Perhaps the most significant feature
of the recent Indian election is the loss suffered by the Left. The BJP’s
defeat was more or less anticipated, except by the psephologists, as was
some loss by the Left; but the actual extent of the Left’s loss has been
quite staggering. True, its vote share has fallen only marginally; but
in its Bengal base it has majority in only about a third of the total
Assembly segments, and in Kerala even less, which is a serious setback.
This setback is significant because the Left, even though not a contender
for power at the Centre as of now, is a major driving force behind India’s
journey towards a modern, secular and democratic society. It is of course
not the only such force: there are large numbers of progressive social
and political movements which also play this role. But it differs from
all of them in one crucial respect, namely that it also has electoral
strength which they lack; and such strength does matter. Any impairing
of such strength therefore portends ill for the progress of India’s democratic
revolution.
The media have been full of analysis of the Left’s loss and of advice
for its revival, much of which ultimately focuses on just one point: it
must discard its “phobia” about “imperialism”. This is occasionally expressed
directly, such as by Lord Meghnad Desai in an interview to The Hindu,
but usually indirectly. Sometimes it is said that the Left should not
have withdrawn support from the UPA government; but since the withdrawal
was precisely on the question of India’s entering into a possible strategic
alliance with U.S. imperialism, this argument amounts to saying that the
Left exaggerates the imperialist threat. Sometimes it is said that the
people’s verdict was in favour of “development”, from which the inference
can be drawn that the Left’s electoral loss must be attributed to its
lack of success in ushering in “development” (meaning “development” within
the neo-liberal paradigm, for which the different states in the country
are vying with one another to attract corporate and MNC investment). This
again amounts to saying that the Left’s opposition to the neo-liberal
paradigm, which is linked to its anti-imperialism, is responsible for
its obsolescence, and hence defeat. Sometimes it is argued that there
was a “wave” in favour of a secular and stable government which worked
to the advantage of the UPA and to the detriment of the Left, since the
latter forged links in the “third front” with Parties that had done business
with the BJP earlier. If the conclusion from this claim is that the Left
should have gone into the election alone rather than with “third front”
allies, then that at least is compatible with the Left’s ideological premises
(though it is unlikely to have made much difference to its electoral fortune);
but if the conclusion is that the Left must always be with those who would
be normally supposed to ride such a “wave”, then that amounts to suggesting
that it should compromise on its anti-imperialism to become a permanent
fixture of the UPA camp. The commonest advice to the Left in short is
to stop making a fuss over “imperialism”.
This is hardly surprising. All over the world, in countries where the
urban middle class has escaped as yet the adverse consequences of globalization,
anti-imperialism among the students, the educated youth, and the literati
is at low ebb. On the contrary there is even a desire to welcome closer
integration with the imperialist world as a means of ushering in a secular
and progressive modernity, and of countering phenomena like feudal patriarchy,
religious authoritarianism and communal-fascism. Since Left ideas typically
get nourishment from the literati and the urban intellectual strata, even
though these ideas reach their fruition in the struggles of the workers
and peasants, who are the victims of globalization but are sociologically
distant from the intellectual strata, the Left movement gathers momentum
in situations where the urban middle class has also suffered from globalization
and hence makes common cause with the workers and the peasants. But it
faces problems in situations where the urban middle class is a beneficiary
of globalization. In such cases, the resistance to imperialism and globalization
often gets championed by forces other than the Left; or, if the Left remains
committed to the interests of the “basic classes” and resists globalization,
it often suffers through isolation from the intellectual strata and the
urban youth and students. (This loss, though real, can of course be more
than offset by an increase in its support base among the peasantry through
its resistance to globalization).
