Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Old Left for Another World?
Mumbai Resistance and the World Social Forum"
Saroj Giri

The time has come for a certain Marxism to assert itself and this is possibly the Marxism of the old Leninist tradition. It is good to find that the debate between the two Marxisms has again come to the fore in the Indian context with the Mumbai Resistance taking up issue with World Social Forum. For with the WSF happening in India, all sorts of objectively dubious and opportunist forces and tendencies on the Communist left in India are finally coming out open and clear with their long hidden ideological and political bankruptcy.What does the WSF happening in India represent? It represents a rapprochement of sorts between the parliamentary communist parties and the non-ideological, reformist social movements (NGOs). And this rapprochement is not one marked by the warming up by the NGOs to the position of the communist left but one marked by the dilution of whatever Marxist positions the parliamentary communist parties ever took in India. Thus the WSF in Mumbai represents, in the Indian context, a major step ahead for the agenda of NGOs that are sometimes strongly anti-communist. (We will not make revolution, not even reform, only ‘capacity-building’).

Indeed, the WSF in India comes at a time when the left social democratic forces in the country are not just weak but in tatters, rejected by the majority of the people for engaging in opportunist politics in the name of left politics. Well, friends, do not think that the rejection of ‘Stalinist’ communist parties is something good, for this means that people are going towards Hindu fascist politics. To a very large extent, privatization, jingoistic nationalism, Hindu fundamentalism, globalization and the essentially right-wing search for identity, indigeneity and Gandhian-style communities are taking place in India unchallenged by the parliamentary communist parties. This is because they are themselves implicated in this process. The parliamentary communist parties in India has long served, objectively, to silence any genuine revolutionary upsurge by the people through hoodwinking and by betraying the communist cause. Today, partly due to the dilution of Marxist politics over decades and generations and partly due to the rise of the Hindu right, all that they really talk about is the defence of secularism and the constitution and the protection of minorities (and about this as well they are not able to do much).

These parliamentary communist parties are the defenders of the status quo, of the Nehruvian anti-communist ‘socialism’. Now that people have rejected their politics of hoodwinking the working class and indirectly aiding the capitalists to extract more and more surplus value from the workers, they are trying to mobilize people by calling for the defence of the constitution, secularism and democracy. What constitution, what secularism and what democracy are these which we are called upon to defend? They are all bourgeois variants, and sometime not even bourgeois. Sometimes it is feudal, without the formal rights and guarantees that bourgeois democracy and law are supposed to ensure(look at the suppression of human rights by the Indian state right since 1947).

Such is the character of the Indian state. And it is to be the prime minister of such an Indian state that the so-called veteran leader of the CPI(M) almost fought with his own party. This shows that the CPI(M) is ready to preside over such an oppressive state system. Or consider the present CPI(M) leader of West Bengal confabulating with ‘captains of industry’, both Indian and foreign, to come and invest in the state. Not only does he offer the state to the capitalists he even promises the capitalist suckers that the workers activism and militancy will be reined in and there won’t be any trouble. Well done sirs, we should concentrate our fight only against the Hindu right and in the defence of the present bourgeois constitution and secularism. It is such a type of communist party which is involved in a big way in organizing the WSF in India.

And it is such a communist party which is now getting cosy with the NGOs, secular academicians and other liberals in the country. Of course, they always got along well together. Now they join hands even more. For the Hindu fascists are coming and all the good old days that they had under Nehruvian ‘socialism’ (read liberalism, with occasional concessions to communalism) is soon going to come to an end. For a very long time the Indian people who rebelled and revolted have never managed to clinch any solid victories. When Mahatama Gandhi, the quintessential figure representing the most subtle forms of duping the working class, challenged the type of thinking which Bhagat Singh, the young communist leader, during the freedom struggle fought for; when after 1947 one of the first actions that the Independent Indian state took was the massacre of thousands of communist-inspired peasants in Telangana; when in the late 1960’s thousands of again communist-inspired rebels were killed in the country with the backing of the CPI(M); when the follower-detractors of Nehru opened the economy in 1991 to liberalization and globalization; when finally now the Hindu right came to power at the Centre: after all of these developments we can say that all the potential that social democracy and the present Indian state with its supposedly great constitution and secularism apparently possessed is thoroughly exhausted. Don’t all of the above developments, each of which represented the consolidation of social democracy and of the then secular Indian state, have something to do with the rise of the Hindu right?

So today, while asking who is at the forefront of fighting the Hindu right in the country, one also has to ask, who are responsible for creating the conditions for the rise of the Hindu right here. Who it was who betrayed the working class movements in the country so that entire section of workers, say in Mumbai today, are with the right wing Shiv Sena. Which political forces were responsible for the failure of the textile mill workers strike in 1981-82 in Mumbai and how was that linked to the subsequent rise of the Shiv Sena? Wasn’t such a pattern seen in Ahmedabad as well which once had a strong working class movement and only sometime back saw a genocide against Muslims?

