NOVANEWS
(Excerpts from a talk by Prof Randhir Singh at a seminar on ‘The Present Political Situation and the Challenges of Strengthening the Left’, at Gandhi Peace Foundation, on the occasion of the Vinod Mishra Memorial Meeting, 18 December 2003.)
I have been associated with the Indian revolutionary wave since 1938-39, and it is an association as a militant, not as a scholar or intellectual. I have done teaching, too, I have tried to live as a militant not as an intellectual.
The problems our country faces today are even more serious than the ones we faced before independence. But I have felt for some time now that we do not discuss those problems in the perspective in which they should be discussed.
I had begun to feel that perhaps I’m a dinosaur with outdated ideas, and that at my age perhaps it was time I retired. In fact, I initially refused a speaking engagement on these grounds. But in the meantime I came across a conversation between two intellectuals of a Leftist persuasion: German Nobel Laureate Günter Grass and renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who recently passed away. I found some things in their conversation useful to understand what’s happening today. Grass observed that what is peddled today as “progress” and neo-liberalism is actually a regression to nineteenth century capitalism. (“What is peddled today as neo-liberalism is a return to the methods of the Manchester liberalism of the nineteenth century.” – Grass in the Conversation between Günter Grass and Pierre Bourdieu, July 3, 2000 – Ed/). They observed that this regression was being equated with progress so successfully that we who oppose it are branded as dinosaurs I felt then that if these people – and other ‘dinosaur’ friends of mine like Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff – are still at it, I too should start speaking.
The Strategic Perspective
Whenever you do revolutionary work, you start from ‘here’, from the present situation. If you think you can ignore your immediate surroundings because you’ve set out to do revolution, you can’t. If you’re at University, if you are an employee, a worker, a peasant, wherever you are, you start work from there. However, there are many who do activism. Gandhians do very good work in many places. If we are a Marxist party, there must be something that distinguishes our work, sets it apart.
In other words, if I speak of a fundamental weakness of the Left as a whole in India, I think I would begin by saying that since India’s independence, all politics in India has been on the terrain of bourgeois politics.
For the past decade, India’s radical politics is caught in the secular-communal trap. If Hindutva has emerged so strongly in the same decade that secularism has been discussed the most, surely we must ask why this is the case. If we don’t ask this question, we will keep saying we should fight communalism, we should form fronts, but we will not be able to check its rise.
You don’t even have to be a Marxist to realize the importance of understanding the material basis for ideas. Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who mooted the idea of the ‘survival of the fittest,’ said that ideas spread when there is a social material basis for them. Spencer said “Ideas wholly foreign to (the) social state cannot be evolved, and if introduced from without, cannot get accepted – or, if accepted, die out when the temporary phase of feeling which caused their acceptance, ends.” So we have to ask what is the social state in India; there is unemployment, the impact of neoliberal economic policies, a bad situation. Look at the excellent studies of Gujarat by Jan Breman and others, that tell us that Muslim and Dalit workers used to fight together in the textile strikes, and today Dalits are killing Muslims – there must be some explanation for this. If you think you can resist communalism without changing the social material basis, without making it part of the larger battle – tactical questions such as whether or not to ally with the Congress are very important questions, but they should not become strategic questions. The strategic questions relate to what is the alternative you are offering.
