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Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 16, 2012 vol xlvii no 24 49
Murzban Jal (murzbanjal@hotmail.com) is with the Indian Institute of
Education, Pune.
On Understanding the Decline
of the Established Indian Left
Murzban Jal
The inability of the Indian left to construct a project of
the transcendence of capitalism (the central thesis of
Patnaik) is understood as constituted within a crisis of
world Marxism that began with the crystallisation of the
Stalinist counter-revolution which paraded state
capitalism as authentic socialism. This essay is on
reading the misunderstanding of the fundamentals of
Marxs scientific discovery by the established left in
India, especially on the transient characters of
commodity production, value and the state; and that
communism transcends commodity production and
abolishes the state immediately after the revolution. As
the established Indian left took the non-Marxist model
of commodity production governed by an alleged
socialist state, it was destined to be destroyed by the
inner contradictions of state capitalism. To project a
transcendence of capitalism one needs to project a
world that is devoid of commodities, money and the
state. It is this task that the left in India in alliance with
international communism must concentrate on.
Fidelity to the democratic consensus means the acceptance of the
present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious
questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the
phenomena it ofcially condemns and, of course, any serious attempt
to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different.
Slavoj iek, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance.
Locating the Crisis of the Indian Left
W
e begin our critique of the established left in India
by recalling our earlier critique of the parliamen-
tary left for using the ready-made state apparatus
for socialist purposes, as well as articulating the thesis of the
state as not merely a sham, but in Freudian terms in articulat-
ing it as defecation (Jal 2011: 66). In this essay we understand
not only the state in this psychoanalytic problematic, but the
entire capitalist mode of production, dominated by the produc-
tion of commodities. With this Freudo-Marxist articulation we
see how this defecation and human waste have become fetishes
to be revered by neo-liberal society. That the bourgeoisie re-
veres this waste should not surprise anyone. But the fact that
the left in India does so becomes the source of our critique. We
begin by turning from this articulating of revering waste to a
metaphor borrowed from Slavoj iek. In contrast to the replies
to Patnaik (2011a) in this magazine by Gohain (2011), Lahiri
(2011) Bhattacharya (2011), and Baisya (2011), our discussion
focuses on the theoretical apparatus of revolutionary Marxism
and what Marxs discovery of the new continent of knowledge
as the discovery of a post-commodity society implies.
iek, in discussing the burakumin, the caste of untoucha-
bles in Japan, talks of a character in Sue Summis novel The
River with No Bridge, how as a child she witnessed a relative
who scratched the toilet used by the emperor to preserve a
piece of shit as a sacred relic, simply to honour the emperor
(2000: 189). The metaphor of the preservation of human waste
of the elites by the oppressed subaltern classes is not only a
metaphor for a certain type of bourgeois politics. It is in actual-
ity what one calls after Hegel, the Wesen (the essence) and
Begriff (the concept) of bourgeois politics. Two concepts emerge
from this metaphorical reading of human enslavement:
(1) bourgeois politics as the epitome of this human waste that
becomes a fetish to be worshipped, and (2) on social and political
hierarchies and the fetish worship of the elites in the age of late
capitalism. It is around this argument that I begin the discus-
sion on the crisis of the left. A certain type of Freudo-Marxism
will guide our argument. The state and the com modity prin-
ciple realised as the politics of state capitalism will be the
waste-cum-fetishes that devours the Indian left movement.
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Our response to Prabhat Patnaik (2011a) on the decline of
the left is based on a deep structured argument. We agree with
Patnaik that the established left is governed by a form of em-
piricisation where the programme of communism as the tran-
scendence of capitalism is totally forgotten for a form of state-
capitalist social engineering. But, as we shall see, the project of
transcending capitalism can never be formulated if a rigorous
critique of the old socialist principles (keeping commodity
production intact within the socialist order) is not undertaken.
In contrast to a mere socialist sociology which is largely pro-
moted by the Indian left, this essay shall talk of theory, to be
precise of Marxist theory. We shall talk of how Marxist theory
ought to be present at all times in the political programme and
praxis of the left. We shall talk of the politics of the particular
and the general and, in this sense, talk of the philosophy of the
particular and the general. In this sense, we will not limit our-
selves to how bourgeois politics is dominated by the Washington
Consensus that imposes the neo-liberal agenda of nance
capitalism on India. We will not talk of privatisation, globalisa-
tion of capital, special economic zones, nuclear deals, etc, in
isolation. We will talk of these in relation to the general idea of
capitalism and commodity production and relate these to the
philosophy of the fetish character of commodities. We will not
merely talk of what one may call the Indian question, but
what Alain Badiou calls after Lenin the question of the
dictatorship of the proletariat in general (2007: 8). To talk of
the transcendence of capitalism implies mentioning these. It
implies talking of the double fetishes of commodity production
and parliamentary democracy and how these fetishes create
illusions and fantasies. But it also implies talking of the not too
fashionable politics that Lenin insisted on. To talk of the tran-
scendence of capitalism would necessarily imply the mentioning
of the not so fashionable Lenin.
This essay in agreeing with Patnaik on the transcendence of
capitalism is consequently based on the general character of
Marxism, thus based on the necessity of the transcendence of
the horizons of both commodity production and the state as
such. We start with our basic proposition: since almost all
shades of the Indian left move within the horizon of market
socialism keeping the instruments of the state and the com-
modity principle intact, we are compelled to say that the cen-
tral idea of the crisis of the left emerges when one forgets this
double fetish characters (the state and commodity production)
that now parasite on the left movement. And since the Indian
left (most notably the Communist Party of India (Marxist)) has
never articulated a post-commodity society, they can never
imagine a post-capitalist society. In this sense one can chide
them that it is not Marxs Capital that serves as a model, but
Stalins Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR and Maos
Critique of Soviet Economics that institutionalised state capital-
ism in the left movement.
