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Remarx

The Indian Communist Movement at a Crossroads:A Marxian Assessment

Anjan Chakrabarti

Faced with the assault of neoliberal globalization and internecine struggle, theIndian communist movement is shown to be facing a series of inherent contradictionsand an identity crisis that has dented its influence and stifled its growth. Maoism andmainstream communist trends functioning with different goals and strategies exhibita common commitment to state-centric politics and a vanguardist party structurethat comes at the expense of advancing the Marxian project of nonexploitation, fairdistribution, and democracy.

Key Words: Class, State, Democracy, Revolution, Vanguardism

Since its birth as a united Communist party in the 1920s, the communist movement in

India has had a checkered and at times controversial history.1 With sustained struggle

over working-class issues in urban and rural areas, facing and negotiating at times

episodes of bans, arrests, and extermination campaigns, the Indian communist

movement has carved out an influential place for itself, albeit still restricted, in the

Indian body politic. Over the years, however, it got itself ruptured into two political

trends: the call of the ballot (parliamentary democracy), and that of the bullet

(armed revolution). In the current juncture, Indian Marxism as typified by the

communist parties appears not just sundered, but faced with an identity crisis. The

massive defeat of parliamentary communist forces in the May 2011 legislative

elections in the state of Kerala and particularly West Bengal, and the growing

criticisms against the totalitarian nature of Maoist politics, only harden our claim.

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/12/030458-17– 2012 Association for Economic and Social Analysishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2012.685288

1. Our coverage encompasses party-based communist movement; the nonparty politicalformations targeting communism are not our focus here.

RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 24 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2012)

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While the fragmentation of the Indian communist movement began prior to

independence, the first major split led to the formation of the Communist Party of

India (Marxist) (henceforth CPI(M)) out of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1964.

Another materialized within CPI(M) in 1967 to inaugurate the Naxalite movement,

proposing armed peasant insurgency along the purported lines of Mao Zedong. The

latter, along the years, split into numerous components, principal among them, as of

now, the CPI (Maoist) and CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. While diverse communist

parties commonly share Leninist vanguardist organizational structure, the history of

the Indian communist movement is a saga of conflict and contestations not only

against mainstream ideas and institutions, but also within itself: inter- and intraparty

struggle continues to bleed the communist movement in India from within.

For convenience, I break down the multilayered strands of Indian Marxism into two

broad strands: the armed insurgency organized around the CPI (Maoist),2 the largest

underground Communist party; and that of parliamentary democracy practiced by a

conglomeration of Left parties organized around CPI(M),3 the largest mainstream

Communist party. The third strand revolves around the Communist Party of India

(Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (CPI(ML)), which, while maintaining a tense relation with

parliamentary democracy, finds itself increasingly squeezed between the two trends

(opposing Maoism while at the same time opposing the state-sponsored, armed

operation to finish the CPI (Maoist), and opposing CPI(M) even though it enters into

electoral alliances with it or other Left parties in certain places). While acknowl-

edging its uniqueness and accepting the criticism of using a broad brush, my focus is

on the first two trends, which dominate the current Indian scene, with particular

emphasis on the nature of their politics and modes of practice.

I will begin by briefly introducing India’s economic transition currently under way.

Notwithstanding the previous debates on modes of production of India (semifeudal,

colonial, capitalist, and so on) and subalternity (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003,

chaps. 2�5), the unfolding shift in policy regime clearly points to the transformation

of India’s economic map into the circuits of global capital and world of the third

(Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009, 12; Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg 2012). This new

setting will set the context for discussing the state of Indian communism.

The New Indian Economic Map

Following the collapse of centralized planning, India’s development strategy under-

went a dramatic alteration in the early 1990s. Accepting that neoliberal globalization

is the best route to a high-growth path, a new economic policy (NEP) along the lines

of the Washington consensus evolved gradually over the next two decades (Ahluwalia

2002), which, through intended and untended effects, heralded a shift in the

2. CPI (Maoist)’s sway spans unevenly across seven states around central and eastern India, withparticular influence over Adivasi belts.3. The CPI(M)� led left formation is very strong in the states of West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura.Except for the states of Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan, its influence, though, has declined in otherstates where previously it maintained substantial presence.

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direction and structure of the Indian economy. Two historical tendencies particularly

invite attention.

First, NEP aimed at a transition from planned economic development to a

competitive market economy in a global scenario. The market and not the state

was to be the main allocator of resources, competition to be the mechanism to screen

winners and losers, and free trade to define India’s openness and integration into the

process of globalization. Accordingly, a wide array of reforms pertaining to industry,

trade, currency, the financial sector, disinvestment, and privatization of state

enterprises, pension funds, and so on unfolded in the course of the past two decades.

Spurred by its wide industrial base (paradoxically, a gift of its previous import-

substitution policy) and fairly advanced higher education system (also, paradoxically,

courtesy of its erstwhile planning system), Indian industries, particularly the big

business houses, gradually adjusted to the rules and demands of global competition

and, along with new enterprises, mutated into global capitalist enterprises. Through

the market, global capital was linked to ancillary local enterprises (big and small

scale) and other institutions (banking enterprise, trading enterprise, transport

enterprise, etc.), and together they formed the circuits of global capital. Rapid

growth of the Indian economy, propelled by the expansion of the circuits of global

capital within manufacturing and services, is feeding an explosive process of

urbanization in tandem with a culture of individualization and consumerism.

