Pothik Ghosh

“The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk” is a Hegelian maxim that permeates our reflection on the everydayness of our modern living. Thinking for all of us here, thanks to this maxim, is now a process that is self-conscious – some would say painfully so – of its retrospective fate vis-à-vis an event, which this process of thinking seeks to make sense of, explicate and give a discursive rationality to, after it has happened. Thought and reason can then be said to be traces left behind by an event that has occurred and in occurringhas disappeared. What we, given our specific conjuncture, ought to do now is complete this Hegelian awareness by comprehending the fact that the “dusk” of post-facto cognition is a movement, yet again, towards the dawn of the event and its non-rational return. The flapping of the Owl of Minerva’s wings in flight should, in fact, be envisaged not merely as the thought on an event that has occurred thereby anticipating its return, but as the re-enactment of the event – which occurred in the moment of so-called political action – and its singular, synthetic, critical processuality in the moment or condition of human thought itself.

In the cognitively anticipated return of the event the event actually returns, of course, in that moment of thinking, even as it presages yet again its own non-rational return in another moment of political action or pragmatics. Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, through this self-reflexive optic, can morph into the revolutionary subjectivity of Marx’s proletariat. And ‘academics beyond academia’ is the conceptual common name that we could give to this emergence of revolutionary subjectivity in the moment of human thinking or knowledge.

It is this term that would, for us, serve to programmatically encapsulate the task of working-class politics on the terrain of institutionalised academics and the university it is constitutive of. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we must recognise why this task of academic revolutionary politics impinges on our consciousness with such pressing urgency. So much so that we have gathered here today, one must add belatedly, to thrash out the issues on that particular count.

The Political Terrain of Academics

Whether or not we on the Left agree with the specific programmatic unity of strategy and tactics posed by the Maoist movement in and from its agrarian-tribal location, it would certainly be disingenuous on our part not to accept the fact that the ongoing Maoist insurgency has posed the larger question of working-class revolution not merely as a passive object of a clinically discursive inquiry, but first and foremost as an agenda of active political action and expression. That said, we must also acknowledge that this insurgency – which is little more than a series of sensational strikes persistently launched by the Maoist PLGA and people’s militias in their areas of dominance – is symptomatic of the retreat the working-class revolution as a whole is in today.

Nevertheless, the unavoidable need to stage that revolution on the ground of the university and canonised academics is something that ought to unite both the upholders and left-wing critics of the Indian Maoist movement. That the former should see this as an unfolding of the revolutionary logic posited by the Maoist people’s war, even as the latter see in this an opportunity to rectify the distortion of the revolutionary project by the “Narodnik populism” of the Maoists does not detract from the given task and thus their unity on that count.

The task of envisaging the university and the institutionalised knowledge-production that is constitutive of it into a terrain of class struggle can be broadly divided into three formally specific but logically united levels or moments.

The first and the most immediately obvious and accessible is the moment of the struggle by students, teachers and other staff members to control the university – much like the history of workers’ struggles to control factories internationally – to run it in terms of both autonomous determination of curriculum and pedagogy, and administration of the larger social life on campus through a process of active and vigorous participatory democracy.

The second level is, of course, the moment of struggle to reconstitute the hierarchical pedagogical relation, and the concomitant monologic and univocal pedagogic modality that is constitutive of this relation, between the teacher and the taught into a completely horizontal space. A space where, following the lessons of critical pedagogue Paulo Freire, the educator himself has to be educated and where the univocal pedagogical relation is envisaged merely as a provisional one with which the reconstituted teaching process begins, only to be eventually abolished in the course of that process.

Last but not least, it is about transforming the grammar or logic of academic production of canonised knowledge and the subjectivity such knowledge-production concomitantly engenders. This transformation would be of a philosophised, a priori, transhistorical subjectivity – which is constitutive of a representative modality of knowledge creation that is contingent on the alienating and hierarchical rift between the subject and the object – into an autonomous expression of the concrete where subjectivity is nothing but the organic expression of the singular, synthetic, processual concrete. This expression of the singular, processual concrete is articulated only in and through a relationship of critique, vis-a-vis the reigning subjectivity of the dualised realm of pedagogic determination. It is this critically oppositional subjectivity of the singular that embodies a critique of political economy, wherein the differential circulation of value and thus differential distribution of power, and their constitutive productive logic of value creation is sought to be decimated through active, politically materialised critique, which is another name for revolution. There is absolutely no doubt that the three levels just described are discrete only in a conceptual sense and are, in the actual operation of materialised politics, not only simultaneously accessible but continually, if not continuously, spill over into each other. It is in that context that we would do well, as of now, to tactically privilege the third moment over the first two in terms of envisaging a programme of revolutionary working-class politics on the terrain of the university.

That the vigorously participatory democratic control of the university by students, teachers and other staff members is not essentially an administrative question, insofar as administration is the bourgeois mode of politics (or anti-politics), must be grasped by the collectivity of the movement that seeks to take such control.That collectivity ought to subjectively realise that for its movement the question of administration of the university is an epiphenomenon, an afterimage in Benjamin’s words, of the critical-oppositional impulse of the politics of autonomy. For, such democratic control, precisely in seeking to render pedagogical relations and techniques, curriculum, and the total modality of social life in and around the university autonomous by seeking to free them from the administrative determination of work, which is alienation of labour from its autonomous, creative and contingent human essence, expresses the tendency to abolish the totality of the process called capital accumulation. This process is embodied in the form of work, which splits human livelihood into alienated domains of production (work) and reproduction (leisure and work for leisure). The culture of administrative determination that completely permeates both these domains is intrinsic to and expression of the alienating logic of work. The university is, to that extent, an emblematic site of capitalism as it is one of those few domains of capital where the determination of alienating work is apparent both in the register of reproduction (for students-becoming-workers) and production (teachers, researchers, other staff members but also students). It is, therefore, one of those rare sites where labour can be seen in more than one of its alterities, sometimes in the same moment, and where Marx’s conceptualisation of the collective worker to indicate the always formational character of the working class becomes almost empirically discernible and possible.

Clearly then, a movement that seeks to take control of the university, if envisaged without any subjective realisation of its constitutive logic of positing a critique of political economy in its totality, is bound to reify its afterimage of administration and, consequently, be subsumed yet again into the very social configuration of capitalist class power it had sought to challenge and supersede. The subjectivity of the movement should be such that it envisages the movement as one that seeks to free the question of human livelihood from the grip of work and capital accumulation through a critical opposition to the bourgeois form of what is called the real economy, even as it in the same movement seeks to transform the pursuit of academics for students, researchers and teachers alike into a continuous expression of critique of the externally imposed discipline and drudgery of work it now is. Such a critique, needless to say, would simultaneously be constitutive of the unalienated human creativity that its operation as critique seeks in the first place.

The latter is nothing but the enactment of the total critique of political economy of capital at one local moment, even as through that enactment it indicates and moves towards re-enacting that essential critique yet again in another local moment manifest as the so-called real economy.

Academics beyond Academia or “Class Struggle in the Theoretical Moment”?

Our tactical privileging of the third moment of the struggle to transform the philosophised structure, and thus the hierarchised, invasive and instrumentalised grammar, of academic knowledge-production would enable the collectivity of the movement for participatory democratic control of the university to grasp and simultaneously subjectivise the essential link between the moment of the university and the form of the bourgeois ‘real’ economy as such. That is because constitutive of this process of transforming the instrumentalised and hierarchised grammar of academically canonised knowledge production is a critical and autonomous subjectivity. Something that embodies not only the manoeuvre of class struggle in the moment of theory but through the self-reflexive expression of its formation and emergence as an enactment of critical singularity at that moment becomes an allegory of negativity with regard to the moment of work in both the university and bourgeois ‘real’ economy. The critical and autonomous subjectivity constitutive of this struggle or process of transforming the philosophised structure and instrumentalised grammar of academic knowledge-production, due to the self-reflexivity of that subjectivity, is thus, very clearly, also an allegory for the unfolding of the unalienated processual logic through its determinate re-enactment at other moments of capitalist contradiction through a critique of and opposition to the alienated, dualised and antagonistic concrete situations at each of those moments. Needless to say that such self-reflexivity, which the form of the transformative struggle at the theoretical moment expresses, implies the negation of its form as such for other moments so that this form’s foundational and constitutive logic of infinite processuality can be generalised and then reclaimed in its multiple formal specificities at other different historical-ontological moments.

It is this double movement of the theoretical struggle, staged at the location of institutionalised academics, that renders its manifest form into revolutionary theory a la Lenin. We have chosen to call it academics beyond academia. But the perfectly legitimate question that arises here is why do we still choose to stick to the term academics, given that it is thoroughly implicated in a transhistorical, hypostatised and philosophised subjectivity, even as we seek to transgress the subject/object dichotomy constitutive of such subjectivity. We could as well ask, why doesn’t the formulation “class struggle in the theoretical moment” suffice.

That is because the form in which the struggle manifests itself at the theoretical moment is important insofar as it has a bearing on other moments, like that of pragmatics say, by way of allegorically alluding through its self-reflexivity to the logic of unalienated processuality, which its determinate affirmation of autonomy enacts through a critical negation of the subjectivated centre of the realm of alienation, duality, antagonism, representation and hierarchy. Clearly, the form through which the logic of unalienated and infinite processuality is critically enacted at the moment of theory needs to be conceptualised not so as to effect the pedagogical and externalised imposition of the concept on another moment but because that concept could allegorically remind us of the universal logic of unalienated processuality it enacted by way of critically asserting its autonomy in relation to the reigning subjectivity of alienation, duality and representation in the determinate condition of theory. That reminder to reclaim or re-enact the logic of unalienated, processual concrete is necessary as without that memory the opposition to the reigning subjectivated centres of alienation, duality and contradiction at other moments would remain caught in the constitutive antithetical fetish of duality and competition, and would fail to become critical. That would also mean the unfolding of the processual revolutionary logic, which emerged through the form of class struggle in the theoretical moment, has been stymied. Therefore, the concept of academics beyond academia is not a concept in the pedagogical sense but in the allegorical sense, whereby it is not a concept only by virtue of being one that is self-reflexively indicative of its own subsequent formal negation. So, the knowledge of unalienated singular processual logic of universality, which is encapsulated in ‘academics beyond academia’, the conceptualised form of class struggle at the moment of canonised academics, can only be remembered as that concept so that it can be repeatedly extracted and enacted anew at every other lived concrete moment of capitalist duality and contradiction.

It is this dialectical awareness of the concept about itself that is fatally absent from the formulation class struggle in the theoretical moment. For, even as that concept arises, not very differently from ‘academics beyond academia’, through the enactment and affirmation of the logic of autonomous and unalienated processuality in the process of critically negating the subjectivated centre of the total system of alienation, duality, hierarchy, externalised determination or representation, and invasive and false objectification of knowledge, it tends to reify the form through which the critical subjectivity of the processual had determinately appeared in the specific moment of theory. As a result, its relation with other historically different moments of capitalist duality and contradiction becomes pedagogical, thereby undermining the entire logic of reclaiming and re-enacting the working-class subjectivity of the singular-universal in a determinate manner.

Adorno’s formulation that his “was the theoretical moment of class struggle”, which informed not merely his own politico-theoretical practice and position but that of the entire post-war Frankfurt School, clearly illustrates a problem that one wishes to term his and his School’s Heideggerian tangle. This problem deserves our special attention because it plagues many of our comrades in the academia, who profess to one strain or school of leftwing radical politics or another. They clearly content themselves by restricting their politics of critique to the theoretical moment, even as they refuse to accept the fact that the form in which their critical politics has emerged in the academic moment of theory self-reflexively cries out to be unfolded through re-enactment of the constitutive processual logic of that theoretical form of critical politics into the messy moment of political pragmatics or, what some of them label with barely suppressed derision as, “mobilisational politics”. They usually meet the demands that the moment of political pragmatics, which for them is a realm of irredeemably uncritical and positivist abstraction, with disengaged pessimism and that classically Adornesque melancholy. This melancholic quietism of theirs with regard to the moment of pragmatics and political action is nothing but the manifestation of their failed attempt to pedagogically impose the form in which their critical politics emerged in the moment of academic theory. An attempt that would fail – even if it were not to be repelled by the dogmatic pedagogues of party politics and pragmatism – by undermining the entire revolutionary project of continuously unfolding the subjectivity of singular processuality by re-enacting it in a determinate fashion at various other concrete moments of capitalist contradiction.

As a matter of fact, this Heideggerian problem of our Adornoesquely academic Marxists, who have come to constitute a silent but rather resilient hegemony in the realm of so-called radical political theory at the academic moment, at least since the Soviet debacle, has turned out to be no less noxious than the problem of our dogmatic party bosses and their sundry organisational apparatchiks. The latter have reified and sought to pedagogically impose the form through which the revolutionary subjectivity of unalienated processuality expressed itself at either the Fordist industrial worker’s location or the agrarian-tribal location in the moment of pragmatics on other locations within the moment of pragmatics or, more dangerously, on the moment of theory and knowledge, thereby denying it its determinate specificity.

“Doing Philosophy under the Condition of Politics”

The working-class struggle is, not surprisingly, caught today between the rock of chronic quietism, as far as the relation as it unfolds from the moment of theory to the moment of pragmatics goes; and the hard-place of dogmatism, as far as the unfolding of the essential relation from the moment of pragmatics to that of theory is concerned. The result, for the project of reconstituting a revolutionary theory, has, as a consequence, been dismal. Theory, in the specificity of its moment of theoretical practice, has become a deconstructionist game of constantly proliferating pluralities, which certainly talks of power but means nothing as it refuses to ground that power in the relations among its various configurations of materiality. On the other hand, pragmatics, in the specificity of its moment of various practices and thus also positing the theories of those various practices, has fallen prey to the tyranny of pragmatism, which has repressed all possibility of constructing a revolutionary theory.

The contradiction between the two positions – of quietist deconstructionism in the theoretical moment and dogmatically positivist pragmatism in the moment of pragmatics – is, as we can see, merely apparent. In reality, they are embedded in the same structure of transhistorical and instrumentalised subjectivity of canonised (bourgeois) philosophy. Our conceptualisation of ‘academics beyond academia’ is an attempt to conceptualise the manoeuvre of dialectically negating and superseding this contradiction. And on this score, one could argue, that this project of academics beyond academia has a stronger affinity to Althusser (and Alain Badiou’s) classically Leninist concept of “doing philosophy under the condition of politics”, than the one-sided formulation of Adorno of “this” being “the theoretical moment of class struggle”. True, Althusser, in his later writings, did dub philosophy as a state-form. But the question he repeatedly broached through the totality of his politico-theoretical practice, and which remains even today the most important politico-theoretical question for working-class politics, is, can there be a philosophy in the negative? Something that becomes, for the theoretical moment, the Leninist transition-state-form? That is, can philosophy be a modality to affirm the unalienated, singular processuality implicit in the critical negation of the subjectivated centre of the horizon of alienation, duality, hierarchy and contradiction?

In other words, can the logic of unalienated processuality be located in a form, idiom, ontology or subjectivity, which has emerged to express its autonomy through critique of the realm of alienation, hierarchy and representation? Can there be a philosophically affirmative explication and description of what such a form or subjectivity says in terms of why and how it says what it says and not merely in terms of what it apparently says as a form or subjectivity per se? It is the constant posing of these questions that our project of academics beyond academia is tasked with. This, and nothing else, is the task of revolution today.

In that context, we would do well to delineate the exact difference between Adorno’s critical theoretical idea of class struggle in the theoretical moment with Althusser’s apparently similar project of envisaging the academic discipline of philosophy as a terrain of politics and class struggle. And this one intends to do through a rather schematic comparison between the politico-theoretical practices and stances of these two luminaries of Western Marxism, if only to show that Althusser’s practice, notwithstanding its ‘theoreticist’ misinterpretation by both his followers and detractors, enables us to stake out a much more militant working-class position than Adorno’s infamous theoretical melancholy would ever allow. Of course, this exercise is not supported by an exegetical mining of their respective texts, something that is par for the course in rigorous academic debates but something from which an interloper is exempt, considering that most ‘academic’ Marxists expect no more than the ‘dilettantish’ and schematic forays into the realm of theory by their brethren from the world of pragmatics. One has every intention to live up to that reputation and no intention to prove otherwise. So, without any further ado one would wish to rush like a fool in the direction of one’s schema, even as one beckons, fruitlessly perhaps, at one’s angelic academic friends to follow suit.

Let us begin with the negative example of Adorno first. The philosopher’s essay on Brecht, to cite Brazilian cultural theorist Roberto Schwarz, “knows and criticizes Brecht’s political-aesthetic positions, places greater emphasis on the work than on the theory; or rather it sees the role of the latter inside the former”. Clearly, Adorno in his reflections on Brecht hails theory as the operation of autonomous Dionysian enactment at a moment and its simultaneous codification that, in turn, would enable another such autonomous enactment at another moment. Yet, in spite of that dialectical and allegorical awareness of theory in working-class politics he falls prey to the Heideggerian problem in his own practice where he temporalises the sense of the moment and hypostatises it. It is a problem that is born out of having to defend the logical universality of class politics in a moment of revolutionary retreat, when the antithetical fetishes comprising the various contradictory junctures of a capitalist conjuncture are sought to be overcome by positing the universality of the singular (and synthetic) revolutionary logic. But Adorno ended up positing that universal logic of revolutionary processuality by seeking to pedagogically transmit the conceptualised form, through which he had enacted that logic of critical autonomy in the determinate moment of theory and discursive discourse, on to other concrete moments of capitalist contradiction.

This imposed transmission of the conceptualised form through which the revolutionary logic manifest itself determinately in the moment of theory destroyed the singularity of universality, for real universality is possible only when there is no alienated duality that implies a struggle between competing particulars intrinsic to the horizon of alienated duality. That Adorno pedagogically imposed a conceptualised  form of the universality of the one (singular-universal) determinate to a particular moment on other moments is evident in his theory of negative dialectics that sees every act of resistance, the moment it is enunciated, as being antithetical and thus governed and articulated by the capitalist logic of competing fetishes. His negative dialectics displaces the synthetic process so completely into the domain of the absent that he cannot ever distinguish between the symptomally materialised critique of the total system in a local moment of its appearance from the fetish it is destined to become in the next moment. His negative dialectics, in fact, has no place for envisaging power or dialectics in their determinate materiality. To that extent, his vision robs the dialectical logic of the materiality that Marx had conferred on it while rescuing it from the distortions of Hegel’s teleologised and phenomenologised prison.

It is no wonder then that Adorno always sees the importance of a form in terms of what it cannot say. He, thanks to his negative dialectical vision, cannot ever see that a form, in the moment of its critical emergence, vis-à-vis another ontologically fixed form that affirms its logic of form as such thereby establishing duality, domination and externalised pedagogical determination, is enunciated in the realm of the positive even before it can become a form there. The figuring of such an enunciative register in the realm of the positive shows that the unalienated logic of the singular processual, which is the logical inverse of ontologised forms and their formal logic of domination and duality, can and does appear in the positive by breaking with the ontologically fixed forms and their logic of alienation, duality, contradiction and domination. The melancholy Marxist, as a consequence, could never see what a form says in terms of how and why it says so. His negative dialectics, wherein the synthetic always resides in the elsewhere of the negative and the absent, actually implies that this elsewhere of synthetic negativity appears only in the mental moment of human thought. The hypostatisation of the form in which the processual synthetic logic appeared in a determinate fashion to the mental-theoretical moment, something that was built into Adorno’s temporalisation of the sense of the theoretical moment of class struggle, made it impossible for him to envisage the unfolding of the processual synthetic logic, which was constitutive of the form of critique determinate to the mental-theoretical moment, through its repeated determinate re-enactment in the specificity of other moments of capitalist duality and contradiction. It was this that led Adorno’s theoretical practice in the direction of radical negativity that precluded all revolutionary hope and made optimism of the will an impossibility.

Adorno, even while being critically enactive in the theoretical moment of institutionalised academics, turns pedagogical in taking the conceptualised form of that enactment rather literally with regard to other moments, especially the moment of political pragmatics, of capitalist duality and contradiction.

That now brings us to Althusser, whose project of doing philosophy in the negative, or philosophy under the condition of politics gave us a revolutionary and mobile ‘metaphysics’ that obviated his theory’s pedagogical reception, and made the re-enactment and refoundation of the logic of unalienated processuality, which was constitutive of his form of critique in the moment of theory and canonical philosophy, inescapable. Althusser’s defence of the revolutionary horizon – as it is encapsulated in a conceptually elevated form through which critique and the coeval logic of unalienated processuality were enacted at the moment of philosophy – is simultaneously a call for re-enactment.  The fact that they are not discrete ideas renders Althusser and Badiou’s notion of philosophy as anti-dialogic combat quasi-Stalinist, a stance that working-class politics would do well to adopt today.

Lecture notes for the Seminar on “Dismantling Democracy in the University”, Hindu College (Delhi University), March 04, 2010.

Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar

A spectre is haunting India, the spectre of Maoism. It represents the Gandhian counterpart in the field of state-centred Marxism in so far as it cultivates extra-parliamentary politics. The similarity however ends there; since (i) even Maoist politics remains ‘in the last instance’ state-centric; capture of state power remains its ultimate goal and (ii) its political practice is circumscribed by the barrel of the gun, which has increasingly become its customised mode of communication. In Marxian parlance, it seeks to establish a self-reliant economy through the capture of state power using violence without much ambivalence or self-reflexivity. While its chosen means is violent revolution, the content of its politics is to overthrow the “class of comprador bureaucrat capitalists” that consists of “a nexus of top politicians, top bureaucrats and the big business house” who are in direct alliance with semi-feudal forces in the countryside and indirect alliance with the imperialists particularly the USA (Arvind 2002; also see Indian Maoists 2009).

Without entering into the debate of whether or not there can be anything called Maoism, it is important to highlight the effects of Maoism on politics in India. While the current debate at times gets reduced to a discursive field situated in terms of the State versus the Maoists, the fact that arguments concerning numerous other aspects (rights of Adivasis and locals, capitalist plunder of resources [minerals to be more precise], development, violence, right to conduct movements [including non-violent movements against exploitation and oppression, and the inordinately violent response of the state to such pacifist movements]) are also coming to the surface is a testimony to the lasting effects of this insurgency. Maoism has forced upon us some serious social questions. Despite the unprecedented campaign by the ‘ideological apparatuses’ against Maoism and the latter’s own repertoire of almost never-ending (and at times reckless) violence that many consider counterproductive and inimical to its own credibility, some questions rather than disappearing keep on exploding in the face of the body politic. Notwithstanding the massive deployment of repressive apparatuses, the ruling elite leading the charge against Maoism is fully aware that this is no ordinary military campaign. The modes of repression must be conjoined with ideological apparatuses to turn the war against the Maoists into also a war of benevolence waged to liberate the Adivasis from their decrepitude state of life. Hence the military campaign is conjoined with and in fact being turned into a campaign for development of Adivasis. Of course, the possibility is always there that, in an insurgency, the line between the Maoists and Adivasis may get blurred, a blurring which leads us to wonder: is this a war against Maoism or against the locals or against both telescoped into one? Even if Maoism as a movement may be incarcerated, contained and/or even destroyed, the larger social questions with their ‘political’ predicaments will not wither away soon. This indicates that in some form Maoism is encapsulating concerns and issues rooted in the forms of life of ordinary Indians, at least of marginalised sections of the populace big enough to make it, in the words of the Prime Minister of India, the biggest internal threat. However, Maoism is not just an internal threat; more potent perhaps is the social wind of discontent and desire it is attempting to telescope which makes it a bigger and lasting threat transcending mere security concerns.