And since Patnaik mentions the transcendence of capitalism
without talking of the commodity principle and the phenomeno-
logy of commodities in Capital, we are bound to quote Lukcs
historical statement: the problem of the commodity must not be
considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem
in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist
society in all its aspects (1983: 83). Keeping the problem of
the commodity as central to our contem porary imagination,
will see how a philosophical analysis of the commodity is able
to articulate the concerns highlighted by Patnaik. Let us rst
see how by keeping the problem of the phantom commodity as
the central problem of capitalism one is able to put forth the
solution to the crisis within the left movement.
Philosophical Foundations of the Problem
We rst redene the classical historical materialist theorem:
the economic base determines the political and ideological
superstructure with a new dictum: the fetishised commodi-
tised economic base of neo-liberal nance capitalism determines
an illusory political superstructure. Understanding how the
illusions dictated by the commoditised base has seeped into
both the national imagination as well as the imaginary of left
politics, we recall two important texts which come in when
one is analysing the contemporary crisis of the left: Stuart
Halls Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Reections
and Kevin Andersons Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A
Critical Study. Whilst according to Hall, the crisis of the left
emerges from the inability to apprehend the character of the
age and to develop a moral-political critique of the specic
epoch of capitalism, for Anderson, the root of the problem is
the inability to understand the mechanism of the Hegelian
dialectic that lies at the root of Marxs revolutionary critique of
capitalism. We are in a sense caught up in the pre- dialectical site.
In this same sense we are caught up in the pre- revolutionary
site. We imagine ourselves to be revolutionaries, whilst in
actuality we use the methodology of the bourgeoisie.
Our response to Patnaiks essay The Left in Decline (whilst
agreeing with the spirit of it) however goes deeper, i e, goes
into the philosophical foundations of the problem: the problem
of the commodity and the state, and that the left in India has
never looked beyond these avenues. Along with these two
problems this essay questions the unilinear view of history, the
view that emerged in Stalinist Russia which stated that history
is governed by so-called iron laws that dictate the march-past
of history from primitive communism to slave society, feudal-
ism and capitalism, nally culminating in socialism. Lastly, un-
like the mainstream left that keeps the question of caste only as
a peripheral issue, this essay (in the second part) puts the caste
question central to the question of the Indian revolution.
Our response is a Marxist philosophical response. We agree
that the horizons of capitalism have to be transcended. But we
claim that this transcendence is possible if we transcend the
parameters of thinking of not only the Stalinists and the
Maoists, but also those of the Trotskyists and the present south
American left. The central focus in this essay is on Marxs
double critiques of commodity production and the state as rep-
resentations of human alienation. Keeping his problematic of
alienation, we are saying that the state does not have to be
viewed only as a committee of the bourgeoisie. Instead we
need to relate this bourgeois committee with the idea of the
state as the imaginary form of human alienation. In this
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dialogue with Patnaik we will emphasise on these two crucially
important humanist points of Marx. We will also see that the
left that is in decline did not take Marxs radical humanist
critiques of the commodity and the state. Instead it made a
strange kitsch-like combination of Soviet type of political
economy and liberal theories of the state, thus incorporating
the old Proudhonist theories of socialist commodity produc-
tion (institutionalised by Stalin and Mao) into the terrain of
parliamentary politics. Little did they know that both these
are essentially elitist and anti-Marxist. The decline of the
left is thus viewed in the moving away from the ideas of
Marx. The decline is thus much more deep rooted than
otherwise thought.
On Revolutionary Dialectics
Let us reect on the decline of the left in what Kevin Anderson
has recently said:
Certainly none of the major Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century
who were also leaders of the parties not only Leon Trotsky, Luxemburg,
Karl Kautsky, or Mao Zedong with the sole exception of Gramsci (and
even then those writings were locked away in prison or in party
archives for many years afterward), had made that return to the
Hegelian dialectic that Marx called the source of all dialectic. Nor
did any of the younger layer of Bolshevik theoreticians, such as
Bukharin or Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, make such a move (1995: 6).
This reection articulates the theoretical roots of the decline
of the left, a decline that was since the mid-1920s rooted in a
false socialist problematic, a falsity that took the left away
from not only Marx, but from Hegelian dialectics to the old
formal logical problematic of Aristotle. Yet one must state that
informed Marxists in the last century did emphasise on the
Hegelian reading of Marxism. This Hegelian reading did not
encompass merely Lukcs, Gramsci and Karl Korsch, but a few
years before the trio entered the scene of revolutionary his-
tory, it was Lenin in 1914 who put the Hegelian dialectic at the
basis of Bolshevik praxis. The Hegelian dialectic did not
merely encompass the questions of trade unions, the national
question, on the question of the revolutionary International
and mass struggle against capitalism and imperialism (espe-
cially against the imperialist war), but was also the basis that
solved the questions of insurrection and the seizure of power.
There is something specic about the Hegelian dialectic that
required Lenin breaking free from the entire continent of sci-
entic reasoning that began with Aristotle and closed with
Kant. Lenin in this sense broke out from the old logical frame-
work. But the global left by and large ignored Lenins Hegelian
intervention. They forgot that to understand revolution one
has to understand insurrection as art. And to understand these
one has to understand dialectics. In this sense nowhere does
Patnaik mention the theoretical and logical roots of the
problem of the decline of the left.
Now we all know that the paradigm of formal scientic rea-
soning (from Aristotle to Kant) is different from the dialectical
one (Hegel, Marx, Lenin). We knew that Gramsci, Lukcs and
Ilyenkov talked of it, that Zeleny wrote about it, not to forget
Raya Dunayevskaya. And yet political praxis in India is largely
untouched by this Hegelian logic. That it retreats not only to
Kant, but also to Aristotle should not be a surprise. And this
retreating into Kant and Aristotle is not merely a retreat into
pre-dialectical logical thinking, but also a retreat into pre-
Marxist politics. We do not think about the idea of the masses
in ferment. We do not think about insurrection. Thinking in
terms of Kant we think of parliamentary democracy, of morality
and goodness, of eternal peace and such abstract metaphysical
ideas. We have forgotten: if one does not think dialectically,
one cannot think Marxistically. One cannot think (what
Lenin said in the Philosophical Notebooks) of self-movement
(Selbsbewegung) and negativity, of historical motion that moves
through leaps and bounds. One thinks instead of parliamen-
tary cretini sm and anarchist adventurism.