Second, outside the circuits of global capital, a world of the third is being

recreated (Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg 2012; Chakrabarti and Dhar 2012). It

was initially hoped that the trickle-down of the benefits of economic growth

transpiring through the expansion of circuits of global capital would work through

the market. But faltering performance of agriculture in the past two decades,

complemented by the persistence of rural poverty and growing inequality, convinced

policymakers that trickle-down was not sufficiently strong. Thus, the consensus

emerged that sustainability of growth rests on guaranteeing a minimum livelihood for,

and pacifying, the world of the third. To achieve this, parts of growth’s benefit would

have to be distributed through state-directed programs to the world of the third.

Accordingly, income-, employment-, credit-, health-, education-, and pension-

related rural and urban projects, some new and some polished versions of the old,

have become operational.

Currently, India’s development goal is being remodeled and renamed into what is

now called inclusive development (sometimes, inclusive growth), which basically

combines high economic growth and redressing of income inequity and social

exclusion through redistributive programs. Accordingly, the rationale of the Indian

state has undergone a transition. Besides creating, organizing, promoting, and, to an

extent, regulating the competitive market economy, the (neoliberal) state is

‘enabling’ that economy by not interfering with its functions, thus allowing the

independent agents to sort out economic outcomes on their own. In contrast, the

state in its dirigiste capacity is ‘enabling’ by virtue of being the director and

controller of the poverty-management exercise so as to actively intervene in the

world of the third in the name of uplifting third world India. The emerging Indian

state arising from the transformed economic map of the circuits of global capital and

world of the third is thus simultaneously neoliberal and dirigiste. Combining this with

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the belief in parliamentary democracy makes the Indian state ‘modern’; the ‘modern

state’ operates with both repressive and ideological apparatuses to fulfil its

objectives.

Transition and Marxism in India

Prior to the NEP, Indian communist movements organized themselves against the

backdrop of the strong role of the state, relatively weak capitalist classes, and a

populated agriculture characterized by sharp class divisions working in conjunction

with entrenched caste-gender-religion interfaces.4 Industrial and agrarian social

movements conducted through parliamentary and extraparliamentary means led to

ground-level transformations, including radical reforms such as land reforms in Kerala

and West Bengal that helped catapult the social prestige, organization, and popular

base of Indian communist parties. Following neoliberal globalization ushered in

through the NEP, the ongoing, profound structural transformation of the Indian

economy and culture has changed the situation.

With the transformations of India’s economic map and of the role of state, the

relative power within the circuits of global capital started shifting toward (global)

capital at the cost of the industrial working class and unions. The logic of capitalist

competition leads to a demand for flexibility in working conditions, and thus for

employing temporary and casual workers while outsourcing activities and jobs; these

changes are appearing alongside the growing income division within the working class,

with a section receiving astronomically high wages. The combination of these changes is

making the old-style trade union method of organizing workers, which presumed

permanent and relatively immobile groups of workers with a tolerable income

difference, increasingly difficult to conduct. Moreover, there is a growing attack on

the radical idea of the ‘worker’, ‘working class’, and ‘trade union’; it includes attempts

to represent the worker as homo economicus, the idea of class and its politics as dated,

and trade unions as redundant and obstructive. While the increasing number of workers

due to industrialization is favorable to communists, the changing structure of

subjective transformation toward individualization coupled with the dissemination of

antiworker tropes through ideological apparatuses such as the state, business

organizations, media, and academia make organizing and maintaining the militancy

of the workers tough; this is not to discount in anyway the repressive apparatus that

have become more nuanced and potent. It is not clear as yet whether Indian

communists have quite fathomed the extent of the changes in economic structure, in

the forms of ideological apparatus, or in the micromodalities of power and norms.

Rather than adapting Marxian politics and practices to confront this ongoing transition,

the response has been confused and counterproductive, as I’ll try to explain.

On the other hand, two counteracting tendencies can be located with respect to

the world of the third, especially its agrarian component. Following the relentless

4. Indian communist parties, without exception, define class as a group of persons defined interms of power and property. This is unlike the understanding of class as processes of surpluslabor (see Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003, chaps. 2�5).

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expansion of the circuits of global capital, the breakdown of agrarian society and of

its way of life aggravated the situation of its stakeholders; the severity falls

disproportionately on the rural proletariat and small farmers showing up in the

phenomena of crop failures, illegal leasing of land, indebtedness, starvation, and

even farmers’ suicides. The structural transformation in many instances has led to the

dislocation of world of the third agrarian societies (particularly the adivasi or

indigenous populations) through the process of land acquisition, mainly state-

sponsored, where land once acquired is delivered to private or public operators,

and land selling (mainly sponsored by private operators for industrial, including real

estate, purposes). Specifically, land acquisitions and sales have been feeding

industrial expansion, including the creation of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ);

the expansion of cities, towns, and roadways; and the augmented extraction of

minerals to feed rapid industrialization at home and abroad. These have lead to the

eruption of agrarian social movements directed at the state-capital nexus. However,

alongside the dismantling of the world of the third in the manner described above,

there is also the seemingly contradictory practice of state-sponsored social programs

directed toward uplifting the world of the third under the template of inclusive

development; the world of the third is preserved and dislocated in one turn. The

response of communist parties to both these phenomena, as I will argue, lacks clarity.

