topics: |  india | politics | left |

Randhir Singh, a longstanding socialist intellectual -- professsor of political science at Delhi University -- holds forth on the communist experience in India.

In the opening chapter, written in 1992 (after the collapse of the Soviet Union), Singh adopts a tragic tone, seeing a lifetime of socialist commitment defeated. He talks of the "present ignoble denouement" of socialism, where

	The deluge of disenchantment has in fact put a
	question mark not only on the possibility of any
	escape from capitalism but on the validity of
	Marxism itself as the theory and practice... 21

Though he later returns to his more committed views:

	The October Revolution, a truly electrifying moment
	in history, heralded the necessary beginning of the
	new epoch of transition from capitalism to communism --
	a fact fully vindicated by the historical experience
	since then... p.26

No mention of homegrown lessons / experiences

Although this is an work on Indian politics, there is hardly any
discussion of Indian experiments.  Kerala is never mentioned, and Bengal is
a purely negative example.  
The entire narrative seems stuck on the outside world -- Russia's October
revolution, Cuba's heroic struggle, and Mao's China.

Singh quotes an endless stream of foreign scholars - from Derrida, Marcuse
Bourdieu and Che Guevera, to Joseph Stiglitz, Michel Chossudovski, Ursula
Huws, James Petras, Chronis Polychroniou and so on.  The only Indian whom
he cites seems to be Bhagat Singh.  He does cite one Amit Bhaduri, but the
point made is banal.

Singh seems sadly stuck in a half-century time-warp.

Reading this book, it would seem that there has been very little
intellectual development in post-independence communism / socialism in
India.

While there is detailed analysis of communism in Chile and Argentina and
the October uprising, there is nary a mention of the debates within the
Communist Party of India in the 1950s; I found no mention of Ranadive in
the entire book, and no mention of the 1964 split that resulted in 
birthing the CPM.

Why should all our theoretical lessons be from events abroad?  Are there no
analysis we can perform of our own histories?

Indeed, we came close to a capitalist-socialist experiment under the NDA
government of Sonia-Manmohan, who actually tried to live up to their slogan
of 'economic reform with a human face', but Randhir Singh is strongly
opposed, seeing it as a "symbolic gesture, being forced on it by the
supporting Left".  Such a compromise socialism "is simply not possible for
capitalism today, least of all for India's third worldist capitalism."

Here Singh reveals his limited mindset, completely ignoring the socialist
experiments within the capitalist fold, and reveals his weaknesses, where he
remains stuck in the orbit of Marx, Lenin and other old communist texts.

Poor editing and organization

In places, the articles seem more like a ramble; some are "hurriedly
written" (chapter 7), others are lectures at somewhat remote gatherings.
Some spelling errors ("opption", p.255, sucides, p.293) seem prehistoric
for a book typeset in 2008.  Grammar issues abound ("The project having
collapse, 1991 onwards").  Sometimes entire passages are repeated - a
self-citation in p.317 appears in the original in the following chapter.

Five chapters are excerpted from an earlier book, most of the others are
articles from the leftist magazine, Mainstream.

The preface quotes from Gunter Grass:
	In politics you have to repeat and repeat, like a parrot, ideas you
	know to be correct and proven as such, which is exhausting -- you
	constantly hear the echo of your own voice and end up sounding like a
	parrot even to yourself. But this is evidently part of the job.

Elsewhere RS has Goethe saying a rather similar thing: "One must
from time to time repeat what one believes in, proclaim what
one agrees with and what one condemns."  None of the quotes in the book are
page-number cited, so I wonder if these two reflect some confusion perhaps.

Lessons for India in the 2010s

Despite these shortcomings, many of the observations, particularly on the
growth of violent revolutionary forces as a necessary outcome of
interminable repression from the ruling elites (chapter 10) do make an
important point for today's world.

Beyond the fall of the Soviets and the "pragmatic" capitalistic turn in
China, socialist progress is also under challenge in the high-taxation
North European nations that have integrated socialistic measures within
captialism.  Here there is increasing unrest about it as their citizens
spend their lives as lotus-eaters, contributing nothing to society.

What path we should choose in India remains obscure, but voices like
Singh's need clearer articulation (and better editing) to join the debate
effectively.

What this volume highlights is how we are yet to find the right balance
between individual incentive and the egalitarian impetus.