What we are claiming following Andersons claim is that a
severe crisis has set into Marxism a crisis that was essentially
theoretical and which cannot be reduced to the polemics that
characterised the politics of Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism.
The crisis is objective. As the left are armed with theories from
Aristotle to Kant and from Stalin to Mao, there is a fundamen-
tal failure of the left to grasp the radical character of what Ben-
jamin called the time of the Now (1979: 265). The crisis also
lies in the fact that we are perpetually bound by the epistemo-
logical and ideological horizons set by capitalism. The solution
too has to be objective, an objectivity that has to transcend the
fetishism of false objectivity: of reied (or false) objectivism.
One has to transcend the horizons of bourgeois thinking.
On Marxs New Physics
With the transcendence of the horizons of bourgeois thinking
and the framing of the idea of revolutionary time, the time of
the Now, we make our rst claim: within the discipline of his-
torical materialism, the sub-idea of historical physics emerges.
We now have the idea of time. We thus claim that Marxs scien-
tic discovery the discovery of the continent of history also
constitutes the idea of revolutionary time, a time zone that is
entirely distinct from bourgeois time. We thus claim that one
cannot confuse these two distinct time zones: historical time
as spiral time and reied time as circular time. To understand
the present epoch, to fathom the peculiarities of this age, one
needs to differentiate historical time from reied time, and
consequently understand the time of the Now.
And what do we learn from this? We learn that the crisis of
the left here one means the international left from Stalin to
Mao and from Trotsky to Hugo Chavez is constituted within
the matrix of reied time or to be precise phantom time, in
Benjamins phrase, of empty, homogenous time (ibid: 263,
266), time that cannot blow open the continuum of history
(ibid: 263). And why is this so? It is so because the time zone
that we are constituted in is the time of abstract time, the time
of commodity production. We are under the eternal spell of
commodity production. We think within its horizons. We
breathe its air. We could not transcend commodity production.
We of course cannot transcend capitalism. We live thus in
what Patnaik calls the mundane and the pedestrian where
we have only the small change in politics (2011a: 12). A bill is
passed. Another is not. Someone fasts. Someone does not.
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Someone comes on TV. Someone does not. Some go to jail.
Some do not. Some join the Greenpeace, some join Human
Rights Watch. We not only live the life of this small change
in politics, but we are bewildered by what Dunayevskaya
calls after Trotsky, the small coin of concrete questions, the
small coin that leads us away from Revolutionary Marxism
(1982: XVIII). Not only do these small coins t in our bourgeois
pockets. They ll our heads.
Now what happens is that reied and mundane time (or
non-spiral, non-historical time), which is also Benjamins
empty, homogeneous time becomes Freuds neurotic time: the
time of the eternal recurrence of capital accumulation: M-C-M
1
.
And since we know that M (money) is an idealist signier reap-
pearing in augmented form (M
1
) and is also the mode of ap-
pearance of the ghost called value (Marx 1993: 52), we talk
of this process of capital accumulation: M-C-M
1
as the march-
past of the ghost. Just as Marx had said in The German Ideology
that philosophy as dreamt by the idealist philosophers is noth-
ing but the history of ghosts; so too one talks of the history of
capital accumulation as the historical march-past of the ghost.
We thus have two formulations: (1) time within the capitalist
mode of production is reied time, circular or neurotic time,
and (2) it is also ghostly time. What happens is that revolution-
ary movements are necessarily defeated in this zone. And if
the revolution takes place that does not abolish commodity
production and the state then: the old lthy business would
necessarily be restored (Marx and Engels 1976: 54). The lthy
business, started in 1928, was realised in 1991. In 2011, we yet
hold this lthy business dear to us. We simply want to work
with the same lthy tools. We want to be the burakumin,
waiting for the emperor to perform his natural duties.
Now what happens is that in this reied-defeatist zone is
that history, or radical history, cannot be rendered possible.
What we live in is spurious history, neurotic history, or simply
phantom history. We once learnt that capital is a barrier to
capital. Now we forget this very important lesson and think
only within the parameters of Monsieur Capitals dictates. This
is the rst terrain in which we locate why and how the left has
declined. It is the ontological terrain. The left declines because
it operates in the reied, non-historical time zone. It operates
with reied-defeatist tools. Keeping this very important point
in mind, especially on the idea of commodity production as
determining the neurotic time of the eternal recurrence of
capitalism, we go into the problem of the decline of the left
and what the crisis of the left indicates. Our claim is that a
particular reication of consciousness emerges with commod-
ity production and this reication does not merely penetrate
into the general ideological superstructure, or only into minds
of social scientists. It also grips the minds of the left. We call
this reication of consciousness, a mimesis: mimesis of com-
modity production and consequently the mimesis of phantom
time. We are all plagued by the phantom commodity. Our
ideological horizons are determined by it. Not only did Stalin
and Mao err in by creating a fallacious category of socialist
commodity production, but the same error occurred with
Trotsky, not to forget Preobrazhensky and Bukharin.
And it is in this space of mimesis of the phantom commo dity
that we claim that Patnaiks article on the decline of the left is a
welcome sign in the Indian left movement. What Patnaik calls
empiricisation we call mimesis of the phantom commodity.
The fetish-like attachment and bewilderment towards parlia-
mentary politics will be seen as this mimesis of the phantom
commodity. And by focusing on an empiricisation of political
praxis, i e, on the mimesis of the phantom commodity combined
with the phantom parliament, the left parties nd themselves
in a position that is no different from other bourgeois parties.