Coupled with these trends, the last two decades witnessed a serious questioning of

the extant caste, gender, and religious divisions in India and of the movements to

eradicate, transform, or preserve them. Coming to terms with these divides/struggles

and their overdetermined relation with existing class processes would go a long way in

explaining the profound transformation of Indian society. Given the fast-changing

shifts of caste, gender, and religious processes vis-a-vis class processes, communists

are facing an increasingly complex and competing terrain in which to locate and

direct their politics, particularly class-related ones.

Left, Right, Left, Right . . . The Maoist Route

Notwithstanding the massive deployment of repressive state apparatuses (symbolized

by operation Green Hunt),5 the ruling coterie leading the charge against Maoism is

fully aware that this is no ordinary war campaign. The modes of repression are

conjoined with ideological state and private apparatuses to turn the war against CPI

(Maoist) into a war of benevolence waged to liberate the rural populace, principally

the Adivasis (the indigenous population) and Dalits (hitherto the untouchables, in the

hierarchy of the caste system) from a decrepit state of life. Hence the war campaign

is conjoined with, and turned into, a campaign for the development of Adivasis and

Dalits; many new rural development projects have been and are being initiated as

part of this campaign to isolate the Maoists. This indicates that Maoism is addressing

concerns and issues rooted in the forms of life of ordinary Indians, at least of

marginalized sections of the population large enough to make it, in the words of the

5. Green Hunt is the code name of the countrywide operation launched by the centralgovernment against the Maoists who have been legally conferred the status of ‘terrorists’.

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Indian Prime Minister, India’s ‘‘biggest internal threat.’’ Yet the Maoist struggle has

several limitations that dent its potency (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2010).

Cultivating exclusively extraparliamentary political space, Indian Maoism exhibits

two properties: state centrism (i.e., the capture of state power), and armed struggle.

Armed insurrection against the state to initiate the New Democratic Revolution is

supposed to overthrow the ruling class which comprises the ‘‘class of comprador

bureaucrat capitalists’’ composed of ‘‘a nexus of top politicians, top bureaucrats and

the big business house’’ who are in direct alliance with semifeudal forces in the

countryside, and indirect alliance with the imperialists, particularly the United States

(Arvind 2002; also see Indian Maoists 2009). The ‘developmental’ face of state is

dismissed as the mask of a repressive state and its ploy to assimilate the oppressed

and expropriate their true demands.

Why does CPI (Maoist) propagate the ‘‘capture of state power through armed

struggle’’?

This state machinery is nothing but an instrument of suppression andrepression, and represents the dictatorship of the comprador bourgeoisieand landlord classes subservient to imperialism. The repressive rule is soughtto be covered up behind the facade of fraudulent parliamentary system. Thisstate system represents the semi-colonial, semifeudal system under neo-colonial form of indirect rule, exploitation and control. During the recentyears, the repressive teeth of this state system has not only been furthersharpened but also centralized more and more by the compradorfeudalalliance backed by imperialism . . . Without smashing this state machinery, anystruggle for the basic rights and problems of the people and for their upliftingcannot move forward beyond a limited level. (CPI (Maoist) 2004a, 17)

What catches attention here is the projected homogenization of the Indian

economy into a semifeudal/semicolonial6 structure that fails to appreciate and

analyze the decentered and disaggregated nature of the Indian economy, of its

multilayered organizations of surplus, and equally diverse modes of power that could

been accessed if a class-focused analysis had been undertaken, where class is defined

as a process of surplus labor. Instead, the Maoists defined and analyzed class not as

process, but as a group of people predicated on property-power rather than surplus

labor.

6. Here is the Maoist assessment of the Indian mode of production as semifeudal andsemicolonial: ‘‘after the British colonialists were compelled to give up their direct rule overour country, the power was transferred to their compradors*the big bourgeoisie and biglandlords, on condition that the imperialist capital and their interests are protected. Severalimperialist powers took the place of British imperialism in oppressing and exploiting our country.It is these imperialist powers that actually control the politics, economy and culture and decidealmost all the vital policies of the ruling classes of India under the sign-board of formalindependence that is fake in essence. Thus, as no single imperialist power is in a position toexercise its control and rule over the country as a whole, India is not a neo-colony but continuesto be a semi-colony under the indirect rule, exploitation and control of various imperialistpowers. Hence we call India as a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country under neo-colonial form ofindirect rule, exploitation and control’’ (CPI (Maoist),2004b, 14).

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This apparently reductionist conception of economy is complemented by an equally

reductionist understanding of the state as being exclusively (only) repressive and at

the disposal of the ruling class, perpetuating the semifeudal, semicolonial system.

Maoism misses the point that the state embodies the mechanics of ideological

consent, even in its most repressive manifestation. Instead, the ideological

apparatuses are seen as a mere supplement to repressive apparatuses and hence

do not warrant much theoretical engagement; the new modes of power and the

emerging governance structures procreating outside the compass of the state are

simply ignored. That being the case, the Maoist theorization renders the Indian state

apparatuses as predominantly ‘premodern’, organized around and through the

centralized power made up of ministries, bureaucracy, police, military, and court.