Excerpts

These are tragic, indeed traumatic times for those who still
take their socialism seriously. ... [opening lines]

Peter Laslett, very far from being a Marxist, pointed out that the
teachings of Marx 'have proved more successful than any other set of
doctrines which the West has brought forth, swifter and more final in its
conquest of the world than ever Christianity was. 20

As we move into the last decade of the twentieth century, the wreckage
around us is already sufficiently comprehensive not only to eliminate the
so-called 'Marxist-Leninist' model of socialism as an alternative to
capitalism, it has compromised the very idea of socialism, in every one of
its forms, Marxist or non-Marxist, be it Trotskyism or Maoism, or
reform-Communism, or social democracy, or even whatever anti-Communist
socialism is still around in India and elsewhere.  The deluge of
disenchantment has in fact put a question mark not only on the possibility
of any escape from capitalism but on the validity of Marxism itself as the
theory and practice... 21

[In Lahore circa 1940: ]
we had very little of Marx and Engels, or for that matter Lenin, available
to us in those days, and a governmental ban on libraries at Lahore in this
regard took care of much of even this little. 'Party literature' apart,
Palme Dutt's India Today and Stalinist 'summing up' of Leninism in
"History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik)-Short
Course, in illegally printed or cyclostyled editions, were the staple of
our education in Marxism...

later, with Hitler's invasion and the heroic Soviet resistance to Fascism
as the war progressed, a great deal more of the Soviet Union became
available, There was the monumental work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
"Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation" -- 'In all social history, there has
been no such a colossal and so exciting an experiment', they wrote. And we
noticed that within two years they had withdrawn the interrogation mark
they had put against the title in the first edition, published in 1935.

7. Talking of a few forgotten or forbidden things

We know of Nehru's concern to build socialism in India.  He not only argued
that 'the only key to the solution of ... India's problems lies in
socialism', but had insisted: 'and when I use this word I do so not in a
vague, humanitarian way, but in a scientific, economic sense'. Aware of the
need for 'vast and revolutionary changes', he most perceptively spoke of
'terrible costs of not changing the existing order'.

Yet, once in power, Nehru shied away from the cost of even genuine land
reforms -- 'they will present numerous practical problems involving basic
social conflicts (and may) give rise to organised forces of disruption',
the Draft Outline of the First Five-Year Plan warned.  What is more, he
simply abandoned socialism [...]  Apart from the insistence on the state
playing 'a vital part in planning and development', the focus is
increasingly on the need to ensure 'rapid economic development with
continually rising levels of production', 'to exploit natural resources',
'to take sufficient advantage of the advance in science and technology',
etc. In fact, in a subtle, perhaps unconscious but politically most
convenient shift, he now sought 'the key' not in socialism but in the
development of 'science and technology, the temples of modern India'.

[Nehru] increasingly opted for what I would describe as 'fetishism of
science', that is, investing science with powers it does not itself have,
expecting it to do the job of a social revolution, which it simply
cannot. Inevitably, once again, the logic of the economic structure asserted
itself.  What got built in India was not socialism but capitalism, a
state-supported capitalism. The rhetoric of socialism, now redefined as 'a
socialistic pattern of society', whatever that meant, served only to
deceive and win mass support. And Nehru, even as he gave India the then
muchlauded 'vision of socialism', in effect, helped reduce it to only 'a
vision' in India. History is indeed a very cruel mistress.

The historical experience in India and elsewhere in the third world makes
it abundantly clear that so far as the common people are concerned, there
is no answer to their problems in capitalism...

there is much in the socialist experience of our times to help guide this
attempt and be hopeful about it: for example,
 - the still unparalleled achievements of the early years of
	post-revolutionary societies in Russia and elsewhere despite the
	economic backwardness,
 - in Cuba's heroic struggle to  build socialism and save the gains of its
	socialist revolution
 - in Lenin's socialist project during the few years that he survived the
	October Revolution,
 - in the experience of the 'Mao years' in China, and so on.
An uncharted territory, we can still enter it with confidence.


[For a lecture being delivered in 2002, these examples, all nearly
moribund for half a century or more, seem well past their use-by time.]


 ==8. What, then, is the CPM's strategic goal?==
			[Mainstream, July 21-27,2006]

Towards the end of "What Is To Be Done?" -- a text which is as
relevant today as ever -- Lenin, in the midst of the most hardheaded
and unsentimental of polemics, quoted the journalist
Pisarev:

	if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream ... if he
	could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive ...  the
	product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape,
	then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be ... (for)
	art, science, and political endeavour ... The rift between reality
	and dreams causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes
	seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his
	observations with his castles in the air .... and works
	conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is
	some connection between dreams and life then all is well.