Some people ask where are the Mumbai Resistance people in the fight against the Hindu right. I ask, where is your working class politics if you want ordinary people not to go with the Hindu right. Where is your armed struggle for the Dalit landless labourers to defend themselves against the landlord’s armies backed by the Indian state? Where is your support for the Maoists in Nepal who are, at this stage, fighting a fight which is actually yours, a fight against monarchy and for a democratic republic (maybe these are too insignificant details for you)? And do you know both the US and Indian state are out to crush the Maoist movement? And if workers are fighting for their rights, for their day to day survival, Dalits and landless labourers are defending themselves through armed struggle and pitching in for the CPIML People’s War, do you think this fight does not contribute to the fight against the Hindu right? Sorry, your mass mobilizations against ‘communalism’ are not enough; they are sometimes just an empty show and an alibi for not changing the fundamental socio-economic structures and the political system. So the civil society in India these days organizes so many of these mass mobilizations, ranging from candle light vigil to so-called non-violent militant action. They organize symposiums and present sophisticated academic papers analysing something like ‘the construction of communalism in colonial north india’ or use Gramsi’s notion of hegemony to examine colonial historiography.

Where are the Maoists in all this, where are they deep in the forest thinking that they alone are the most genuine revolutionaries? This is a valid question but it is a question which caricatures the Maoists and is essentially asked in bad faith. For those who put such questions actually want the Maoists to be in the forests and never come out and maybe perish there. And this was manifest in the WSF India’s Charter of Principles passed in Bhopal where they declared the exclusion of “organizations that seek to take people’s lives as a method of political action”. Thus the communist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh is out and his detractor Gandhi is in. But the paradox and opportunism here is that the same organization and individuals who were responsible for drafting this Charter would be the first to claim the legacy of Bhagat Singh: for populist purposes that is. No wonder that the Maoists are not wanted by the WSF India organizers and they are also not interested in being part of the WSF. Hence the WSF and Mumbai Resistance as parallel programmes truly represent one of the principal fissures within the Indian communist left.

And this is where we come to the notion of network of movements and the striving for non-hierarchical structures that the WSF is supposed to represent, in contrast to the Mumbai Resistance which is supposed to represent the old, Stalinist hierarchical left (see Aditya Nigam, “Old Left in a New World”). My understanding is that the really fruitful question to be raised is not about hierarchies and organizational structures in themselves but about the elements and specifics of social change. Further the question to be asked is, what is change? If change is merely about reshuffling things around, of say being more inclusive and multicultural and representative and participatory, then sorry for me this is no change at all. Change has to be about changing the structural principle around which all social factors, classes and identities get organized: not a mere solving of innumerable partial problems without however catching the core around which things coalesce. Or else we will be merely making an exhaustive infinite approach to achieve what Ernesto Laclau calls ‘the impossible fullness of society’.

On the other hand, are those who argue that this approach of addressing partial problems through dispersed, network-based movements leaves the core principle of the system unchallenged and unquestioned. This may often take the form of, in the Indian context, only organizing mass meetings opposing the Hindu right and appealing to people’s conscience and never challenging any of the structural logics. Hence the very nature of the ‘struggle’ dictates no more than a so-called non-hierarchical network. Thus civil society intellectuals, lots of them left-liberals in India have taken in large doses of post-modernism-inspired critiques of Marxism and pose themselves as merely opposing Stalin but not Marxism, true followers of Khruschev. They never want to dirty their hands by going beyond networks, that is, their computers and offices. Thus it is not their commitment towards democracy which seems to be propelling their charge against hierarchical structures supposedly represented by the Mumbai Resistance but their refusal to take the struggle beyond the infinitesimal circularity of their civil society mobilizations. This leads to what I would like to call the fetishisation of struggle, a corollary of the refusal to change the very structural principle of the system.

My feeling is that forces represented by the Mumbai Resistance might very well be hierarchical and non-network based but they have got their politics right to the extent that they are not the victim of this fetishisation of struggle. They know that you do not dissipate your energies and of the people supporting you by organizing never-ending processions, marches and seminars but this has to be accompanied by a frontal attack on the system, on the class and caste hierarchies and on capital itself. To what extent they are able to do so, whether they are successful in it or not are questions that we should all raise but they have hit home the point that a change is needed in the very structural principle on which society rests. As Zizek points out: “what about changing the very fundamental structural principle of society, as happened with the emergence of the ‘democratic invention’? The passage from feudal monarchy to capitalist democracy, while it failed to reach the ‘impossible fullness of society’ certainly did more than just ‘solve a variety of partial problems’” (in J.Butler, E. Laclau and S. Zizek, “Contingency, Hegemony, Universality”, London, 2000, p. 93).

The point then is not to merely make self-laudatory statements about how we should all be non-hierarchical and network based for this is often accompanied by getting entangled in the fetishisation of struggle and petty reformism. Instead it makes much more sense to maintain the focus on changing, superseding the structural principle of the present and yet maintain a non-hierarchical form of activity. But what if in countering this structural principle it is the working class which comes to play a pivotal role? Maybe we are back to the Marxism of Lenin. Addressing this question is to my understanding one of the key tasks of all those revolutionaries gathered in Mumbai for the Mumbai Resistance and WSF.

Saroj Giri