Arup Baisya
(This article has been written by the author in early March, 2014. Recently lot of new data and their theoretical interpretations by many experts in the field of economics and sociology are pouring in for further review on this issue)
Reformism versus adventurism
A leading section of the left circle mechanically
delineates the path of establishing the working class hegemony as the war of
maneuver in the East in contradistinction to the war of position in the west.
Both the traditional parliamentary left and the extreme left strategically
placed themselves in practice completely in a war of position and the war of
maneuver respectively in the post seventies. Though this phase is heavily
burdened with their past legacy, the post seventies period demands special
attention in view of the neo-liberal phase of capitalism which differs in
significant way from the post-war boom and welfarism. This phase is marked by
many new dimensions in the scene of global capitalism due to the far-reaching
consequence of the process of centralisation-cum-globalisation of finance
capital, but it does not perforce indicate a radical break from Lenin’s
prognostication on monopoly capital and imperialism. The mere counterposition
of “war of position” to ”war of maneuver” in any Marxist strategy in the end
becomes an opposition between reformism and adventurism. In the history of
communist movement, once the united front had become equated with the war of
position, against maneuverist strategies of adventurist period of all-out
confrontation, it threatened to slide towards a gradualist reformism that was
the mirror image of the ultra-leftist immediacy of the positions it proposed to
replace.
Misconstrued notion
The crisis of the traditional left is ingrained in
a serious political error. The left’s implicit and explicit politics was that
capitalism was standardising Indian society, that proletarianisation would
reduce rural “idiocy,” that, like the freedom struggle, class struggle would
reduce obscurantism, communalism and casteism, and, finally the community
fabric of society would be more and more transformed into a class fabric. The
parliamentary or mainstream Indian left like CPM and CPI has been visibly
changing the strategy in practice from the seventies to war of position alone
and started equating this with the united front activity and thus losing the
zeal to build mass movement. Theoretically they accept the semi-feudal
character of the Indian state, but with an understanding that the national
bourgeoisie is at the helm of affairs moulding the capitalist formations.
However, the development of capitalism in India
has not resulted in submerging the communities in great socio-political
development. Rather, dormant communities have now woken up, awakened
communities have become restive, and a competitive polity based on a regime of
subsidies and patronage has created communities out of sub-communities. The
left offered neither non-violent resistance at Ayodhya, nor did it order a halt
to Mr. Advani’s march at Purulia. More importantly, the slogans and methods to
preach secularism were imprisoned by the rhetoric of the Nehruvite liberal age.
On the other hand, the extreme left like the
Indian Maoists are engrossed in a static mindset and fail to notice the
internal dynamics of societal change under the influence of the global
capitalism and Indian Democracy even in the hinterlands within the over-arching
semi-feudal structure.
Land reform was undertaken haltingly through the
1950s to the end of the 1970s. NSSO survey report, 2003-04 shows that the
landless household is 31.12 per cent and the percentage of households having
more than 3 hectares of land is only 5.19 per cent (of this, 3.06 per cent has 3-5 hectares and 0.52 per cent has more
than 10 hectares). Agricultural statistics, 2013 published by Directorate of
Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India, reveals
that in 1951, agricultural cultivators was 71.9 per cent of total rural
population and agricultural labourer was 28.1 per cent, but these figure
changed to 45.1 per cent and 54.9 per cent respectively in the year 2011. The
total amount of land operated by big farmers has decreased by roughly 38 per
cent, accompanied by a very substantial jump in the area under small and very
small operational holdings (Ministry of Agriculture 2013). The NSS data also
show that the share of agricultural workers among all male rural workers
declined steadily from 80.6 per cent in 1977-8 to 71.7 per cent 1989-90 and for
rural females this share dropped from 88.1 per cent in 1977-8 to 81.4 per cent
in 1989-90 (as noted in Jha 1997). These figures imply that non-agricultural
sector absorbed about 70 per cent of the total increase in the rural workforce
between 1977-8 and 1989-90 (Social Development report 2012, Council for social
development). These changes in the rural landscape have substantially changed
the balance of forces in the semi-feudal relations of production, and this
itself demands special attention to formulate new programme for left movement.
Different phases of
transition
The series of successful revolutionary upsurge
that had been first witnessed in Russia and ended with the last revolutionary
victory in Vietnam in May 1975 was based on the premise of the workers-peasant
alliance built in the backdrop of rising peasant militancy. But widespread
peasant militant movements like Tebhaga, Telangana could not be transformed
into revolutionary social movement in India under the leadership of working class.
