Murzban Jal

Abstract

With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs that there is pressure for the two to unite to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in the 2014 National Elections. These views echo the line of the General Secretary Sitaram Yechury of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), a view that seems to echo the old revisionist S.A. Dange line of the former united Communist Party of India, which talked of a collaboration with the Indian National Congress and total abandonment of the idea of the Indian Revolution. This essay claims that the Left needs to go back to its philosophical roots and rediscover themselves rather than getting involved in the tactical maneuvers of parliamentary politics, tactics that are increasing becoming devoid of ethics. It also claims that the Left in this philosophic discovery totally transcends Stalinism of all sorts, which is stated not merely as a deviation or an accident, but a counterrevolution against the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and Marxism in general. In this philosophical rediscovery, the essay also asserts that liberalism and Gandhism are alien trends to Marxism and cannot be considered otherwise. Instead, one needs to go to Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar for a radical critique of the Indian rightwing project.

Keywords

Marxism, Stalinism, Indian Revolution, Gandhi, Liberalism, Phule, Ambedkar

From: Critique 2019 47 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi