Challenges for the Indian Left

Description

This volume stems from essays written in theEconomic & Political Weeklyon the crisis confronting the Left in India along with the challenging of the basic concepts of communist politics liks democratic centralism, essays which were responded with critical philosophical reading of Revolutionary Marxism, especially on the need of understadning Hegelian dialectics for constructing mass-based communist politices. While the theme of the crisis of the Left formed part of the debate in theEconomic & Political Weeklythere was a dialectical counterpoint that located the crisis in the form of parliamentary politics of the Left that worked in the strange thematic of Marxism devoid of Marx and emancipation devoid of humanity. The crisis of the Left in India was thus not merely pointed to a form of politics that was becoming irrelevant to the Indian masses in the form of social engineering. The crisis was understood as a form of philosophically uninformed Left politics that drew more from Stalin to Mao than on Marx’s emancipatory repertoire itself. The debates on this theme of whether Stalin to Mao are not merely relevant to revolutionary politics, but whether both were essentially counterrevolutionary form a part of this volume. The analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union and whether socialism collapsed in the early 1990s or whether the rise of Stalinism in the late 1920s signified the collapse of socialism forms an important part of this work. The volume stresses on the need for reading Marx’sEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844and his theory of alienation in modern capitalist society along withCapitaland Lenin’sState and Revolution. In order that one contextualises alienation in the larger narrative of class struggle, caste and the Asiatic mode of production, as well as to locate this important debate on the challenges confronting the Indian Left in its important historical and philosophical contexts, other interventions came up, penned especially for this volume, where the relevance of Gramsci along with the questions of the contemporary nature of imperialism and the nature of the socialist alternative, the analysis of the downward slide of the Parliamentary Left in the 2009 National Elections that culminated in the triumph of the Indian fascists in the 2014 National Elections and the inherent opportunist and defeatist nature of parliamentary politics have been included. The analysis of the rise of fascism and its linking to both the violent nature of capital accumulation in the 21st century, as well to the caste syste, also forms a part of this work. The study of European and Indian fascism is also included here. This volume seeks to be both empirical as well as theoretical, where along with Marx’s original works, the ideas of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao Tse-tung, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Paul Sweezy and Salvoj Zizek also emerge in critical discussions.

Murzban Jalis Professor and Director at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune and author of The Seductions of Karl Marx, Zoroastrianism: From Antiquity to the Modern Period(ed.), The New Militants, Why We Are Not HindusandWhat Ails Indian Muslims(ed. with Zaheer Ali).