This coterie embodies the interests of the ruling class, as already described. The

Indian state is considered both the strongest and the weakest link of this system,

which must be captured through violent means. Because its politics is state-centered,

which is theorized as repressive, CPI (Maoist) argues that the sovereign/state must be

countered in its own language: repression with repression, force with force. ‘‘In order

to defeat the offensive campaign of the enemy the people’s guerrilla army should

mobilise the people in a big way for political and military actions and should carry on

enemy annihilation operations extensively which includes sabotage actions also’’ (CPI

(Maoist) 2004b, 66). Its emphasis on class as a group of people divided by power/

property helps supplement its class annihilation thesis since class struggle now could

be held as a struggle between two groups of people*one, a bloodthirsty, repressive

group, and the other, the repressed. Class struggle thus gets reduced to class

annihilation rather than a struggle over processes (of surplus labor). Following its

version of class struggle, only after the violent capture of the state can true social

change, including true democracy, be ushered in.

It is important to ask whether the Maoists have any position regarding democracy.

Maoists reject parliamentary democracy as a sham just as they reject its predicate,

the premodern state conceptualized as serving the semifeudal, semicolonial system.

Yet, while initiating a violent revolution by erasing all spaces of dissent to its ideology,

the Maoists seek to ‘‘democratise the social fabric of the country by smashing the

backward and retrogressive semi-feudal relations in the countryside . . . build a new

democratic culture . . . build a democratic modern India’’ (Arvind 2002, 255�6). It is

not clear, though, how encapsulating ‘true’ democracy within the logic of armed

struggle directed against the state will allow for the space needed for democratiza-

tion; for example, smashing ‘semifeudal, semicolonial’ relations by superimposing

Maoist rule may stifle, instead of advancing, the process of democratization, a point

we shall soon touch upon. Capturing state power through armed struggle is one thing;

democratizing the social fabric quite another. The result: the Maoist model of Jacobin

terror sits uncomfortably with its slogan of ‘true’ democracy, which evidently cannot

allow dissent to its rule.

The problem of handling dissent in the Maoist paradigm can be gauged from its

strategy of managing social movements. The proliferating social movements (say,

against land acquisition or eviction of squatters/hawkers/bustees), tending to expand

democratic potential through the cultivation of diverse ground-level opinions and

organizations, typically run against the Maoist logic of armed struggle. From the

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Maoist perspective, it is important to incarcerate the social movements within the

ambit of armed struggle so as to channel the feeling of discontent in favor of its

objective of capturing state power. This requires, as has been tried with many social

movements (unsuccessfully in Nandigram and successfully in Lalgarh, a disciplining of

social movements that claims its usual price: the process of democratization itself.7

This explains why CPI (Maoist) has an ambivalent position vis-a-vis social movements.

Social movements offer it the space of discontent that it wishes to cultivate for

expanding the scope of armed struggle; however, because social movements also

thrive on a diversified space of dissent/difference that overflows the discipline and

boundary of armed struggle, they need to be domesticated. Battle zones opened up

by social movements need to be transformed into ‘free zones’, free of dissent/

difference and world-views other than the Maoist one; free/liberated zones are

turned into a ‘base’ of opposition to the state. By literally creating a ‘parallel state’

(Janatana Sarkar or People’s Government) grounded in contesting repressive

apparatuses that keeps track of ‘traitors’ and ‘reactionaries’, it purloins the

possibility of democratization as a political objective. Maoist strategy may indeed

be relevant and even exhibit relative success if there is no scope for social

movements*that is to say, when the state becomes exclusively repressive, as has

often been the case with its dealings with Adivasis and Dalits; it could also have initial

success if the local caste-class difference is extreme, making nonviolent social

movements against oppressive structures difficult to originate. However, if alter-

native social movements find the space in which to function, Maoist political

imagination becomes a barrier, at least on grounds of cultivating and spreading the

democratization process among the masses.

Social movements and the democratization process need to be comprehended

within a disaggregated understanding of social reality; diverse situations, not least

resulting from multifaceted class organization of surplus, give rise to a variety of

problems and demand multiple modes of intervention. In contrast, Maoist armed

struggle, with its tendency to homogenize otherwise disaggregated reality, defies and

obfuscates differences resulting in collateral damages. Situations that could be

handled without violence are subjected to the arbitration of the sword, where

everybody is potentially a (class) enemy, where villagers and neighbors begin to be

perceived with suspicion as possible agents of the state.

Ironically, in addition to being wrongly displaced into class annihilation, as we have

argued, class struggle also ends up being demoted. Disaggregated class organization

of surplus demands a variety of class struggles with differentiated strategies instead

of reducing them to a singular kind of struggle*namely, state-oriented armed

struggle. By emphasizing the latter, CPI (Maoist) demotes the former, which shows up

in their tactics of allying with dominant classes or supporting ‘bourgeois’ parties in

elections at the local level if this is envisaged to secure territorial control and benefit

7. Having helped the opposition Trinamool Congress (TMC)� led social movement to gain afoothold in Nandigram, the CPI (Maoist) subsequently found itself ousted from the area by TMC.In the Lalgarh movement, it made a conscious effort to keep the area under its control, therebyrefusing to provide any political space to TMC or other social forces. Even the local socialmovement that pioneered the Lalgarh movement was subsequently brought under its control.

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the logic of armed struggle. In a war over territory, class struggle is evidently not the

central concern of CPI (Maoist).

CPI (Maoist) also remains at odds with alternative social constructions promoting

nonexploitative organizations of surplus with the intention of community building.

Such alternatives, even Marxist ones as exemplified in the practice of Shankar Guha

Neogi led Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha or CMM (translated as Chhattisgarh Liberation

Front),8 offer alternatives to capitalist development without any necessary commit-

ment to armed struggle or capture of state power. The language of such struggle is

constructionist (Nirman), whose very manifestation in terms of the alternative

language-logic-experience-ethos it embodies encapsulates a struggle (Sangharsh)

against the dominant order. Similarly, Sangharsh embodies the potentiality of Nirman.