The current anti-imperialist upsurge in Latin America, which has brought
Left or Left-oriented governments to power over much of that continent,
is a consequence of the long years of crises that hurt, and hence radicalized,
the urban youth, students and intellectuals. On the other hand, in much
of central Asia, and now Iran, where the urban youth has not directly
experienced the adversity inflicted by globalization, imperialism still
retains the capacity to mobilize, or at least claim the sympathy of, vast
numbers of the urban population in so-called “orange”, “tulip” and “velvet”
“revolutions” that are supposed to bring in modernity and democracy together
with neo-liberalism. In India, since the adversity of workers, peasants,
agricultural labourers and petty producers, under globalization, has been
accompanied by high growth rates, and rapid increases in incomes and opportunities
for the urban middle class, a degree of pro-imperialism among this class
which includes intellectuals, media persons and professionals, and hence
a degree of exasperation with the Left’s continued adherence to old “anti-imperialist
shibboleths”, is hardly surprising.
The Left’s error that accounts for its loss in the recent elections can
be located here. As long as the urban middle class in India is not hit
by the adverse consequences of globalization, it will continue to remain
sympathetically disposed towards imperialism. Anti-imperialist ideological
appeals alone, though they must continue to be made, will not sway it
much. Two additional factors that will contribute towards this sympathy
for imperialism are, first, the assumption of US Presidency by Barack
Obama who represents “imperialism with a human face”, and, second, the
strong opposition to imperialism coming at present from the Islamist movements
with which broad sections of the Indian urban middle class have little
affinity. As long as the Indian Left remains true to its ideology and
the interests of its class base, the pro-imperialist sympathies of the
Indian urban middle class will necessarily entail some estrangement of
this class from the Left. This is a phenomenon that will haunt the Left
for as long as the current conjuncture continues. In the recent elections,
it follows that a certain loss of urban support for the Left became unavoidable
when it broke with the UPA because of its anti-imperialism. (In Kerala,
such alienation from the Left was compounded by certain specific local
factors: the secular segments of the electorate could not accept the Left’s
relationship with the PDP, and the Left’s stand on the SNC-Lavalin Deal
carried little credibility.)
If the Left had managed to increase its support among the workers, peasants,
petty producers and the rural poor, then it could have offset this loss
among the urban middle class; even if it had managed to retain its support
among the former, its overall loss would have still remained limited.
But, notwithstanding its opposition to imperialism, it did not have an
alternative policy on development, different from what the neo-liberal
paradigm dictated. In West Bengal, the government led by it pursued policies
of “development” similar to what the other states were following and in
competition with them, which, being part of the neo-liberal paradigm,
necessarily brought with them the threat of “primitive accumulation of
capital” (in the form specifically of expropriation of peasants’ land).
These policies, though subsequently reversed in several instances, had
an adverse impact on the “basic classes” and caused a crucial erosion
of the class base of the Left.
While some loss of peasant support on account of Singur and Nandigram
was anticipated in West Bengal, it was thought that the Opposition’s thwarting
of “development” would make the urban middle class switch to the Left
as the preferred alternative (because of which pictures of the Nano car
were posted all over the state as part of the CPI(M)’s campaign to remind
the electorate of the Opposition’s intransigence in thwarting “industrialization”).
As a matter of fact, however, the Left lost votes both among the urban
middle class and among the peasants and the rural poor. It lost votes
among the urban middle class because this segment could not stomach the
Left’s anti-imperialism and its fallout in the form of a distancing from
the UPA; it lost votes among the peasants and the rural poor because the
Left’s anti-imperialism was insufficient, in the sense that it did not
extend to the formulation of an alternative economic policy. True, the
scope for a state government to produce such an alternative economic policy
is limited; but no effort in this direction was discernible.
The Left, it follows, cannot pursue its resistance to imperialism unless
it also evolves an alternative approach to “development”, different from
the neo-liberal one which is promoted by imperialist agencies everywhere.
The central feature of such an approach must be the defence of the interests
of the class base of the Left. Development must be defined in the context
of the carrying forward of the democratic revolution, as a phenomenon
contributing to an improvement in the economic conditions of the “basic
classes”, and hence to an accretion to their class-strength. It must be
seen as having a class dimension and not just referring to the augmentation
of a mass of “things”. A supra-class notion of development, such as the
augmentation of a mass of “things” or the mere growth of GDP, is a form
of commodity-fetishism, and a part, therefore, of the ideology of imperialism.