And by putting the project of the transcendence of capitalism
as the essential project of Marxism, Patnaik has in a certain
way started a debate on how one denes the status of revolu-
tionary praxis. Yet, as I shall argue out, the question though
posed, relapses into a form of empiricisation itself if one works
within the parameters of the Indian left, because the organised
left in India shall not be able to conceive of the project of the
transcendence of capitalism. By organised left I mean not
only the parties of the Left Front led by the CPI(M), but also the
Maoists and other left of CPI(M) parties and groups.
The Nature of Marxist Science
My response to Patnaik is on the nature of Marxist science that
Marx rst raised in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 and has in no way to be reduced to a polemic. The
questions posed are important and need a scientic response.
As we shall soon see, there are two important scientic revolu-
tions to be taken into consideration: the rst started by Hegel
and best represented in his Phenomenology of Mind and the
Science of Logic; and the second revolution that begins with
Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 where he
points to the construction of a human natural science (1982: 99).
We, of course, had heard of dialectical and historical materialism.
But we seem to be oblivious to Marxs original human natural
science. And what is the fundamental aspect of this New
Science? The fundamental aspect is that it raises the very
important humanist and communist question: What is free
humanity? by differentiating the sites of humanity (or class-
less societies) from the phantom site of commodity producing
class societies. That this line of demarcation is so fundamental
to Marx seems again to escape ones critical imagination. That
is why one needs to state that the left is stuck up with the ideas of
old socialism what Marx called crude communism which
is nothing but the manifestation of the vileness of private
property, which wants to set itself up as the positive commu-
nity system (1982: 90). The left seems to have forgotten that
their brand of old socialism is perpetually affected by private
property, i e, by the estrangement of huma nity (ibid). Since
the Indian left has within its political cranium, the mechanism
of crude communism as the governance of private property
and human alienation, the seeds of its decline are to be found
within its own fallacious theoretical problematic.
But the left is not merely caught up with the ideas of old
socialism. It is caught up with the old bourgeois logic of reica-
tion, where subject and predicate, civil society and state, the real
and ideal are inverted, and privilege almost of a theological
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type is granted to the idealised Indian state with the even
more idealised Indian Parliament. That the Indian liberals and
the conservatives love the state should not shock anyone. But
why does the left do so? In order to understand the Indian
lefts succumbing to this state logic one will have to move to
Marxs critical epistemology in the Theses on Feuerbach where
he differentiates the sites of the worlds of object (along with
political passivity and contemplation, one would add: parlia-
mentary democracy as a form of political passivity) from
human sensuous activity or simply as revolutionary practical-
critical activity (Marx 1975 a: 28).
Now it must be noted that this is not merely a question
restricted to a materialist psychology, but in fact remains the
core for the production of the critique of capitalist political
economy and bourgeois politics (especially parliamentary
politics). In order to understand the epistemic mechanism of
political passivity (the core component that denes the declin-
ing factors of the left, and thus in order to understand the core
factor of parliamentary politics), it must be noted that Marx in
the very rst page of Capital identies the phantom commod-
ity as a dehumanised thing: Marxs words are Gegenstand,
Ding, Sache (1993: 49), and as we very well know, the thing too
loses its material form and becomes a ghost (ibid: 52). What
happens is that the commodity as the dreaded thing and ghost
converts real human beings into mere personications and
embodiments of these ghostly class interests (Marx 1986: 21).
One could therefore add that not only does capitalism in its real
practice give privilege to capital and prot over people, but also
its political practice here one means parliamentarism
depreciate people. The left parties in India use this same reied
logic of the domination of the object world over people. That
bossism satrapism and careerism rule the roost in the
left parties should not thus shock anyone. And keeping this
difference between the world of objects, along with its ghosts
(not only capital and the Parliament, but also the Communist
Party) and the world of humanity (the former is the world
where only reied activity is possible, whilst in the latter revo-
lutionary praxis is its leitmotiv), it is imperative to state that
Marx states that capitalism favours the rule of the thing and
ghost, as the rule of capital and prot. The privileging of prof-
its over people is found not only in the ideological cranium and
practice of neo-liberalism. It is the essence of the commodity
principle, a principle that the praxis of the left has not been
able to transcend.
The world of capitalism is thus necessarily anti-humanist. It
does not deal with people. People are only accidental and inci-
dental to it. In exact opposition, communism breaks off imme-
diately with commodity production and the entire political logic
of the state, not merely with this or that state, but with the
state as such. And since left politics has kept the idea of commo-
dity production within the ambit of its ideological parameters
(with the institutionalisation of the incorrect idea of socialist
commodity production and the politics of command by
Stalin and Mao), the crisis that it would eventually suffer from
is both necessary and obvious. One did not need a Singur, a Tata,
or a Mamata Banerjee to explode the revisionist politics of the
organised left. It did not need an explosion that came from
the outside. It was an implosion that emerged from within.
The left saw through the ideological spectacles of not Marx or
Engels. Instead it saw through the commoditised, authoritarian
and counter-revolutionary visions of Stalin. And thus one could
say: the project of transcending of capitalism could never have
been an order for the parliamentary left. Their model of tran-
scending capitalism was the transcendence of Anglo-American
capitalism, of the transcendence of the west European and
North American types, but not of capitalism as capitalism.
Marx and Engels Vision of Socialism
Note in contrast to the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist visions
what Marx and Engels had to say. We take Capital, Critique of
the Gotha Programme and Anti-Dhring to understand the
essential difference between Marxs vision and that of the so-
called socialist experiments that the left loves mimicking.
Note that the left has never taken these very important issues.
For Marx when the union of free people carries on its work
with means of production held in common, the labour-power
of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the
combine labour-power of the community (1986: 82-3). Unlike
capitalism that is built on the inherent split between personal
and social labour (thus not only letting value and money inter-
vene to ll this wide abyss, but also the state), in communism
the total productis directly social product (ibid: 83). Social
relations are consequently not reied, not built on class domi-
nation. They are simple and intelligible (ibid). They need
neither value, nor the state to intervene. Further, unlike the
lefts idea of the socialist market, for Marx, in communism
(here it is the rst stage) neither do the producers exchange
their products, neither does labour appear here as the value of
these products (1975b: 319). For individual labour no longer
exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part
of the total labour (ibid). Since Marxs communism is moneyless,
one receives a certicate from society that he has furnished
such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour
for the common funds), and with this certicate he draws from
the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the
same amount of labour. The same amount of labour which he
has given to society in one form he receives in another (ibid).