In this Nirman-Sangharsh model, the emphasis is not on arms but on the exploited,

oppressed, and marginalized masses making history through social construction

(village development, cooperatives, and community construction) that operates on

principles of cooperation, sharing, and solidarity; its ethic is not self-centered

individualism, unbridled competition, and management of humans. Notwithstanding

the strengths or weaknesses of the Nirman-Sangharsh model, the point I am trying to

make is that Maoism is inherently incapable of facing, let alone accommodating, such

models that are ostensibly fostering noncapitalist alternatives. Maoism cannot

comprehend disaggregation/difference, and its framework cannot even embrace a

differentiated field of noncapitalist experiences; ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’

becomes ‘Maoist dictatorship over the proletariat’. Not only has Maoism no place for

parliamentary democracy in its political imagination and praxis, but it has none

whatsoever for ground-level democratization, either.

Our overall discussion suggests a deep-seated paradox underlying the Maoist

paradigm. CPI (Maoist) considers it legitimate to protect the multitude, including the

Adivasis, from the repressive state. By modeling its political organization, goal,

strategy, and tactics around a model of governance that is designed to counter the

state-sponsored one, it projects the state’s model of governance a la its repressive

form, back onto itself. The very model that functions against the state becomes the

practical form of governance that appears over and above the constituents it plans to

protect. Not surprisingly, in areas of its influence, Maoists bring the ‘liberated’

population under the repressive model of governance similar to that of the state; the

functions of Jan Adalat or Peoples Court, under the strict vigilance of armed cadres

taking ‘class enemies’ to task that includes summary executions, are now well

documented. The liberated multitudes that see virtues in the Maoists today come to

view them as oppressors tomorrow, a scenario that seems to be acted out repeatedly.

The CPI (Maoist) program of capturing the state through armed struggle begs this

question: why is the Maoist model of governance any different from that adopted by

the state it opposes?

8. Inspired by but expanding beyond the Marxian theme of nonexploitative organization,Gandhian politics of swaraj and village development, and Rabindranath Tagore’s samavaya/cooperation ethic, CCM combined the trade union movement and village-based communityconstruct to launch a unique movement of social reconstruction in the state of Chattishgarh(Basu 2008).

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Communist Parties in a Parliamentary Democracy

The participation of legal communist parties in a parliamentary democracy sits

uncomfortably with the proposed political horizon they claim beckons a revolution.

Let us explore by focusing on CPI(M). In its assessment, ‘‘The present Indian State is

the organ of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and landlords led by the big bourgeoisie,

who are increasingly collaborating with foreign finance capital in pursuit of the

capitalist path of development. This class character essentially determines the role

and function of State in the life of the country’’ (CPI(M) 2011, 5.1).

The exploitative and oppressive system supported by the state will have to be met

by the Peoples Democratic Front (PDF), led by the working class in alliance with the

peasantry in order to initiate a Peoples Democratic Revolution (PDR) as a stepping

stone to socialism. Moreover:

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) strives to achieve the establishmentof people’s democracy and socialist transformation through peaceful means.By developing a powerful mass revolutionary movement, by combiningparliamentary and extra parliamentary forms of struggle, the working classand its allies will try their utmost to overcome the resistance of the forces ofreaction and to bring about these transformations through peaceful means.However, it needs always to be borne in mind that the ruling classes neverrelinquish their power voluntarily. They seek to defy the will of the peopleand seek to reverse it by lawlessness and violence. It is, therefore, necessaryfor the revolutionary forces to be vigilant and so orient their work that theycan face up to all contingencies, to any twist and turn in the political life ofthe country. (CPI(M) 2011, 7.8)

Outside the problems of the representation of the economy as a homogenous entity

and the understanding of class (like the Maoists, in terms of a group of people, rather

than process, predicated on power/property rather than surplus labor, whose

problems have already been highlighted), the CPI(M)’s program and practice contain

a few areas of ambivalence of which only three will be highlighted below. First, PDR

and its participation in state-centered politics render its stance on state and

democracy fuzzy. Second, as the balance of CPI(M)’s politics tilted toward state-

centered politics, it disturbed and ultimately blew up its class alliance of workers and

peasants, as we shall argue looking at the case of West Bengal. Third, retaining a

vanguard party directed toward PDR and governing the modernist-developmental

state in terms of the neoliberal rationale is problematical.

To begin with, if the CPI(M) accepts parliamentary democracy that reduces

democracy to statecraft, what remains unaddressed is the issue of the state’s

repressive and ideological apparatuses, which are conjoined with the capitalist

organization of exploitation and of its conditions of existence. What about the

rationale of this modern state if, as Marx (1975) argued, its political content lies in

formally circumscribing democracy to the domain of representative democracy and

rendering ‘civil’ society as an apolitical space represented by a multitude of

competing, atomized individuals in a market economy? Crucially, this civil society is