The ‘civil war’ will take its own course in a scenario when both sides are fighting the war to the finish. If this is one side of the story then the other, crucial from a Marxian perspective, is the philosophy of Maoist politics, constituting its own challenge to Indian Marxism, at least to the dominant form steeped in the ethos and practice of parliamentary democracy. It is on this ‘other story’ that we focus in this essay.

For reasons unknown, this challenge has been sidestepped within the field of Marxism and even now the response is mostly in the realm of turf war (for example, over territories as in West Bengal) rather than that of the political; this has typically involved evacuating a particular territory of all oppositional philosophy or idea of the political; territorial battle is paradoxically considered won with the capture over the process of political voices. At times, attack on Maoism has taken the form of the defence of a particular party position, which is of course welcome if it is enriching the Marxian tradition. However, it has rarely led to a self-reflexive questioning of the manner in which Marxism is practised in India. What we mean to say is that Maoism throws some questions to the way Marxism in general is conceived, practised and symbolised; on some such questions, leaving aside rare attempts that now have thankfully started appearing (including in Radical Notes), conventional Marxists have not sufficiently responded. Or, should we say, a gloom of confusion reigns in Marxist circles currently. The result is that the response of conventional Marxists in the debate with Maoists remains bereft of dealing with fundamental questions on Marxism itself. Under the present situation, engaging with such questions is no longer an option. It is a necessity. Not that any position, even the one we forward here, would answer all the questions, but the field made turbulent by the events surrounding Maoism beckons us to take the debate into the heart of Marxism in India, throwing light not just on a rethinking of Marxism but perhaps also in the way we practise Marxism in India. This is crucial because, as is evident today, the critics are subsuming Marx within Marxism and Marxism within Maoism (for example, Mamata Banerjee has represented Marx and Mao as two sides of the same coin). This ‘external’ threat to the Marxian imagination (whether in parliamentary or in an extra-parliamentary form) takes an ominous proportion if internal problems regarding the veracity of its politics threaten its imagination too setting off ‘Marxists’ against ‘Marxists’ as is the case today. The task is not to insulate or close debates and changes within Marxism, but to make it relevant in the Indian context, without which the future of Marxism is bleak. At present, let us concede that there is a crisis in (Indian) Marxism; the crisis is not merely one of practice; it is also one of theory.

In accordance with this spirit, we take up one concept which has really spelled trouble for Marxists and Maoists. It is the concept of democracy. What is the relation between Marxism and democracy? Is there a relation; or are they non-compatible bedfellows? If one exists, what then is the nature of the relation? What happens to the known nature of the democratic ideal as it engages with a radical idea: Marxism? Does it become different? Does the nature of Marxism also change because it is engaging with a liberal ideal: democracy? Further, what is the relation between Marxian democracy and parliamentary democracy? Can the two meet?

Instead of dealing with all the questions and engaging with all Marxian positions concerning democracy, we pick one area: possible theorisation of the relation following Marx’s own take on state that is splattered across his writings with intermittent references to democracy.(1) We ask: was Marx suggesting an inalienable relation between the Marxian political and democracy? Is democracy an internal component of his imagined political? Have then twentieth century Marxisms (of the Maoist and the non-Maoist kind) purloined much of Marx’s imagination of the political? If so, have parliamentary Marxism and extra-parliamentary Maoism (the two variants of twentieth century Marxism in India) lost contact with the Marxian political in the process of engagement with the bourgeois discourses, its institutions, laws and norms? Doesn’t the language of Marxists espousing parliamentary democracy use the tune of liberalism (with its own art of governmentality as Foucault would say) it opposes, at least programme-wise, so trenchantly? Doesn’t Maoism dance to the rhythm of the repressive state apparatus it seeks to oppose? Are both forms (the parliamentary Marxist form and the Maoist form) lost in statism, an aspect Marx critiqued and wanted to move away from in drawing his route towards social transformation?

In this scenario one can make a case for rescuing Marxism from statism and resituating it in a different political register that will allow us to describe reality in terms different from what is proposed in the bourgeois discourses. A need to return to Marx is crucial in this context: while we do recognise that ideas of state, civil society and modes of power have changed substantially since Marx’s time, what needs to be appreciated is that he dealt with this triad at their moments of birth and offered a new methodology for imagining the political. Disdainful of mediated rule, Marx would settle for nothing other than the direct rule of the people; and by people Marx meant the mass of the exploited –  whether in the industrial  space (as in the Communist Manifesto) or in the agrarian space (as in the writings of Late Marx) – proletariat.(2) No state, no party, no dictator, no broker of power; the social must be reconfigured to facilitate the unmediated rule of the masses which is where Marx’s idea of democracy can be located. Everything else, including the idea of organisation, must be rethought to facilitate the direct and unmediated implementation of this democratic imperative. Because of the connection of democracy with the unmediated rule of people, let us call it people-centric democracy.(3)

In this context, Marx was fully aware of the need to articulate the idea of the political in a manner that would move beyond the liberal idea of democracy and statecraft. This was required because the liberal ruse of mediation intervened in the materialisation of a people-centric democracy. The state was the proof of this unfulfilled project of democracy; the bourgeois state not just truncated the possibility of democracy; it throttled the emancipation of the masses from exploitation, inequity and oppression. For Marx then, a challenge to capitalism was intimately connected with the realisation of people-centric democracy. Following Marx, and contrary to the history of twentieth century Marxism, the idea of the political cannot but contain an engagement with democracy; however it is democracy not of the liberal kind. This shifts the current debate to a totally new ground and makes the struggle for communism and people-centric democracy coterminous.

A word of caution: this essay should not be taken as suggesting that Marx’s take is final, total or even something to be copied; instead Marx keeps moving for the Marxist as the word moves; it is God who remains unmoved and unchanged by the process of creation; Marx was no God.(4) Politics that proceeds like a copycat is uncreative, comical and hollow; politics that moves by learning, engaging with the other, displacing one’s own terrain is creative, sensitive (to the past, present and future) and responsible (or should we say cautious). The gaze of the former is on the outside while the latter is self-reflexive.

Self-reflexive as he was, Marx was rethinking the concept of democracy in a different light. In so far as our essay reflects on Marx we seek to renew our engagement with democracy in the direction proposed by Marx which though, as with all works, must pass through series of displacements and why not, conceptual sharpening. There is a need to rethink the relation of democracy with the Marxian political and in that light seek new models of engaging with the context called ‘India’ and the experience called ‘Indian’; all the more because our intellectual and political history is replete with such engagements, albeit at times in radically different ways by to name a few, Gandhi, Tagore and Shankar Guha Niyogi. Marx arguably provided the most extensive and incisive ‘internal critique’ of the modern west’s form of life and philosophy; while the latter three provide an ‘external critique’ of the modern west and which is no less incisive; and rethinking the political in the context of India requires a dialogue between the two strands of critique (with all the differences and contradictions within and between them). It also paves the way for a critique of the hegemonicphilosophemes of the modern west – ‘capitalocentrism’, ‘orientalism’ and ‘andro-centrism’ (to name a few). To a great extent, the future of Marxism in India depends on this dialogue and a rewriting of the script of its practice in light of the critique.

Parliamentary Democracy versus Marxian Political:
A Schism that Haunts Marxism in India Today

Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.
– Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

What was Marx’s relation with democracy? There has been a lot of controversy regarding Marx’s intermittent usage of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” (according to Thomas (1994), eleven times in total) which was subsequently popularised by Lenin so much so that it ended up acquiring a cult status among official Marxists. This however left a trace/trail of a troublesome and uncomfortable relation with democracy, and indeed played an instrumental role in tarnishing the image of Marxism as an anti-democratic philosophy. The popular version of official Marxism, which took centre-stage in the twentieth century, held the view that democracy is a bourgeois charade that must be abolished and replaced by state sponsored Communist Party rule, an understanding that was put to deadly effect by twentieth century Marxism with equally deadly consequences. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” became a ruse for relationalities of enslavement, giving a fillip as also a legitimisation to the violence, often state sponsored, enacted by conventional communist parties worldwide.

This issue is topical because of what we believe is a failure of Indian Marxists to confront headlong their troubled relationship with democracy; not even the collapse of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the erstwhile ‘socialist’ countries could shake this state of slumber. This problem leads to another troublesome choice: revolution or democracy (as if both are mutually exclusive; as if both cannot go together; as if one cannot be the condition of the other; can revolution be the condition of democratisation? Can democratisation be the condition of revolution?). While both are present in some form in almost every party programme, the programmes lack a clear understanding of their relation leading inevitability to a sequential ordering of the two – revolution after democracy or democracy after revolution. This structure of choice (choose one, because you can’t have both together) amounts to a trade-off between the two ruling out any imagining of the political that seeks a conjoining of the two. As we shall argue, in contradistinction to the above, Marx conceived of revolution with(in) an unmediated praxis of democracy; because, for Marx, revolution is the realisation of people-centric democracy.

The Maoists however reject representative democracy and propagate ‘capture of state power through armed struggle’ (purportedly proposed by Mao Zedong). In the Maoist frame, violence is not the means to an end but also the end of communication. This follows from the understanding of the state apparatus as being singularly repressive (this misses out the point that the state functions as both repressive and ideological even in its most repressive manifestation) and as being exclusively at the disposal of the ruling class; the ideological apparatuses are seen as a mere supplement to repressive apparatuses and hence do not warrant much engagement. In the Maoist imagination, the idea of the state has remained predominantly ‘pre-modern’; the state is, as if, organised around the whims of the ‘sovereign’ (with its shield of bureaucrats, police, military and court). This sovereign telescopes the aspiration of the ruling class comprising “a nexus of top politicians, top bureaucrats and the big business house” in direct alliance with semi-feudal forces in the countryside and indirect alliance with the imperialists particularly the USA. The state is thus both the strongest and the weakest link in the Indian context. Revolution is, therefore, state-centred; and the struggle to finish the ruling order must telescope a violent revolution against the state; by overcoming the ruling order through the capture of the state, the state can be reclaimed for the exploited and the oppressed; only after such a re-capture can true social change be ushered in. Not only does Maoist politics become state-centred, it privileges in its political philosophy and practice expressions of violence as the exclusive mode of communication. This follows from its thesis that the sovereign/state must be countered in its own language: repression must be countered with repression, force with force. It has to be understood that urging/asking Maoists to give up violence is tantamount to asking them to give up their worldview; its position on violence is inalienably connected with its view of the state as exclusively repressive and as representative of exclusively, the ruling class. Just like Gandhi’s position on non-violence is inalienably tied to his worldview, so is the case with the Maoists. One cannot deal with Gandhian and Maoist fetishisms of non-violence and violence respectively without addressing their respective worldviews.

Seeking to move beyond the dualism of violence/non-violence, our issue is precisely with the Maoist worldview. As we see, at the heart of the Maoist worldview is its understanding of the state. One can start with an engagement with state. While we do tangentially attend to the state, it is not our focus here. Instead, we begin with what has given the state legitimacy in our times: democracy or more precisely parliamentary democracy. We ask: do the Maoists have any position regarding democracy? In so far as the Maoists are concerned, they reject parliamentary democracy just as they reject its predicate – the pre-modern state. However, even as they reject parliamentary democracy as a sham, they extol ‘democracy’. While taking forward a violent revolution by erasing all spaces of dissent, 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). Evidently, this democracy is conceptually distinct; also, capturing state power through armed struggle or insurrection is one thing and democratising the social fabric is quite another. One cannot be reduced to the other; one does not necessarily follow the other, a lesson we thought had been learnt by Marxists; democracy remains conspicuous by its absence in the Maoist political. The result: the Maoist model of Jacobin terror sits uncomfortably with its slogan of ‘true’ democracy. The faltering nature of democracy overdetermines its adopted political practice. Any effort to forward democracy by the Maoists (say, through Janatar Sarkar – peoples’ government) is subsumed within the logic of armed struggle.

Because everything is reducible to the logic of armed struggle, social movements that tend to expand the democratic potential at the ground level, are, by definition, incompatible with this logic. By expanding on the potential of democracy towards people-centric democracy, the logic of social movements tends to overflow and overpower the discipline and boundary of armed struggle and hence, not surprisingly, from a Maoist perspective, it becomes important to incarcerate the social movements within the logic of armed struggle. This requires a disciplining of social movements which claims its usual price: the process of people-centric democracy. That explains why Maoist politics has an ambivalent position vis a vis social movements. Social movements offer it the space of discontent which it wishes to cultivate for future armed struggle; however, because social movements also challenge the logic of the elimination of dissent/difference, a logic that drives the framework of class annihilation, they need to be contained. Battle-zones are thus transformed into ‘free zones’ – free of dissent/difference  and worldviews other than the Maoist one; free/liberated zones are turned into the ‘base’ of opposition to the state. By literally creating a ‘parallel state’ grounded on contesting repressive apparatuses to fight the bourgeois-democratic state, it purloins the cultivation of people-centric democratisation as a path towards socialism/communism. The Maoist strategy may indeed be relevant and in fact may even have relative success if there is no scope for social movements (that is when the state becomes fundamentally repressive as in operation Green Hunt). However, if the space for alternative social movements exist then Maoism becomes a suspect political imagination.

Finally, armed struggle as an end-in-itself presupposes a homogenous representation of the Indian condition. What it thus lacks (and indeed fails to internalise in its worldview) is an understanding of the complex nature of the Indian social. In contrast, people-centric democracy can only be comprehended within a disaggregated understanding of social reality; different situations give rise to different kind of problems and demand a variety of interventions. Social movements and people-centric democracy can only thrive within a disaggregated understanding of reality; armed struggle with its tendency to homogenise the otherwise disaggregated reality defies and obfuscates differences. Collateral damages occur as a result of glossing over these differences; situations that could be handled without violence are subjected to violence; once section of the people of India are turned into an enemy of another section of the people of India; where everybody is potentially a (class) enemy; where villagers and neighbours begin to be looked at with suspicion as possible agents of state. In this rather reductive approach built on a homogenisation of the otherwise disaggregated social space, not only is democracy the casualty but the concerned social field often turns into a battlefield between the poor and the poor. The war between the Indian State and the Maoists is threatening to become a war between the rural poor of the country and in being mediated through armed struggle against the state, the importance of class struggle ironically gets demoted and is at times obfuscated. This illusion of ‘class struggle’ (where ‘armed struggle’ is taking the place of class struggle) renders secondary the element of actual class divisions and struggles over class processes (performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus) materialising in society; which evidently takes numerous forms and thus calls for a variety of class struggles with differentiated methods instead of reducing them to a singular kind of struggle namely armed struggle. Maoists with their emphasis on the latter demote the former which shows up at certain times in their ‘tactic’ to ally with ruling classes at the local level if it is envisaged to benefit the logic of armed struggle. They do not participate in elections, but may have no qualms in supporting the local dominant classes for tactical purposes, with purposes of securing control over territories; the issue of class struggle is evidently not the central concern of their struggle and neither is the question of articulating class struggles through ground level democratic struggles (the realm of social movements) any issue for them.

From a different angle, for the same reasons that make Maoists suspicious of social movements, Indian Maoism cannot but remain at odds with alternative social constructions which promote non-exploitative organisations of surplus and seek to relate it to the process of community building. Such alternatives, as exemplified in the work of Shankar Guha Niyogi, do not just present a challenge to capitalism and its liberal order, but to the Maoists as well. They offer us alternative paths, paths different from the path to capitalism and its associated developmental logic without any necessary pre-commitment to armed struggle. In such struggles for an alternative, capture of state power is evidently not the preset objective. The language of such struggle is constructionist, that is, Nirman, and whose very manner of re-representing social life encapsulates a struggle, Sangharsh, where Sangharsh is for Nirman. This model is not one of Nirman andSangharsh, but rather one where Nirman is also Sangharsh. Moreover, the location of its politics is not in arms, but in the exploited and oppressed mass; its content is people-centric democracy for it builds its project through expression of opinions, forming associations of humanity and creating bonding; its ethic is not individualism, competition and enslavement, but cooperation, sharing and solidarity. Nirman-Sangharshforwards the point that it is the mass and not arms that make history. Notwithstanding its strength or weakness, our argument is that Maoism is inherently incapable of facing, let alone accommodating, such models that are clearly and openly fostering non-capitalist alternatives. Not only can Maoism not comprehend dis-aggregation/difference, it cannot even embrace a differentiated field of non-capitalist experiences; ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ becomes ‘Maoist dictatorship over the proletariat’. In short, in the Maoist imagination, democracy stands un-theorised; not only has Maoism no place for parliamentary democracy, but none whatsoever for people-centric democracy as well.

In contrast, most other conventional Communist Parties in India participate in parliamentary democracy. For them, this participation though sits uncomfortably with an inadequate theorisation regarding the place of democracy in their proposed political horizon that they claim is purportedly revolutionary. There is a tendency to espouse Jacobin-style revolution in their party programme and at the same time increasingly accept the possibility of entering given corridors of state power through elections. Such an ambivalent position partly results from an inability to have a clear stance on either state or democracy. If they accept parliamentary democracy that reduces democracy to (bourgeois) statecraft, what remains unaddressed, at the minimum, is the issue of its repressive and ideological apparatuses that are conjoined with the exploitative organisation of surplus in the ‘civil space’. If, as Marx argued, the content of modern state lies in ensuring that the (class) division within (civil) society is perpetuated in the name of liberty, equality, freedom and utility then what about the rationale of this state. In this context, how the practice of representative democracy gets related to its ‘Marxian’ political practice remains unclear? In other words, here too, an unresolved schism appears: how to reconcile the democratic political (rooted in liberalism) with its professed Marxian political (rooted in the Jacobin imperative). The result: the other Communist Parties practise parliamentary democracy with the Jacobin rhetoric of revolution.

The result of this ambiguous existence is inevitable. Communist Parties position their participation in parliamentary democracy in terms of strategy and tactics (in the spirit of Leninism) even as they propose a different political model. This is no realisation of radical philosophy in practice or practice of radical philosophy. This begs the question of their stance on the forms of democracy. If these parties have doubts about parliamentary democracy, then does this doubt translate into a rejection of democracy as such? Or are they proposing other visions of democracy? If so, what are they? And, how are these other visions of democracy being integrated into their current political practice? Answers to these questions remain suspended. It begs the question of how such a Marxian practice of state and democracy is distinct from the modernist-bourgeois model of state and democracy. The increasingly unbridled and unquestioned use of the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the modernist-bourgeois state by Marxists guided by an equally un-problematised acceptance of ‘reality’ as spelled by the bourgeois discourses as the true and only reality speaks volumes about the confusion that reigns in this circle. After all, to think, conceptualise and act in distinctly different ways on the same issues, we understand, is the Marxian imperative and the distinctness of its politics; Marxists must contest the reality of the bourgeois discourses by producing a distinctly different knowledge of reality and of its components – state, civil society, democracy, etc. For Marxists to be Marxists, one will have to produce a different account of what the world is and what the world ought to be.

Taking a cue from their advocated rejection or doubt or confusion concerning parliamentary democracy, bourgeois critics straightway question the democratic credentials of the Indian Communist Parties, Maoist or otherwise. Scepticism on Indian Marxists’ hidden love for dictatorial/anti-democratic values is not a fanciful imagination in light of their reluctance to confront the issue of democracy in the context of the political they propose. The idea of democracy is after all not a strategic or tactical matter. The central question is: Is the ‘Marxian political’ democratic or not? If so, what kind of democracy does the ‘Marxian political’ propose and is it distinct from the liberal notion of democracy? This is a question Marx faced and answered affirmatively paving the way for us to open up a distinctly different continent of understanding democracy. In our reading, Marx wanted to take the mask off the illusion of state-sponsored democracy with its horizon of bourgeois rule meant to secure capitalist exploitation, distribution and plunder, and re-establish the political to where it is supposed to belong – the mass of people. It was this process of re-establishing the political life in peoples’ social register where, following Marx, we locate the domain of democracy. Seen in this way, democracy could be viewed as an expression of peoples’ unmediated active participation to control their social existence and govern it. Marxian ‘struggle’ has to be tuned towards directly producing and realising this democratic process.

This is also because, under Marx, democracy, as with other aspects of ‘reality’, underwent a fundamental change in meaning in comparison to what became known as parliamentary democracy under the modernist-bourgeois model. De-familiarising the latter on grounds of democracy itself and criticising it for producing an abstract and alien concept of democracy that is centred on state and not the corporeal existence of people, Marx paved the way to imagine a unique theory of democracy that is not only different from but also opposed to both the modernist-bourgeois model as also what official Marxism in the twentieth century offered. In a way, official Marxism turned the clock back on Marx to embrace the Jacobin model (the Leninist form) that is built on terror. On the other hand, Marx’s problem was not the Jacobin model (which he saw as passé), but the liberal model of democracy (which he saw as shaping the present).

In the modernist-bourgeois conception of democracy, the political is inalienably tied to the state. Evacuating the political of ‘social life’ including the economy meant that capitalist organisation of surplus with its relationality of enslavement would become depoliticised even as the state now seen as the representative of the people could do its utmost to facilitate such organisation. It was this inalienable tie between democracy and capitalism that Marx questioned; he criticised it for (i) disconnecting democracy from the social life of people including their economic life, and through that, (ii) securing and facilitating an exploitative/capitalist organisation of surplus. Marx wanted to overcome this with a different vision of democracy. For him, locating politics in the state was problematical because it guaranteed the absence of the political qua democracy in the social life of people. He searched for avenues that would re-establish the political in the social life of people, establish a connection between the economy and the political by doing away with exploitative existences and its associated injustices. True democracy, a la people-centric democracy, is achieved through the conjoining of political and economic democracy into one: that is the methodological break Marx envisaged in his idea of the political.

Dictatorship of Proletariat: Marx versus Lenin

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society;
the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity. 
Marx in “Theses on Feurbach, XI”

We begin with a fundamental distortion of Marx’s usage of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” which, Thomas (1994) pointed out, “as Marx had contemplated, is defined by the way it applies democracy, and not by the way it abolished democracy” (121).

Dictatorship to Marx, forever the classicist, carried not so much its later, twentieth-century connotation of despotism and authoritarianism but its Roman meaning: an emergency, transitional assumption of power for a limited period and for the sake of carrying through determinate tasks that were to be specified in advance. This is not at all what Lenin had in mind. (Thomas 1994, 122-123)

In the Leninist imagination, the term ‘dictatorship’ acquired a stable/permanent character and became tied to the vanguard party. Taking a life of its own, it gave the vanguard party divine right over or moral ownership of the rest of society, and, when in power, the right to rule through the apparatuses of the party/state. Under official Marxism of the twentieth century, the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ became a defence for the suppression of democracy that tragically ended up legitimising processes of enslavement and violence over even the so-called natural constituents of the vanguard party – the industrial and agrarian proletariat. Far from restoring the political in the social life of people, the Leninist model turned out to be a programme of evacuating the political from social life. This assigned place of democracy (in the dustbin of history, as our official Marxist friends would like to say) is a far cry from what was visualised by Marx; so too was the unprecedented statism that took its place.