Look again at Engels and note how this formulation is radi-
cally different from the old socialist version of transgured
socialist political economy: From the moment when society
enters into possession of the means of production and uses
them in direct association for production, the labour of each
individual, however varied its specically useful character
may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour (1978:
374). When Engels says that with the quantity of social labour
contained in a product need not then be established in a
roundabout way (ibid), he meant that value (and exchange
value and money as modes of manifestation of value) need not
intervene. Society can simply calculate how many hours of
labour are contained in a product of labour. Consequently
society will not assign values to products (ibid). And people
will manage everything very simply, without the intervention
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of much-vaunted value (ibid: 374-75). A very important
question is posed: Would the Indian left ever agree with this
very Marxist formulation?
What happened to the post-Marx vision of socialism is con-
centration of the idea of the just (consequently Platonic) dis-
tribution of wealth, erasing the ideas of the mode of produc-
tion and class struggles from revolutionary discourse. Look
again at Engels and one will nd how far the left in India with
its economism and trade unionism, and along with these the
propagation of the politics of a fair days wages for a fair days
work, is from the revolutionary idea of the abolition of the
wages system altogether (Engels 1984: 16). One would then
have to ask: Did the organised left in India ever propagate the
ideas of the abolition of the wages system? After all have not
the left trade unions, not only the Centre of Indian Trade
Unions and the All India Trade Union Congress, but also the
ones that went under the generic term Marxist-Leninist, only
indulge in economism and the struggle for higher wages, and
thus indulge in the maintenance of the system of the capitalist
slave wages system?
Thus to Patnaik who wants a radical critique of capitalism,
we can only say: if one wants to critique capitalism, one will
rst have to go to the cell form itself, thus go into Marxs
critique of commodity production, such that not only the high
capitalism of the Yanks and the Brits, but also Soviet and
Chinese capitalism, as also the capitalism of the third world
variety undergo a radical critique. In this radical critique not
only will we have a critique of the revisionist politics of econo-
mism, but also a critique of parliamentary fetishism.
On Combating the Prohibition against Thinking
The problem, to recall iek again, is that all this occurs
against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, a pro-
hibition against thinking. Todays liberal-democratic hege-
mony, so iek continues, is sustained by a kind of unwritten
Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of
the late sixties (2002). Not only does the capitalist culture
industry render unnecessary the process of radical thinking,
but also parliamentary democracy has this iekean prohi-
bition against thinking. And to recall iek once more, one
of the sure signs of capitalisms ideological triumph today was
the disappearance of the very term capitalism and the
dangerous temptation of the anti-globalisation movements
to transform a critique of capitalism (which ought to be
centred on economic mechanisms, forms of work parti-
cipation and prot extraction, and so on) into a critique of
imperialism (ibid).
If one looks carefully one will nd a close connection
between the world that prohibits thinking and the rounda-
bout world that exist in what Engels called oblique and
meaningless ways (Engels, op cit: 375). This close connection
between thoughtlessness and meaninglessness becomes even
more clear when one sees how the CPI(M) mimes Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and the Aryan mullahs war against satanic
imperialism imperialism that is said to be devoid of capita-
lism. After all one knows that the world of capitalism is what
iek calls after Habermas, Undurchsichtlichkeit, the new
opacity (iek 2002).
However one has to state that it is not merely neo-liberal
ideology that prohibits thinking. It is also the established left
which has joined hands in this prohibition of critical thinking.
It is in this space where we see how the model of state capitalism
and its authoritarian types of social-capitalism (determined
by commodity production, value, money and socialist capital
accumulation) has become the model of the organised left in
India. At the most the left can make claims to be Proudhonists,
or Utopian Socialists Utopians who are incorruptible, Utopians
who can join the stable of liberalism, Utopians who want what
Stalin called a special kind of commodity production (1976:
299) but most certainly a great wall separates them from the
ideas of Marx. And that is why one needs to say that the project
of the transcendence of capitalism that has been put in
the backburner in the Indian left movement distinctly since
the last two decades when the Stalinist special kind of
commodity production collapsed has its roots sunk much
deeper. If 1928 led to the special kind of socia lism, a socialism
that mimicked state capitalism led by the Platonic managers of
this special commodity, the collapse of the Soviet Union
converted the left in India into bricoleur and tinker-men of
capitalism. In this context one must recall the old CPI(M) state-
ment: There is no alternative to capitalism. Thus any attempt
to talk of an alternative model of social history, forget talking
of the transcendence of capitalism, is a sheer impossibility.
The problem is not merely of tactics or strategy. It is theoreti-
cal: the inability to understand dialectical and revolutionary
materialism, the inability to go into the deep structure of
capitalism and thus the inability to comprehend bourgeois
economics. Marxs great discovery: the dis covery of the conti-
nent of history remains lost once again. One reads now what
Patnaik calls the partys being hegemonised by the ideology
of capitalism (2011a: 12) in a deeper structure of Marxs origi-
nal critique of political economy. To Patnaiks question, we re-
spond: the party was always hegemonised by the ideology of
capitalism. Earlier it was the Soviet model of state capitalism.
Now it is the free-for-all barbaric model of neo-liberalism,
where in the Trojan horse gifted to India by the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund one sees the Yankee
occupants playing chess with the comrade satraps.
