The Left might have become the laughing stock of the nation post elections, but laugh is the last thing we should be doing. It is a matter of tremendous concern that a country with such a vast pool of industrial and agricultural proletariat has just 24 Members in Parliament to speak on their behalf.
This is the lowest ever since the first Parliament of 1952, during which time the strength of the Left on the floor was matched by their extra-parliamentary strength in the field with representative control over peasant and worker organisations and syndicates. Not like at present when the low numbers in Parliament is matched by a drastically shrunk base in representative bodies of working class interests. So is the Left leadership worried in any way? From the tone of the inner party stock-taking going on in the CPI(M), in Kolkata, Delhi and Thiruvananthapuram; and the preambles to the forthcoming June 6 meeting of the CPI in Coimbatore, it certainly does not seem like any lessons have been learnt or any yardsticks for evaluation have been evolved. All one hears are strident and arrogant sounds indulging in mutual slanging, just looking for scapegoats to apportion blame. The question arises, what are the criteria for self-evaluation that Left parties should be laying down? Is it at all a ‘political’ evaluation to propose (as in Kerala, for example) that the Left was drubbed due to its poor alliance strategies (particularly with the communal People’s Democratic Party of Madhani) or due to the whiff of a financial scam that enveloped it in the wake of the SNC Lavalin case. How ‘political’ is it to lay the reason for their setback at the door of something as silly as inner-party dog-fights (in this case, the prolonged spat between Chief Minster V S Achuthanandan and the CPI(M) party Secretary Pinrayi Vijayan)? In other words, these are mere day-to-day events in the life of any party and stuff on which their electoral strategies are built. But what should distinguish ‘Left’ evaluation from the rest? Is it enough for them to be stuck in the rut of the ‘tactics and strategies’ discourse? Or is it important that they embark on the route of a theoretical evaluation which tries to find answers to a whole range of new questions? Some of the questions that demand answers in a public sense need enumeration. Like, why is it that in this time and age, the Left is splintered into three — the CPI, CPI(M) and the CPI(ML)? It has been a good twenty-five years since anyone has even bothered to analyse what the ideological divisions between these three and their various off-shoots are. Besides delivering the conventional gyan than the two big CPs are parliamentary and believe in the ballot-box while the ML are extra-parliamentary and profess the line of ‘armed revolution’, we really have not had either a serious theoretical analysis nor a theoretical debate on the reasons for the continued fractiousness of the Left or why it is so impossible for the splinters to fuse together into a common front. It’s not now enough to admit, like a few senior leaders of the CPI(M) did, that the party has lost touch with ‘reality’. We also need to hear what that idea of ‘reality’ is with which they feel distanced. Is it possible that the organised Left has steadily been losing touch with newly-developing realities, regionally, nationally and internationally? *One has not heard party leaders telling us about, say, climate change or why caste is consolidating in India or how they understand emerging issues of gender, ecology or culture. We have not heard from Left parties on why they stand opposed to opponents of mega-projects like dams, SEZs or nuclear programmes who have been taking up the cause of millions of internally displaced people. We have not heard from them on issues of human rights abuses in India; for example, neither the parties nor individuals within it even made a token noise against the treatment of someone like Binayak Sen. Even after the initial absurd justifications for what happened in Nandigram, they seemed to lack the courage to face the truth. They have not been able to explain why they need to wait for a global capitalist like Tata to develop West Bengal industrially before obtaining the ideal conditions for a proletarian revolution in the state*. The Left parties have not been able to explain their holier-than-thou posture, when it is clear that they have devolved into a conservative, inflexible, intellectually moribund club, mortally scared of both self-critique or external evaluation. But one would like to offer a critique from the outside here. It is from Karl Marx who warned us (in ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’) against “doctrinaire socialism” which “surrenders this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie.” This is the ‘reality’ the Left needs to ponder. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