Marx with his commitment to the ethic of sharing, cooperation and solidarity remained determined to usher in democracy in its true, participatory sense. Participation in the sense of association formed through the ethic of cooperation and not compulsion. Participation in the sense of self-rule and self-governance would imply a direct control over decisions and actions concerning the reproduction of the social life of people. Marx argued that this found fruition through the commune, which in turn would form the bedrock of a communist society (at least in its initial stage). Rather than envisage commune as a given or static entity, commune was seen by Marx as the product of the creative being-in-common through which subjects, via cooperation, form a collective. For Marx, the commune was the preferred institutional form through which communist society would be organised. There is another aspect to the commune that needs emphasis.

The commune is neither a political nor an economic entity. It is not even an exclusively cultural entity. It is a formation that conjoins the three into one in a bundle of overdetermined and contradictory processes. It is a non-exploitative economic institution involved in production activities and decisions regarding the flow of surplus and use values to itself and to other components of society. The commune is, at the same time, an active and contested site of collective deliberation and decision making concerning what kind of non-exploitative economic institution would appear as also what kind of relation the commune would have vis a visthe rest of the society through its distributive decisions or otherwise. In both the sense of politicising the economy and relating economic institutions to the rest of society, the commune acquires a political character. The commune is also a site of the culture of sharing, cooperation and solidarity as against an environment of individualism that celebrates income/commodity fetishism and unbridled competition (the hallmark of the bourgeois horizon of right). The social struggles over and within commune are thus also over cultural processes involving subjects in chains of meaning production that espouses love and not enslavement, that celebrates bonding and not bondage. The “subjects’ relation to the (nodal) signifier” must change such that they now relate themselves to the ethico-political of non-exploitation, fair distribution and democracy. In the process, subjects become, through their social struggles against capitalism and through their everyday practices within the ethico-political environment of the commune, communist subjects. In this sense, instead of the state, people-centric democracy built on the difficult relationality of being-in-common would find release through the commune. In referring to the commune, it is

..very telling that Marx himself carefully and consistently avoided identifying the Commune as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. So long as Marx was alive, Engels too was similarly careful. Only in 1891, long after Marx’s death, did Engels in his introduction to (a new edition of) Marx’s Civil War in Franceidentify as a, or the, form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Harding 1984, 13-14)

Taking off essentially from Engels (along with, what Thomas called discriminatory lifting from Marx’s work that was far removed from the context of his intervention), Lenin and particularly later Marxists gave a twist to ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that decisively mired the ‘political’ meaning of commune. This turn took a life of its own under the statism of official Marxism that ended up practically reducing commune to an economic institution; currently, discussions on cooperatives often tend to focus exclusively on the economic content forgetting that, like commune, cooperatives could be seen as sites of economic, political and cultural processes (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2008). Finally, the universalising of state enterprises as beacon of socialist institution buried the idea of commune dead. This, in turn, ultimately led to a purloining of the commune from the lexicon of Marxian practice; it was not really the disappearance of the commune that is the issue, but of the idea of democracy it was supposed to harbour. Marxism deluded itself into a search for seeking changes in structures – essentially economic structures – trivialising in the process the importance of social struggles over political and cultural processes. It was also an unpardonable misunderstanding of the context in which Marx was reflecting on the relationship of state, civil society and democracy and a serious misrepresentation of the direction of communism he was professing.

The State’s Usurping of Democracy

The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen. Who is this man who is distinct from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society simply called ‘man’ and why are his rights called the rights of man? How can we explain this fact? By the relation of the political state to civil society, by the nature of political emancipation.
– Marx in The Jewish Question

Marx left his imprint on ideas of state, civil society and democracy in his debate with Hegel and Bruno Bauer. Hegel in Philosophy of Right described the division between state and civil society, and offered a precursor to what we now know as modernist-bourgeois state theory. Because Hegel and Marx focused on foundational aspects governing the relationship between state and other aspects that in all these years have not undergone any fundamental change, this encounter between the two remains topical in the current setting and perhaps more so with the neo-liberal turn that has seen a sharpening of the dualism of state and civil society.

First though, there were liberals down from Smith, Hobbes, Locke, to John Stuart Mill who believed that the state is an ‘accidental evil’ which is needed to ensure that the horizon of bourgeois right – positioned as the ‘natural laws of life’ – works among individuals conceptualised as isolated, atomised and self-seeking. It would be ideal if, left to their respective selves the individuals could work on their own in civil society and reproduce the natural laws of society. But alas, the basket of humans has some rotten apples whose pernicious influence needs to be curbed since they threaten the natural laws of human life. How will the natural laws of human life then be protected? The answer was sought, quite reluctantly, in the state. The state thus emerges as alien to civil society in order to restrain the liberty of a few so that there can be liberty for many. The fact that it is paradoxically also a force that encroaches on civil society to ensure that the natural laws work makes it evil albeit a necessary evil.

Hegel did not question the dualism of state and civil society, but turned it on its head. Instead of visualising state and civil society as compartmentalised or as unrelated domains, he conceptualised the state as the universal/community that holds the plural particularity of civil society together. The different members of civil society see the unification of their diverse interests(/welfare) materialising in the state; the state represents an abstract universal so that the concrete rights of members of civil society – still, the horizon of bourgeois rights of atomised individuals – can find fruition. Rather than being accidental, the state emerges in Hegel as essential. It is evident that Hegel did not reject the conceptual division between state and civil society nor did he fundamentally question the understanding of individuals as isolated, atomised, homo economicus. He was at one with, as Marx would say, the ‘horizon of bourgeois right’. If anything, Hegel secured the position of modern state and, for our current interest, left us to contend with a location of the political that in the course of time had far reaching consequences. What interests us here is this location of the political and the kind of democracy it gives rise to.

Through his concept of Beamtenpolitik, Hegel defined the state as an embodiment of collective/universal rationality that telescopes a set of actions and forms of consciousness in line with the pre-given idea of the state. The site of state as a universal is personified by bureaucrats or experts who can rationally take decisions on matters of public concern without being vitiated by noises from the public opinion that is ‘accidental,’ ‘negligible’, ‘caprice’ and ‘uninformed’. The public made up of isolated, atomised individuals in turn forms the domain of civil society and their plural interests come to be mediated through the state. The state thus emerges as the universal/community that while deemed as containing the particularity of individuals is in effect external to the individuals; the state has relative autonomy. With matters of public concern resituated firmly in the domain of the state, the Hegelian model reconfigures the political and takes it away from the people; it additionally produces in the realm of the political a relationship of subordination of civil society to the state.

Feudal society was dissolved into its foundation {Grund}, into man. But into man as he really was its foundation – into egoistic man.

This man, the member of civil society, is now the foundation, the presupposition of the political. In the rights of man, the state acknowledges him as such.

The political revolution (of the bourgeoisie – emphasis ours) is the revolution of civil society….The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society….Political emancipation (of the bourgeoisie – emphasis ours) was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.

Marx. The Jewish Question (232-233)

Marx, of course, took the state and civil society division as weaning away the issue of class division and of social intervention from the people; for him, this was one way of locating the political away from the people which he squarely rejected. He refused to accept any notion of the political that works by excluding the vast majority from collective deliberation and action with the underlying effect of securing and facilitating the class organisation of exploitation and hence perpetuate class division. In this context, Marx remained highly critical of the bureaucracy. His search for an alternative imagination of the political made him look for a ‘collective’ not in the realm of the state, but in what this conception of state excludes in the process of becoming an abstract universal. In the process, he fixes the meaning of his political in terms of what has been alienated from public life. And, what has been alienated from social life is, yes, democracy. This is analogous to what the process of the very formation of the capitalist class has to exclude as a concentrated mass – the mass of the proletariat, industrial and agrarian. Not surprisingly, for Marx, the relation between the state and the capitalists shaped through the bourgeois horizon of the rights of men is in direct opposition to any relation between the proletariat and people-centric democracy; the formation and stability of the former relation requires an undermining and an undercutting of the later. The loss of the relation between the proletariat and people-centric democracy is a crucial condition for the depoliticisation of the economy and the securing of the political within the state; the disintegration of the proletariat into atomised individuals is also crucial for maintaining capitalist/exploitation organisation of surplus; in tandem, they don’t allow the formation of the association of the proletariat. From Marx’s perspective, it demonstrates the necessity of class struggle in his imagination of democracy since it is only by the formation of such an association making possible the condition of expropriating the expropriators that a relation between the proletariat and democracy can materialise. This also meant, following Marx, that a movement towards the register of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls being-in-common (not a given collective but the coming together of a collective or association) demands sharing, cooperation and solidarity that is to be reached through collective deliberation (amidst contending positions and differences that ensure an active body of individuals), which in turn calls for a model of participation, akin to people-centric democracy. The political form of being-in-common defines a state where the economic emancipation of workers a la end of exploitation transpires. The movement from the proletariat to the being-in-common means that the former is not to be seen as a hypostasised or as an abstract entity at the disposal of the Other (State, Party, etc.); but rather becomes a ‘creative contingent universal’ in motion and flux and that is at the same time realisable in concrete terms; realisable in the sense that both individual members and the mass constituting the proletariat are able to practically cultivate their freedom on their own and in association with others; which is why, the proletariat is active-enough to take the form of (or give way to the)being-in-common: where the “free development of each is the condition of the free development of all”. It seems twentieth century official Marxism has reversed the above-mentioned ethical leash: the proletariat continues to be an abstract ruse for proposing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ leading in turn to the suppression of the freedom and the free development of none other than the proletariat; dictatorship in the name of the ‘proletariat’ usurps the democracy of the actual proletariat. Even while the consequence of all of this is so evident in the fall and demise of the ‘socialist’ promise, we are not sure as to whether the various strands of Indian Marxism quite understand this crucial relation between proletariat and being-in-common, between emancipation of proletariat from exploitation and people-centric democracy; the latter is a condition for the emancipation of the former; the freedom of each individual is a condition for the freedom of the proletariat as such; achieving this freedom demands freedom from the state of exploitation; that is why freedom of the individual requires the freedom to form associations; and associations (from proletariat to commune/cooperative) are formed not merely to end exploitation (the scenario of Sangharsh) but to make possible a non-exploitative future (Nirman). Marx’s opposition to the liberal horizon of the individual rights of men was not an opposition to individuality as such. Instead, it was precisely the location of this horizon of right in the dual frame of state and civil society that was deemed problematic by Marx.

Marx saw state not as a simple reflection of class or bourgeois rule as had transpired under much of official Marxism. Instead, his analysis of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte combined the repressive apparatuses that Lenin was to emphasise later with hints of the cultural/ideological construction of subjects to be expanded later on by Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault. It not only takes us far off from an understanding of the state as singularly repressive, but also signals the breakdown of a purported boundary between state and civil society.

…it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, rents and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple the independent organs of the social movement where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely.

In fact, in situations with especially strong ‘civil society’ actors, as in the current era, the bourgeoisie would not want to be seen as taking over and ruling the state. Marx contends,

The bourgeois confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the consequences of its own rule; that in order to restore tranquillity in the country, its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that, in order to preserve its own social power intact, its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion and order only on condition that their classes be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit its crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its head like the sword of Damocles.

The appearance of the modern-bourgeois state as the ‘universal’ becomes clear in this passage.

Every common interest was immediately severed from society, counterpoised to it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France.

Marx was emphasising the need to understand the state in terms of its practice; rather than reduce the state to the machinations of capital, perhaps a more open-ended analysis in terms of and in the practice of state is being suggested here. This, however, does not mean that state (the political) and capitalism (the economic) are unrelated. Rather, capitalist organisation of surplus is secured by, paradoxically, excluding the economic from the domain of the state by making it a private affair. The very formation of modern state (and civil society) institutionalises this exclusion of the functioning of capitalism and its (class) divisions and injustices. Even the laws and rules that the state lays down, as universal rights of the individual man, ensure and secure the conduct of capitalist organisation of surplus.

Bonapartism, as described by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, shifts focus on the state apparatuses; it is as if the apparatuses – created, refined and perfected in a continual process – acquire a life and purpose of their own in line with the contingencies and challenges that arise. In other words, as a machine, it is increasingly perfected to be made to rule and dominate. As Thomas (1994 104) argues,

Every previous revolution, as Marx put in, had consolidated the “centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature.” All previous revolutions had “perfected this (state) machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoil of the victors.” The pronounced shift in emphasis on Marx’s part, away from a rigidly ruling-class theory of state, and towards an emphasis on the power of the state apparatus itself, helps explain Marx’s insistence in 1871 (The Civil War in France) that “the working-class,” for its part, “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” since this machinery is likely under modern conditions to have purposes all of its own, and these are unlikely to intersect and more like to crosscut, or strike out, the workers.

Following Marx, the problem with state extends to the very apparatuses, repressive and ideological, which makes a state-centred understanding of the political complicit with relationalities of enslavement, oppression and exploitation. Recourse to a simple-minded usage of state is problematical because one “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”; overthrowing the ‘bourgeois’ state by the ‘Marxian’ state may well have been the Leninist imperative, but it certainly was not that of Marx; Marx was positioning the idea of political on a totally different register. The problem for Marx was not simply that of this or that state but state (as a concept) itself and more particularly its modern-bourgeois version that de-linked the political and the economic; also the reduction of the political to statism would entail a surrender of the democratic release Marx was determined to introduce into the realm of the political; such surrender would take us miles away from the political Marx was contemplating in terms of being-in-common. Like Tagore and Gandhi, Marx’s political was firmly grounded on the need to move beyond the ‘horizon of (individual) rights’ (the register of state and citizenship) into the ‘horizon of freedom and emancipation’ (the register of people-centric democracy), though we must not confuse or demote the differences that may and do exist between the three.

Marx emphasised the need to move beyond the horizon of individual rights because while capital faces labour on a social plane, it tries to deal with labour on an individualised plane, as individual citizens, who sell labour power of their own free will. Its fear and despise for organised labour (a political force) is not accidental, but connected to the securing of the capitalist organisation of surplus; where the de-linking of the organisation of capitalist exploitation from the social marks an important moment in the liberal order. This moment of ‘de-linking’ has to be internalised in whatever conception of ‘democracy’ the modernist-bourgeois model forwards. In this model, the dispersion of organised labour is achieved if the workers see themselves as individualised; a bloodless coup occurs, if we may say, producing the homo economicus as the political imperative of liberalism.

The modernist-bourgeois model thus marks a separation of the economic and the political; the economic, now banished from the domain of the state, become subjected to the decision making and activities of isolated, atomised individuals. Consequently, the processes of capitalist exploitation and distribution of surplus, as also their conditions of existence such as (private) property, commodity and market, etc, are taken beyond the political register. These are now essentially private matters and have nothing to do with the political; any conflict therein is mediated by law and the sanctity of their existence, such as private property or right to appropriate surplus value, is now comprehended as an individual exercise of liberty marked by the universal right of all men. In the process, the phenomenon of exploitation is foreclosed. This inaugurates the moment of the capitalist’s right to organise and manage the process of performance, appropriation and distribution of surplus value and via that legitimise its presence as the acceptable appropriator of the wealth of society.

The foreclosure of exploitation (and indeed of class process of surplus labour since exploitation arises in the context of class process (5)) depoliticises the domain of the economic and makes it the site of individual interactions where the horizon of bourgeois rights – Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham – is secured. There is thus no political to be claimed in the domain of the economic except in what can be legitimately claimed at an individualised level – the (neo) liberal idea of the freedom to exchange (the freedom to buy and sell labour power as also buy and sell private property). The modernist-bourgeois state is thus an indispensable condition for capitalism not only in the sense of invoking repressive apparatuses against any opposition to bourgeois rights and capitalist exploitation. It is also so because, along with other institutions (academia, media, corporations, etc.), it helps secure the de-politicisation of the economic. It is this twin register (marked by ideological subjectivation and repressive subjection) that makes the state’s relation with ‘civil society’ so intricate and inextricable.

In the context of parliamentary democracy, the issue is not one of having or not having universal suffrage (Marx was an early defender of universal suffrage when the liberals were busy denying it to part of their own population and of course the colonies), but of appreciating how the mode of oppression (suspension of people-centric democracy) and the mode of exploitation (looting of the wealth created by workers by a small set of appropriators), rather than disparate, are connected. This dis-connect is secured by the compartmentalisation of a certain kind of state-sponsored democracy from the (neo)liberal economy enmeshed in civil society. Marx was clearly opposed to that kind of democracy which took the ‘political’ away from the people and in the words of Tagore “becomes like an elephant whose one purpose in life is to give joy rides to the clever and to the rich” (2006, 32). As Tagore so perceptively argued, such a system of governance “…cannot be called a government of the people, by the people, for the people” (1963, 18).

Turning Back on Marx and Democracy: The Leninist Turn

It is one thing to draw up fantastic plans for building socialism through all sorts of workers’ association, and quite another to learn to build socialism in practice in such a way that every small peasant could take part in it.
                 – Lenin, “On Cooperation”

The nature of the political proposed by Marx was missed by twentieth century official Marxism that again envisaged restoration of the political within the realm of the state. This was particularly true for the Leninist conception of the state. While Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution’ (1968b) does de-fetishise the state, he was perhaps overzealous of the repressive character of the state which can probably be understood in the Russian context then, which lacked a ‘civil society.’ As Gramsci (1971, 236) noted:

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.

Lenin analysed capitalism as dovetailing into the state and acquiring the form of state monopoly capitalism.

The imperialist war has immensely accelerated and intensified the process of transformation of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism. The monstrous oppression of the working people by the state, which is merging more and more with the all-powerful capitalist associations, is becoming increasingly monstrous. The advanced countries are becoming military convict prisons for the workers. (Lenin 1968a)

With this linkage between mode of production and state, state monopoly capitalism had prepared the ground for “a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism.” But, has the development of capitalist mode of production materialising through the state fulfilled its potential? Here, Thomas (1994) reasoned that Lenin changed the meaning of socialism/communism by arguing that the “principal task of the dictatorship of the proletariat” must be the “the creation of a proletariat in the place and in the proportion needed by the state, imbued with attitudes favourable to the maximisation of productivity and free from defensive autonomous organisations that might have frustrated these goals.” Socialism becomes “that system of social ownership that best conducted to maximum economic efficiency and productivity.” Lenin would argue that capitalism has exhausted its potential to achieve greater economic efficiency and productivity, and the imperialist wars are a reflection of that crisis. Consequently, the stage was set for the Bolshevik Party to “capture the new means of control” which “have been created not by us, but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage.” Thomas argues, resulting from Lenin’s intervention, “socialism is seen in the first instance as a solution to capitalist problems (production, organisation, efficiency) rather than as a rise of a new humanity, a new civilisation, and the supersession of domination.” (Lenin in Thomas 1994, 131) That there is a case for Thomas’s interpretation of Lenin is borne out by Lenin himself when late in his life (1923 to be precise) he backtracked from this understanding of state and meaning of socialism.

Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch – to reorganise our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganise it. Our second task is education work among the peasants. (1968c, 687)

Notwithstanding his revisions, Lenin’s original state theory giving way to Leninist state theory gathered its own momentum, got deified, and dominated the Marxist understanding of the state. The state came to be defined as mirroring class rule and class struggle and hence the work of socialism came to be formalised in terms of the capture of state power which in turn is to be deployed to repress and control the multitude so as to create maximum economic efficiency and productivity in order to out-compete the so-called capitalist economies. One aspect needs to be reiterated. Not only was the state seen as the sponsor of socialism, this belief led to a celebration of state apparatuses. In Lenin’s State and Revolution:

Once we have overthrown the capitalists….and smashed the bureaucratic machine of the modern state, we shall have a splendidly equipped mechanism….which can very well be set going by the workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foreman, and accountants, and pay them all workmen’s wages.

The new means of control have been created not by us, but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage.

This goes against the grain of Marx’s warning that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Since these apparatuses were perfected to control and suppress, Marx warned that the state machinery will turn against the working class, which indeed can be seen as having come prophetically true. Notwithstanding Lenin’s warning against the danger of bureaucratising the socialist agenda through the bureaucratisation of the party apparatchik as it takes control of extant state apparatuses, the Leninist model with its statist approach could not but end up precisely with that outcome. In a way, such an embracing of statism is reflective of a different understanding of socialism and emancipation than what Marx envisaged. Under the scanner of state sponsored socialism, “the dictatorship of the proletariat” literally took the permanent form of dictatorship of the party operating through the state. Here, the term ‘dictatorship’ acquired its current meaning of despotism and authoritarianism in abstraction from the democratic release that Marx was emphasising. Politics centred on ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ not only became an instrument against the modern-bourgeois ideal of democracy but equally tellingly against the more relevant ideal of people-centric democracy; thus Leninist politics around ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ turns against the political imagination of Marx. Evidently, our analysis is pointing to the problematical nature of the Maoist vision of Jacobin-style revolutionary upsurge based on a dated conception of state. It is also arguing against the naïve pragmatism of conventional communists who would want to use the ready-made state machinery through the parliamentary set up without rethinking the elementary relation between state and democracy from a perspective opened up by Marx. In the case of Soviet Union, China and elsewhere, the result was disastrous but predictable. It ended up replacing one group of capitalist exploiters – the private ones – with the bureaucratised party apparatchik who ended up appropriating the surplus of the workers creating what following Milovan Djilas we may call the new class of ‘state capitalists’. In the case of the Soviet Union, while Lenin himself became alarmed at such statist possibilities late in his life and tried to recover the socialist spirit of the Bolshevik revolution, the interpretation he had let loose by then carried a momentum that took the Soviet Union towards a new class divided society split between the new class of exploiting state capitalists and the exploited workers.

Democracy a la Commune

Where the state organism is purely formal, the democratic element can enter into it only as a formal element. If…it (democracy) enters the organism or formalism of the state as a ‘particular’ element, its ‘rational form’ will be nothing more than an emasculation, an accommodation, denying its own particular nature, i.e. it will function purely as a formal principle.
– Marx in Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State

Marx was opposed to the ‘horizon of bourgeois right’ that took away peoples’ right to be politically active in the sense of cultivating association, and practising, via cooperation, collective demands and goals respectively; he was opposed to an a-political economy that was based on the utility maximisation of atomistic and self-centred individuals; he was opposed to a state-centric meaning of the political; he was opposed to formal democracy rooted through citizenship. He was opposed to all these because, they, in combination, produce an order-normativity that secure the enslavement of the multitude, that secure capitalist organisation of surplus, and prevent the cooperative realisation of the being-in-common. In this context, the commune signifies:

The reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression – the political form of their emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors)…of society wielded for their oppression for their enemies.

Commune as the institutional form of the being-in-common is simultaneously the political anti-thesis of the state through which the emancipatory project of communism materialises and people-centric democracy is reached. One can imagine different non-exploitative arrangements epitomised by varied class organisations of surplus that co-exist in their overdetermined relation with economic and cultural processes. This helps us view and analyse the institution of commune or communist/communitic organisations from different angles. There is no one model of commune; it takes various forms. Referring to the ‘Communal Constitution’ of the Paris Communards, Marx lays down his imagination of the commune.

It was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.

Except on this last condition, the Commune would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.