To which Lenin added:
	Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our
	movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who
	boast of their sober senses, their" closeness" to the" concrete".

In the same text, Lenin had insisted: He, who forgets that
'the Communists support every revolutionary movement' and
are for that reason obliged 'to expound and emphasise general
democratic tasks before the whole people, without for a moment
concealing our socialistic convictions', is not a Communist. 251

[Disillusionment with the modern brand of "Communism"]:

	[Here] is Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee himself: 'We are Communists
	(but) we are not fools'. 'We have to learn the truth from the
	facts. We have to change, we have to reform.' So, 'we are practising
	capitalism.' He is warm about his 'friendship with industrialists'
	and does not want 'to send wrong signals to investors'. He likes and
	learns from China and Vietnam, but does not mention Cuba. He
	proclaims his freedom from' dogmas', but does not tell us which'
	dogmas' he has given up. And all this while: 'I am a Communist and I
	am proud of it.' Obviously, being a Communist no longer has the
	meaning it once had.  253

a brief economic history of independent india

Our struggle for freedom was a struggle to break out of a globalisation
whose structural logic meant wealth in England and poverty in India. This
was a necessary, through not sufficient, condition to be able to build a
better life for our people. Aware of this exploitative logic of the global
capitalist market, of centuries of experience of imperialism which provides
little evidence of the beneficial effect of foreign investment in countries
of the third world so far as the common people are concerned, and in its
own way influenced by the interim successes of the Soviet Union, the
post-independence (Nehruvian) national project opted for the strategic goal
of a state-led self-reliant development ·promising economic growth with
'equity and distributive justice' to the people.

That it did not work out the way it was intended, that there was a
significant degree of economic growth but not much equity or distributive
justice for the people, that the project ended up building an
India-specific government-supported capitalism, and that the rhetoric of
'socialistic pattern of society' only deceived the people, legitimised the
statist-capitalism that was coming up, and created confusion about it as
'socialism' that persists to this day-all this, its why and how, is not my
concern at the moment.

The point to be noted is that passing through a series of economic and
political crises, the national project, such as it was, finally and
definitively collapsed in 1991, foregrounding, once again now in the
context of the changed balance of forces in the world following the
collapse of the Soviet Union-the question of strategic options for India's
future economic and social development.

The post-independence national project having collapsed, 1991 onwards,
India's ruling classes, through their different political formations,
notably, the Congress and the BJP, have gone in for 'globalisation' as
their new strategic option- a shift from the state-supported capitalism to
a wholly privatised 'free market' capitalism and from self-reliance in
economic development to reliance on Foreign Direct Investment and the
multinationals, a shift euphemistically described as 'economic reform'
whose structural logic, as a former President of Brazil once reported it to
the masters in Washington, is: 'the economy is doing fine, the people are
not.'

Incidentally, post-independence, state intervention in the economy was
deemed necessary by the then economically and politically weak, relatively
underdeveloped, Indian bourgeoisie itself, which, as a major beneficiary of
'economic growth' during the Nehru era and afterwards, soon developed
substantial strength of its own and grew hopeful of new avenues of
profit-making at home and abroad in partnership with global capitalism. The
new strategic option, therefore, can be viewed as a natural progress for
the Indian bourgeoisie. 254


Amit Bhaduri [source not cited] has pointed out that:

	the unprecedented high economic growth on which privileged India
	prides itself is a measure of the high speed at which India of
	privilege is distancing itself from the India of crushing poverty
	(and that) the higher the rate of economic growth along this pattern
	becomes, the greater would be the underdevelopment of India...
	Destruction of livelihoods and displacement of the poor in the name
	of industrialization, big dams of power generation and irrigation,
	corporatisation of agriculture despite farmers' suicides,
	modernization and beautification of our cities by demolishing slums
	are showing everyday how development can tum perverse .... The devil
	in angel's guise would soon appear when large populations in rural
	India would be rendered landless, jobless, homeless, incomeless,
	rootless and displaced making way for gragantuan SEZs, the so-called
	epitomes of economic development.

10. On Violence and the Question of Means and Ends

			Address to the Conference on 'Emerging Trends of
			Violence in North-West India' November 5, 2007

[AM: should political violence be a monopoly of the upper classes?]