The objective barriers existed in India, as Utsa Pattanaik pointed out, were :
“for one, the strength and efficiency, honed over two centuries, of the
repressive apparatus of the unitary British colonial state, as compared to
moribund tsarism in Russia or the internal bickering of rival imperialist
powers in seni-colonial China. For another, the relative strength of the
English-educated Indian bourgeoisie which seized the leadership of the national
movement particularly after Gandhiji’s returm from South Africa and his
brilliant political innovation – the satyagraha, which perfectly suited the
requirement of a movement which wished to stave off revolution while taking
over the legacy of power.” In addition
to her diagnosis of objective difficulties, it would be pertinent to say that
the Indian peasant movement of that period had seldom crossed the
caste-community fault lines built into Indian semi-feudal hierarchical
caste-structure and could not change the upper-caste moorings of the
English-educated class who acted as the colonial intermediaries.
In the country like India with emerging market
economy, there occurred many changes in the structure of workers and peasants
over the period from colonial rule of de-industrialisation to the dirigiste
industrial development to the present phase of imperialist globalisation. It
can be claimed that the de-industrialisation was merely a decline from a
development which had been specially stimulated by the activities of the
European merchants themselves in buying Indian cloth for export to other
countries. Hence the major part of the de-industrialisation must be attributed
to the displacement of traditional manufacturers as suppliers of consumption
goods to the internal Indian marker.
Characterising the colonial de-industrialisation,
Amiya Kumar Bagchi wrote : “Capitalist industrialization up to the phase of
maturity is attended by at least three types of changes : (a) an increase in
the proportion of the population engaged in secondary industry (b) a sustained increase in per capita income
and (c) a continual rise in the degree of mechanization in industry -- and to lesser extent perhaps, in
agriculture. The reversal of any of these conditions over a long period of time
can be characterized as de-industrialisation. Indian experienced the reversal
of the first two conditions from probably 1820 up to 1914.”
During the post independence period up to the
seventies, a new industrial policy of import substitution of manufactured
consumer goods with a view to catching up the developed western world was
followed. But that policy was heavily dependent on the import of heavy
machineries and thus remained completely entangled with vicissitudes of the
global market and the policy framework of global capitalists. The capitalist
classes of the India cannot step up their rates of accumulation without running
into inflationary, and balance of payments, difficulties, because they have to
reckon with the formidable influence exerted on world economy by the advanced
capitalist classes, and also due to the fear of the unrest of the Indian peasantry
and the proletariat, the capitalist classes of India have to adjust to the
demands of the property-owning strata in control of sector characterized by
pre-capitalist relations. The neo-liberal policy framework that was initiated
by the Indian Government in the backdrop of balance of payment crisis let loose
an onslaught on the labour at the behest of Global capitalist class. The left
in power in the Indian states especially in West Bengal also succumbed to this
pressure with a policy paralysis.
Dilemma of the left
The total abdication of its role by a supposedly
pro-labour government in West Bengal further worsened the situation. In 1988,
for example, of the total 228 work stoppage, lock-outs accounted for 85 per
cent and strikes 15 per cent: 88 per cent of mandays were lost because of
lock-outs and 12 per cent because of strikes. Of the 246,053 workers affected,
a majority (60 per cent) suffered owing to lock-outs. The average duration of a
strike was 33.4 days and a lock-out 169 days. Lay-offs increased from 510 in
1985 to 1,572 in 1988. (Samaddar, Ranabir : 2013). The unions and the state
both remained mute witness to the onslaught on workers during the decade. In
fact, the unions often became part of a structure that resulted in managerial
hegemony – just as the policies of the so called pro-labour State government
did.
The left, in principle, must always strategically
place themselves in favour of the strike by labour on the capital with tactical
variations during the period of boom and of recession of global capitalism
marked by underdevelopment, restricted home market, stagflation, a large
unorganized sector and technological restructuring of industry as argued by
Lenin long ago. But the left in power in Bengal became mere witness of the
strike by capital in the ‘80s. Left could have sided with the labour by
initiating a policy of social security, co-operative management of the existing
industries, building social infrastructure that also generates employments, and
the support to increase in demand for indigenous commodities through state
purchases, and also pushing the achievement of operation Barga further ahead
progressively through land reform and boosting agricultural commercialisation
and cooperation. But they dared not pursue this pro-labour path with a fear to
face the hostility of the global capitalist class and reluctance of global
investors who are interested in profiteering and in ensuring super-profit
through the existence of pre-capitalist social relations with a skewed
development model. The extreme left, especially the Maoists, on the other hand,
failing to realise the change in the urban and rural social classes and the
balance of forces evolved during the long period of post-independence
capitalist re-construction and the existing parliamentary democracy put much
emphasis on the immanence of the seizure of state power and on the combat with
the coercive apparatuses of the state following the argumentation of the
mechanical division of strategy in the Eastern and the Western countries.