If Marx was looking at the workers commune in the The Civil War in France, late in life Marx while contemplating on the ‘Russian Road’ was proposing a peasant commune. That Marx was deeply concerned with a possibility in which the commune would be subjected to the rule of external force – state, monarchy or even party – was clearly laid down in his analysis of the Russian commune. In words worth quoting, Marx noted:

There is one feature of the “land commune” in Russia, which constitutes its weakness and is detrimental to it in all respects. This is its isolation, the lack of contact between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is not found everywhere as inherent feature of this type, but wherever it is present had given rise to a more or less centralised despotism over the communes….Today this is an obstacle that can be very easily overcome. All that need to be done is to replace the volost, a government institution, by an assembly of peasants elected by the communes themselves, which would serve as an economic and administrative organ to protect their interests. (1970, 157)

Elsewhere, Marx argues that, no matter its microcosmic form, the commune by replacing the state does not immediately imply the disappearance of the nation; it only constitutes the nation differently.

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality…Instead of deciding once in every three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes.

Universal suffrage – voting – is not to be decried, but must be turned into a means people can use to exercise their right to collective deliberation on matters that affect their daily procreation. The issue is not to do away or dilute universal suffrage but to prize open the social space to increasingly open the possibility of its application to its deepest level. In a scenario where the state sponsored governance structure tends to rule from above, the aspect of universal suffrage can be a ‘weapon’ against such governance through the realisation of a bottom-up form of democracy. Thus as against the political emancipation of the liberal/bourgeoisie, Marx forwards his own revolutionary thesis on human emancipation:

The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – who are related by law just as men in the estates and guilds were related by privilege – are achieved in one and the same act. But man, as member of civil society, inevitably appears as unpolitical man, as natural man….Actual man is acknowledged only in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in the form of the abstract citizen. …Political emancipation (of the bourgeoisie – emphasis ours) is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person. (Marx in The Jewish Question, 233-234)

Only when the actual individual man takes back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognised and organised his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political force – only then is human emancipation complete. (Marx in The Jewish Question, 234)

Following Marx, this form of human emancipation must usher in people-centric democracy and abolish exploitation, a process that appears in tandem. Evidently, a people-centric democracy that strives to achieve this is fundamentally different from parliamentary democracy that is devoid of any permanent engagement with concerns that affect people’s social life including the class effects procreating therein. The former type of democracy would politicise the economic and hence make capitalist organisation of surplus (and the issue of its governance) a matter of public debate; the latter form in contrast helps to keep the question of capitalist organisation of surplus beyond the political register. Why not situate the political within a struggle overdemocracy? Why not make the issue of exploitation and of mal-distribution, inequity and plunder also a matter of democratic engagement? Why not make the issue of the democratising of economic life the political goal? Instead of taking defensive positions, why not take the battle into the territory where the bourgeois feels most secure – the realm of democracy?

A Few Related Observations

(i) By the end of his life, Marx had done away with any prioritisation between ‘land commune’ and ‘workers commune’ at the ethico-political level.  The commune is to be inaugurated in the distinct corners of social life where classes (processes of performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labour) exist. Given the nature of his political organised around communism, this is understandable. In a decentred and disaggregated reality of class existences, the commune subjected to specific sets of overdetermined and contradictory effects encapsulates the possibility of appearing in various forms. Consequently, rather than imagining the commune to be a given, pre-determined model, it is more perceptive to look at it as contingent and in a state of flux, as being open to effects from contesting political, cultural, natural and economic processes.

(ii) The commune would become as if the institutional face through which the political life of the populace would take shape, through which an embodied and not an abstract form of citizenship finds fruition. Here, Marx was warning against the possibility of a distant power overseeing the commune. This was a situation unacceptable to Marx because the political dimension of commune would be shaped by the democratic release of the multitude. The Rules of the International (with which Marx was associated) said: “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves.” It is in the appearance of this act which inaugurates the field of democratic practices. The ‘value’ of democracy is self-governance and self-determination and not governance from top down and/or outside whether that being the state or party. The party organisation must be tuned to facilitate this field of democratic practice and not usurp this field in the name of democratic practice under the guise of dictatorship of the proletariat. Self-governance and self-determination does not mean turning inwards or being parochial. They also do not mean not engaging with the outside and not adopting modern techniques and organisations of production, distribution and consumption. They only refer to a refusal to be governed by external forces and from above, to be excluded from the governance of their own social life. The external resides not just in the far away imperialist but also concerns what exists amidst us – the party, the state, the modern-bourgeois institutions, and so on. It is such an ethico-political commitment to democracy, which made it impossible for Marx to accede to any rule concerning the commune other than the rule of the commune itself. Any other possibility, such as a rule of commune through state/party, as Marx remarkably foresaw, would jeopardise the very democratic release by once again distancing democracy from the people. In that case, “free development of each” as the condition of the “free development of all” will continue to remain a distant dream.

(iii) Taking off from Marx, the communes at the ground level would culminate in a ‘national council’ that would be responsible for dealing with the more macro issues. This national council though is a collective arrived at through elections at the level of commune (which, as we are emphasising are also political institutions) that includes not only the workers but the members of the broader community as well. Importantly, following our analysis, the national council cannot be deemed as ‘independent’ from the social life of the people (such that it would be practically impossible for the national council to enact a scenario such as in Kalinganagar, Nandigram, Singur and Lalgarh). For, in a democracy, “nobody transfers his natural right [that is, his or her freedom] to another so completely that thereafter he is not to be consulted; he transfers it to the majority of the entire community of which he is a part” (Spinoza 2001, 179). The violation of this principle is possible in the ‘modern-bourgeois’ state because the political is attached to the state and its apparatuses (including the party in power) is considered to be representing the will of the people; the representative/parliamentary form of ‘modern-bourgeois’ democracy delivers a rather alien form of democracy. It is a democracy in which the will of the people is mediated by the bureaucracy/parties through the state. In people’s democracy, as Marx was attempting to envisage, parliament in the form of national council would be forever subjected to the scrutiny of the people emanating from their continual engagement at the level of and/or surrounding the commune. People’s decisions and actions have immediate effects on the questions of governance, wealth, power and policy; it fundamentally changes each one by subjecting them to the decisions and actions of the multitude. It is close to a somewhat unmediated rule of the people where the distance between the state and civil society as also the distance between the political and economic blurs.

Conclusion

Arbitrary reduction of multiple and potentially conflicting principles to one solitary survivor, guillotining all the other evaluative criteria, is not, in fact, a prerequisite for getting useful and robust conclusions on what [is] to be done.
Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice

It is stunning to see how official Marxism of the twentieth century with its state sponsored socialism (under the guardianship of a vanguard party promoting dictatorship of the proletariat) had precisely done the opposite of what Marx had proposed. In one of the tragic ironies of history, official Marxists re-established the abstract and formal rule of the state and successfully reinstated the division between the political (now attached to the state/party) and the economic (now pinned down to aspects like productivity, efficiency, etc.) that, as Resnick and Wolff (2002) so convincingly demonstrated, reinstated capitalism albeit in its state capitalist form in the so-called socialist countries. The de-politicisation of the economic and the farce of the political that was conjured by official Marxists through their statism lead to a purloining of Marx’s insights by Marxists. What was forgotten in the process was that Marx’s take on democracy would sit equally uncomfortably with the modern-bourgeois theories of state. For Marx, as for us, the template of bourgeois right is problematical because it takes away the political from the life of the multitude. The reduction of the political to statism in turn reduces questions of ethics and justice to legality. From civil society to association of humanity – that was the journey Marx was seeking; it is a journey that probably, like Marx’s other interventions, fundamentally seeks to read history and politics from the perspective of the masses and one which is remarkably pertinent in what is fast becoming a flash point of confrontation in the twenty first century.

Marx opened for us a new continent of rethinking politics by problematising the very strength of liberalism – democracy. The problem was and is that democracy as it exists is paradoxically conditioned to secure social divisions including the perpetuation of capitalist organisations of exploitation and its associated injustices. Democracy must be reclaimed, an event that is coterminous with the eradication of exploitation and its associated mechanics of enslavement and oppression. This re-turn of democracy would of course seek a change in the very meaning of democracy and that is what Marx was explicating, an exploration in which the conception of alternative institutions, for him the commune (for others it could be the Tagorean cooperativeor the Gandhian swaraj-satyagraha or Niyogi’s Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha or some other form), would play a major role. The issue is over the kind of questions that Marx was trying to put forward and whether those questions are relevant in current times and whether they should and can be brought back. We believe that they are (not least because the basic framework of the modern-bourgeois paradigm remains intact amidst an expansion of the capitalist organisation of surplus and of its development across the global landscape), but because such a return would also demand a deconstructive embrace with the Marxian of the political. What is also urgent is to comprehend that valuing democracy in its fullest and real sense cannot but make us turn to Marx; if not to wholly embrace his position then at least to lend a patient ear to his ideas. The question is: what do we make of it? Are we ready to enact a transition within Marxian theory and Marxian practice itself?

Anjan Chakrabarti is Professor in the Department of Economics, Calcutta University. Anup Dhar is Fellow, Centre for Studies in Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore. Recently they authored Dislocation and Resettlement in Development: From Third World to World of the Third (Routledge, London).

Notes:

(1) We have used the texts of Marx as given in the bibliography.

(2) However, this is not to say that the category ‘people’ is exhausted by the ‘class of the exploited’. The category people has been extended and expanded in a number of directions and ways in recent times, especially with the inauguration of feminist, postcolonial, sexuality and disability-related critiques. Of late, Marxist theory has also extended its examination of class as processes pertaining to surplus labour to the space of the household and has shown that diverse kinds of organisation of exploitation operate and function within households as well (see Fraad, Resnick and Wolff 1994). Evidently, the idea of the ‘proletariat’ or ‘working class’ needs revision.  Some, such as Hardt and Negri (2000), have called for the replacement of the category proletariat with the idea of multitude, multitude as the global force of revolution. Without entering into these important developments, in this essay, let us stick to Marx’s original understanding of people to take a close look at his take on democracy.

(3) The details of people-centric democracy in the context of capitalist development are analysed in Chakrabarti and Dhar (2009).

(4) This quote/slogan is from Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s (1999) book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. We posit this quote/slogan against a singularly atrocious poster put up by the ‘official left’ – the ‘left’ whichofficially runs Bengal – in fact, runs over the ‘spirit’ of Bengal – and whose poster runs thus in Bengali:Marxbaad Sharbashaktiman Karon Ehaa Satya – Marxism is all powerful because it is True. We juxtapose the two slogans because it is also through slogans that we learn Marxism – slogan dite giye ami chinte shikhi notun manushjon – slogan dite giye ami bujhte shikhi ke bhai ke dushman – it is through slogans that we come to know who/what Marx is – what the bhindeshi errant perhaps stands for.

(5) See Resnick and Wolff (1987) and Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2003) for an understanding class as process of surplus labor.

Bibliography

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Rohit

Presentation of a budget is generally assumed to be indicative of the financial statement that a government makes. But what is often lost sight of is that the budget is more a political statement than a financial one. It clearly exposes the socio-economic policy orientation of the government. The class orientation of this government was made very clear by the Finance Minister in his speech when he argued,

The Union Budget cannot be a mere statement of Government accounts. It has to reflect the Government’s vision and signal the policies to come in future. With development and economic reforms, the focus of economic activity has shifted towards the non-governmental actors, bringing into sharper focus the role of Government as anenabler. An enabling Government does not try to deliver directly to the citizens everything that they need. Instead it creates an enabling ethos so that individual enterprise and creativity can flourish. (Emphasis added)

Unlike the earlier stint of the UPA government, this term has rid them of the ‘baggage’ of carrying the left on whose critical support they were sustaining their government in the last term. We need to remind ourselves of the euphoria that was generated among the big corporate houses and the apex industrial institutions like the FICCI, CII and ASSOCHAM after the victory of the UPA in the last general elections. Vijay Mallya represented this opinion very clearly when he said “[t]he UPA need not worry about hotchpotch partners. The Congress can clearly pursue its policies without the need to convince the Left”.  Echoing similar opinion, Prime Minister’s economic advisory council chairman, Suresh Tendulkar said, “Economic reforms would certainly be on top of the agenda of the government”. The second union budget of this government plays to this gallery in its bid to woo the neo-rich sections of the Indian population. This budget is no different in essence from the ‘India Shining’ politics of the NDA except for a facade of a ‘human face’.

The essence of this budget is conveyed in Pranab Mukherjee’s statement when he said that the government instead of being the provider in the economy should be an ‘enabler’ for individual enterprises (read, big corporations). What this essentially means is further withdrawal of the government from the economic activity except from the sphere of military expenditure. It is surprising that during an economic downturn, our Finance Minister has argued for ‘fiscal consolidation’, which means decreasing fiscal deficit. What is required is an increase in the government expenditure which would add to the demand, and thereby, in employment and total output of the economy. His position is a clear reflection of the class bias that the UPA government has. The financial and corporate interests always want the government’s role in the economy to be passive and to keep the fiscal deficit low. This bias becomes even clearer if we look at the way in which it has been sought to be lowered. He has proposed to increase the indirect taxes, which increases the price of common goods, to mobilize revenue without increasing the expenditure in similar proportion. On top of that, he has proposed tax sops to the neo-rich sections of the Indian population, which means that the burden on indirect tax revenue would ipso facto be higher to compensate for the decline in direct tax revenue. This budget is a clear indicator of the pro-rich and anti-poor political strategy of this government.

This paper will analyse the basic tenets of this budget by placing it in a broader economic perspective. It is divided in four sections. Section one deals with the issue of fiscal deficit. The second section deals with the revenue aspect of the budget and the third section with the expenditure side of it. The last section attempts to draw some conclusions from this budget and where the government is headed in its second term.

Fiscal Prudence: The Humbug of Finance

The treasure view: It has now become a mantra for the powers that be to declare that government should minimize the expenditure that is not financed by its tax revenue, i.e. balance its budget. This view is an old one going back to the famous treasury view which was held during the Great Depression of the 1930s by the then governments in the advanced capitalist countries. To put this argument in a nutshell, let us see what the treasury of the British government during those times had to offer (1),

Any increase in government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of private spending or investment, and thus has no net impact on economic activity.

It is surprising that despite a cogent rebuttal of this argument by Keynes, an English economist and Kalecki, a Marxist economist, it remains alive and, worse still, dominates the policy making. It seems as if Keynesian revolution did not take place in the history! Before we present a critique of this view, let us present the arguments put forth in favour of such a policy.  This argument has three aspects.

First, it is argued that a high fiscal deficit means low private investment, which is the driving force in the economy. Proponents argue that if the government garners a higher share of savings of the economy, less would be left to finance private investment. Therefore, according to this view, the very purpose of increasing growth through fiscal deficit gets defeated.

Second, it is argued that a high fiscal deficit means a higher indebtedness of the government in the future which puts financial burdens on the exchequer. Even if government expenditure boosts demand in the economy, interest payments for past borrowings do not contribute to this process.

Third, a high fiscal deficit means pushing the economy beyond its limits which eventually results in inflation. They argue that a higher fiscal deficit financed by government borrowing from the RBI means an increase in the money stock which would result in inflation since the supply of goods remains the same.

Why is this view wrong? Let us examine each of these points to show why they are wrong. First, the view that government expenditure ‘crowds out’ private investment because it depletes the pool of savings assumes that the pool itself is a given. Whereas any increase in activity in the economy ipso facto generates savings. This can happen in two different ways. First, an increase in government expenditure could generate higher real output (and possibly higher employment) if the economy is not functioning at its full capacity. This increase in output, and thereby of income of workers and capitalists together, generates higher savings than earlier. Second, even if the economy is working at full capacity, it would generate savings by squeezing the share of wages of workers through inflation in prices even as the money wages remain constant. Thus, there is no economic logic for why the ‘pool’ of savings would remain constant.

Second, an increasing share of interest payment out of the fiscal deficit is only possible if the rates of interest are rising. The treasury view assumes again that since the government is increasing the demand of credit, its price (interest rates) is bound to shoot up. The truth, however, is that the interest rates are not decided in the economy through equalisation of demand and supply of credit. It is instead fixed exogenously by the central bank, i.e., RBI in our case. Now, if the interest payments increase at a higher rate than the fiscal deficit, it is because the RBI keeps increasing the interest rate and not the other way round. This increase in interest rate in itself is a result of the process of liberalisation of the Indian economy which requires wooing international finance capital to come and invest in the Indian stock markets.

Third, fiscal deficit is not necessarily inflationary. First, as explained above, if a larger amount of goods can be produced, especially when the economy has idle capital and unemployed labour, the increased amount of money stock chases an increased amount of good. Hence, it would not result in inflation in the economy. Second, if the economy is running at its limit (resources are fully employed), it is not just the fiscal deficit but any expansionary activity, including private investment, becomes inflationary. So, there is no reason why fiscal deficit should be made out to be a villain. In fact, under capitalism, this is the only stable source of providing some respite to the common people facing the brunt of the pro-rich economic policies.

Most importantly, when an economy faces a downturn, any attempt to balance the budget or to put the fiscal deficit within a certain limit puts the burden of adjustment primarily on the working class. A declining economic activity means declining tax revenue for the government because both wages and profits go down. In such a situation, a commensurate downward revision of the government expenditure closes up even the limited opportunities of getting alternative work for the poor and the unemployed. Thus, there is a strong class bias in favour of the rentiers and capitalists in such a policy framework.

After placing the issue of fiscal deficit in a theoretical perspective, let us now concentrate on the specific proposals in this regard in the current budget. This is what Pranab Mukherjee had to say in his budget speech on ‘fiscal prudence’,

I am happy to report that in keeping with my commitment, I have been able to present the Budget for 2010-11 with a fiscal deficit of 5.5 per cent. In the Medium Term Fiscal Policy Statement being presented to the House today, along with other Budget documents, the rolling targets for fiscal deficit are pegged at 4.8 per cent and 4.1 per cent for 2011-12 and 2012-13, respectively… The improvement in our economic performance encourages a course of fiscal correction even as the global situation warrants caution. [emphasis added]

It is interesting to note that he says that although the global situation warrants caution, which means stimulus packages should not be withdrawn abroad, India should do just the opposite. Contrary to his claim, this is not the time to claim any consistent improvement in India’s economic performance since the economic crisis broke out. In fact, growth figure for the last quarter shows a decline in the GDP growth rate (see fig. 1 below).

What remains to be seen is whether the government strictly follows these targets. In case it does, it will be disastrous for the economy in general and the poor in particular. This would be particularly so because government expenditure would have to be scaled down in the event the revenue estimates are not realised. This is a very likely possibility given the nature of tax proposals the current budget proposes.

Pranab Mukherjee’s roadmap for achieving this target comprises of the following strategies:

1. Increasing tax revenue through higher indirect taxes even as sops are doled out to the upper middle class and the rich through tax concessions or revisions.
2. Decreasing crucial expenditure or at best increasing it marginally in the social sectors to ‘rationalise’ the fiscal policy.

Let us now examine these two aspects in some detail.

Resource Mobilisation: A Pro-rich, Anti-poor strategy

Taxes are of two kinds: direct and indirect. While direct taxes are levied on the income of the individuals and business enterprises, indirect taxes are levied on individual commodities. Direct taxes are also used to counter the rising income inequalities resulting from the spontaneous functioning of a capitalist system. This can be done through progressive taxation for higher income groups and using this fund to provide relief to the poor. Indirect taxes on common commodities on the other hand do exactly the opposite. It takes the same tax from the poor as well as the rich. This would obviously affect the poor more because their tax payment as a proportion of their income in this case is much higher than the rich.

Excise Duty on Petrol and Petroleum Products: In the name of curtailing fiscal deficit, the government has proposed to increase the tax revenue through greater incidence of indirect taxes. The specific proposal is to restore the basic duty of 5 per cent on crude petroleum; 7.5 per cent on diesel and petrol and 10 per cent on other refined products. The budget also proposes to enhance the Central Excise duty on petrol and diesel by Re.1 per litre each. For all non-petroleum products, the proposal is to enhance the standard rate on them from 8 per cent to 10 per centad valorem.

The effect of fuel price inflation on the overall inflation (2) can be understood from figure 2, which measures the contribution of three categories of goods i.e. primary articles (PA), fuel, power, light and lubricants (FPL&L) and manufactured products (MP). It can be seen that the contribution of fuels etc. to the overall inflation has been rising steadily since 1999-2000. It should be clear, therefore, that any further increase in inflation of this category would have a cascading effect on the overall inflation.

There are specific reasons for why we are stressing on the fuel prices. First, apart from having a direct impact, fuel price inflation influences the other categories of goods dramatically. The best example of this is the food items. Any increase in the fuel prices means an increase in the transportation cost, which has a direct impact on the final prices at which we buy these goods. Since this spill over effect is strong, any increase in fuel prices should not be taken at its face value alone. Second, there is an asymmetry involved with fuel price movements. While the international price hikes in oil have a direct impact on the domestic prices, any reversal internationally does not get translated into decline in domestic prices. This has become especially true because of our integration with the international economy.

After having presented the data on inflation and its various components, let us now explore the implications of such a process on the economy in general and the poor in particular. In a capitalist economy, the adjustment between theex ante aggregate demand and ex post supply (GDP) takes place through two routes: quantity adjustment and price adjustment. This distinction is central to understanding the effect of inflation in an economy. While the process of quantity adjustment could possibly open up opportunities for the working class and the petty producers through increase in employment, price adjustment squeezes their real income to make this adjustment work. Let us see how this takes place.

We have explained above how an increase in fiscal deficit effects an increase in the GDP. Let us now generalise this process where any one or all of the components of the aggregate demand can increase. Aggregate demand has five components: workers’ consumption, capitalists’ consumption, capitalists’ investment, government expenditure and net exports. An ex ante increase in any/all of these leads to an increase in the GDP ex post. There are two ways in which this can happen. First, it can happen through an increase in the physical quantity of output which is equivalent to the quantum of increase in demand. This also has a possibility of increasing employment unless this increase is equally compensated by an increase in labour productivity.

Second, it can happen through price adjustment. Since our focus at present is on this process, let us explore this possibility in some detail. For simplicity, we assume away the government sector and the foreign demand and concentrate on the demand of the workers and the capitalists. Suppose there is only one good, corn. Its nominal value is Rs 100 where the price is Rs 10 and the real output is 10 units. Nominal wage bill of the workers is Rs 40, which leaves Rs 60 as the nominal profits. We assume that workers consume all their wages whereas capitalists consume only a part of their profits, say half of it. For the given prices, workers have a claim over 4 units of output whereas capitalist over 6 units (3 as consumption and 3 as investment).

For some reason the capitalists, instead of investing Rs 30, want to invest Rs 40 by taking a loan. This extra demand for investment could be met by an increase in output of corn but if it is not possible, then the increased demand would be met by an increase in prices of the 10 units of corn. The price would have to increase to Rs 11 to accommodate the nominal increase in investment demand. If the workers are unable to increase their nominal wages, say because of presence of a large reserve army of labour or absence of unions, their purchasing power (real wages) would ipso facto decline. Instead of having a claim over 4 units of corn, now they have a claim over only 3.6 units (40/11) whereas the capitalists’ share increases to 6.4 units (70/11). Therefore, any price inflation, without a commensurate increase in nominal wages, inevitably leads to a redistribution of real income and output in favour of the capitalists.

