Editorial
Kicking, Yet Declining
Communist and socialist parties around the world are
talking about socialism in the 21st century, but they often lack the
conviction they used to exhibit before the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the drastic changes in East European countries. Communists in India, official communists to be precise, seem to have stopped talking socialism altogether. They seem to have come to the conclusion that socialism is doomed to fail though they openly refuse to propagate such a situation as it would be a nightmare for their very survival. They are lucky in the sense that they never feel any compulsion to indulge in polemic, both nationally and internationally. Nor do regional and global issues get priority in their political discourse. Unlike their big brothers of China they are in no position to boast of theorising socialism with Indian characteristics. Even in the fifties the Nehru-brand of social-democratic posture was the only option for them to keep their socialist flag flying. As the Congress party no longer preaches anything remotely resembling old Nehruvian social-democratic stance, communists look too busy to rationalise the ‘there is no alternative’ syndrome in the present era. From time to time their socialistic adventure ends with patching up with the obnoxious Mulayam-Lalu pack, hopefully to erase Congress-Communist irritants in running the biggest show of democracy.
Liberals and democrats who are visibly disheartened because of the radical shift in the erstwhile socialist bloc, if it can be so called, occasionally organise seminars to dissect the crisis and explore the future possibilities of Marxism and leftism, albeit their efforts are unlikely to influence the left-movement, otherwise moribund for a pretty long time, because all left parties have charted a course of action that hardly suits the realities of India. And after each round of discussion the same old question returns : what is socialism and how to build and develop it? They have no answer. Or they have been searching for it since the twenties without making any breakthrough.
CPM being the leader of the established left camp, looks happy with their British Labour Party status and they won’t cross the limit to keep people in good humour. Revolution is a misnomer in their lexicon. For all practical purposes they have permanently settled for two or three fiefdoms while saying goodbye to socialism, even of their kind. They are yet to announce their total faith in ‘market socialism’ as expounded by the Chinese but it is a matter of time that they will emulate the Chinese path to keep their elitist status intact. After all they have a chequered history of being dictated first by the Soviets and then to some extent, by the Chinese, in fashioning their theoretical and ideological niceties.
When the Soviets promoted nationalisation as a stepping stone for building socialism in underdeveloped countries, they got the heaven and an excuse as well, to abandon the arduous task of fighting and making sacrifices for radical change and social revolution.
The marxist left is now desperately trying to get back what it has lost—the feudal principalities of Bengal and Kerala. While in Bengal Marxists are still in a calculated hibernation, possibly buying time to allow the situation to drift towards chaos, their Kerala brethren are now making noises about ‘land rights’ of the peasants. It may sound ludicrous. Then it is their way of life—opportunism and compromise. Only the other day the party’s Kerala unit launched a massive ‘land rights’ campaign and asked the Congress-led UDF government to take immediate steps to take over surplus land and distribute it to the landless. What stood in their way of acquiring ceiling surplus land and distributing it to the landless when they were in power, remains unanswered. The issue they are raising now is large-scale acquisition of paddy land for purposes other than agriculture. Their immediate target is the Rs 1000 crore healthcity project in Kochi as it will destroy a huge tract of paddy field, leading to dispossession of land of the peasants of the locality and food security as well. In truth the Marxist party was humiliated beyond recognition in the last assembly poll in Bengal due to their naked and unashamed support to such big projects at the cost of poor and marginal farmers. They did everything fascistic to gift the prime land to the Tatas in Singur while in Nandigram, they had chalked out a plan to evict thousands of farmers and acquire land for an environmentally unsustainable chemical hub with foreign investment tag. Maybe, they were experimenting with the possibilities of building socialism with Indian characteristics! For them history is not a continuous and revolutionary process. It would be quite some time before they could talk of socialism of their kind.
In Kerala, they are enacting all this ‘landrights’ opera because they are no longer in power. In Bengal they are now convening district-level conferences of their peasant association—Krishak Sabha—hopefully to regain their lost territories which seems remote at the moment. In a sense they are in a dilemma as to how to efficiently and deceivingly disown their own part.
For one thing socialism is not on the agenda of any Communist Party, official or non-official. Nor do they bother about how to address the complex issues stemming from the rapidly changing agrarian pattern in rural India. Farmers, big or small, no longer, listen to political leaders when it is the question of farming and modern techniques. It‘s market that dictates and changes the farming practices these days; there is a little bit of market in everything from sowing to harvesting. Come crop sowing season peasants, poor and marginal included, begin to knock at the doors of market dealers, not party offices. The governments, state and central, and the parties that control them, are on the sidelines. They cannot change the momentum that the omnipotent market has generated in agrarian practice over the years. Whether they like it or not, the impact of market on farmers and farming seems to have disintegration effect on feudal land relations. With the advent of contact farming—and its scale would be big business oriented after the entry of global retail giants in Indian market—it is simply self-defeating to view the agrarian scenario in the old framework. The problem is the persons in authority have developed a habit of refusing to see ‘reasons’ and they continue to ask ‘what is socialism?’
Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 27, 13-19, 2013
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