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represented as devoid of social divisions, notably class divisions; with existing class

division repressed, the rationale for conducting political struggle over the organiza-

tions of exploitation gets sidelined or is rendered absent. Marx critiqued liberal

political economy for this repression of the organization of exploitation that

structures a class-divided society. Instead, following Marx, it can be argued that

politics should attend to class division by struggling for a reorganization of surplus

along the lines of nonexploitation and fair distribution, which can be achieved by

further deepening democracy (requiring, at the minimum, that those who perform

surplus labor must participate in appropriating and distributing the surplus);

unmediated participation in decision over surplus is a necessary condition for

ensuring peoples’ freedom to control and govern their economic life; ‘democracy’

must conjoin economic democracy with political democracy. This democracy in

association with nonexploitation and fair distribution constitutes the Marxian

political, which inevitably is a struggle against capitalist development (Chakrabarti

and Dhar 2010). Such a Marxian politics attuned toward producing and realizing this

democratic potential is distant from the kinds of governance not only proposed by the

Maoists, but even those embraced by conventional Marxists such as CPI(M) through its

acceptance of the modernist-developmental state with its repressive and ideological

apparatuses working with the underlying rationale by which capitalist exploitation, its

embedded inequity, and ubiquitous networks of plunder could function with impunity.

In this context, how communist practice circumscribed in the networks of statecraft

is to be related to this impulse of ‘Marxian’ political practice that envisages a deeper

vision of democracy remains unclear.

While the CPI(M) does also invoke extraparliamentary means for its political

objectives, it is not clear ‘what’ these are and what is their extent of challenging the

‘ruling class’ and state. That is, the questions of how challenging these are to the

basic liberal division between state and civil society, and whether these are seeking

accommodation with and/or further extension of the liberal idea of democracy,

remain unanswered. In an age when the state gives space for extraparliamentary

politics that parties of all dispositions now use, to the extent that the demands are

ultimately negotiated through and within the realm of the state, the danger of

complicity of such movements in and their reduction to the domain of statecraft and

the underlying rule of law that protects the ‘ruling class’ is palpable. CPI(M) decided

to walk into this space of state-centric politics with the intent of extending the

‘extraparliamentary’ struggle and, through it, its proposed revolution. As we shall

describe below, the above strategy gradually opened a can of worms that led to a

growing schism between the party’s objective of PDR and its practice.

The inherent problems of locating Marxian politics within the rationale of a

modernist-developmentalist state particularly came to the forefront in West Bengal,

which witnessed thirty-four years of uninterrupted Left Front rule (1977�2011),

showcased by the Indian left as an outstanding example of left governance

(Chakrabarti 2009a). Riding on decades of uninterrupted social movements and pro-

poor politics conditioned by a projected anticapitalist stance, the CPI(M)� led Left

Front under the late Jyoti Basu’s leadership came to power in 1977. During 1977�87,

while it did not try to establish communist enterprises with workers performing and

appropriating surplus value, it was credited for initiating unprecedented land

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reforms, local governance models requiring electoral mandate, giving rights and

transferring power to the workers and poor, and maintaining a critical attitude toward

the central government policies; all these were initiated to advance the stage of PDR

and helped cement a deep-seated connection of the Left Front with the industrial and

rural workers as well as the small peasants. Following an interim period of indecision

regarding which course to follow next, the party started veering toward the

neoliberal model of capitalist development under Buddhadev Bhattacharyaa’s reign

(2001�11); the rest of the Left Front partners, albeit reluctantly, followed suit. In the

past decade, even as the parent body of CPI(M) opposed many facets of neoliberal

policies of the central government such as disinvestment and privatization, dereg-

ulation (including the financial sector), pension fund reform, and labor law reform,

its policies at the state level, especially in West Bengal, ended up compromising with

neoliberal globalization. Embracing neoliberal policies in West Bengal alongside its

opposition at the central level pointed to an ambiguity in its ‘Marxist’ politics that

made the party look increasing hypocritical and its identity suspect, saying one thing

in opposition and doing exactly what it says it opposes otherwise when in power.

To justify the shift in West Bengal policy, the state unit of CPI(M) acceded to what

Marx critiqued as the fatalistic ‘historico-philosophical’ model of progress, propagat-

ing an inevitable transition from agricultural to industrial society. With capitalism

comprehended as the maker of industrial society, the role of the party in conjunction

with the state was seen as essential to secure the conditions for the expansion of

global capital and its circuits. Instead of confronting neoliberal globalization and

reorienting the working-class movement in this new scenario, CPI(M) adjusted itself

to neoliberal globalization and consequently supported the expansion of global

capitalism. The historically combative position of West Bengal CPI(M) vis-a-vis the

central government policy subsequently also melted away.

As the historic shift of emphasis from social movement to state-centered practice

evolved, the trade unions were pacified and attempts made to control the industrial

workers to facilitate capitalist-induced industrialization. In many instances, this

collaboration of CPI(M) and its unions with capitalists became fraught with

impotence, sell-out, and corruption; the growing complicity with capitalists,

promoters, and realtors became in the end so palpable that even the party bosses

started warning against its pernicious effects.9 With this political shift toward the

rural constituency of small farmers and agricultural workers who were its mainstay

alongside the industrial working class, the party lost its pride of place, and attempts

were initiated to sell to it the dream of an industrial society; this turn ultimately

culminated in the party’s acceptance of land acquisition and SEZ as a legitimate

strategy. As against initiating movements for the workers and small farmers so as to

9. The Central Committee of CPI(M) openly acknowledged in January 2010 that ‘‘Where theParty is strong, in some places, there are instances of these vested interests trying to influenceour comrades. Real estate promoters, contractors and liquor contractors seek to establishconnections with our comrades and those working in panchayats, local bodies and electedpositions’’ (CPI (Marxist) 2010, 69). After six months, as part of its rectification campaign, theWest Bengal state committee of CPI(M) issued a circular, warning party members of theseinfluences within its ranks and beyond.