We could fit this simple model to the current situation in our economy. The assumption that the workers (3) have not been able to maintain their real share in output can be easily validated by data. If we take the manufacturing sector alone, which has the most organised labour force, the share of wages in net value added has been declining steadily. This decline is even more drastic if we look at wages as a ratio of profits (see fig. 3). This is especially so in the neoliberal era. One could imagine that if this is the condition of the most organised labour force of our country, the share of income of the unorganised and the poor in general would be even worse. In such a situation, an inflationary budget such as this is going to be a drastic squeeze on the livelihood of the majority of the Indian population. It is important to note that the inflation resulting from the budget proposals would be self-inflicted in the sense that this could have been controlled but was consciously decided not to. It is here that the class orientation of the present dispensation at the centre comes out starkly and so unabashedly.

Direct Tax Concessions: It would be interesting to contrast the proposal on indirect taxes with that on the direct taxes. The finance minister declared that the tax sops through relaxations in direct taxes would lead to a revenue loss of Rs 25,000 crores this year. One of the most important factors is the proposal of ‘broadening’ the tax slabs.

One can notice that all those whose income is more than Rs 3 lakhs per annum stand to gain from this announcement (see table 1). Let us take the example of a person who earns Rs 10 lakhs and see how his tax payment would change.  Earlier he was paying 10, 20 and 30 per cent for the portions 1.6–3  lakhs, 3–5 lakhs and remaining 5 lakhs of his income respectively, which means a total of Rs 2.05 lakhs (approx 20 percent of his total income). Now, he would pay 10, 20 and 30 per cent for the portions 1.6–5 lakhs, 5–8 lakhs and remaining 2 lakhs of his income respectively, which means 1.55 lakhs (approx 15 percent of his total income). Similarly, all those people whose income is greater than 3 lakhs gain from these new slabs and as we have shown the gain is substantial. Instead of paying 20 per cent as taxes, a person with an income of 10 lakhs pays only 15 per cent of his total income. Therefore, this is effectively transferring income into the hands of the upper middle class and the rich even as higher taxes in the form of indirect taxes are levied on the working class and the poor.

There is an important factor that we would like to bring in while discussing distribution of income between different classes in India. There is an interesting study by Banerjee and Piketty (2005) on growing income inequality in India (see fig. 4). It can be seen that after a continuous decline in income share of the top 1 per cent between 1950-1982, there has been a dramatic reversal since the early 1980s. The authors draw a significant conclusion as to why this was the case,

[T]he shares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s but then rose again, so that today these shares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920s and 1930s. This U-shaped pattern is broadly consistent with the evolution of economic policy in India: From the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s was a period of “socialist” policies in India, whereas the subsequent period, starting with the rise of Rajiv Gandhi, saw a gradual shift toward more probusiness policies. Although the initial share of the top income group was small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had a nontrivial impact on the overall income distribution. [emphasis added]

 

It is to be noted that their analysis only covers the period till 2000, the first part of the post-reform period. However, the successive NDA and UPA governments have adopted even more pro-rich policies so this trend would have continued till present times. It is alarming to see that in such a situation the government has openly adopted an inequality-enhancing budget. So much for Manmohan Singh’s ‘globalisation with a human face’!

Disinvestment of PSEs:  Another alarming announcement made in this budget is the decision to revert back to the path of disinvestment of Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs). It will be clear in a moment why we have used the phrase revert back. While talking about revenue mobilisation through disinvestment, Pranab Mukherjee said that they expect to generate Rs 40,000 crores in the coming year from disinvestment as against Rs 25,000 in 2009-10. In his own words,

While presenting the Budget for 2009-10, I invited people to participate in Government’s disinvestment programme to share in the wealth and prosperity of the Central Public Sector Undertakings. … The proceeds will be utilised to meet the capital expenditure requirements of social sector schemes for creating new assets.

Listing of Central Public Sector Undertakings improves corporate governance, besidesunlocking the value for all stakeholders—the government, the company and the shareholders. [emphasis added]

It is startling to see that the finance minister is leaving no stones unturned to woo the corporate sector to ‘share in the wealth’ of the PSEs. The class bias in this statement becomes starker if we notice the word that he used for the corporate sector, which is ‘people’. He has made it clear that people for him (and his colleagues) stands for the rich corporate houses and not the ‘aam admi’ that the UPA keeps referring to.  This policy statement is to be seen in sharp contrast to their previous tenure when the Left parties had kept up the pressure to stall the disinvestment plans of the government. While in the first three years of the previous tenure of the UPA, it could disinvest worth Rs 4424, 1581 and 534 crores, it has already mobilised 20,000 crores for the present fiscal year and proposes to mobilise 40,000 crores for the next.

The justification for disinvestment given by the finance minister is that the proceeds would be utilised to meet the expenditures in the social sectors. The vacuity of this statement can be established from this year’s glaring disparity between the resource mobilisation from disinvestment and the expenditure proposals on the social sectors, an issue that we turn to in the next section.

Government Expenditure: Too Less to Have an Impact

On the expenditure side, this budget is a damp squib. Despite making tall claims about an ‘inclusive budget’, the increase in total expenditure is grossly inadequate. This is in line with the fiscal consolidation policy of the finance minister. Let us evaluate the budget proposals for some of the important sectors.

• Agriculture: It is alarming to see that despite a negative growth rate in agriculture registered in 2009-10, the share of allocation on agriculture and allied activities of the total budget expenditure has gone down from 10.77 per cent in 2009-10 (Revised estimates) to 9.75 per cent this year. This complete lack of prioritisation and gross neglect of the agricultural sector especially at a time when it is witnessing one of the worst crises since independence speaks volumes about the real motive of this government. It should be kept in mind that the agricultural sector employs 56 per cent of India’s population today. At a time of dwindling income in the agricultural sector, instead of providing monetary relief to the farmers, the government has decided to decrease the allocation on fertiliser subsidies, thereby, increasing their misery through cost inflation. There has been an absolute decline in fertiliser subsidy from Rs 73660 crores in 2008-09 to Rs 52980 crores in 2009-10 and Rs 49981 crores in the current proposal.
• Rural Development: If we take rural development as a whole, the picture remains the same. This budget allocates lesser share of the total plan on rural development as compared to the previous years. This share has been decreasing from 21 per cent to 16.79 per cent to 16 per cent in 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11 respectively. The allocation on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which is the flagship programme of the government, has gone up by only 2.5 percent from Rs. 39,100 crore in 2009-10 (RE) to Rs. 40,100 in 2010-11 (BE).
• Food Security and Nutrition: As per government’s own reports (4), 77 percent people of our country, i.e. 83.6 crore people, spend less than Rs.20 per head per day and live in poverty and hardship.  Moreover, different national and international reports have shown that around 50 per cent children are undernourished and more than 75 per cent women are anaemic in rural India. There has been a continuous decline in the per capita net availability of food grains since the early 1990s. In such a situation, the requirement was to increase the food subsidy as a step towards universalisation of the Public Distribution System (PDS). However, the government has decided to decrease even that in the name of fiscal prudence.
• Health: The combined expenditure of Centre and States on Health, as a proportion of GDP, has increased marginally from around 1.02 percent in 2008-09 to 1.06 percent in 2009-10. This should be seen in sharp contrast to the election promise of the Congress government of raising total public spending on health in the country to 2 to 3 percent of GDP. Despite the increase in incidence of TB, Malaria and other communicable diseases, there is actually a decline in the allocation of resources on national disease control programme. There is also a decline in allocation to the premier institutes of medical education like PGIMER, Chandigarh. Allocation on National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) has been increased to Rs. 15,514 crores in 2010-11 from Rs. 14,002 crores in 2009-10. There was a large scope of increasing this expenditure if the government was serious about health coverage, especially to the poor and the disadvantaged sections of our society.

Therefore, it is more than clear that at a time in which the government could have played the role of boosting the demand and output as also help generate employment, it has focussed on the policy of controlling expenditure. Government expenditure does not only provide impetus to grow in an unemployment-ridden economy, it also has the potential to partially counterbalance the income and wealth inequalities generated as a result of the spontaneous functioning of capitalism.

Conclusion

This is probably one of the few budgets in recent years which clearly expose the class bias and strategy of the government. There is not even pretence of a ‘human face’ as the UPA government announces the economic policy that they would follow for their present term. At a time in which the working people of our country are getting doubly squeezed due to spiralling inflation and loss of jobs as a result of the global crisis, it is outrageous that the government has not only turned a blind eye to them but has burdened them further. This budget quite clearly is going to aggravate income and wealth inequality while bringing hardship to the aam admi of our country. The question, however, is whether the aam admi would be able to gather enough strength to give a fitting rebuff to these anti-people policies of the UPA government.

Rohit teaches Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi.

Notes:

(1) Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_view

(2) The overall inflation in India is measured by an index called Weighted Price Index (WPI) which calculates the weighted inflation of all the commodities, where the weights are their quantitative contribution to the GDP.

(3) By workers, we do not only mean the working class but the working population, which would include the agricultural workers, petty producers etc.

(4) Arjun Sengupta Committee was set up by the UPA government to look into the condition of the unorganised workers.

References:

Banerjee, Abhijit and Thomas Piketty (2005): Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000. The World Bank Economic Review, 19(1): 1–20

CBGA Report: Union Budget 2010-11, Which Way Now? Response to the Union Budget, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability

Patnaik, Prabhat (2000): The Humbug of Finance. Frontline, 4 February

Union Budget 2010-11: Available at http://indiabudget.nic.in/ub2010-11/ubmain.htm

Pothik Ghosh

Loss: From Phenomenology To Structure

The idea of loss is, without doubt, an object of overriding concern in the canons of psychoanalysis. It also defines, as we would all know, the imaginary of what is called modernism in art and literature. But this idea of loss is perceived to have a rather un-Marxian ring to it. Can that, however, be taken as an accurate account of the relationship between loss and working-class politics, especially of a Marxian vintage? One would wish to begin exploring the theoretical plausibility of such a question by asserting at the outset, perhaps in violation of the kosher rules of dispassionately neutral academic theory, that a revolutionary politics of resistance and class struggle is not possible without a sense and consciousness of loss. That this idea of loss does not figure on the surface of the dominant discourse generated by such politics does not take away from the fact that it has always been its subterranean, constitutive field. But it is time now to foreground this inextricable link between revolutionary politics and the idea of loss in order to save such politics, and its Marxian theory and discourse, from being identified with a normative-Stalinist modality of ‘revolutionary’ politics. Something that both the poststructuralist detractors and communistological proponents of Marxism have been equally culpable of.

What is intended here is an attempt to foreground this relationship between loss and revolutionary politics by exploring how loss can be perceived, articulated and (re)defined within the Marxist paradigm. And in order to accomplish that one would try to come up with an abstract, philosophical model of loss, which is framed by a Marxist understanding of the totality of human experience, even as one simultaneously follows one’s subjective preferences with regard to literature, art and cinema to choose, in a seemingly eclectic and random fashion, certain works that one thinks would enable the expression and explication of this critical Marxist logic of loss. Even at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we would do well to remember that a Marxist conceptualisation of loss no longer allows the consciousness of loss to remain as such because such a conceptualisation is bound up with the transfiguration of the sense of loss into a subjectivity of revolutionary resistance. This exploration, considering that it is being carried out under the twin-signs of working-class politics and psychoanalysis, shall naturally entail a juxtaposition, even transposition, of terms of canonised philosophy and Marxist theory with those of Freudian, especially Lacanian, psychology and psychoanalysis. This approach, which seems in the beginning to be analogical, will eventually show how philosophical and Marxist terminology when transposed into psychoanalytic discourse and vice-versa do not merely serve a metaphorical or allegorical function, but exhibit an underlying logical unity as well.

To better comprehend how a consciousness of loss emerges within the Marxist paradigm as a reconstituted subjectivity of struggle and resistance, we need to understand that the sense of loss as loss emerges within and due to the same logical horizon within and by which that loss is empirically produced. Thus perception of loss as loss, and the consciousness that is contingent on such perception, is an externalised perception of loss insofar as it is bound up with the same logic that has resulted in that loss and makes it appear so. Clearly then, the meaning of loss that is conferred on the empirically extant phenomenon of loss is inextricable from its production as an empirical actuality. It has nothing to do with the expression of how loss experiences itself. In other words, loss, whether it is ignored or recognised as loss, is a distortion of the real insofar as it is registered through a process of imposition of an external sign that robs the real of its reality by replacing it with a symbolic meaning that it is not. Thus the sense of loss, in spite of it coming into being by overcoming the oblivion which the constitutive logic of actually existing history seeks to relegate it to, is no more than the consciousness of loss as an externalised, phenomenological documentation. This consciousness of phenomenological documentation embodies the logic of objectification, which is precisely the invasive, autonomy-destroying, truth-sapping symbolic logic of capitalist modernity that has produced it as an actual, empirical fact in the first place. For loss to really become conscious of itself, it has to become the autonomous expression of its own interiority. In so doing, it will become an active subject by resisting objectification and its constitutive representational/symbolic logic to become another. It will thus cease to be loss and become what we could now call resistance.

This inversely differential relationship between two senses of loss – one passive because of its situation within the symbolic logical horizon of capitalist modernity and the other transfigured into resistance – is captured by poet-filmmaker Pasolini in ‘The Weeping of the Excavator’ (Roman Poems). I cite the most illustrative lines here:

To their neighborhoods, to their suburbs
the young return on light motorbikes –
in overall and workpants

but spurred on by a festive excitement,
with a friend behind on the saddle,
laughing and dirty. The last customers

stand gossiping with loud voices
in the night, here and there, at tables
in almost-empty still brightly-lit bars.

Stupendous and miserable city,
you taught me what joyful ferocious men
learn as kids,

the little things in which the greatness
of life is discovered in peace,
how to be tough and ready

in the confusion of the streets,
addressing another man, without trembling,
not ashamed to watch money counted

with lazy fingers by sweaty delivery boys
against facades flashing by
in the eternal color of summer,

to defend myself, to offend,
to have the world before my eyes
and not just in my heart,

to understand that few know the passions
which I’ve lived through:
they are not brothers to me,

and yet they are true brothers
with passions of men who,
light-hearted, inconscient,

live entire experiences unknown to me.
Stupendous and miserable city,
which made me experience that unknown life

until I discovered what
in each of us
was the world.

A moon dying in the silence that lives on it
pales with a violent glow
which miserably, on the mute earth,

with its beautiful boulevards and old lanes,
dazzles them without shedding light,
and a few hot cloud masses

reflect them over the world.
It is the most beautiful summer night.
Trastevere, smelling of straw

from old stables and half-empty wine bars,
isn’t asleep yet.
The dark corners and peaceful walls

echo with enchanted noise.
Men and boys returning home
under festoons of lonely light,

toward their alleys choked with darkness and garbage,
with that light step
which struck my soul

when I really loved,
when I really longed to understand.
And now as then, they disappear, singing.

The initial lines of the excerpt can be read as Pasolini’s account of what the “stupendous” and “miserable” city of Rome has taught him, the lost detritus of the actual life that Rome is, by way of surviving as that detritus. It constitutes for loss, embodied by the poet, a passive consciousness of itself. It is all about knowing how to live the life of detritus as detritus. This knowledge and its practice, and the associated consciousness, is the affirmation of the logic that produces the life of such loss-exuding jetsam while signifying it as such.

However, as we proceed further down the poem we find the poet encountering members of the Roman underclass, who, despite sharing his actual empirical condition of low life and loss, thrust upon them by the capitalist modernity of Rome, experience their lives of loss and know that loss in a manner that is unknown to the poet. It is this difference in the sense that each makes of their common condition of loss that we see the two different registers or consciousness of loss – loss as loss and loss becoming an active subject to be transfigured into another.

That Pasolini is able to distinguish between his phenomenological, externalised sense and register of loss from what that sense becomes when it gets transformed into its own subject, thereby ceasing to be loss, is clear when he writes:

Men and boys returning home
under festoons of lonely light,

toward their alleys choked with darkness and garbage,
with that light step
which struck my soul

when I really loved,
when I really longed to understand.
And now as then, they disappear, singing.

The “darkness” and “garbage” that he talks about indicates how the sense of loss for him resides on the surfaces of the actual fact of loss produced by his and his underclass “brothers’” empirically lived actual history and its spatio-temporality. His simultaneous longing to understand their disappearance and singing is his yearning to enter the entrails of loss to become one with loss’s sense and expression of its own interiority, whereby the expression of loss becomes another, evident in the non-despairing register of singing by people who in actual, empirical history have been experiencing that loss and its despair. The disappearance of those people indicates, for Pasolini and his readers, the fleetingness with which one encounters the transfigured experience of loss-as-another when one is still caught in the passive, phenomenological and externalised experience of loss.

It is this phenomenological, externalised experience (or shall we say account) of loss that Pasolini seeks to devalue vis-à-vis another where loss is becoming the subjectivity of its own interiority:

A moon dying in the silence that lives on it
pales with a violent glow
which miserably, on the mute earth,

with its beautiful boulevards and old lanes,
dazzles them without shedding light,…

Light, when it is shed, is always an externality, whereas the “dying” of  “a moon in the silence that lives on it…with a violent glow” that “dazzles…without shedding light” is an image that invokes the transfiguration of loss into another where loss ceases to be (dies) like Pasolini’s moon. And in so “dying”, and transfiguring, his moon of loss glows and dazzles the objects of Pasolini’s Rome of loss without shedding its light on them. That implies the loss embodied by each of those objects of Rome of loss appear not in the external light that identifiesthem as loss but in their own glow, thereby ceasing to be objectified embodiments of loss to become subjective embodiments of another.

Nevertheless, the emergence of such subjectivity of resistance through the transformation of the objectified and passive consciousness of loss is, as should be fairly obvious, not possible without undergoing that experience of loss, and acquiring a passive and symbolised consciousness of loss as loss. In other words, the subjectivity of resistance – which is born out of the will and endeavour of an ontological embodiment of loss to transgress the symbolic boundary within which it is produced and signified as loss – cannot be conjured up from thin air through a voluntaristic feat. It can arise and be conceived of only as a determinate critique in and of a historically particular but logically quasi-objective and universal horizon of capitalist modernity. Pasolini is aware of that:

Stupendous and miserable city,
which made me experience that unknown life

until I discovered what
in each of us
was the world.

This, needless to say, is a rather perilous affair. To come to grips with the dangerously fraught nature of this dialectically determinate relationship between a passive consciousness of loss and an active subjectivity of resistance – or capitalist modernity and the counter-capitalist subject immanent in it – we would do well to properly grasp the architectonics of the dynamic of production of loss, loss gaining consciousness of itself as loss and its transfiguration into another.

The Horizon of Revolution: A Dialectical Dance

To envisage loss/excess only in ontological terms is to reify or congeal it. This keeps loss, as its name suggests, within the horizon of capitalism – produced and articulated by its constitutive logic of contradiction, and alienated dichotomisation between gain (or victory) and loss that such competitive contradiction inevitably results in. Such ontological congealment is intrinsic to the logic of alienation (of capitalist modernity) that disrupts the process of reality by estranging its various moments from one another into isolated, struggling monads. The consciousness of congealed and ontologised loss is, thus, as much determined by the capitalist logical tendency of competition, alienation and externalised determination (domination) as the ontology of gain that originates the competitive tendency and reinforces it.

In such circumstances, to pose loss as loss, that is, as a congealed ontology, against the ontological embodiment of gain is to remain stuck within the horizon of capitalist modernity and reinforce its alienating logic. That is precisely why the consciousness of loss as a congealed ontology resonates with the politics of communitarian (or petty-bourgeois) anti-capitalism, and is the constitutive glue of Fascism and Bonapartism in the societal or statist moment of politics. It manifests itself in the realm or moment of remembrance – something that we here are more concerned about – as congealed memory or nostalgia. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Fascist historiographical mode – evident, for instance, in the Sangh Parivar’s vision of history – is nostalgic. Proust’s way of remembering, that is recovering memories and the loss that accompanies the transformation of lived experiences into memories, is the inverse of the nostalgic framing of memories and loss as congealed facts or entities. Benjamin explicates this impulse in ‘The Image of Proust’ (Illuminations):

We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s memoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warf, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness?

This woof and warf of remembrance and forgetting is a dialectic of motion and stasis, of decongealed flow (trans-subjective process, or narrative, or becoming) and its various congealed moments (ontologies, characters, subjects and their plots and analytics), only through and in which our human condition allows us to grasp the processual-real. But we must make sure that we are aware of the fact that what is glimpsed by us in our human condition in those individual and discrete moments is the appearance of the trans-human processual-real at that moment and the trans-subjective, processual logic of the real. Benjamin and, as he shows, Proust are both sanguine on that score:

Only the actus purus of recollection itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes the unity of the text. One may even say that the intermittence of author and plot is only the reverse of the continuum of memory, the pattern on the back side of the tapestry.

The “continuum of memory” and “the tapestry” are allegories of the decongealed, trans-subjective process (recovery of loss) while “the author” and “the plot” are its various moments in which the recovery of the lost processual-real is apprehended, and which in turn congeal to once again produce loss by repressing the processual-real by imprisoning it in its various respective moments, which then present themselves as eternalised ontologies of the real or, in the terms of our discussion here, the ontology of loss. Their “intermittence” is the effect that is produced by the operation to defreeze them in order to recover the lost moments of the real and through them the processuality of the real. This Proustian logic of remembrance, which Benjamin so incisively lays bare, not only constitutes the model of historiography the latter proposes in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Illuminations) but also deeply informs his own memoiristic writings such as ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ (Reflections).

Of course, loss/excess is bound to be (posed as) an ontology. That is so because its coming into being is tied up with the ontology that embodies gain and thereby dialectically originates or founds the constitutive logical horizon of the system (capitalist modernity) that produces this alienated, hierarchical binary of gain and loss. But this ontology of loss not only posits the recovery of what had been lost in ontologised terms due to the repressive manoeuvre of the ontology of gain, it also simultaneously posits the twin logics of autonomous self-expression and processual-real, which are the repressed inverse of the loss-producing, truth-sapping, autonomy-robbing logic of formal determination or representation constitutive of the horizon of capitalist modernity that is co-founded and co-reinforced by the ontology of gain. (The logic of autonomous self-expression – which the capitalist logic of representation, formal determination or symbolisation constitutively precludes – implies the appearance of essence as itself and not through representation or signification by another ontological appearance or sign.) Unless the ontology of recovery (of what had been lost) self-reflexively expresses this awareness of its constitutive logic at all constituent instances of its moment, the politics it would pose would generate, to begin with, a Fascist/Bonapartist tendency that would strengthen the systemic logic of the very historical moment, whose representative ontology it challenges. Or, it could eventually end up reintroducing the capitalist logic of formal determination/representation and alienation into the form of the new historical moment that it had founded through its initial revolutionary impulse of rupturing the historico-logical conjuncture of a loss-producing moment of capitalist modernity to refound the revolutionary logic of autonomous self-expression of the processual-real. The form that manifests this grave philosophical peril of revolutionary politics is Left authoritarianism of, what may be called following the historical characterisation of the degeneration of the French Revolution of 1789, the Thermidor. Stalinism is but one concrete instance of such a thermidorian institutionalisation or congealment of the revolutionary or processual-real.

