How will Left fill Achuthanandan void

Before the veteran Communist leader from Kerala, VS Achuthanandan, breathed his last on July 21, he had lived to be 101 years and seen it all: a childhood of poverty, youthful grassroots agitational politics, long innings in the Kerala Legislative Assembly, rise to Chief Ministership. He was a member of the Politburo, the CPI(M)’s highest organisational body. He was a part of factional politics within the party, along with its controversies, disgrace and eventual decline.

On a larger plane, Comrade VS, as he was called, was probably the only one who witnessed all phases of contemporary India’s political history, both pre-and post-independence. He saw the mass movements led by Mahatma Gandhi, observed the politics of both moderate and radical factions within the Congress, and watched the pendulum swings of his fellow Communists in India.

The post-independence period, marked by Nehru’s socialistic vision of a mixed economy led by the public sector, Indira Gandhi’s centralised, personalised politics that was epitomised by the declaration of the Emergency, PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh’s liberal/neo-liberal economic reforms, the Hindutva politics of both Vajpayee and Modi — VS was a witness to it all.

But did he fully comprehend the precipitous decline and growing irrelevance of Left politics in India? It is true that his party, the undivided CPI, was the first Communist party in the world to elect a government in Kerala in 1957. It is also true that the CPI(M) led-LDF continues to do well in Kerala — it broke political convention by forming the government for a second consecutive time in 2021. Except, the Kerala story has increasingly begun to look like an exception to the rule.

In West Bengal, where the Left Front ruled for 34 years, the Left is almost completely marginalised and helplessly watches the TMC-BJP tussle for primacy. The Left has considerably weakened in other states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, etc. where it once had a stronghold.

Here in Punjab, out of a total 126 Assembly seats in the 1952 elections, Left parties had won six, about 6.45% of the vote share. Fast forward to the 2017 and 2022 elections — they won zero seats. The combined Left vote-share today is part of the ‘Others’ category which got 1%.

Nationally, the Left is in a wilderness. From 16 seats in the Lok Sabha in 1952 and 29 seats in 1962, the combined CPI and CPI(M) only have six seats between them today.

You could argue that the strength of the Left should not be judged by electoral politics, but by its strength in trade union-based politics as well as its ability to influence public and policy-making discourse.

If membership is an indicator, the CPI(M)-affiliate CITU has a membership of 7 million, while the RSS-affiliate BMS has a membership of 10 million. There is little doubt that the agitational politics of Left trade unions has been unable to stall or modify the neoliberal economic policies of the last three decades.

The reasons for this decline are two-fold. The past is partially responsible, as is the manner in which the future has shaped itself.

In the past, the either/or manner in which issues and questions were addressed left much to be desired. The character of the capitalist class was either nationalist or comprador. Either the former Soviet Union or China was right. Only one country or one position was meant to be either unreservedly supported and the other thoroughly opposed. The ideological swings were rooted in this binary thinking, leading to the split in 1964.

This was ironical when the claimed source of all Wisdom was Marx, who had always insisted upon the unity between opposites, thereby creating the dynamics for dialectical thinking and development. Marx maintained the necessity for dialectical tension between the whole and its parts, between the universal and specific. But Indian Communists, unlike Chinese Communists (“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was its mantra) refused to take account of the local and immediate, and insisted on universal theorems and practices.

One fallout of this insistence was the culture of ‘oppositionism’. The Congress had to be opposed because it was a bourgeois party, Socialists had to be opposed because they were “pink” rather than “red”, and Naxals had to be opposed because they were driven by ultra-leftist adventurism. In short, if the choice was to be made between enemies and flawed potential allies, flawed potential allies had to be opposed first.

Another fallout of the Left’s insistence on the universal was the rise of university-bred party bureaucrats who, having no firsthand experience of the ground realities, often undermined grassroots leadership, like Achuthanandan. When VS opposed the overgeneralisation of tactics, party bureaucrats accused him of violating party discipline. And out he was sent from key positions.

The second explanation for the Left’s downfall lies in the Left’s inability to understand the capacity of capitalism to constantly reinvent itself. The Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School had pointed this out as long back as the 1920s. The New Left learnt, but the Old Left refused to. Of course, the Old Left did not like the New Left one bit.

If capitalism in the 20th century was nothing like what Marx had seen in the 19th, it followed the 21st century would be even more different. The world in which VS Achuthanandan was born was very different from the world he has just left. The global economy has changed fundamentally. Global corporate entities, not nations, are the principal moving force. Jobless growth and growing inequality is global — this is bound to increase with the exponential growth of artificial intelligence. The casualisation of labour has made working class unity physically impossible.

Today, states are facilitators, not sites of resistance. Mainstream media and social media are both the opium of the masses. Politics has swung to the Right and the democratic space has shrunk. In such a world, the prospect of a Left revival is bleak — unless the Left decides to radically reinvent itself.

Perhaps it’s a tall order. The Left must stop courting the privileged employees of the state-owned, formal sector, instead focus on the wretched of the earth that largely make up the unorganised informal sector and gig economy. It must tie up with other progressive forces such as feminists, Dalits, environmentalists and human rights activists. It must shed its proclivity for class alliances and look for social alliances. Can the Left do this? Will it?

Bhupinder Brar is Professor Emeritus, Panjab University.

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