waning of revolutionary movements
eo ipso shifted the limelight to the questioning of Marxism and its unilinear
version. Hundreds of Marxism have emerged from the practicing Marxism and new
insights have also surfaced in theoretical premise from the attempt to
interpret the world from diverse dimensions. But the defeat begets defeat in
theoretical and practicing renderings so long as the agency of changing of the
world i.e. the working class remains within the confinement of the ideology of
benevolent capitalism. The Marxist practice in India too visualized the working
class as a victim of capitalism, not as the agent of change and as such hovered
around the agenda of reformism. The real danger of Marxist practice lies in the
linear interpretation of Marxism as a set of formulae and not as an evolving
process and these have been adequately challenged by the Post-Marxist thinkers.
But they inevitably failed to challenge the basic premise of Marxism “the
philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the question is how to
change it”. When the global and Indian polity is agog with the possibility of
change and the working class and the masses have upped the ante to challenge
the capitalist relation of production, Marxism is once again becoming the
common meeting ground of all the forces aspiring to go beyond capital. In the
history of capitalism, whenever the capitalist production system entered a
crisis, Marxism showed the light to the oppressed and the exploited for
liberty.
During the last few decades, it was a
common understanding among the Indian revolutionaries that the democracy in
Kashmir with the right to self-determination is a precondition for democracy in
India. Kashmir has a checkered history of rebellion and subjugation, but
Kashmir question has never relegated to such a marginal question in Indian
political lifeline as it is today. This compels us to review the past prescient
positioning and putative understanding of Kashmir question as Marx changed his
strategy on Polish question from time to time.
In 1847, Marx’s view was that the victory
of the English proletarians over the English bourgeoisie is decisive for the
victory of all the oppressed over their oppressors. Hence Poland must be
liberated not in Poland but in England. Since the revolt in Poland of 1794, 1830,
and 1846 had been crushed by its powerful neighbours Russia, Prussia, and
Austria, Marx’s view was that England would give the signal for the deliverance
of Poland and that therefore Poland would be liberated only when the nations of
Western Europe had won democracy. Marx, Engels and their colleagues viewed the
labour struggle and democratic one as closely related. Again in 1863, when a
full-scale uprising broke out in Poland, Marx viewed it as the harbinger of a
wider European revolution. The Marxist revolutionaries in India tend to fall
prey to the staticity of mindset and formulate the strategy once for all. In
the backdrop of a fascist danger and the rising people’s movement to challenge
this menace, the revolutionaries need to review its strategy and assert that
the victory of democracy in the rest of India is the precondition for a victory
ofh7 democracy in Kashmir.
In the Indian landscape, the fascist
movement and its concomitant fallout of on-going meticulously planned
subversion of constitutional democracy for a fascist take-over of power is
facing tough challenges from the people’s multifaceted movement for citizenship
rights, rights of the workers and peasants, women’s rights, forest rights,
people’s rights on natural resources, ecological rights, etc.
Though all these movements are
fundamentally directed against the neo-liberal economy and masculine
nationalism, these are revolving around a defensive and reformist agenda. The
participation of the working class is still not as class-in-itself for
transformation to class-for-itself but as a group of workers especially in
cities and urban centers.
The people’s upsurge in cities and urban
areas on citizenship question has already brought the question of democracy and
state character into the focus of political discourse. This indicates that if
all the people’s movements can be coordinated with a common revolutionary
direction, it can lead to a revolutionary crisis in the next round of popular
uprising under the leadership of working-class and workers-peasants alliance in
the event of a global economic meltdown.
One should not miss the social dynamics of
ongoing spontaneous people’s movement in India on the citizenship question.
Firstly, the epicenters of this people’s upsurge are urban areas and cities. Secondly,
though the Muslims, Dalits, and women are at the forefront, it should be kept
in mind the workers in urban and city areas are mostly constitutive of people
from these communities.
If imperialism is defined as the
domination of capitalist forces over the pre-capitalist relation of production,
then imperialism is inherent in capitalism from its birth. Lenin defined
imperialism as the latest form of capitalism, not highest, based on the
dependence of industrial capital on finance capital for the emergence of
monopoly capital and the domination of backward countries by the centers of
capitalist nation-states and the imperialist conflict thereon with a danger of
war. The center-periphery and capitalist and pre-capitalist relation is
prevalent throughout the global capitalist system, it does not matter whether
the imperialist is in driving seat or not. It is naïve and mechanistic approach
to divide the totality into two separate continuum of imperialist capitalist
center and pre-capitalist periphery without delving into the changes within the
pre-capitalist relation of production due to killing of space by time for
global expansion of capital.
The diversity is not always progressive,
sometimes it may also act as a regressive factor for revolutionary change.
Today’s identity or Dalit Adivasi movement is not the same as the movement in
the nineteen-eighties. The new emerging leaderships are representing the
students-youths, women and working-class and they are fundamentally fighting
for a new India with the question identity rights underlying within this grand
narrative. Prakash Ambedkar is leading a long march on the citizenship
question. The Bhim army and other newly formed or reorganized Dalit
organisations are unconsciously leading and addressing the inherent issues
related to the working class gradually making the old class leadership
redundant and that’s why the leaders like Mayawati are muted.
The global capitalism is in deep crisis
and due to the inherent contradictions within capitalism or due to any external
triggering effect, this crisis may lead to another global meltdown. The Indian
people’s movement this time has set the stage for another popular uprising in
the event of a global meltdown when the working class will be at the forefront.
The epicenter of such uprising will, likely, remain as the urban and city areas
with rural areas as rear. It is worth mentioning here that post-1905, Russia
was predominantly an agricultural country with industrial cities and urban
areas having deep penetration of European capital and Russia did not even
achieve the basic tenet of bourgeois democracy of universal suffrage.
This necessitates a formidable
revolutionary subjective force who can play the role from the perspective of
“from the masses, to the masses” to emerge and this underlines the urgency of
the unity, albeit through stages, of all the Indian communist revolutionaries.
In the absence of revolutionary subjective
force organically linked with the people’s movement, there is every possibility
that the people’s movements which have mostly developed spontaneously and from
their life-experience either may be coopted by a new version of liberal
democracy with a soft Hindutva core or fascist state may be successful to
suppress people’s assertions.
But there is no denying the fact that this
moment of the here and now is the moment for broadest unity against the
imminent danger of fascist takeover of the state.
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