The bitter truth, however, is that the Stalinist thermidor is the inevitable outcome of revolutionary politics. For, the unavoidable expression of what had been lost as an ontology of recovery or revolution would lead, equally unavoidably, to its congealment. The decisionist question, in the face of such dangerous inevitability, is where the wager of revolutionary politics ought to lie: on the side of administrative anti-politics as a subjective embodiment of the autocratic thermidor, or on the side of non-revolutionary quietism that forms the subjectivity of perpetual ironising and absolute political agnosticism, or with the critical oppositional subjectivity of the trans-subjective posed against its arrest in the congealed institutionalisation of one of its moments?

For Marxism and its Marxist bearers at any one of its congealed, thermidorian moments the answer to that question should be fairly clear. The only way a Marxism can remain true to its foundational impulse of recovering the perpetually lost processual-real is to oppose the loss-producing Stalinist thermidor even while upholding the revolutionary logic of recovery of autonomous self-expression, and its constitutive logic of trans-subjectivity, whose foundation at a preceding moment has emerged, as is its wont, in the congealed ontology of the Stalinist thermidor. It is this trans-subjective revolutionary logic that Alain Badiou has chosen to call the One or subjective materiality vis-à-vis its determinate and concrete subjective encapsulation and expression at a specific moment of lived history. And the inevitable congealment of the subjective-material One shows up, according to Badiou, as its division into two – the subject (idea) and the object (materiality). This, needless to say, will produce externalised determination (domination/repression) of the latter by the former, and loss. In other words, the absence of critical self-reflexivity would congeal the momentary ontology of the recovery of what had been lost, producing in its turn its own loss and excess. That would imply the return of the capitalist logic of formal determination or representation it had sought to transcend through resistance.

The question, therefore, is does the Marxist discourse on the logic of revolutionary politics provide a theoretical vantage point from where the subjectivity of revolutionary praxis at a moment of recovery of loss indicate an in-advance critique of its inevitable loss-producing reification and thus escape being identified with the Stalinist thermidor that its formal expression is destined to congeal into?

Clearly, the expression of self-reflexive awareness, or its absence, by an ontology of recovery of what had been lost would determine whether that particular ontology of loss or its recovery will be a subjectivity of revolutionary trans-subjectivity; or whether it is, or will be, a congealed ground of reaction within the symbolic logical horizon of capitalist modernity that it would, as a result, reinforce.

This revolutionary self-reflexivity, wherein the subjectivity of recovery of what is lost consciously envisages itself as the expression of the logic of autonomous or sovereign self-expression in opposition to the loss-producing congealed ontology of gain and the historico-logical horizon of capitalist modernity that co-found one another, is in the same movement a subjective momentary expression of the trans-subjective. Such subjectivity, which is aware that it is essentially expressing the trans-subjective logic of the real through its ontologised recovery at one of its infinite moments indicates the provisional nature of its own ontological appearance and consciously anticipates and projects the need to negate its own ontological appearance to the save the processual essence that it is an expression of at that moment of its appearance, but which the imminent congealment of this appearance would also inevitably repress and thus lose for another moment. Such self-consciousness of a subjective political position, which is enshrined in the Marxist theory of dialectics as the logic of negation of negation, is what renders it truly revolutionary.

This formulation of negation of negation is, however, impossible without the idea of “real abstraction” in Marx, in whose work, particularly the Grundrisse, Marxist thinkers such as Alfred Sohn-Rethel and others have located the idea that abstraction in social life – as opposed to intellectual abstraction that produces thought and knowledge and which is in turn contingent on such “real abstraction” – is the congealment of ontologised expressions of the processual-real at its various respective moments wrought by the capitalist logic of competitive exchange and alienation. But insofar as such congealment is the inevitable outcome of their appearance as sovereign self-expressions of the processual-real in its various specific moments they are also real. (The processual-real is, however, not a priori but is, in turn, constituted and reconstituted dialectically through the dynamic that is unleashed by the production of loss and its consciousness, which is a constitutive contradiction of the symbolic logic of capitalist modernity.)

The Psychoanalytic Moment of Revolution

In the context of these twin Marxist ideas of negation of negation and real abstraction, we are probably now better placed to reflect on the import of Lacan’s declaration – in the lecture with which he opened his famous January-June Seminar of 1964 at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and which has been translated and published under the title ‘Excommunication’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis:

Personally, I have never regarded myself as a researcher. As Picasso once said, to the shocked surprise of those around him – I do not seek, I find.
“Indeed, there are in the field of so-called scientific research two domains that can quite easily be recognized, that in which one seeks, and that in which one finds.”

This assertion, if one were to receive it as a credo of Lacan’s intellectual engagement, can easily be read as an attempt by the psychoanalyst-philosopher to refound the twin logical formulations of Marxism – negation of negation and real abstraction – in, what I wish to call, the psychoanalytic moment of class struggle. The domain of seeking for Lacan is – if we are to understand it in terms of our concern for loss – the perception of the loss of a self as that loss, which is expressed by a psychic state and is produced within the symbolic horizon of human psychology by the logic of repression. This logic emanates from the dominant and conscious self (ego), and is constitutive of the dynamic that produces, according to Freud, the psychological economy of the human conscious and unconscious and its symbolic logical horizon. This loss-producing psychological economy – which has necessitated the emergence of psychoanalysis as both a therapeutic and epistemological protocol – is, one can easily argue, following some of Freud’s socio-psychological writings, especially Civilization and its Discontents, the direct outcome of the encounter between human psychology and the social and socialising logics of capitalist modernity.

But this perception of loss in Lacan’s domain of seeking, both in psychological and  psychoanalytical registers, is an externalised, phenomenological, passive consciousness of loss that is recognised in terms of precisely the same repressive logic that has constitutively produced it within its own symbolic horizon. Such recognition of loss is, both in terms of psychological-affective experience and as objects of psychoanalytic science, registered through socio-psycho- or psycho-pathological symptoms such as neurosis, anxiety and paranoia. It is in the “domain of finding” – which is something Lacan himself appears to emphatically embrace as the determinant of his psychoanalytic praxis, and where there is no seeking within the symbolic – that the real is found. This finding consists in the loss transcending the logic of the symbolic horizon, within and by which it has been actually produced and has phenomenologically known itself as loss, to be transfigured into another by becoming the sovereign self-expression of its own interiority. This, one would argue, would register within the framework of psychoanalysis (both as a therapeutic and epistemological protocol) as the complete obliteration of the already permeable boundary between the analyst and the analysand, and the curing of the analysand through the transfiguration of his sense of psychic loss, registered in terms of the symbolic system of the repressive modern psychological economy that has both produced it and identified it as such, and of which his pathologies are mere symptoms. Such transfiguration of psychic loss and its ontologised consciousness into another renders the latter into its own logical horizon of non-repressive sovereign self-expression and the trans-subjective real glimpsed in that moment of its unfolding.

These two domains of seeking and finding, and the mutually exclusive relationship that Lacan envisages between them, show how the real can express itself at a moment as its own ontology only by negating the symbolic, which is an embodiment of the congealed ontological appearance of the processual real in the preceding moment. And yet by acknowledging the existence of the domain of seeking, which he personally does not prefer, he suggests that seeking is impelled by the distorted consciousness of the real that is produced within and by the symbolic. Considering that the symbolic horizon and its logic of externalised formal determination or representation is constitutively produced through the congealment of the ontological appearance of the real at one of its many moments, Lacan not only indicates that the symbolic is a real abstraction, but also signals the necessity of prospective negation of the ontological form that finds the real at a moment by becoming its sovereign self-expression through the negation of the congealed ontological appearance (symbol) of the preceding moment of the processual-real.

The keen awareness of a determinate and dialectical relationship between the sense of loss and its transfigured other, that Lacan displays by counter-intuitively demarcating the two “scientific domains” ofseeking and finding as mutually exclusive and then by stating his own partial preference for the latter, is expressed even more sharply and systemically by the symbolic-imaginary-real triad he constructs. For Lacan, seeking or the consciousness of loss as loss is the play of the imaginary within the horizon of the symbolic. What he finds is the real; of the imaginary of loss as loss transfiguring itself into another of recovery by becoming the sovereign self-expression of its own internality and generating its own totally self-grounded and self-contained logical horizon of the determinate aleatory by rupturing out of the horizon constituted by the symbolic logic of externalised formal determination and the historical form that embodies that logic at that moment. Real contingency or aleatory materialism, it must be stated here, is possible only through historical determinateness, which precludes externalised determination or representation by congealed ontological appearances of the processual-real at its various other moments.

This transgressive rupture of and with the horizon of the symbolic by the imaginary of loss as loss – which becomes another because that antithetical imaginary of loss is only possible constitutively within the logical horizon of the symbolic whereby it is produced and known as such – results in the collapse of the contradictorily binarised dyad of the symbolic and the imaginary, and the logic of ontological fixities and formal determination that has been constitutive of this peculiar dyadic relationship. It is the appearance of this moment of the collapse of the dyad that is the real, which offers an evanescent glimpse of its processual nature in that one among its multiple moments and posits a different synthetic horizon of, what in Badiou’s words is, the singular-universal where logic or essence is its own form. Or rather, the multitudinous lifeworld of the human beings is its own system and its logic.

When he shuns the domain of seeking for that of finding, Lacan is acting as an engaged militant in the psychoanalytic moment and is essentially envisaging the imaginary, which he rightly sees as a constitutive contradiction produced by the symbolic within its own horizon, as the bearer of the immanently inverse tendency of the counter-symbolic that he seeks to express by turning the imaginary into its own founding ground and its own regulative-logical horizon, thereby bursting open the conjuncture and continuum of the symbolic system to reclaim the real and its processual essence at that particular historico-temporal moment of psychoanalysis.

The Free Self: Pseudo-Recovery or What? 

This dialectical and revolutionary Lacanian awareness can be discerned, albeit in a passive mode, in ‘psychotic’ Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s only novel, The Book of Disquiet, which Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s many heteronyms, wrote as a loose-leaf, meditative journal. Pessoa (or Soares) laments the impossibility of the artist to free himself through his art from the distortionary determinations that life imposes on him, his sovereignty and his autonomous self-expression. According to the poet, the artistic quest for freedom (or recovery of what is lost because of the distortionary repression effected by the symbolic logic constitutive of Pessoa’s, and even Soares’s, empirically actual history of capitalist modernity) has its locus in the self of the artist, who is constitutively produced with his sense of loss within and by the symbolic logical horizon of life (capitalist modernity).

And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself but in a different way.

As a consequence, any attempt by that unfree, loss-bearing self to seek freedom for itself, or express that loss through art, would only serve to consolidate the symbolic horizon within which the empirically actual fact of loss and its artistic consciousness are produced. That would, if anything, mean the continuance of both unfreedom and loss.

Although Pessoa himself did nothing in his actually lived empirical life to transfigure his passive consciousness of loss and the art through which he expressed that loss into another, by transgressing the symbolic horizon of his actually lived history within which that loss, its consciousness embodied by his poet’s ontology and the art that emanated from that ontology as its consciousness, took shape, he was acutely aware of the need to do so and said as much. That is precisely why he terms the self’s questing after freedom as an act of “cowardly love” since it ends up consolidating the loss-producing symbolic horizon that enframes this loss and its ontological expression.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom – which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange – is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understanding that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it? Suffocating where I am, would I breathe any better there when it is my lungs that are diseased and not the air about me? Who is to say I, longing out loud for the pure sun and the open fields, for the bright sea and the wide horizon, would not miss my bed, or my meals, or having to go down eight flights of stairs to the street, or dropping in at the tobacconist’s on the corner, or saying good morning to the barber standing idly by?

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.

The reason why Pessoa was probably loath to make this transfiguring leap from the artistic (embodying passive consciousness of loss) to the political (active consciousness of loss by which loss ceases to be loss) is because he failed to fully realise the political implications of his art-destroying poetic enunciations. Pessoa did not, unlike Lacan, or the latter’s favourite poet Rimbaud, envisage the aesthetic register as the self expressing in a cellular form an entirely new counter-juridical order and unalienated, self-determined/free associative historico-logical epoch that posits its own founding by rupturing through and with the historico-logical conjuncture of actually lived history of capitalist modernity. He saw the aesthetic for what it was – an ontology of contradiction that is constitutively produced within and by the symbolic horizon of actually lived history – but no more. He proved unwilling, or at any rate incapable, of strategically re-signifying such a contradictory ontology in terms of the counter-logical tendency – to the constitutive alienating, representational and competitive logic of the symbolic system of capitalist modernity – that is immanent in such ontologies of contradiction.

The Symbolic Economy of Aesthetics: A Coopted Tale

Following Lacan’s renewal of the classically radical Hegelian-Marxist triadic and recursive dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis as symbolic-imaginary-real in his psychoanalytic moment, we would do well to see some artistic-literary practices and experiments in terms of whether or not they re-envisage the aesthetic deportment – present as constitutive contradiction within the horizon of the symbolic system as  a register for expressing loss and/or its sense – as a cellular form of the inversely oppositional or critical logic immanent in that system.

We should recall that the thesis (or the Lacanian symbolic) is the objectifying logical horizon of empirically actual life in all its various momentary ramifications. The antithesis (or the Lacanian imaginary) is the constitutive contradiction of the thesis produced by the symbolic logic that the thesis founds and helms. The synthesis (or the Lacanian Real) – which is a new self-grounded, self-determined horizon of the One without any two – is, therefore, absolutely sovereign and completely free of conflicts and contradictions. This is the horizon of inverse opposition, critique and politics, vis-à-vis the qualitatively different symbolic spatio-temporality of administrative anti-politics and competing ontologised fixities. The synthesis, however, is immanent in the antithesis’s ontology of contradiction and is always posed, either actively or potentially, by it. The revolutionary Lacanian operation, mentioned earlier, of turning the imaginary into its own founding ground and its own regulative-logical horizon, is the active recognition of necessity in the antithesis and the constant attempt to make the leap to the qualitatively different synthetic horizon that such recognition posits.

All contradictory registers of antithesis, produced and signified within and by the quasi-objective logical horizon of the historically determinate symbolic system, are constitutive of that system. But in studying them retrospectively in and through their effects and traces, to figure out the constitutive logic they expressed in their evental moment of enunciation or production, some can be seen to have a more critical and sovereignty-seeking orientation towards their respective theses and their respective symbolic horizons, within which they were all produced, than the others. In fact, this quantitative difference among various registers has, at times, shown up as a fundamental qualitative difference.

Muktibodh’s poem ‘Bramharakshas’, thanks to it being imbued most acutely with the poet’s perfect grasp of the triadic dialectic, is one of those rare examples of an artistic-literary production that very self-consciously founds itself as the ground of the synthetic even as it expresses the self-reflexive critique of art in whose determinate moment it re-enacts Badiou and Zizek’s invariant communist logic of sovereign self-expression and the processual-real. Words, Muktibodh shows and we must see like he wanted his readers to see, can become their own flesh.

The estrangement and loneliness that the symbolic system visits on Bramharakshas because of his intellectual arrogance and disdain for the system this arrogance produces in him, and which in turn impels him to court such marginalisation and atomised loneliness with even more arrogant rage, is etched out rather poignantly by Muktibodh as the lot of  anti-systemic intellectuals, who, given that they persevere with their ‘unproductive’ intellectual pursuits in the face of socio-economic marginalisation that the culture industry of the symbolic system of capitalist modernity and its concomitant societal norms impose on them and their pursuits, are the perfect ontological embodiments of the consciousness of loss as such. Something that Muktibodh captures in the invective-ridden, lamenting tone of Bramharakshas by giving a descriptive account of it.

Bawdi kee un ghani gaharahiyon may shunya
Bramharakshas ek paitha hai,
va bheetar se umardti gunj kee bhi gunj,
bardbardahat-shabd pagal se.
Gahan anumanita
tan kee malinta
door karne ke liye pratipal
paap-chchaya door karne ke liye, din-raath
swachch karne –
Bramharakshas
ghis raha hai deh
haath ke panje, baraabar
banh-chchati-muh chchapaachchap
khoob karte saaf,
phir bhi mael
phir bhi mael!!

Aur…honthon se
anokha strotra, koi kruddh mantrochchar,
athva shundh Sanskrit galiyon ka jwar,
mastak kee lakiren
bun rahin
alochanayon kay chamakte tar!!
Us akhand snan ka pagal pravah…
pran may samvedna hai syah!!

(My Translation: In the emptiness of the deep dark depths of the pond/ lies a Bramharakshas,/ And an echo of the echo bursting out from the inside,/ like the words of an insane mutter./ To rid himself, every moment, of grave doubts and his body of its squalid griminess / To rid himself of his sinful shadow/ To cleanse himself/ The Brahmarakshas scrubs his body, day and night without any respite./ His paws moving continuously over his arms-chest-face…splash! Splash! Splash!/ To rub himself clean, absolutely clean,/ Yet there’s dirt/ Yet there’s grime!!

And…from his lips emanate bizarre shlokas, like some angry enunciation of spells,/ or else, a torrent of invectives in impeccable Sanskrit,/ the lines on his forehead/ knitting together/ shimmering threads of criticisms!!/ The insane flow of that unceasing bath…/ the blackness of his sensitive soul!!)

But, the poet, even as he hails Bramharakshas’s dogged pursuit of ‘useless’ knowledge as much as the status of the lonely marginal that such a pursuit is bound to bring, rues his failure – precisely on account of the same intellectual arrogance that had given Bramharakshas the courage to court systemic rejection unto death – to actively and critically engage with the system in order to transform it while simultaneously transforming his own loss-bearing ontology.

Kintu yug badla va aaya keerti-vyavsayi
…labhkari karya me se dhan,
va dhan may se hriday-man,
aur, dhan-abhibhoot antahkaran may se
satya kee jhain
nirantar chilchilatee thi.
Atmachetas kintu is
vyaktitva may thi pranmai anban…
vishwachetas be-banav!!
Mahatta ke charan may tha
vishadakul man!
Mera usi se un dinon hota Milan yadi
toh vyatha uski swyam jeekar
batataa mai usey uska swyam ka mulya
uskee mahatta!
Va us mahatta ka
hum sareekhon ke liye upyog,
us aantarikta ka batataa mai mahatva!!

Pis gaya vah bheetree
au’ baharee doh kathin paton beech,
aisee tragedy hai neech!!

(My Translation: But the epoch changed, and traders of fame arrived/ …in profitable activity shimmered wealth,/ while only in that wealth could heart-and-mind be glimpsed,/ and, the brightness of truth flashed unceasingly from the inner recesses of a soul overwhelmed by such riches./ But in this self-conscious/ being resided life-affirming contradictions…/ an unreconstructed consciousness of the world!! On the feet of greatness lay prostrate/ a despairing soul!/ If only I had met with him then/ I would surely have lived his pain/ to tell him his worth/ his greatness!

Also, the use such greatness could be put to/ for people like us,/ And the significance of such inwardness I would surely have communicated to him!!/ But alas, it ended in a lowly tragedy!/ Caught as he was between the inner and outer mill stones of his dilemma that ground him to dust!!)

After all, the marginalisation that the symbolic system of capitalist modernity visits on an intransigent intellectual such as Bramharakshas can be construed, as is actually done by him in the poem, as capitalist society’s gift of seclusion and awe. That the vampire-like symbolic system of capitalist modernity can, and does, enable its most intransigent rejectors such as Bramharakshas to draw such false comfort, shows how this real-symbolic system can differentially include and thereby distort even the anti-capitalist symbolic economy of non-exchange, embodied by such uncompromising bearers of the sense of loss as Bramharakshas, into a commodity and ideology of the marginal’s pride in maintaining himself as a marginal.

Kintu, gahri bawdi
kee bheetree deewar per
tirchi giree Ravi-rashmi
ke udte huye parmanu, jab
tal tak pahunchte hain kabhi
tab Bramharakshas samajhta hai, Surya nay
jhukkar ‘Namaste’ kar diya.
Path bhoolkar jab chandni
kee kiran takraye kahin deewar per,
tab Bramharakshas samajhta hai
vandana kee chandni nay
gyan-guru maanaa usey.

(My Translation: But, when and if some stray atoms of the sunbeam,/ which falls slantedly on the inner walls that enclose the deep pond,/ reach its bottom/ Bramharakshas takes that to be the Sun’s wish to bow before him in obeisance./ If ever moonlight, straying from its path,/ collides with those walls,/ Bramharakshas is given to believe that the Moon,/ which has accepted him as its master,/ is singing paeans to him.)

This problem cannot, clearly, be overcome unless that symbolic economy is transformed into its own political-economic ground or flesh through an active oppositional and transformative engagement with the symbolic system of capitalist modernity and its constitutive logic of competition, alienation and externalised formal determination or representation.

It is this unfinished task of Bramharakshas that the poet promises, towards the end of the poem, to take up and accomplish. But not before he has vowed to do so as “the truest disciple of Bramharakshas” without whose (passive) consciousness of loss determinate, and thus effective, resistance would not be possible.

Vah jyoti anjaani sada ko so gayee
yah kyon hua!
Kyon yah hua!!
Mai Bramharakshas ka sajal-ur shishya
hona chahta
jisse ki uska adhoora karya,
uskee vedna ka srot
sangat, purna nishkarshon talak
pahuncha sakoon.

(My Translation: That light has been snuffed out for ever/ Why! Oh why! Did this have to happen!/ I now wish to become/  the truest disciple of Bramharakshas/ so that I can take his unfinished task,/ the source of his pain,/ closer to its deserving conclusions.)

This returns us to the beginning where one had contended that revolutionary resistance is not possible without a consciousness or recognition of loss as loss.

The problematic that Muktibodh expounds in ‘Bramharakshas’ with regard to the location of the aesthetic register in the triadic dialectic of the symbolic-imaginary-real is taken up with as much critical sharpness, vis-à-vis the traditional Indic philosophico-spiritual imaginary, by Hazariprasad Dwivedi in his novel Anaamdas ka Potha (The Treatise of the Unnamed One). Dwivedi, who unlike Muktibodh, was neither a Marxist nor an avant-garde litterateur but a rather traditional writer, albeit in modern Hindi literature, displays a sharply intuitive grasp of the operation of this triadic dialectic as the author of Anaamdas…. He, through his astute plotting of the novel as a critique of renunciation in its linkages with the institutionalised Brahminism and Brahminical knowledge production in post-Independence India, ends up envisaging the philosophico-spiritual register as a cellular form in the self of the renunciant – located within the symbolic horizon of what such an all-renouncing philosopher-hermit deems as the illusory ‘this-world’ – of a qualitatively and logically different historical time.

Raikwa Tapaskumar, the protagonist of the novel, is a young ascetic, whose choice to be a renunciant makes him into an ontological embodiment of the loss of truth in the ‘illusory this-world’ of his empirically actual historical era of the Chhandogya Upanishad. But he realises he cannot go into Samadhi as he is assailed by the misery of the starving and the poor. On his mother’s suggestion, Tapaskumar gives up his ascetic life to plunge into ‘this-world’ as a householder. Anaamdas… is neither meant to be – as it would appear from the rather sketchy summary of its plot provided here – a simple-minded criticism of renunciation as escapism nor its rejection for the empirical actuality of life in ‘this-world’. Instead, it shows how the philosophico-spiritual being of an Upanishadic ascetic or hermit, if it fails to actively work towards materially realising another new historico-logical horizon of human life that it posits vis-à-vis the empirical actuality of life within the symbolic horizon of the ‘this-worldly’,  will end up consolidating its own ascetic ontology and the symbolic system that he calls the illusory this-world, and within which he is situated as a conscious ontological bearer of all that has been lost in the illusions of ‘this-world’.