To avoid the Trojan horse, what the new revolutionary left
will have to learn is how to manage everything very simply,
without the intervention of much-vaunted value (Engels
1978: 375), to see that production no longer goes on behind
the backs of the producers or in a roundabout way (Marx
1986: 52, 57). It is clear that the left in India does not have
Marxs model of communist society an international society
that is devoid of commodities, money, classes, the state and
nations. Consequently it relapses into Platonic models of state
capitalism regulated by the Idea of the incorruptible politi-
cians. Its sole reason to exist is that the communist parties are
not communal, casteist and corrupt, unlike all bourgeois
parties. But its material base is capitalist through and through.
Its empiricisation is mimicking Platonic state capitalist models.
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 16, 2012 vol xlvii no 24 55
Consequently the decline of the left has to be understood as
similar to the decline of the Platonic Idea and the emergence
of the Yankee barbarian neo-liberal model.
Since the model of the left is state capitalism with a just
mode of distribution, we need to contrast Marx and Engels
visions of communism as post-commodity, post-state and
post-nation societies, with the Stalinist revisionist model of
socialist (rather bureaucratic-Platonic) commodity produc-
tion. To counter Marxs ideas, a terrible revisionism in ideas
was necessary, a counter-revolution in the realm of the social
sciences that was carried out by Stalin. Trotsky himself is to
blame. In Philosophy and Revolution, Dunayevskaya claimed
that Trotsky refused to accept Stalin as a counter-revolutionary
mole kept in the Bolshevik party by czarist agents (1982: 318,
n.1). That Trotsky ignored Lenins advice to remove Stalin
from the post of general secretary also ought to be noted. The
counter-revolution in the realm of ideas has to be seen in par-
allel to the massacre of the Old Bolsheviks by Stalin.
Stalins Counter-revolution in the Realm of Ideas
According to Stalins counter-revolution in the realm of ideas,
one must disregard certain other concepts taken from Marxs
Capital(like) surplus product, necessary and surplus
product, necessary and surplus time(For) it is strange, to
say the least, to use these concepts now (Stalin 1976: 300). One
also does not talk of internationalism, for socialism has al-
ready been accomplished in our country (Stalin 1975: 448).
One also disregards Marxs and Engels formulation of the im-
possibility of communism in one country. Instead one bows
down to Stalins new idea of national-socialism. One there-
fore has to talk of the possibility of Stalins socialism in one
country, maybe extend this formula and talk of socialism in
one state. The internationalist formulation that Marx and
Engels insisted on was said by Stalin to be an old formula
(ibid). So what did Stalin do? He put an end to this incongr-
uity between old concepts and the new state of affairs in our
socialist country, by replacing the old concepts with the new
ones that correspond to the new situation (Stalin 1976: 300).
Let us see the new things that Stalin did. He took the magi-
cal and necromantic commodity, this queer thing, abounding
in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties (Marx
1986: 76), and claimed to have tamed this fetishised monster
into a necessary and very useful element (Stalin 1976: 299).
Marx had talked of value as dead substance (1986: 189) and
a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies (ibid). Yet for
Stalin (along with Mao) this principle of death is very neces-
sary and useful. Marx had insisted on the fetish character of
commodities. He also said that society would not be able to
control value, but value would devour society. Stalin exorcised
this monster and then said: our commodity production radi-
cally differs from commodity production under capitalism
(1976: 299). In direct opposition to Marx, for whom value has
a personication with its own will and interest (Marx 1974:
453), as also has a soul of its own (ibid); for Stalin, value
(namely, the dead monster with its own soul) is not a bad
thing (1976: 301). Stalin extolled the vanguard of Platonic
socialism, namely, what he himself called our business execu-
tives, to let value inuence production (Stalin, op cit). Value
which appeared in western Europe as Monsieur Capital (the
liberal monster) reappeared again as Generalissimo Stalin
(the post-liberal angel) in the Soviet Union. That value is not
only the core component of capitalist societies, but has also
nestled in the hearts of the comrades is the tragic part of recent
history. With the Stalinist revisionist tools that the left has in
hand, its history can be written both as tragic history as well as
the history of its permanent decline.
And because the left extols Stalinist capitalism and Stalins
general methodology of understanding Marxism as a science
that studies laws independent of the will of man (Stalin
1976: 288) whereby one may discover these laws, get to know
them, study them, reckon with them in his activities and
utilise them in the interests of society, but he cannot change or
abolish them (ibid: 288-89). Marxs general precept of chang-
ing the world goes consciously repressed. For the Indian par-
liamentary left, one must interpret the world in various ways,
but never change it. And when Stalins counter-revolution
in the realm of ideas is transformed into practice, one can
only nd decline.
The Politics of General Human Emancipation
So how does one struggle against this trend? I said earlier that
one necessarily has to move to a new space, the space of the
commons that Engels had called Gemeinwesen (2011: 66). I
also said that this commons involves the critique of the state,
especially the critique of parliamentary democracy. Let us see
how one can use this new space and see how human emanci-
pation is possible. Let us also see how the Indian left could
never pose this question, but like the liberal bourgeoisie would
at the most talk of political emancipation.
The term universal human emancipation is picked up
from Marxs A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy
of Right. Introduction. As it is necessary to formulate a radical
politics of the union of free people that is market free and state
free (an idea that the left in India seems totally to be ignorant
of), one is reformulating Marxs principles of classless and
nationless communism. In this early essay a theme that he
rst outlined a little before in his On the Jewish Question he
talks of two types of emancipations, the rst is this human
emancipation and the other is political emancipation. Accord-
ing to Marx the type of political emancipation is a spurious
type of emancipation. What political emancipation does is not
liberate people. It, on the contrary, emancipates the state from
religion and other unnecessary admixtures. And that is why
one has to learn to differentiate the idea of universal human
emancipation that gives way to revolutionary energy and
intellectual self-condence which itself leads to universal
self-liberation; and the partial, merely, political revolution
(Marx 1975d: 253-54).