Hence any “development” that entails primitive accumulation of capital
(which includes primitive accumulation through the state budget via the
doling out of massive subsidies to capitalists for undertaking investment),
that entails a reduction in workers’ wage-rates, rights, and security,
cannot form part of the Left’s agenda. If, in the context of the competition
between different states, private investment refuses to come into Left-ruled
states because of their development agenda being different, then alternative
ways of undertaking investment (e.g. through public or cooperative sector
investment) have to be explored; and of course whatever relief can possibly
be given to the “basic classes” against the onslaught of the neo-liberal
policies must be provided.
Accepting the advice given to it to overcome its “outdated” opposition
to imperialism and to the neo-liberal policies promoted by it will amount
to self-annihilation by the Left and to its incorporation into the structures
of bourgeois hegemony; it would entail a transformation of the Left into
a “Blairite” entity. The argument may be made that a temporary acceptance
of bourgeois hegemony will quicken the capitalist transformation of our
society and hence bring the question of the transcendence of capitalism
that much faster on to the agenda. This argument is not just similar to,
but actually identical with, the bourgeois argument that the imposition
of absolute deprivation on workers, peasants and petty producers in the
process of capitalist development is of no great moment since such deprivation
is only temporary and will be more than made good in due course. (The
argument advanced, even by as sensitive an economist as Amartya Sen, during
the Singur and Nandigram agitations, that building London and Manchester
must also have meant the dispossession of some peasants of the time, suggesting
that such losses are eventually more than compensated, is of this genre).
This is a flawed argument on several counts, of which the most obvious
one is the following: capitalist transformation in societies like ours,
even as it erodes pre-capitalist and non-capitalist structures, cannot
absorb the producers displaced by such erosion into the fold of the capitalist
sector itself, since the level of technology on the basis of which this
transformation is undertaken, and the rate of its change, are such that
its capacity to generate employment is negligible. (The context in which
London and Manchester were built was altogether different: inter alia
large-scale emigration was possible at that time from the capitalist Centre
to the temperate regions which were opened up through colonialism for
white settlement). Capitalist transformation in societies like ours is
altogether different: it gives rise to a process of sheer pauperization
but not of proletarianization of petty producers, for reasons quite different
from those adduced by the Sixth Congress of the Communist International
that had first cognized this phenomenon in colonial and third world societies.
The Sixth Congress had attributed this phenomenon to the fetters put on
capitalist transformation in these societies by their integration into
the world economy, under imperialist hegemony, which trapped them in a
certain pattern of international division of labour. But the phenomenon
today would arise not from the fact of such fetters, which obviously are
quite loose in the case of an economy like India: it can apparently break
out of this international division of labour and experience rapid capitalist
transformation within a neo-liberal dispensation. The phenomenon arises
today from the contemporary technological basis of such capitalist transformation.
It follows that if the Left fell prey to this argument, of first seeking
to usher in capitalist transformation in the hope of working for its transcendence
later, and hence proceeded today along a “Blairite” path, then it would
remain a Blairite entity forever. The moment of that passage from capitalist
transformation to the transcendence of capitalism will never come as some
natural historical break; and if there is no such discontinuity then this
entire distinction between two phases becomes invalid.
Accepting the advice to eschew its opposition to imperialism will not
only erode the existing class base of the Left, without ever creating
the conditions for a revival of revolutionary resistance later on a new
basis; it will not only fritter away the Left’s class base built through
decades of struggles in exchange, not for a later rebirth as a revolutionary
force but for an incorporation in a Blairite fashion into the structures
of bourgeois and imperialist hegemony; but it will also push the “basic
classes” into the arms of extremist ideologies, ranging from “Maoism”
to Islamist anti-imperialism, which not just unleash violence and restrict
mass political action, but, for this very reason, are also “unproductive”,
in the sense of being intrinsically incapable of achieving even the intermediate
goals they set for themselves, let alone achieving a society that emancipates
people. Anti-imperialism is not a product of the Left’s imagination; it
arises from the objective conditions faced by the people. If the Left
abandons it, then others, no matter how incapable of overcoming these
objective conditions, will step in to fill the vacuum, and the people
will be left to their mercy.
July
1, 2009.
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