Loss As Resistance: A New Constellation of Revolution

The transfiguration of the passive consciousness of loss and its constitutive ontology into an actively engaged consciousness and ontology of resistance is very clearly articulated in a picture (Flood) from the atelier of revolutionary Bengali artist Chhitaprasad. Chhitaprasad’s line-drawing (circa 1947) depicts a pauperised peasant family of Bengal wading through flood waters towards dry land, away from their home and hearth, which have been destroyed by the deluge. We see a woman and a young girl in the peasant group looking back with despair at their marooned and half-destroyed house even as a man looks up at the overcast sky, while trying to shelter a young boy with his emaciated arms, fearing more elemental fury. But at the head of the group is a man, who is walking towards the shore with his fists clenched and face taut with an angry determination to struggle against nature’s fury and possibly also the systemic socio-political condition that has rendered him and his poor family vulnerable to such fury.

In this Chhittaprasad we see how the affect, consciousness and the ontologies of loss, which in the absence of the angry man at the head of the group would have continued to be situated within their empirically given history and time of the symbolic system of capitalism, have because of him been transfigured to become part of a new historical constellation of resistance against such empirical history and the symbolic system of capitalism that has generated it.

A similar reconfiguring of an empirically given history of loss – within the horizon of the symbolic system of capitalist modernity – into another spatio-temporality and logicality of resistance that seeks to found itself by disrupting the given conjunctural logic of symbolic determination and loss, is seen in filmmaker Mrinal Sen’sCalcutta 71. The syntagmatic  units that constitute the narrative of the film are four disparate short stories of loss in the city of Calcutta through the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The first centres on the tenuous living quarters of a petty-bourgeois family facing pauperisation. Its home is eventually destroyed by rain displacing the family into a common shelter levelling, in the process, the remaining culturally-ordained  fragile class boundaries between the underclass and the lower-middle class. The second story is about a young woman from a bhadralok (‘respectable’ middle-class) family – living in chawl-like conditions in the city after being displaced from its village by the great famine – being ambivalently egged into prostitution by her own mother to support the family. The next one revolves around the lives of poor, rural and suburban teenagers, who rebel against existing food-control laws to smuggle rice into the city in order to earn their livelihood under difficult economic conditions. Last but not least is a tale of disengaged intellectual voyeurism and ritual philanthropy by a corrupt and hedonist Calcutta bourgeoisie amid the hunger and social disturbances brought about by the violent assertion of the lumpen-proletariat, uprooted from their rural homes by the socio-economic processes that constituted, what in canonised national history is called, nation building.

But what unifies these discrete units into a single narrative syntax, even as they are bound together into a singular paradigmatic relationship, is the dénouement the filmmaker has plotted for them. The four stories eventually culminate in the rupture of the horizon of empirically actual capitalist history of those four Calcuttas, within which they had been produced and perceived as loss, to found the real Calcutta of 1971 of young communist and naxal revolutionaries bursting out on to its streets to mostly become martyrs in fake encounter killings. Through this reconfiguration of four Calcuttas of lost denizens into a Calcutta of revolution, Sen shows us how concrete, empirical instances of loss can be seen, in a transfigured optic, not as part of the history that produces such loss and maintains it as such, but as constituent units of a new historical constellation of revolutionary resistance.

But this ontological expression of the real, whereby the real becomes its own appearance (symbol), would, as we have seen, inevitably lead to its congealment, producing its own loss and excess. We have also discussed how the self-reflexive deployment of the Marxist idea of negation of negation saves the trans-subjective politics of resistance from being obstructed, repressed and distorted by the congealed ontologies through which it appears at its various moments. The question, specifically with regard to art as a historico-logical moment — where the subjectivity of loss is also often transfigured in a determinate way into a subjectivity of resistance – is what are the works and practices of art that have deployed this self-reflexive Marxist idea of negation of negation while seeking to reconstitute the subjectivity of loss into a subjectivity of recovery and/or resistance.

An Unlikely Communist Hero

The self-reflexive sensibility of negation of negation has been an integral, prominent and, often, overt part of the works and practices of many avant-garde artists and writers, who have either been part of the international working-class movement or closely aligned to it. But one’s caprice compels one to look for this sensibility elsewhere: in a poet, whose life, work and death have come to constitute an emblematic reminder of the horrors of Stalinism and, as many would argue, the revolutionary politics of the working class.

My warmth, my exhalation, one can already see
On the window-pane of eternity.

The pattern printed in my breathing here
Has not been seen before.

Let the moment’s condensation vanish without trace:
The cherished pattern no one can efface.

These lines from Osip Mandelshtam’s 1909 poem (8) from Stone make for a precisely beautiful example of recovery and affirmation of the self’s absolute sovereignty at a moment through the negation of what had repressed it (The pattern printed in my breathing here/ Has not been seen before.), even while indicating almost concurrently the necessity to negate the momentary form/appearance of this recovery. This is nothing else but Mandelshtam’s way of attempting to prevent or preempt the recurrence of loss – something the repressive operation of that appearance would inevitably produce at the next instant – that he has recovered through transfiguration. Mandelshtam is in no doubt that this proposed negation of the momentary appearance of absolute sovereignty of the self would spell the reclamation of the same essence that had been recovered at a prior moment through the emergence of the appearance that is now sought to be negated (Let the moment’s condensation vanish without trace:/ The cherished pattern no one can efface.)

But this decision to take Osip Mandelshtam as an illustration of the self-reflexive play of the idea of negation of negation in art is, on second thoughts, not a caprice after all. Among other things, it is an attempt to free his poetry from a reading that is tinted by an optic of despair, precisely the sensibility his poetic vision expressly broke with, but which has been imposed on his poetry by many of his ‘ardent’ admirers, who in deciding to be moved much less by the artistic expression of his personal experience of life-wrenching loss than by his actual plight, have subordinated, unwittingly or otherwise, the former to the latter. That, needless to say, has done great disservice to his poetry and the larger aesthetic sensibility that underpins it, beside, of course, delivering a liberalist body blow to the entire legacy of working-class politics by identifying it completely with the various thermidorian episodes to one of which our poet fell a gratuitous victim. My concern has been to show how Mandelshtam provides us with a ground, not for the liberalist anti-Stalinism of lamenting and decrying the Stalinist horrors he experienced, but for a genuinely transgressive and revolutionary critique of Stalinist congealment and repression of working-class politics.

Osip Mandelshtam’s break with the lamenting mode of accounting for loss becomes even more sharply evident when we see it in juxtaposition with his wife Nadzheda Mandelshtam’s testimonial response to the Stalinist horrors, an experience they both shared, in her two-part memoirs titled Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. There can be absolutely no dispute that the two-part memoirs, especially the first, constitutes one of the most poignantly brilliant and beautiful works of testimonial writing in the canon and annals of world literature. The comparison that one seeks to make between the husband and the wife is, therefore, not an attempt to diminish the literary-artistic power of the Hope… books. Neither should it be seen as an attempt to understate the horrors of Stalinism or trivialise the experiences the Mandelshtams and their friends had to undergo, and which she recounts with such sharp beauty in those books by her. My only intention here today is to show how her choice to take recourse to the testimonial mode in order to engage with the horrific empirical actuality of everyday life in Stalin’s USSR bespeaks a sensibility and consciousness that is oriented towards experiencing and expressing repression and loss as loss in an externalised, phenomenological fashion, even as her husband chooses to encounter and express the same experiences in a fashion that transfigures them into another. True, the few Osip Mandelshtam poems we discuss here to illustrate this contrast between the sensibilities of the husband and the wife are all from before 1917. But the fact of the matter is that Mandelshtam’s transfiguring expression of loss is something that continued, with a few perfectly legitimate exceptions, to be the dominant and even salient feature of his poetic sensibility and diction even in the darkest days of his life in Soviet Union.

The tone, register and style of his poems are marked by an absence of, what in Nietzsche is termed, “resentiment” (reactivity/revenge). Nadzheda experienced and articulated repression and loss as lament, pain and despair, which shows that she knew loss only as such, congealed and thereby as a contradictory (or direct) opposite of gain/victory that founds the symbolic system of (state) capitalist modernity which encompasses such loss as its constitutive element and thus precludes the possibility for the passive ontological bearers (objects) of such loss to overcome the externalised, phenomenological paraphernalia imposed on them by the symbolic system within which their loss is produced. The same repression and loss are, in Osip’s case, transfigured into a really possible world of joyful life and recovery even as it evokes a fleeting pain – qualitatively (not merely quantitatively) different from the actual intense pain born out of his and Nadzheda’s suffering from the empirically actual fact of repression and loss – of the really possible world having still not been actualised. This transfigured register or subjectivity of loss as recovery is, in contrast to the subjectivity of loss as contradictory (direct) opposite to the ontology of gain, ranged in non-contradictory (logically inverse) opposition to the so-called ontology of gain and the symbolic system it has founded and it helms. Through his transfigured subjectivity of loss as another, Osip Mandelshtam indicates that the consciousness of recovery of what has been lost has to be much more than the ontologised recovery of that loss at any given moment.

The poet’s transfigured subjectivity of loss as another is evident in the defamaliarisation, vis-à-vis his empirically lived history, that he produces by presenting other strangely possible worlds in his poems. Worlds that he inhabits with a joy that finds no correlate in the joy that could be actually experienced, was actually experienced, by the powerful of his empirically actual historical time. This is a surreal joy, an empirically impossible joy, a joy that is fleeting in its materiality in his, and our, mind, soul and flesh. We could call this the joy of spectral materiality, in that the material ground of such joy is real like an apparition, which is not the same thing as illusory. A fitting example could be the 1908 poem (4) from Stone:

To read only children’s books, treasure
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.

I’m tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it’s the only one I’ve seen.

In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.

As for the register of lament, not only does Osip Mandelshtam criticise and reject it, he depicts this affect of his empirically actual history, through a kind of dialectical reversal, as uncanny in and alien to the world of his poetry. ‘The Lutheran’ (1912) from Stone is a case in point:

On a walk I came across a funeral
Near the Lutheran church, last Sunday.
An absentminded passer-by, I stopped to watch
The rigorous distress on the faces of the flock.

I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking,
And nothing shone except fine brass
And reflections from the lazy horse-shoes
On the toneless Sunday side-roads.

In the resilient half-light of the carriage
Where sadness, the dissembler, lay entombed,
Wordless and tearless and chary of greetings
A buttonhole of autumn roses gleamed.

The foreigners stretched out in a black ribbon
And weeping ladies went on foot,
Red faces veiled; while, above them,
Nothing stopped the stubborn coachman.

Whoever you were, Lutheran deceased,
They buried you with ease and artlessness
Eyes were dimmed with the decency of tears,
Bells rang out with dignified restraint.

I thought – no need for speeches:
We are not prophets nor precursors,
We do not delight in heaven nor live in fear of hell,
In dull noon we burn like candles.

The poet Mandelshtam encounters the rituals of loss, death and grieving as if he were a denizen of a world to which all this is unfamiliar, alien even. (I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking,/ And nothing shone except fine brass/ And reflections from the lazy horse-shoes/ On the toneless Sunday side-roads.) In his poetic world, which is implicitly and obliquely posited here in the poem through its embodiment in the poet, we sense a new norm of life and a new structure of history “where sadness” is a “dissembler” that presumably falsifies the expression of loss by manifesting it as such. It is a new space to which the language of lament or grief does not belong (I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking,…), even as the awareness of the pain of loss and loss as such in empirical actuality seethes just below the surface of that world and its consciousness. For, how else does one explain the poet’s expressed awareness that a funeral embodies loss. And yet what he finds troubling in the funereal ambience is the absolutisation of death or loss that completely precludes the transgression of the symbolic horizon of life (or gain) that founds itself through the constitution of contradictory and mutually alienated binaries of life (gain) and death (loss). (I thought – no need for speeches:/ We are not prophets nor precursors,/ We do not delight in heaven nor live in fear of hell,/ In dull noon we burn like candles.)

This consciousness of transfigured loss in Osip Mandelshtam is a dialectical sensibility that leads simultaneously to the consciousness of transfigured life, whereby every ontological death or loss is the possibility, even necessity, for the emergence of a new ontological life or gain. So with every death occurs a new life, which is the recovery of the processual-real or the trans-subjective becoming from the congealed ontological appearance of its prior moment. Thus the death of an ontology of a moment becomes the condition for the resurrection or re-enactment of the processual-real at the next moment, through the emergence of another momentarily real and momentarily provisional ontology.

No History Without Loss: Poetic Lessons from Nature

The absolutisation of the consciousness of death/loss that leads to the consolidation of the constitutive logic of the symbolic system – which is founded through the reification of life/gain, even as that produces its constitutive contradiction in the reified idea or ontology of death/loss – obviates the transfiguration of death/loss into a new life. It thus stymies the possibility of recovery of a new processual, trans-human (read trans-ontological) logic of life. Bishnu Dey’s poem ‘Sandiper Char’ critiques this absolutisation of the consciousness of death/loss precisely those terms:

Prakritir maya
Aha banorajinila!
Hey tamaltalibon!
Sumdrobijonsikta shofen kallol!
Baaliyaardi hira jaley choto choto tila,
Shanto mridu khardi – Jeno tanukaya
Ashtadashi! Prakritir maya –
Jibanmaraney gantha jibaner ayushmanroopey
Katey na ebar chchuti
Sacchal bhushargo sukhey – kobey chupey chupey
Hoye geche jibaner haar –
Aajke shobai pratibeshi bhai, hey prakriti, bhuley jai
Jibaner maraner haarey bandha jibaner chchobi
Aaj shudhu maari, mari, purdi o purdai, khepi ar luti.

Eh maraney pran nai, eh toh nesha unmaader,
Shaktimadamatta andho pagaler apraakrito aandhi!
Hey prakriti aamra manush, ai maransaader madiraye
Aamrai kobi, noi talibon
Sari sari talsuparir
Samudrabijonsnigdha dhaiuer jiban noi, — chchya dhaka khardi
Noi, hirajala baaliyaardi noi, hey prakriti,
Aamrai mari aaj aapan pashar chchakey
Tobu sthir jani, tobu man drido satye bandhi

Ai rogey eh maraney, praan naaye, shaman sujogey
Nikaote sudurey Kashmire o Tribancurey raktakta Golden Rocke-ey
Anek Hasnabadey praner aabaadey, noye buniyaadi  hatho apaghath,
Hey Prakriti aamra manush, noi bonorajinil talibon tatorekha noi –
Aamaderi karme lekha aamader durgata jiban
Aamaderi bhabbishath o srimti.

Dey contrasts the absolutised consciousness of death in human life, as a dominant conception of life and death in capitalist modernity, with the more liberatory and productive notion of death as it obtains in nature, where death/decays is a necessary possibility for new life and its continuance as a process.

…Jibanmaraney gantha jibaner ayushmanroopey
Katey na ebar chchuti
Sacchal bhushargo sukhey – kobey chupey chupey
Hoye geche jibaner haar –
Aajke shobai pratibeshi bhai, hey prakriti, bhuley jai
Jibaner maraner haarey bandha jibaner chchobi
Aaj shudhu maari, mari, purdi o purdai, khepi ar luti.

A maraney pran nai, a toh nesha unmaader,
Shaktimadamatta andho pagaler apraakrito aandhi!
Hey prakriti aamra manush, ai maransaader madiraye
Aamrai kobi, noi talibon
Sari sari talsuparir
Samudrabijonsnigdha dhaiuer jiban noi, — chchya dhaka khardi
Noi, hirajala baaliyaardi noi, hey prakriti,
Aamrai mari aaj aapan pashar chchakey
Tobu sthir jani, tobu man drido satye bandhi…

(My Translation: The immortal form of life woven in the garland of life and death will not suffice this time during the period of repose. One does not know when — in this tranquil earthly heaven – life was surreptitiously defeated. Oh nature I forget that everybody is a neighbour, brother. Life’s picture today is enframed in life and its death.
Today, we kill, die, burn and be burnt, and embark on enraged plunder.

In this death there is no life. This is the intoxication of insanity. The storm of fury of a blind man drunk on power. Oh nature we are humans, poets drunk on the wine of death. We are not a palm forest, or rows and rows of areca nut palms. We are not the life of sea-calmed waves  — or a delta under a shade. We are not the sandy plains sparkling with the glow of diamonds. Oh nature, we die today caught in our own moves on our own chessboard. Yet, we are so sure. Yet, we are so certain about the truth…)

From here we gather that within the horizon of the unalienated, processual-real, for which nature is a metaphor in Dey, not only does the death (loss) of an ontological appearance lead to a new ontology of life but is the necessary condition for the recovery of the future of the processual-real, which would otherwise not emerge from the repressive signification of its prior congealed appearances and, thus, be lost. Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky in ‘Objects’ (from Life, Life) envisages death in terms of the dissolution or loss of an ontological fixity or self and deems it necessary. In this poem we see how he completely realises Osip Mandelshtam’s poetic vision of loss of the past becoming a loss of the future. And how the subjective operation of recovery transforms loss into not what we have been dispossessed of in the past but, because of that, what we are losing out by way of the unemerged future. Here we see in the subjectivity of recovery of loss a collapse of temporal linearity, and the flow of time as a question constitutively contingent on the founding of a different plane, a different vector of history.

Objects which shared my childhood
Keep on disappearing:
Lighting lamps and black gunpowder,
Dark water from the well,

Plush red divans and decadent-
Framed Islands of the dead,
Men with moustaches, old photographs,
Aeroplanes made out of reeds,

Nadson’s consumptive three-parters,
Adonis-like lawyers in morning coats,
The peculiar smell of galoshes,
Shoulders sloping from ostrich-like necks,

The curlicues of drunken symbolists,
Platitudes of strapping futurists,
Slogans on lime and chestnut trees,
Gangsters’ imbecilic shotguns,

The hard sign and the letter yat –
One disappeared, the other altered –
And where there never used to be a comma
Now death intervenes as well.

I’ve done so little for the future,
Though the future’s all I crave.
I don’t want to start all over again
As if I’ve been wasting my time.

But there’s no guarantee
I can play with the modern inventions –
I’m stepping on my grandson’s baubles,
My great-grandson’s glory.

The craving for the future is, in Arseny Tarkovsky, the craving of the processual-real that expressed itself through the ontological appearance of the poet’s self to emerge sovereign at the moment of the poet’s self –I’ve done so little for the future,/Though the future’s all I crave./ I don’t want to start all over again/ As if I’ve been wasting my time – even as that self or ontology rues the fact that it has done “so little for (that) future” precisely because its congealed appearance has repressed that future and prevented it from emerging as its sovereign self-expression.

And, therefore, this processual-real, which is what the poet’s self expressed at one of its moments, can only really get to its real future if that self (ontological appearance) of the poet gets out of the way. (But there’s no guarantee/ I can play with the modern inventions –/ I’m stepping on my grandson’s baubles,/ My great-grandson’s glory.)

Future is Forever, Or How Not To Regain Lost Time

Therefore, what is lost and experienced as loss in the present is in the past but what can be recovered in trying to truly reclaim that loss in the present is the future. The recovery of loss ontologised as the past would be a pyrrhic, pseudo recovery as it would entail recovery through gaining or winning, thereby producing loss yet again. The idea of recovering, rather reclaiming, what is lost would be truly revolutionary when it recovers the condition of not losing, something that is lost in losing. In other words, the loss ontologised as the past is the constitutive contradiction of the symbolic system of capitalist modernity that is dialectically co-founded and helmed by the ontology of gain. Any attempt to recover that past-ised ontology of loss would be an effort constitutively confined within the logical horizon of the symbolic system of capitalist modernity, which can be called life, society or what have you, and would only end up reinforcing the symbolic system. The idea is to reclaim the logical horizon where there is no loss because there is no gain. That is precisely the reason why Marx’s scientific socialism, even as it critiques the founding of capitalism through expropriation of some pre-capitalist producers by others (primitive accumulation of capital), does not strive to restore pre-capitalist communitarianism. Rather, it is a battle for the reclamation of a new horizon where capital with its founding ontology of gain disappears together with the now-proletarianised-then-pre-capitalist artisans and peasants, who as ontological bearers of loss are its constitutive contradiction.

But the human condition, as we have seen earlier, allows us to reclaim the processual-real only in its momentary ontologised appearances. In such a situation, production of loss through congealment would be a permanent affair as, therefore, should be recovery. Clearly, the reclamation of the processual-real or the future is a perpetually infinite becoming. That is reason enough to end for now with the prescient words of Louis Althusser: “Future lasts a long time.”

THE CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE INDIAN STATE AND THE CPI (MAOIST) IN THE CONTEXT OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY

A PERSPECTIVE/A PERCEPTION

Gautam Sen

The present essay has been written with the object of examining the ongoing war-like situation between the Indian State and the CPI (Maoist) [henceforth referred to as the ‘Maoists’]. We ought, therefore, to begin our discussion with a description of this war-like situation.

We have seen that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the Indian home minister has, on behalf of the Indian state, already made preparations for a long war, which has been launched as a semi-military campaign in the Maoist strongholds; a few extra battalions have been kept ready, while the air force is supposed to keep a vigil on the ground operations even as it awaits a formal order to launch an air-borne attack. A satellite reconnaissance mission, to keep a watch on the Maoist guerillas and to indicate their positions, is also in place. There has, however, been no formal declaration of war and hence no deployment of the army as yet, pressure from a section of the ruling class for the same notwithstanding. On the other hand, an armed campaign has simultaneously been launched by the Maoists against the Indian state with a call to overthrow it. It is as part of this campaign that a police officer was taken in as a prisoner of war by the Maoists, who subsequently let him go on the condition that a specific number of Maoists in police custody be released. Thus, a similar declaration of war seems to have been issued from the Maoist side too. Our task, in the midst of such war preparations by both sides and the military challenges they have thrown at each other, must be to attempt an analysis of the entire situation.

It must be noted that the state conducting this military operation against the Maoists is one that is democratic, not colonial, fascist or some other kind of autocratic institution. The well-known system of ‘check and balance’ is in place here, what with the existence of an active and independent Parliament, executive and judiciary, which are expected to work within certain constitutionally-ordained limits. The Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and the right to organisation, and even assures the right to life and self-defence.

In this context, a few more characteristics of Indian democracy ought to be mentioned. This kind of autocratic aggression by a democratic state against a section of its own population is sanctioned here by Parliament as well as the Constitution. It is true that Parliament is constituted by representatives elected by the people on the basis of universal suffrage, but the nature of this election is such that irrespective of all the ongoing debates and differences of opinion amongst the rival parliamentary parties, it is pre-determined that the elected government would follow the capitalist path and would adopt anti-people measures. It is also true that compared to a feudal state, the structure of the bureaucracy, army as well as the judiciary in a modern bourgeois state is certainly relatively more democratic, since one need not formally belong to the class of aristocrats in order to be included in these organs. Besides, in no sense does the ruling class exercise any direct control over any of these institutions. Every citizen has the right to be appointed to positions within these institutions. That said, there is no denying that the indirect power of capital remains operative in these areas to such an extent that in case of a deep, fundamental class conflict, all these organs separately and collectively take the side of the dominant class as well as the established economic and social relations. Moreover, any perceptive person knows and understands, how with the magic touch of money even the democratic rights of expressing opinions, publishing newspapers, holding meetings and so on, which are purportedly for everyone, actually remain reserved for and in favour of the haves and against the have-nots. (This is even when the restrictions and negations of these rights through the continual interventions of the police and the law are not accounted for.)