Political emancipation is necessarily idealist. Despite it being
structured in the site of the secular world, it is structured like
religion. It claims to give freedom, whilst bondage is written
on its banners. It is contradictory and confused in nature: The
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june 16, 2012 vol xlvii no 24 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 56
limits of political emancipation are immediately apparent for
the fact that the state can liberate itself from a restriction with-
out humanity being truly free of it, that the state can be a free
state without humanity being free humanity(Marx 1975c:
218). For Marx, not only is the state idealist and theological, it
appears as a messiah, to be precise as Christ, the intermediary
between one human and another humans freedom. Just as
Christ is the theological intermediary to whom humanity
transfers all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is
the messianic intermediary to whom humanity transfers all
his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint (ibid: 219).
So what do we learn from this? We learn that the state is not
only the managing committee of the bourgeoisie and the engine
of class despotism. We learn that this despot appearing as the
messiah compels humanity to transfer all his human constraints
on the messianic bourgeois committee (ibid). What one needs
to do is to develop a rigorous Marxist theory of the state from
the early Marxs theory of alienation and stop being obsessed
with the functionalist theories of the state that claim that
every society needs a state: the feudal lords needed one, the
capitalists need one; consequently the communist will also
require a state. To my mind not only has the left in India
ignored Marxs writings in this young or early period, thus
ignored works from Marxs 1843 Critique of Hegels Philosophy
of the State to On the Jewish Question and the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, but also ignored Lenins State
and Revolution and consequently built its political theories on
non-revolutionary foundations. Now it is well known that the
CPI(M) has not only the best and most radical intellectuals and
it has at no time been bereft of theory, unlike a certain type of
radical left who were most happy to read Maos On Contradic-
tion, supplemented by party pamphlets penned by Charu
Mazumdar and Chandra Pulla Reddy.
So who would take up Marxs concerns of alienated huma nity,
relate this with his theory of class struggle and then develop and
actualise this theory in practice, namely, that the state is the
representation of both class tyranny as well as of alienated
humanity? How should one make this theory of the state alive
to people, such that they know that their emancipation that
includes Ranadives the small change in politics that Patnaik
recalls (op cit: 12) is directly linked to the smashing of the
state? Every small change in politics has to be linked with the
concerns of alienated humanity as well as with the programmes
of class struggle and of the smashing of the state. We have already
noted before that the state is not to be understood as a rational
organisation, but a counterfeit and a sort of defecation (Jal
2011). That this counterfeit and defecation have necessarily to
be smashed could then be said to be a self- evident statement.
Let us look at the young Marxs humanist theory of the state.
We have seen that the state is both a counterfeit and defeca-
tion. But also as the perfect political state (the state) is, by its
nature, humanitys species-life (Marx 1975c: 220). What hap-
pens is that as species-life, politics of the bourgeois variety (i e,
politics of the state), reduces life to a form of a counterfeit or
simply, a false and lthy life. Since we are articulating that not
only is parliamentary politics false (but that the entire politics
of the state is a fraud) one must note the alienated and schizo-
phrenic condition that the politics of the state leads us to. We
must also be wary of the organised lefts attempt to tame this
counterfeit-lth combine. Let us note the genealogy of the
state and relate this with the dynamics of civil society.
We see that the bourgeois breast has two souls: the soul of
the state where humanity is said to be a social being, and the soul
of civil society which is the realm of the egoistical individual.
Humanity leads a double life, a Mephistophelian life in
heaven and a Faustian life on earth. One here recalls Freuds
notion of doubling from where the feeling of a complete
breakdown of the human personality followed by the emergence
of dread and psychosis (1990: 356-58). In this schizophrenic
double-life, the individual lives in the political community, as
a community being, and in civil society, where he is active as a
private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades
himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers
(Marx op cit). In both the realms (of state and civil society),
humanity is necessarily an illusory being. In the state he is an
illusory social being, an imaginary member of a ctitious sov-
ereignty, divested of his real individual life and lled with an
unreal universality (ibid). As member of the now declared
royal civil society (after the media sponsored messianic fast-
onto-mystical-death) he imagines himself to be a profane
being, even a real individual, whilst in actuality merely an
illusory phenomenon (ibid).
Why Embrace Falsity?
The immediate question that comes up is: if the state is the
spurious site of false universality a condensation of human
alienation and thus is itself a form of false consciousness that
produces a false practice, then why have the comrades
embraced this falsity? Why does the CPI(M) function within
the fractured domains of civil society and the state, knowing
well that this dichotomy is a type of social and political schizo-
phrenia that actively represses radical praxis? To my mind it is
because they have perfected best the logic of the French Revo-
lution and along with it have understood the very important
text of The Rights of Man and the Citizen. But they have been
able to understand these in the context of Marxs critique of
alienation and the state where what Marx calls the splitting
of humanity (Marx op cit: 222) remains its tour de force. That
the fact that the state not this or that state, not the liberal or
the fascist state, but the state as such (ibid: 216) is to be
recognised as the unreality and the imaginary form of
human alienation (ibid: 223) is yet to be understood. And
because these two unfortunate and split souls of the egoistic
individual and the abstract citizen (ibid: 234) dwell within the
even more unfortunate breast of not only the Indian liberal
and the fascist, but also our national leftist, one has to tell them:
political emancipation by itself is not human emanci pation
(ibid: 226). Political theory, especially the left-of-centre type of
political theory talks of the state, talks of political emancipation,
but an emancipation that is woven round pre-Marxist theories.
As they cannot talk of human emancipation, as they cannot
smash the fetish of the state, one can only say that it is the
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 16, 2012 vol xlvii no 24 57
sophistry of the political state itself (ibid: 220) which enslaves
their political imagination.
Recall recent talks of how parliament is sovereign. Recall
that people become predicates to this sovereign. Recall that
this sovereign, as the Modern Prince, is completely alienated
from people. Recall then that all other forms of political
revolutions New Democratic or whatever jargon one wants
to blab out, is necessarily built on the theory of the alienated
Modern Prince. The idealism of the state was carried out in
Europe by liberalism. In India it is the left that can truly perfect
this idealism of the state (ibid: 233), where the biblical
heaven is realised in its mythical national-socialism. Francis
Fukuyama wanted liberalism to govern the world. This is not
the tragedy. The tragedy is that it is the Indian left which has
become the bearer of liberalism. The Old Liberals, as we well
know, are sitting in the Pentagon busy searching for new
nations to destroy, after blowing out Afghanistan and Iraq.