The change of agrarian social classes has diverse
ramifications in the diverse geo-political regions of Indian nation. The
distress condition in the cash crop areas shows the sign of landlord capitalism
and strengthening of pre-capitalist relations and the caste-communities
cleavages under the influence rentier financial and merchant capitalism. But
the region like Bengal where left had undertaken land reform to a certain
extent has unleashed the forces to carry forward agrarian commercialisation
through the path of peasant capitalism. The proletarianisation of rural
peasantry would have opened up the new vistas for working class unity and
consciousness in both rural and urban sector, had the left in power not given
much emphasis on the path of development basing on global capitalist investors,
and the extreme left not marginalised themselves with the combatant role
relying much on the politics of the barrel of the gun. Both the mainstream left
and the extreme left have missed the opportunity to build the sustained
struggle for social security, weakening of caste based pre-capitalist structure
to ensure working class unity and consciousness. But the traditional left
forces like CPI and CPIM have been
pursuing the misplaced legacy of strategic and tactical path of second communist
international and Stalinist determinism without taking into cognisance the here
and now of the post-independence Indian reality.
Marxism and Binary
categories
In defense of the Marxist dialectics, E P Thompson
wrote : “Marxist theory…… can become a
false consciousness if, instead of being used for the methodical investigation
of reality through theory and practice, it is misused as a defence against that
very reality……. Those who wish to deprive Marxism of its critical, subversive
power and turn it into a affirmative doctrine, generally dig in behind a series
of stereotyped statements which, in their abstraction, are as irrefutable as
devoid of result.” Citing the Indian Marxist, he further reiterated : “…..If
one considers for a moment the possible consequences if the Communist Party of
India (One of the most unreconstructed Stalinist parties in the world) were to
reinforce its existing anti-libertarian tendencies and contempt for
‘petit-bourgeois’ masses – tendencies amply displayed in its partnership in the
recent emergency – with a dose of Althusserian arrogance; and if its largely
bourgeois and intellectual upper cadres were to become theoretical
practitioners; and if the opportunity to practice, not only in theory, but upon
the body of India, should return -- then
we could expect nothing less than the re-enactment of the full repertoire of
high Stalinism within the raging inferno of Indian ‘scarcity’.”
This argument is also applicable to CPI(M) to a
great extent. The left front role in West Bengal in post seventies was guided
from the premise that the Party is able to decide the best interest of the
working class on the basis of Marxist ‘Science’, and to serve this interest
through ‘ideological state apparatuses’. In this understanding, Marxism becomes
an inert tool only to be handled by the Party to judge working class morality and
in this framework working class becomes a passive onlooker who is only to be
led and guided. Thus Mraxist science degenerates into deterministic formulae to
be used to predict the future. Following this approach, both the variants of
Indian left, the CPI-CPIM and Maoist, have conceptualised the reality in binary
framework of opposite categories of war of position versus war of maneuver. Another
such category is the civil society versus the political society. The
interconnectedness of these two categories and their dialectical relation with
the state are missed while strategising the revolutionary movement. When the
broad-based strategy to build united front of all forms of movements for the
rights of civil societies and the movements to resist the onslaught of the
ruling classes of political societies are not mooted, it becomes apparent that
the content of diverse mass-movements in India in this neo-liberal phase of
economy against both the consent and coercion of the existing state is
undermined. The two aspects of ruling class hegemony and domination, the
consent and coercion, have been segregated by the two variants of the lefts in
their formulations of actual practice. A new approach needs to be developed for
the new left to emerge with a view to resolve the conflict between the forces
of production and the relations of production in this neo-liberal phase of
capitalism in the country like India.
References :
- The Gramscian Moment, Peter D.
Thomas.
- Introduction to Daniel Thorner
Memorial Letures, Edited by Alice Thorner.
- Colonialism and Indian Economy, by
Amiya Kumar Bagchi.
- Passive Revolution in West Bengal,
1977-2011, by Ranabir Samaddar.
- Studies in the Development of
Capitalism, Maurice Dobb.
- Poverty of Philosophy, E P
Thompson