Above all, in a capitalist society the democratic rights provided for by a most democratic Constitution are always appended by parallel provisions capable of being used and explained in order to suppress the very democratic rights of people in the interest of the ruling classes. The recent promulgation of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and other similar repressive laws, and their implementation, ought to be understood in this light.

The prime minister has, on behalf of the democratic state of India, repeatedly asserted that the Maoists are the greatest internal security danger the country currently faces. Based on this assessment, the chief ministers of various states have, at the Union home minister’s behest, enforced the sternest of measures to safeguard themselves from this danger. However, it does not require one to be an economist or a professor of sociology or political science to understand that this is an attempt to completely invert the cause-effect relationship. Simple common sense would suffice to grasp the reality. While not even the minimum requirement for food, clothing and shelter has been met during more than six decades of the existence of the democratic republic of independent India, this attempt by the state to teach lessons in democracy is not only shameful but a tragic farce. In spite of all the tall claims contained in all the five-year plans and the so-called development achieved through  them, the truth is that only a  handful have gained immensely while the majority have almost nothing. In a country, where the biggest problem of security, as far as people go, are posed by hunger, poverty and the uncertainty of life and livelihood, the prime minister’s statement shows nothing but indifference and contempt for the suffering of the people and is an insult to democracy. In response to the prime minister’s false and deliberately confusing statement we must openly say that far from being the problem, Maoism is an expression of the burning problems facing this country, a revolt against the most cruel and depriving aspects that make for the undemocratic content of this democratic state. We must remember that not even the minimum norms of bourgeois democracy are observed in the affected areas. Anyone can be arrested at anytime of the day or night, anyone can be beaten on a mere suspicion or complaint, not even children or the old are spared, the women can be subjected to sexual harassment with impunity. Police in these areas have been given authoritarian power to ill-treat people even without introducing any special laws. As a matter of fact, many representatives of the ruling class have, albeit in a gesture that is rather belated, pointed out these excesses. Many human rights organisations have pointed to socio-economic causes behind the revolts of the deprived masses, which include the indigenous Adivasis in various marginal areas of India. These revolts, which are being inspired and organised by the Maoists, have succeeded in gaining a degree of justification. The real situation in these areas can no longer be hidden behind the excuses of law and order. In this situation, Romain Rolland’s famous saying that “Where order is injustice, there disorder is the beginning of justice,” becomes absolutely pertinent.

Even after granting due recognition to the democratic character of the Indian state, the undemocratic aspects of this democracy get exposed to anyone paying a little attention to the phenomenon. First, the Indian state is armed from head to foot with army, police, courts and jails, ever-ready for use against the people. Second, no government helming the Indian state ever feels responsible or gives even an iota of recognition to the democratic language of protests expressed through the dissenting voices of its people. Only when there is a violent reaction, do they sometimes respond positively. Third, the ministers as well as the big bosses of administration, police, army and the judiciary, enjoying hefty salaries and perks, possessing shares of big corporations and socialising with the capitalists in elite clubs, lean naturally towards the rich and the propertied classes. They have no inclination or need to pay attention to the daily indignities and injustices heaped upon the oppressed and the poor. Moreover, the way Kashmir and several states of Northeast have been forced to live under permanent rule of the army within the geo- political boundaries of India, puts to shame all accepted norms of democracy. In this situation, the responsibility for the armed struggle as well as the revolt of the oppressed masses and oppressed nationalities against the rule of law does not lie upon those who rise up in revolt, but upon the deaf and blind anti-people Indian state. In fact, the entire ruling class ought to be held responsible for inciting the armed uprising of the people against the rule of law and the Constitution.

However, in the interest of democracy and for the establishment of a higher form of democratic practice and culture in society, we cannot support or condone the Maoist agenda. The kind of operation launched by the Maoists to eliminate ‘class-enemies’ or their strategy of annihilation of individuals is antithetical to the extensive participation of the masses in people’s movements  It is also against a favourable atmosphere for a free exchange of different viewpoints within the movement required for its advancement. The Maoists have been killing local activists or office bearers of rival political parties and issuing threats against them. This action of the Maoists cannot be condoned on the ground that the victims are police informers, hated scoundrels or have been punished by the people’s courts, Since, first of all, in most of the cases the accusers, judges and executors of punishment are the same persons and this kind of judicial system is in no way higher or more progressive than the existing one, but is rather of a lower standard and regressive, more so in the absence of necessary opportunity and space for the accused to defend his / her case. Secondly, it is not sufficient that the Maoist authorities and the people under their influence believe that the accused are really the perpetrators of the crime they are accused of and that proper justice is being rendered to the accused through the people’s court, (although even in these cases it would be necessary to ascertain whether a situation of fearlessness prevails in the area for people to appreciate and approve of these judgments delivered by the peoples courts) but they have to become credible even to people who come to know of them from a distance. In these fast-track people’s courts, however, there is no scope for such things. Moreover, taking into consideration the degeneration of human as well as democratic values in today’s world, we cannot approve of any death sentence whatsoever. Since the Maoists think they enjoy massive support in the areas controlled by them and claim that the charges against the accused person are transparent to the masses, it ought to be possible for them to isolate and even neutralise the accused. And in case punishment is deemed to be necessary, it should be of a kind aimed at reforming the accused. All vengeful attitudes towards the accused ought to be avoided in the interest of fair justice. (Some of the accused may become targets of attack by spontaneous anger of the masses, but we are discussing here the system of punishment through trial by people’s courts.) There is something thing needs to be particularly taken note of here: the villagers, both those who are condemned to death by the Maoists in their people’s courts and the ones killed by them without any such trial, are mostly poor laborers. We may say the same thing about the common armymen or police constables – they are labourers in uniform.

Now coming to a more fundamental question; even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that the killing of political leaders or individuals suspected of being police informers are merely excesses or mistakes committed by the Maoists, what does the path of guerrilla warfare promise in the specific conditions of India? It should be kept in mind that till today guerrilla wars have succeeded only in countries subjugated by a colonial power, oppressed as a nation or ruled by an autocratic state power. In other words, guerilla wars have succeeded where the immediate aim is defined in terms of national liberation from a colonial power or a democratic revolution within a country. But, in a situation where the struggle is against the undemocratic content of a democratic state, that is, against the power of capital continuously truncating and limiting democracy, converting it into a paradise for the rich and a deceptive inferno for the poor, guerrilla warfare of a handful of determined militants as the only or primary mode of struggle cannot lead that struggle to a desirable end. In a country such as India where democracy exists in an incomplete, deformed state, and where the problem lies in transcending from a stage of national liberation to that of human liberation, or transformation of a formal democracy into a real democracy, we need extended mass movements enriched by the extensive participation of all sections of masses. That is, free and unfettered development of class struggle. Only such unfettered struggles can lead to class consciousness, overthrowing of the democratic state dominated by capital and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship enriched with a higher form of democracy suitable for abolition of capitalism as well as socialist transformation. Whether this struggle for liberation could take the form of an armed struggle, whether a partial use of guerilla warfare would be required or not and what other forms of struggle are needed would be determined by the existing situation, and is a question of tactics. However, it can be said in general that neither armed struggle nor unarmed struggle, nor even a combination of the two can be raised to a level of principle in our struggle for freedom from exploitation and oppression of capital. It is nevertheless true that the ruling classes are armed to the teeth and their state apparatus is fully prepared to impose violence on the masses. It is also true that they will not quit their ground willingly. Therefore, a demonstration of people’s power and deployment of force by the masses becomes an inevitable necessity. As Marx says, “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”

In this context, we should discuss the fallacies and confusion of those who advise the Indian Maoists to return to the mainstream in blind pursuance of the example of the Nepali Maoists. We would do well to remember that in Nepal the people’s movements as well as the movements of various political parties were directed against monarchic autocratic political power towards the aim of accomplishment of an unfinished democratic revolution. Accordingly, when conditions for the establishment of a democratic republic were created in Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), keeping aside its own agenda of ‘People’s Democratic Revolution’, joined the process of establishing democracy along with other competing parties. Thus by choosing greenness of life to the greyness of theory they demonstrated their wisdom. It is a different question altogether – which can only be answered by the future course of events – whether by sharing power in this democratic republic, the Nepali Maoists succeed in raising democracy in the newly born democratic republic to the higher level of ‘people’s democratic revolution’ or are entirely coopted by bourgeois democracy. The outcome of the process of their newly formed hostile relationship with other participating parties is also yet to be seen. But this example of Nepal, given the altogether different condition of the Indian state and socio-economic system, has little relevance for figuring out the suitable strategy and appropriate tactics necessary to carry it through. It must be noted that even those who have adopted the agenda of Peoples Democratic Revolution in India do not raise the slogan of democratic republic or “so and so quit India”. Hence the question of following the Nepali Maoists to return to the mainstream is superfluous here. It is, however, true that in the context of a parliamentary democratic state the question of participating in parliamentary struggles along with the main form of extra-parliamentary struggles is not an insignificant tactical question but a tactical question that is worthy of serious consideration and engagement.

A few others would want to initiate another kind of discussion saying that since we have many instances in this country and elsewhere of governments coming forward to talk with armed militants, it is highly inappropriate and out of character for the Indian government to not invite the Maoists for talks. They also criticise and dispute the government’s insistence on the Maoists renouncing violence and laying down arms as a precondition for talks with them. Before we form a proper opinion on this, attention needs to be focused on a fundamental and a specific characteristic of the Maoist struggle which differentiates it from other struggles. The anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, the struggle for self-determination of Ireland, and the struggle for transfer of power in India had the characteristics of a fundamental strife but at the end of the day they were all resolvable through mutual discussions. The same is true of the struggle for self-determination in Nagaland, Mizoram, Kashmir and Manipur. The demands for separate states of Bodoland, Gorkhaland, Telangana and Jharkhand within the Indian State are of a different kind but are equally resolvable through discussions. Unlike any of the above, however, the ultimate objectives of the Maoists are not attainable through negotiation.  [Although the Maoists have declared freedom from exploitation as their final goal, their immediate objective is seizure of state power in India following the traditions of the ‘Communist Party’ states in China, Vietnam, Hungary, Romania, and so on for stamping their ‘socialist blueprint’ on society. But having seen the results of all such previous experiments, the big question is to what extent can such societies actually achieve freedom from exploitation. Anyway, as an accompaniment of the Maoist agenda, founding of parallel state power has been part of their strategy in the predominantly jungle areas where they have succeeded in establishing their hegemony.] But it is, of course, desirable that discussions be held in the areas of conflict around the burning problems faced by the inhabitants of these areas, to determine in what conditions, joint forces can be withdrawn to restore the previously existing rule of law. Through these measures a few urgent reforms in favour of people can be achieved along with a reduction in the ongoing tension and conflict in these areas. A few positive gains can certainly be expected as a consequence of the continuous revolts of the marginal people and the attempts-for-revolution by the Maoists. Some ‘development’ would reach these neglected areas; the people of these areas would be treated with dignity and as equals with those of the mainland and would get the equal benefits of democratic procedures available in the mainland. This may expand the horizons of Indian democracy (of course within bourgeois limits) and create space for free expansion of class struggle. Already, the people of these areas have succeeded in conveying this strong message to the ruling class and the people at large that they deserve to get equal rights with the rest of the people of India. Herein lies the strength and the beauty of these revolts.

We now enter into a discussion on the issue from another angle. If the central government decides to crack down on the Maoists by assembling the entire military might at its disposal and by coordinating its actions with the concerned state governments, the adverse reaction which is bound to be provoked by that might place the Indian state in an extremely awkward situation. It would amount to a declaration of war by a democratic state upon a section of its own citizens. That, while it is within the limits of the constitutional rights of this (exploitative) democratic state, exposes its extreme undemocratic nature that it wishes to hide. The fact that the Maoists are actively holding on and growing in strength in many of their strongholds is not only because of the shelter being provided to them by the marginal, indigenous people but also because the latter are directly participating in the struggle. Moreover, the way the Maoists are using the jungles as their base of operations, it is impossible to selectively target or attack them. So, any desperate attack by the government would create an adverse reaction not only in the minds of the Indian people but also among the international community at large. Besides, this kind of a step by the ruling class is likely to be strongly rebuffed by the forces and traditions of democratic culture and in the milieu of political democracy in India (however truncated and one-sided it might be), which would certainly not be desirable for the ruling class. And for this very reason, keeping pace with the increasing intensity of the ruling class offensive, new oppressive laws would be promulgated and implemented and there would be curtailment of democratic rights. We, therefore, need to pay serious attention to another issue. The restrictive steps taken by the state will not only curb the democratic rights of common people, sections of the ruling bourgeoisie and their political parties will also be deprived of these rights; as a result they would find it more difficult to mobilise people’s opinion in order to pressure or run the government in concert with their respective sectional interests. It is very much doubtful if and to what extent the Indian bourgeoisie can digest and accept curtailment of their democratic rights. We have seen, when in order to keep herself in power, Indira Gandhi launched an all-out attack on democratic rights by declaring Emergency in 1975, she failed to win the bourgeoisie over even by imposing a number of repressive measures upon the working class along with a number of favorable measures for the bourgeoisie. It is well-known how almost the entire bourgeois class had revolted against the Emergency and the masses steeped in the democratic ethos of India had rejected it by taking advantage of the half-chance provided by the 1977 general election.

Four decades have gone by since. Meanwhile, the power of democratic traditions has become more deeply ingrained in the body-politic and within the political culture of India. This is why, on the question of decisively combating the Maoist challenge the ruling classes are in a dilemma. This dilemma is being expressed in the form of differences even within the main ruling party, Congress.  Debates and differences are being expressed more openly and questions are being raised even within the partner parties of the ruling coalition in many states including West Bengal. Although principally in agreement on the question of launching an offensive on the Maoists, no one is ready to take upon themselves the entire responsibility of an actual strike, taking into account the probable consequences. This, however, does not mean that the Indian state will never be able to take stringent measures on behalf of the ruling classes. But it is really on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, faced with the challenge they are obliged to demonstrate the sovereign existence of the state, to uphold its honour as well as law and order. On the other hand, if implemented in practice this is bound to foment internal dissidence. Besides, if unlimited terror is unleashed by the state and increasingly stringent repressive laws are implemented through a concomitant curtailment of democratic rights, there is every possibility that opposition political parties would leverage them as popular issues in a future election to defeat the current ruling clique. The far-sighted representatives of the ruling classes are also troubled by another apprehension. If, instead of addressing exploitation, deprivation and oppression on the soil on which Maoism was born, the ruling classes respond through the power of the gun, then the suppressed anger of the people may erupt like a huge volcano of people’s revolt and may spread beyond the orbit of the Maoists and the marginal Adivasis, gripping the imagination of the common masses all over the country and may even infect the state’s own security forces. If that happens, neither construction of new jails nor implementation of special laws can save the situation for them. These are reasons why the ruling classes are taking a few steps forward only to take a few steps back. Even if they decide to strike they are unsure whether or not their bite would be as strong as their barking.

And precisely because of the same reason – the existence of a democratic bourgeois state – the Maoists too are caught in another kind of self-contradiction. Although theoretically they do not recognise the existence of a democratic state in India, nevertheless they take advantage of each and every opportunity provided by this democracy and wish to appropriate such opportunities to the cause of their declared objective and programme. Had it not been so they wouldn’t have initiated the movement for freeing of prisoners or participated in the trial sessions in (bourgeois) courts in accordance with (bourgeois) laws or utilised the news and electronic media and, above all, mobilise as well as welcome protests of bourgeois civil society and public opinion against repression of their movement by the bourgeois state. [However, their failure to recognise India as a democracy on the basis of its repressive state apparatus detracts them from their objective and confuses their strategy and political propaganda. On the one hand, they fail to see that even the most democratic nation in the world is similarly flawed, the reason for which cannot be found in the revealed characteristics of the state, since capital succeeds in implanting its indirect but definite imprint upon it. On the other hand, they fail to see that in a capital-dominated democratic state; the thrust of our struggle ought to be directed against capital itself. Their futile attempts to mark as enemy feudalism or semi-feudalism (which are practically extinct except as a cultural remnant) or semi/ neo- colonialism (which came to an end on August 15, 1947) disorients them from developing a thorough, wholehearted struggle against the bourgeois content of this democracy. Many of them give a call for an independent India free from imperialism (which ought to be identified as a form of capitalism to be dealt with at the global level.)] Moreover, it is much more difficult to break the feeling of one-ness between the rulers and the ruled in a democratic state than in an authoritarian/colonial state devoid of democracy. Similarly, it is possible to strike at an autocratic or a colonial state from outside and can be turned into a democratic or independent state by seizure of state power, but in the case of a democratic state it has an altogether different trajectory. In the former case, the revolution is terminated within the bourgeois limit by achieving bourgeois democracy or Independence, whereas in the later case it would be required to destroy the autocratic content of bourgeois democracy from within the bourgeois state and instead of the seizure of state power it would be necessary to smash it and replace it by a new higher form of democracy. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that the destruction of the state is not the end of the said revolution but its beginning. Armed with the characteristics of a qualitatively higher form of democracy, a democratic state under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a democratic state to end the rule of capital would begin its journey. In fact, although it might be possible to broadly indicate a few signposts towards the goal of socialism, the entire project of socialist transformation lies in the mist of future. After the establishment of the proletarian state, the proletariat will have to advance step by step, very carefully towards socialism and this requires initiatives and creativity of the masses, the indispensable precondition for which is the healthy expressions of multiple opinions and debates accompanied by the free-est form of democracy.

Conclusions

1. As the US is the number one terrorist in the political arena of the world today, in the same way the Indian state is the real terrorist in the context of Indian politics. A great majority of Indian population today is confronted with the terror of hunger, poverty, eviction from land, life and means of livelihood on the one hand and on the other are faced with parliamentary as well as extra-parliamentary terror. And in most cases the so-called anti-national terrorist activities and the armed rebellions are outbursts against these desperate conditions. However, even while accepting the justification for these revolts, we cannot support or condone the methods of struggle persuaded by them since their acts inflict serious damage upon the total perspective of our struggle. But at the same time it should be clear that while our critique of state terror is a principled one, our critique of the erroneous path of the Maoists is a comradely criticism within the same camp of sisterly organisations.

2. The existing conditions remaining the same, no final outcome is possible in the ongoing battle between the Maoists and the Indian State. Taking into account the socio-economic conditions of India, the existence of various political forces and the democratic nature of the Indian republic, it can be said that since the strategy followed by the Maoists is dependent upon the support of the marginal and Adivasi people and the Maoist tactic of using inaccessible jungles, the possibility that the Maoists would be able to expand their influence in the main cities, towns and the vast expanse of the rural areas is bleak. Not to speak of their declared final goal of establishment of an exploitation-free society, even the immediate goal of the seizure of state power through their programme appears to be almost impossible. The success achieved by the Maoists, it appears, can only fluctuate within certain limits, since their guerrilla warfare is confronted with one of the most well-armed, well-trained modern army in the world. On the other hand, it is also a fact that as long as a section of Indian people continue to suffer extreme poverty and hunger, are forced to live in perpetual uncertainty over means of livelihood and subjected to extreme neglect and indignity, the Indian state will neither be able to halt the ongoing Maoist insurgency nor stymie the possibility of such Maoist-type of rebellions in the future. Some times the rebellion might appear in the form of Naxalism or Maoism, at others inspired by some other ideology. It is, however, not likely that the think-tanks and the administrators of the Indian state are not aware of this peril. But the Indian rulers do not either have the necessary will to allocate the required budget for the amelioration of the extreme misery of the people, or lack sufficient courage to target the vested interests and status quo. So, probably this kind of rebellion has some historical justification if only to wake up the rulers from their deep slumber. But the eagerness of the Indian ruling classes for a military solution to the crisis, instead of a socio-economic one, shows that they would be satisfied if they succeed in merely reducing the intensity of the Maoist insurgency to a tolerable level. The problem, however, lies elsewhere. Although the far-sighted representatives of the Indian ruling class know and understand their own limitations, they have nothing much to offer in the immediate future. And the Maoists, under the strong influence and inspiration of their ideology, are simply incapable of comprehending the limitation of their programme and the long-term futility of their methods. Simultaneously, the indifference and non-intervention of the broad masses of people outside the conflict zones have made the situation worse – more complex, painful and bloody.

3. We have seen how the rights of the media, freedom of expression, freedom to hold meetings, assemblies etc naturally incline towards the rich and the powerful in our day to day life. We have also seen that the most democratic constitution and the democratic laws adopted according to this constitution are invalidated by undemocratic provisions and statutes when needed. These undemocratic laws and statues can easily be used to clear all the obstacles from the path of capital accumulation and also to block the real and potential protests and movements whenever necessary. That’s not all. Whenever it is found that the existing laws and provisions do not suffice to suppress protests and revolts, new black laws are promulgated, excessive power is bestowed upon the police, army and the administration; the much publicized ‘check and balance’ of bourgeois democracy gets paralyzed and even the existing authority of the remaining institutions of the democratic state (e.g. the parliament and the judiciary) are taken away. Moreover, it is now becoming clear from the circumstantial evidence that the Indian rules have a specific agenda to turn this country into the free playing-field of the corporate capital both foreign and domestic. The recent onslaught for the suppression of Maoists as well as restriction of democracy is a move towards accomplishing the same agenda. Thus the question of democracy in India has moved beyond the arena of civil rights into the arena of class-struggle. Explaining it more broadly, we can say that the issue of protecting and expanding democratic rights in a bourgeois society quite naturally becomes an agenda of class-struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

4.  Under the impact and reactions of India’s democratic state, a completely different kind of movement could have freed the Indian state, its rulers and the government on the one hand and the Maoist militants on the other from the horns of this dilemma – unleashing of an unbounded class-struggle and mass-struggle, the consequence for the absence of which is being expressed painfully in Indian politics. There are various reasons why the working class can never toe the line of armed struggle by a handful of armed militants. Firstly, the style of working class struggle by its very nature is open and expansive; the more widespread its mobilizations the more forcefully will it be able to resist the offensive of the ruling classes and to strike more powerful blows on capital. Secondly as a class it is aware that a general strike accompanied by widespread resistance, initiative and creativity of masses can deliver the mortal flow to capitalism, contrary to armed guerilla warfare, which is not a suitable strategy for it. But, why the revolts of the oppressed and the exploited are not taking the most suitable and desirable route of class-struggle, the form of struggle which could have simultaneously replaced the undesirable path of the ongoing rebellion and combated the destructive offensive of capitalism; the search for the reasons, background and transforming- alternatives is a subject matter of a different discussion. However, to make a brief comment – the absence of this struggle, the continued predominance of dirty, parliamentary politics is aiding the Maoist cause even though indirectly. Similarly the Maoist agenda and the response of the state to it are continuing to harm the possibility of the struggle taking desired shape.

We have to look ahead and move forward with this perception of reality.

Translated from Bangla by Arvind Ghosh