Things the Left needs to do right

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Way forward: "Uniting with others against semi-fascist forces and on the basis of a concrete
alternative agenda to neo-liberalism will help Indian communists serve the people better."
Graffiti of Lenin in Thrippunithura, Kerala. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat
V Geetanath

B Rishikesh Bahadurdesai

Zahid Rafiq

TOPICS
politics
Communisms slide worldwide is due to its ambivalence towards globalisation and democracy.
The Indian Left has shed that ambivalence, but it has no concrete alternative development
strategy
Exactly a century ago around this time, Vladimir Lenin was in Zurich completing a manuscript
that would go on to become perhaps the most consequential book of the twentieth century.
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism may not be the most widely read of Lenins works,
but it is certainly the most important.
 Prabhat Patnaik
It argued that an era of revolutions had arrived, since capitalism had entered a stage where wars
for re-partitioning an already partitioned world among rival monopoly combines, each aligned to
a powerful state, would thenceforth leave workers with the option of either killing fellow
workers across trenches or turning the imperialist war into a civil war for overthrowing the
system. And since it saw imperialism as a chain of exploitation across the entire world, a chain
that could be broken at its weakest link, it conceptually incorporated third world liberation
struggles into the process of a world revolution.
Decline of communism

Imperialism brought world revolution on the agenda, and it developed Marxism into a theory of
world revolution from being merely a European philosophy. It provided the conceptual basis for
a new International, the like of which the world had never seen, where German, French, Russian,
and Italian delegates rubbed shoulders with those from China, India, Vietnam and Mexico.
Subsequent events confirmed the prognosis of Imperialism to a remarkable degree. The First
World War, the Russian Revolution, the post-war revolutionary uprisings across Europe, the rise
of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Japanese militarism, Japans attack on China, the
Second World War, the Red Armys march across Europe to set up communist regimes, and the
post-war revolutionary upsurge in Asia were all part of a scenario that was in conformity with
what Lenin had sketched. But already at the end of the Second World War, the world had started
moving away from what one can call the Leninist conjuncture. The moment of dazzling
success of communism was also ironically the start of its decline.
Capitalism made three major concessions to ward off the communist threat: decolonisation, the
institution of democracy based on universal adult suffrage, and state intervention in demand
management to maintain high levels of employment (which in Europe meant welfare state
measures under Social Democracy). The fact that democracy based on universal adult suffrage is
a post-war phenomenon is often not appreciated. True, it arrived in Britain in 1928 when women
got the vote (notwithstanding some residual property-based restrictions); but in France the first
election based on universal adult suffrage occurred only in 1945.
State intervention in demand management kept up aggregate demand and employment in
advanced capitalist economies, and thereby facilitated high levels of investment, output growth,
and labour productivity growth. High productivity growth in turn led to rapid increases in real
wages since employment rates were high and trade unions consequently strong. Such
intervention underlay in short what has been called the Golden Age of capitalism, the period
from the early fifties to the early seventies. Ironically, the Golden Age of capitalism occurred
not because of capitalism, but despite it, within a regime that was erected against its wishes (for
it had opposed demand management by the state earlier, and is again doing so today), and as a
concession it had to make to ward off the communist threat.
In addition, the post-war period also saw the emergence of the U.S. as the unquestioned leader of
the capitalist world, and a muting of inter-imperialist rivalries, initially because the Second
World War had weakened all the protagonists other than the U.S., and later because of the
emergence of globalised or international finance capital which saw all partitioning of the world
as standing in the way of its freedom to move globally. The era of struggles for repartitioning the
world among rival nation-based monopoly combines was over, since such combines no longer
held centre stage. In short, the Leninist conjuncture had been superseded; wars of course
continued, but they did not express inter-imperialist rivalry, not even by proxy.
The oft-repeated question, why did communism collapse so suddenly, has, I believe, a simple
answer: because the premise upon which it was founded no longer held, the premise of an
imminent world revolution. As this imminence receded, communism had to reinvent and
restructure itself, to come to terms with a post-Leninist conjuncture, in order to remain viable.
This was difficult enough; it was made more difficult by a common but undesirable tendency
among revolutionaries to place moral purity above practical politics and deny the non-imminence
of revolution.
Though the Leninist conjuncture had ended with the war, this fact had not been immediately
apparent. Besides, the prestige and affection earned by communism (even among many who
found it otherwise unacceptable) because of its intense fight against fascism, camouflaged for
quite some time the fact of its losing ground. (Professor Joan Robinson of Cambridge, when
someone was very critical of the Soviet Union, used to say: Dont forget that but for the Soviet
Union we would not be sitting here like this, referring to the Soviet Unions role in Hitlers
defeat.) This had a paradoxical effect: during the Golden Age years when one would have
expected the appeal of communism to diminish, it did not, while in the era of globalisation when
the miseries of the working people are mounting everywhere and capitalism is attenuating
democracy and the welfare state, communism, far from gaining ground, seems to be at a loss.
Communisms incapacity to deal with a post-Leninist conjuncture springs above all from its
ambivalence towards globalisation. This is true of the European Left in general, and exhibited
most recently by Syriza in Greece: no matter how objectionable it finds the hegemony of finance
capital which characterises globalisation, it cannot contemplate shaking off this hegemony
through a delinking from globalisation, because it sees any such delinking as a revival of
nationalism which it abhors. Communist parties no doubt are less hamstrung by such
considerations and more forthright in advocating delinking. But even though this may nominally
be the case, they too lack any concrete strategy of countering globalisation. The Greek
Communist Party (KKE) was strongly opposed to Syriza and bitterly criticised its capitulation to
German finance; but it hardly had a credible concrete alternative of its own.
Communisms incapacity to remain viable in a post-Leninist conjuncture also has roots in an
ambivalence it traditionally had towards democracy. From G.V. Plekhanovs dictum, accepted by
Lenin, that in any situation of conflict between the proletarian revolution and existing democratic
institutions, a revolutionary must choose the former, communism tended to see democratic
institutions, far stronger in the post-war world, as being secondary to the revolution that they
believed was imminent. Thanks to this legacy it has ceded ground to a (non-Blairite) segment of
social democracy as the primary defenders of democratic institutions which are under attack
from finance capital in the era of globalisation.
The case of the Indian Left

In countries where communists have shed their ambivalence both towards opposing globalisation
and towards defending democracy, they have remained a formidable force; and India is one such
country. Some would contest this, citing the Communist Party of Indias support for the
Emergency, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) preventing Jyoti Basu from becoming Prime
Minister, and both parties withdrawal of support from the United Progressive Alliance
government over the nuclear deal with the U.S. Each of these episodes, they would argue,
strengthened the Hindu Right and constitutes evidence of the communists not taking the
strengthening of democratic institutions seriously. But the communists culpability on these
issues can scarcely be held against them. The CPI has been self-critical about its role during the
Emergency; the CPI(M) did support the formation of the United Front government without Jyoti
Basu; and on the nuclear deal the more persuasive argument is that the Lefts mistake was to
allow the UPA to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the first place.
What is true, however, is that even the Indian communists, despite being opposed to
globalisation and associated neo-liberal policies, have not charted a concrete alternative
development strategy. Their opposition has taken the form of identifying particular parties as
neo-liberal and having no truck with them, which has hampered united struggles for the defence
of secularism and democracy. But uniting with others in struggles, on platforms, and even in
government, against the Hindutva and semi-fascist forces and on the basis of a concrete
alternative agenda to neo-liberalism, will serve the people better.
Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, New
Delhi.
Keywords: Communist Party of India (Marxist), Jyoti Basu, globalisation, Capitalism,
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