Red
Brigade: Indian Communists Rally and Reflect
DECEMBER 28,
2015
§
About a million Communists and sympathizers gathered in the center of
Kolkata, India, for a massive rally on December 27. The rally took place on
what is alternatively called the Maidan or the Brigade Ground. Red Flags
fluttered from one end of the Maidan to the other. Two distinct but related
events occasioned this massive show of force. The West Bengal Assembly
elections will take place in 2016 – it is the first event of importance. The
second is the Organizational Plenum being held by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) [CPI-M], its first such meeting after thirty-seven years. The Plenum
will run for four days, setting the CPI-M up not only for the short-term
electoral challenges it faces but also the longer-term political opportunities.
The CPI-M remains India’s largest left party, which is in close partnership
with other left parties in electoral and political alliances.
West Bengal
The Left Front
held state power in West Bengal for thirty-four years, until the right-leaning
populist Trinamul Congress (TMC) ousted the Left in 2011. Since then, the TMC
and its leader Mamata Banerjee have opened the floodgates of violence against
the Left. Assassination of its local leaders has come alongside the razing to
the ground of its offices. The bourgeois press egged on the violence with
incendiary language (“The Left continues to bleed,” The Telegraph,
November 4, 2014). CPI-M State Secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra defined the
repression along four axes: an attack on democracy and democratic institutions,
an attack on the peoples’ livelihood, an attack on secularism as well as an
attack on the Left. At the rally, he led with the slogan, “Oust Trinamul, Save
Bengal.”
A few months
ago the mood amongst the Left’s cadre was low. The attacks had their effect. To
build momentum toward this rally – and toward the elections – the CPI-M
organized a massive campaign of marches (jathas) at each of the 77,240
polling booths in the state. Small to large groups of Communists and their
sympathizers paraded through terrain which had been forbidden until recently.
Violence met
them. TMC activists blocked the jatha as it marched through
Mishra’s assembly constituency of Narayangarh in West Bengal’s southwest. An
attack on Mishra – who is also the leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal
State Assembly – and others, did not stop the jatha from
pushing ahead. This was not the only attack on the CPI-M jathas.
Each time the jatha was blocked, the CPI-M cadres made sure to
return to the scene of the attack and restart their march. It was a symbol of
great confidence. No wonder a million people gathered on Brigade Ground on
December 27.
The coming elections in the state
pose a complex test. The national parliamentary (Lok Sabha) elections of 2014
offer an arithmetic solution for the defeat of the TMC. Despite a wave in its
favor, the TMC won only 39% of the votes – a minority. The rest of the votes
were split between the Left Front (23%), the right-wing BJP (17%) and the
Congress Party (10%). Mamata Banerjee recognizes her vulnerability, which is
why she has alternatively courted the BJP and the Congress. If one of them
joins with her, then she will likely be unassailable. But future elections are
not won by the past election’s totals.
Corruption scandals that
implicate the TMC government and deterioration in living standards has seen a
drift amongst the TMC supporters. Where would they go? The Left will have to
fight to win back the trust of the workers and peasants who went to the TMC
since the late 2000s. That is the only way forward. But will the Left be able
to draw in sufficient people before the elections this year?
The arithmetic of alliances is a
siren, but could also be false. Linkage with the BJP is impossible. It is
committed to a politics of ethno-nationalism and neo-liberal economics. The
Congress is notionally committed to secularism, but its most severe problems
are in the realm of economic and political policy. One of the considerations is
for the Left Front to appeal to Congress voters to abandon their party in the
name of democracy. The call for these supporters to join the Communists is read
in the press as a call for an electoral alliance with the Congress. The
Congress is not a worthwhile ally. It is also an unviable ally. In 2016, the
Left will also go to the polls in the Kerala State Assembly election, where its
main adversary will be the Congress Party. The Left will find it hard to work
with the Congress in one state and then fight it in another.
Time is brief for the Left to
turn matters around in West Bengal. Can a strong Left emerge not only on the
Maidan but also in the ballot box? This is not a theoretical question. The test
will be in the villages and neighborhoods of West Bengal. It will take a great
deal of courage for the Left activists to give confidence to their supporters.
As the CPI-M’s General Secretary Sitaram Yechury put it recently, the Left can
win only “when our Party’s links with our people deepen – Communists take to
people like fish takes to water.”
Plenum
The CPI-M holds this Plenum at
this juncture to discuss the shifts in the capacity of the working-class and
peasantry to build their own organizations. Trade unions of the factories and
the fields are on the back foot, as capital has created mechanisms to undermine
their ability to organize. Production units are spread out across the world at
a scale at which workers are forced to beggar each other to the benefit of
capital. Mechanization of production displaces workers, rendering hundreds of
millions of people into conditions of bare employment. Almost ninety per cent
of Indian workers, for instance, are employed in the informal sector.
Over the course of the past year,
the CPI-M has been studying the changes in the socio-economic conditions in
India and the impact of neo-liberal policies on the different classes. Having
made an attempt to understand these shifts, the CPI-M leadership will now have
to determine how best to organize the workers and peasants. As Prakash Karat of
the CPI-M put it, the new conditions require the adoption of “new slogans,
tactics and organizational forms of work in order to develop the class and mass
movements.” This is the core of what the Plenum will discuss. There will be a
serious conversation about the forms for building up the unity of the informal
workers, the slum dwellers, the landless and itinerant field workers: these are
workers too, indeed they comprise the bulk of the working-class and peasantry.
No full-blown models exist anywhere to show the way – but there are shadows of
new ideas, such as to organize workers where they live rather than where they
work. But these will have to be tested in struggle.
The CPI-M alone has over a
million card-carrying members. There are tens of millions of people in the mass
organization of the CPI-M. Its allied parties – the CPI, the Revolutionary
Socialist Party, the Forward Bloc, the CPI-ML (Liberation) and the SUCI
(Communist) – come to the table with millions of members and mass supporters of
their own. The Indian Left remains vibrant. But it has suffered greatly from
electoral defeats (most notably in West Bengal) and from slow attrition of
membership.
Not only must the Left create
tactics sensitive to the present, but it will also have to make a claim for the
future. There is no captivating sense that the Left is the future—that the Left
can indeed take power and that only the Left can find solutions to the pressing
problems of today. The compelling urgency to believe that the future is the
arena of the Left is no longer in place. It has to be created not merely by the
struggles in the present but by a more robust and confident assertion for the
future. The horizon of the Left remains in the midst of the present struggles.
It will need to be stretched out into the future, to push aside the prevailing
view that the future is the domain of the Right. This is what the Peruvian
Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui imagined was the case in 1925.
“What most clearly and obviously
differentiates [the bourgeoisie and the proletariat] in this era is myth. The
bourgeoisie no longer has myths. It has become incredulous, skeptical,
nihilist. The reborn liberal myth aged too much. The proletariat has a myth:
the social revolution. It moves towards that myth with a passionate and active
faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms. The bourgeois
intellectuals entertain themselves with a rationalist critique of the method,
the theory, revolutionary technique. What misunderstanding! The strength of
revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, their passion,
in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual power. It is the force of
myth.”
Precisely what
the communists have to invoke is the myth of the revolution.
The revolution is the spell that the sorcerer conjures up from the nether
world, and can no longer control. It affirms life and provides a full
alternative to the present. But short of that myth are the smaller claims of
governance—the communists are incorruptible and decent, able to govern for the
needs of the people rather than simply be the brake on a corrupt and indecent
system. Broader horizons that were once the coin of the Left need to be minted
once more.
Vijay Prashad’s most
recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New
Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).
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