Our critique is however historical and structural. Today
imperialism functions in what is called the space of humani-
tarian interventionism. But humanitarian imperialism is not
something contingent to the present age. It belongs to the deep
structure of bourgeois democracy where:
Democracy is a contradiction in itself, an untruth, nothing but hypoc-
risy at the bottom. Political liberty is sham liberty, the worst form of
slaveryThe contradiction must come out.(in the form of) real
equality.(in the form of) communism (Engels 1975: 393).
We yet live in the age of this sham liberty where one cannot
discover that the real roots of bourgeois democracy lie in the
social contract between capital and labour. Yet sham liberty
cannot be overcome in what Marx calls crude and thoughtless
communism (1982: 88), most certainly not in Stalinism, nor
in the born-again messianic forms of political theo logy that
are propagated by the organisations like the Hezbo llah. The
organised left cannot see the historicity of democracy and what
the meaning of democracy in contradiction means. Because
they stick to the spaces of Old Physics, especially to civil society
and the state, and because they are enslaved by this patronis-
ing Nehruvian state, they cannot allow the contradictions of
democracy to play out their histo rical role. And that is why the
parliamentary left led by the CPI(M) either declares this Ne-
hruvian state as the Holiest of the Holy and also has fascina-
tion for anti-communist organisations like the Hezbollah. Since
the Aristotelian method is the only one available to them,
since Hegel is totally out from the bounds of their reasoning,
their beloved either/or method compels them to choose be-
tween Yankee imperialism and the Hezbollah, just as they are
torn between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party in
actuality whilst murmuring curses at both of them.
Another Frankensteinian Monster
We have seen the fallacy of socialism that is built on the principles
of the commodity and the state. We saw how they became
Frankenstein-like monsters, to borrow Marxs phrase inde-
pendent beings endowed with life (1986: 77). We have also
seen that the left in India has embraced these Frankenstein-
like beings. We now move to another Frankensteinian monster
that the left has not been able to conceptualise: the caste
system and how caste is inexorably linked to modern classes,
political power and ideological hegemony. If one has said that
the transcendence of capitalism needs the transcendence of
the commodity principle and the state, one now says that it
necessarily requires the transition of the caste system and its
entire ideological superstructure. Though Patnaik had once
talked of caste and the Asiatic mode of production (with refer-
ence to E M S Namboodiripad) to be considered for Marxist
reasoning (2009a), his essay on the decline of the Indian left
does not once refer to caste. Neither have those who have
responded to him done so. Patnaiks basic classes are then
simply meaningless. In contrast to this form of reasoning, it is
Kevin Anderson who has articulated another dimension to
Marxism which includes the following:
(1) How the revolutionary subjectivity of African-Americans
was a driving force in American society.
(2) How racism had held back the development of a labour
movement in the industrial northern states of the US.
(3) How race had distorted the consciousness of the poor
whites of the South.
(4) How slavery and capitalism were intertwined.
(5) How the struggle against slavery and racism in America is
an international cause for the emancipation of labour.
Now link Andersons reading of race and put the word caste.
Put the dalit in place of Andersons reading of the African-
Americans. Replace caste in each of the above ve formula-
tions and one gets a different perspective of Indian society, es-
pecially a different perspective of the Indian proletariat. Caste
would turn out to be (to borrow Gunder Franks phrase from a
different context): the underdevelopment of development. The
revolution against caste and its entire superstructure that was
perfected by what we call the Indian Fanonists (after Franz
Fanon), Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar, was tragically ignored
by the mainstream left.
To understand the decline of the Indian left is to understand
that the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist baggage did not allow
any space for a Marxist reading of non-western societies. It
meant that not only does one read Marxs essays of the 1850s in
a different light, but one also reads his Ethnological Notebook,
a text almost unknown to the Indian left. The basic classes
that Patnaik seeks emerge from a womb that is different from
the European one that saw the transition from feudalism to
capitalism. And since feudalism was absent from India, the
Indian left was left chasing European ghosts. Attention thus
has to turn to the historical materialist genealogy of the basic
classes. But then one does not merely challenge the manifestos
written by the Stalinists and the Maoists. One also challenges
the theories formulated by R S Sharma and Irfan Habib who
mistakenly imposed the European ideas of feudalism and
capitalism onto India.
And nally since the Indian left has never talked of Marxs
idea of the human essence (das menschliche Wesen) and not
understood that communism is nothing but the recovery of
this human essence that has been destroyed by the caste-class
system, they could not understand the subaltern humanist
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june 16, 2012 vol xlvii no 24 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 58
theory of casteless and classless society. Caste is not a mere
pre-capitalist remnant that will automatically wither away. It
is the Frankensteinian soul of modern India and an active
agent of global capital accumulation. Marxs smashing of the
state now synthesises with the radical subaltern smashing of
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the prison of caste and the superstructural iron cage that holds
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REVIEW OF WOMENS STUDIES
April 28, 2012
State Policy and the Twelfth Plan through a Gender Lens J Devika, Mary E John, Kalpana Kannabiran,
Sharmila Rege, Samita Sen, Padmini Swaminathan
Gendering the Twelfth Plan: A Feminist Perspective Mridul Eapen, Aasha Kapur Mehta
Gender Responsive Budgeting in India: What Has Gone Wrong? Yamini Mishra, Navanita Sinha
Ladlis and Lakshmis: Financial Incentive Schemes for the Girl Child T V Sekher
Addressing Domestic Violence within Healthcare Settings: The Dilaasa Model Padma Bhate-Deosthali,
T K Sundari Ravindran, U Vindhya
Beyond Feminine Public Altruism: Women Leaders in Keralas Urban Bodies J Devika, Binitha V Thampi
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