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advance PDR, the vanguardism of the party was reoriented to fulfill this historic shift

of pacification in both rural and urban areas which, however, over time had the

contradictory effect of shifting the identity of the party itself from being ‘pro-poor’

to ‘anti-poor’ in the eyes of its traditional constituents.

Since its election victory in 2006, the CPI(M)� led government sponsored a well-

advertised land acquisition campaign to expropriate land from the peasantry in order

to hand it over to global capitalists (Chakrabarti 2009a, 2009b). Its abrasive policy of

land acquisition culminated in the spirited resistance of peasants in Singur and

Nandigram, which served as a catalyst for many segments of the population, including

sections of intellectuals, to organize and push forward a trenchant opposition to the

CPI(M) regime. These opposing voices ultimately congregated under the banner of the

major opposition party of Trinamool Congress. Not only was the CPI(M) seen as blatant

procapitalist, but its method of land acquisition combining the repressive apparatus

of both the state and party turned Marx’s emphasis on the politics of democratization

upside down. The far-reaching symbolic effect of Singur and Nandigram can be seen

by the impact land acquisition and its resistance generally had on the West Bengal

peasants, who erupted into fierce opposition to tentative plans or even rumors of

land acquisition. The final straw was the Lalgarh movement CPI (M)’s traditional

Adivasi stronghold in Midnapore-Purulia-Bankura, which was met with the invocation

of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), a law created by the central

government against Maoist ‘terrorists’, genuine or otherwise. Faced with a life-

and-death struggle with the Maoists, the alignment of CPI(M) with the paramilitary

forces soon became identified with the suppression of local people, including their

traditional Adivasi supporters; this is not to forget that the Maoists indulged in their

own quota of exterminating CPI(M) supporters, thus pointing to another ugly bout of

internecine battle between communist groups. A segment of the working class was

already smarting under severe pressure from the effects of competition and flexibility

imposed by the logic of capital. Complementing this was the passive and at times

antiworker stance of left trade unions with respect to private capital. Not

surprisingly, this section found the CPI(M)’s procapitalist inclinations too much to

consume and abandoned the Left Front. Compounding this problem was the utter

failure on the part of the Left Front to fathom the template of inclusive development

and specifically the importance of the redistributive programs initiated by central

governments, but implemented through state government. While many state

governments took advantage of this available fund to increase their influence over

the poor and ‘socially excluded’, especially in the rural areas, the Left Front, because

of its myopic gaze on industrialization and governance malfunctioning at the local

level mainly controlled by its member parties, failed to properly implement the

programs; this failure on social programs was particularly disturbing, given that it has

been traditionally strong in this area and once showed the way to the rest of the

country. The already gathering discontent, especially among the rural mass, found

additional ammunition. Notwithstanding the effort to transfer the blame of defeat on

the central leadership’s withdrawal of support to the UPA government on nuclear

issue so as to divert attention from their own internal failings, there is no doubt that

it was the combination of all these internal factors which led to a process of shifting

allegiance, which culminated in a mass movement against the CPI(M)� led Left Front,

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leading to a series of devastating electoral defeats in parliamentary and local

elections. With a dented legitimacy that has made governance unmanageable, the

destiny of the Left Front and CPI(M) was sealed; the scale of its debacle in the state

assembly election in May 2011 conformed with the disconnect from its major

constituents*that is, the urban and rural workers and small farmers. With its support

among the workers and small peasants weakened, the CPI(M)’s program of PDR, which

was supposed to have seen further extension through the West Bengal experiment,

now lies in tatters. If anything, CPI(M)’s experiment in West Bengal has shown the

limitation of its program of shaping PDR from within the womb of a capitalist,

competitive market economy sustained by a supportive state.

The fallout from the events in West Bengal had already severely damaged the

conventional communist movement in India. Its electoral defeat in West Bengal and in

Kerala (albeit in a close contest) is bound to further compound its already dented image

and influence. Across India, its previously significant presence and role in social

movements, including in the rural heartland, was evidently hit hard, which, increas-

ingly, is being shouldered by the noncommunist left and, to an extent, the Maoists.

Having realized the gravity of the situation, the central leadership of CPI(M) is currently

trying to put the focus back on neoliberalism and capitalism as its main adversary; the

party resolution in the Vijaywada convention in August 2010, the central committee

meeting at Hyderabad in June 2011, and the 20th party congress in Kozhikode in

February 2012 pointed to this effort at damage control when calling for changing the

old land acquisition act, for supporting the peasant movement against land acquisition

and redirecting its opposition to the combined forces of neoliberal globalization and

global capitalism. Given that the identity of the party is perceived as having shifted,

and the intractable nature of the inherent ambiguities between its long-run objective

and short-run practice, reclaiming its prestige is naturally a Herculean task.

The Problem of Marxian Practice: Vanguardism

One stunning similarity among diverse communist parties of India, legal or illegal, is

their Leninist, vanguardist party structure with a commitment to democratic

centralism; the Jacobin political imperative, openly evident in Maoism and latently

in CPI(M), helps sustain it. But, problematically, the context of vanguardism in which

Lenin operated hardly exists in India’s current scenario, making Leninist organization

a stumbling block rather than an aid in shaping communist politics in the country.