In a society like ours which is structurally saturated with violence, with
exploitation and oppression, injustice and inequality, there is always room
for revolutionary violence. To reject such violence and uphold non-violence
on principle has no justification, rational or moral, in the light of the
historical experience of the struggles of the oppressed the world over.

there is a strong social pressure of the established dominant elites, the
beneficiaries of the present organisation of society, to prevent a truthful
understanding of violence in their societies.

[As Thomas Hobbes pointed out in the 17th c., the search for truth can be
risky]:
	I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right
	of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the
	three angles of a triangle, should be equal to two angles of a
	square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the
	burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it
	concerned was able. 306

[this quote is repeated on p.199 and at least one other point in the book.]

J.D. Bernal's adjuration:
	What social science needs is less use of elaborate techniques and
	more courage to tackle, rather than dodge, the central issues.

As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once put it, 
	to teach nonviolence is to strengthen established violence, that is
	to say, a system of production which makes misery and war
	inevitable.'  
Revolutionary violence aims at destroying this established violence and
creating a new system of production and society in which 'misery and war'
are no longer inevitable. It is a violence, as he put it, 'which transcends
itself on the way to the human future'.  

Thus, for example, the problem that the "Naxalites', as they are called,
present to our society is not one of private violence to be condemned, but
of an exploitative and oppressive social order crying out for revolutionary
change. 310

There is the ever-growing draconian legislation and the ever-expanding
apparatus of repression, and the ruthless use of both everywhere in this vast
land of ours.  The old, extended or new laws are there -- ESMA, MISA, NSA --
different Armed Forces Special Powers Acts, many kinds of Disturbed or
Terrorist Affected Areas Acts, amendments to the Constitution and the
Criminal Procedure Code ... and so on-which provide for new structures of
authority, a new hierarchy of courts, new legal procedures, new ranges of
offences, new and stiffer penalties, new detentions without trial and new and
harsher powers for the police, para-military forces and the army. New
restrictions have come to be imposed on the life and liberties of the people
in violation of old and established Constitutional safeguards. 311

Only the nationalistically blind will fail to see that
	it is this mindless violence of the state, growing ever more mindless
	in its failure or impotence and the accompanying loss of legitimacy,
	which spawns anew and fuels the terrorist violence in the
	country. 312

[the ruling classes have not even remotely shown a willingness for a
socialist transformation of society.]  Instead they have invariably used
their enormous economic and political power, often across countries, to
thwart far less radical changes.  One has only to recall the overthrow of
Mohammed Massadegh in Iran in 1953, of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, of Joao
Goulart in Brazil in 1964, of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic in 1965,
of Salvador Allande in Chile in 1973, and so on right up to the current
efforts to ~verthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela - all of them constitutional
democratic regimes ... 315


[However, there is no discussion of violence as practiced by Charu
Mazumdar' say. 

Contents

Publisher's Note (K. K. Saxena)  					7
 0. In lieu of a biodata [1988] 					9
 1. The collapse of Soviet socialism: an initial response 		19
 	[article in E&PW 1992]
 2. Of Marxism of Karl Marx [2006] 					39
	[chapter from book, "Crisis of Socialism -- Notes
	in Defence of a Commitment" (no date given)]
 3. Socialism -- A Negation of Capitalism [2006] 			139
	[chapter from "Crisis of Socialism"]
 4. On the 50th Anniversary of India's Independence-
 	A Marxist Argument [Mainstream, Nov 1997] 			184
 5. The Return of Karl Marx  [Mainstream, 2001] 			198
 6. Talking of a few or forbidden things 			214
	[Lecture 2002, printed in Mainstream 2003]
 7. A Note on the current political situation in India   		242
	[Mainstream, Sep. 2005]
 8. What, then, is the CPM's Strategic Goal?     			251
	[Mainstrem, Jul 2006]
 9. Future of Socialism [lecture, Allahabad, 2007] 			258
10. On Violence and the Question of Means and Ends 			303
	[lecture at Patiala, 2007]
11. Of Parliamentary Politics   					335
	[excerpts from "Crisis of Socialism", 2007]
12. Of Globalisation 							350
	[excerpts from "Crisis of Socialism", 2007]
13. Crisis of Socialism Today   					445
	[final chapter from "Crisis of Socialism", 2007]