Locating the Russian state as fundamentally ‘premodern’ and repressive, Lenin put

forth two reasons for the success of the Bolshevik revolution: ‘‘the most rigorous and

truly iron discipline in our party (and) the fullest and unreserved support from the

entire mass of the working class’’ (Lenin 1968, 514). Gramsci later warned, ‘‘In Russia

the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West,

there was a proper relationship between the state and civil society, and when the

state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed’’ (1971, 236).

With a somewhat modern state and with the ongoing attempt to transform society

into a competitive market society under neoliberalism, Gramsci’s insight is even more

relevant today than ever before, at least in India.

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The problem with a vanguard party is both methodological and substantive (Hindess

1986; Laclau 1988; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003, chaps. 1 and 3). One problem

flows from the perceived inability of structurally defined workers (class in itself) to

transform themselves into a working-class agent of proletarian revolution (class for

itself), referred to as the problem of false consciousness. However, while false

consciousness explains the need for a party of educators (vanguardists), it has been

shown that it cannot serve as a legitimate explanation of actual consciousness

thereby failing to rationalize in the first place why a movement from class in itself to

class for itself is actually not transpiring. The hollowness of false consciousness as an

explanatory variable thus makes the rationale of the vanguard party moot.

The problem with vanguardist organization is further compounded by the fact that

party organization and its activities come to be based on the presumption of people/

workers as akin to children, as suffering from a deficiency of knowledge and truth and

hence in need of parenting. The vanguard party is akin to the pastoral model requiring

the shepherd to guide the flock of sheep from a state of delusion to salvation.

Moreover, with the vanguard party acting as a mediator between workers and

revolution, it is unclear how the Marxian goal of unmediated rule of workers over

their economic life would be realized; many a movement/revolution has stumbled

over the pulls and pushes between mediation and nonmediation or between

dictatorship (of the vanguard party equated with the proletariat) and democracy.

India’s communist movement is no exception.

In a scenario where ‘civil society’ has developed to inculcate principles of

individualism and freedom (no matter how faulty these are) and where, in a country,

literally thousands of systems of thoughts and sects connected to nonmodern modes

of language-logic-experience-ethos exist, thus producing vastly disaggregated cultur-

al structures to thrive, the limitation of the Leninist-type pastoral model of

vanguardism becomes glaring. Moreover, the issue is not merely about what

vanguardism excludes, but also what it makes of the party*a totalitarian entity

tuned into Jacobin-style practice. The rule of the party and its diktat, while

appearing tolerable when it is leading movements and initiating progressive

programs, soon becomes unbearable under normal circumstances when its desire to

control social life becomes a ritual.

The methodological problem of vanguardism acquires a specific character when the

rule of the modernist state with its repertoire of repressive and ideological

apparatuses is combined with the rule of the vanguard party, as in the case of

CPI(M). Ensured of totalitarian control inside the hierarchical party setup, vanguard-

ism soon starts to transfer that control over the masses and increasingly renders the

democratic credential of its politics, parliamentary or otherwise, suspect. Interest-

ingly, the parliamentary politics of CPI(M) produced a reverse effect on the vanguard

party; the army-style regimentation and discipline demanded of a vanguard party

targeting revolution is subverted from within by the demand for adjustment and

accommodation with the passage to capitalist development and its accompanying

statecraft flowing from an engagement with parliamentary politics. As the CPI(M)

grew in numbers, its obesity hid the disintegration of its health just as Lenin warned

in his essay: ‘‘fewer better but better.’’ While this adjustment within the language-

logic-experience-ethos of capitalist development explains why the marriage of CPI(M)

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vanguardism with the neoliberal art of governance could transpire, it also exposes, in

the face of trenchant opposition, the hollowness of its once formidable organizational

structure, which is now showing signs of severe strain.

On the other hand, the CPI (Maoist) guerrilla struggle, while not directly facing the

problem of the influence of parliamentary politics, nevertheless does encounter the

problem of negotiating with civil society and nonmodern cultural structures, some

exhibiting resistance to the culture of violence. The CPI (Maoist), with its army-style

regimented party requiring an iron discipline, finds its presence limited to certain

areas; this, however, is not surprising since its party structure geared toward the

universalized logic of repression (on oneself and on others) is unable to cope with

differentiated and contesting modes of assessment, rationalization, judgments, and

decisionmaking that define social life over much of India, including the fast-growing

urban space.

Conclusion

Without demoting the importance of the growing state-capital-media onslaught on

the imagery of communism that is complementing the shifting geography of India’s

economic map, my focus in this essay has been to highlight the internal crisis of both

Marxian politics and its forms of practice. This sense of crisis has deepened following

the electoral defeat of the parliamentary left and the partial effectiveness of the

state-sponsored attack on the Maoist route. Besides the problems already high-

lighted, I would end by saying that perhaps it is time to recognize that, while

communists have been good at opposition and in initiating movements, they have

stumbled on the question of governing, whether that be through the illegal Janatana

Sarkar of the Maoist or in using the modernist statecraft. Because of the nature of

politics, they have not, as yet, found a way to articulate a methodology of

governance different from the modernist state moored in liberalism. Communist

politics in India, in the twenty-first century, calls not just for rethinking Marxism, but

perhaps, given our predicament here, for a redoing of Marxism.

Acknowledgments

Anup Dhar can claim a share of the credit for many of my arguments. I am also

thankful to Serap Kayatekin for her comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer

applies.

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