The Indian Communist Party was born in Kanpur in 1925. A party centenary is an occasion for celebration and also to restate the aims, path and reinforce the character of the organisation. But if spirit is lacking, the celebration will ring hollow.
Over the century, the Party has gone through several splits. In time, it has given birth to various Left mass formations, or inspired them. The focus on elections and electoral victories in some states transformed an organisation that aimed to be a Leninist party into a mass party with Leftist ideas.
But as the Party – a word that in this article is an idea as well an organisation that includes the various communist parties in India without intending to dismiss their differences as meaningless – became Left and democratic, it left behind the communist nature of its ideals, goals and methods.
Has this transformation of the Communist Party into a mass party with Leftist ideas been an unalloyed achievement?
In India, centenary celebrations will surely follow among followers of the Leftist movement and the different communist parties like the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) among them.
Yet, this spirit will not resonate with the nation and its working people – this spirit has been killed by the onslaught of neoliberalism and the enfeebled state of the communists.
Under siege
Ideas of class struggle, popular resistance, the dignity of the human being, equality, justice – all of which are commonly associated with the spirit of communism – not only survive, but flare up with greater intensity from time to time.
The Party is in decline but communism lives on tenaciously in spirit. This is the paradoxical legacy of the last 100 years.
The Party knew that when it embraced parliamentary democracy, its lives would be re-conditioned by parliamentary experiences. Now, it has no alternative to being part of a parliamentary system wrecked by the onslaught of unfettered capitalism and Hindutva.
At the same time, the pauperisation and immiserisation of informal workers, particularly migrant workers and agricultural labourers, continue apace. It is ironic that, even in terms of parliamentary life – barring a few periods – there is nothing much to show in terms of the expansion of the Party and the Party-led movements among the people who are at the receiving end of this process. Among other blows, they have had to deal with the withdrawal of welfare measures and social protections.
Yet, even as mass movements inspired by Left ideas have not died down, the party does not gain from them. That is because these movements cannot be tied to the party. A revolutionary agenda that can frame this reality in the language of a radical social transformation is missing from the horizon of struggle.
The hollowness of a single-minded strategy of gaining governmental power as a way to accelerate the path towards radical transition has been laid bare. Will the centenary be the occasion for the Party to introspect about its decision to jump into a culture of parliamentarianism in the hope that this will give a “great fillip to the revolutionary movement of the working people and thus help the process of building the democratic front”, as a Communist Party of India (Marxist) document once declared?
Will the centenary occasion an examination of the serious reversals the party has experienced in the last few decades? Where do the nation and the working classes stand with respect to the party? How do the three – party, nation, and class – relate to each other and to what degree?
Janus-faced organism
As an answer to the questions posed above, it is essential to study the conditions that enable a party of social transformation to grow and become the vanguard of the people. Will the Indian Communist Party ever be a revolutionary party? A Leninist party?
The party has remained a Janus-faced organism. It was always been torn between militant activism and its scholarly, traditional, organisational leadership, engaged in managing party offices, running party organs and supervising and surveilling membership. The focus on parliamentary politics hurt party building, its expansion and the character of this expansion.
The decline of the Party’s strategic capacity, organisational strength and future-looking vision started in the early 1990s with the onset of neoliberalisation on a global scale, and certainly in India. Many other communist parties around the world perished in this storm.
Indian communists faced a double jeopardy. Postcolonial conditions in which old colonial power relations have reemerged and a new era dominated by powerful financial-corporate groups have combined to make India different.
Class relations changed. Old class formations disintegrated between early 1990s and 2020. Corporate barons captured the entire economic structure. Industrial decline combined with the rise of virtual accumulation (in which money begets more money without increasing production, such as money from interest or rent or investment in futures), primitive accumulation (where force rather than economic logic increases wealth), resource extraction and investment in the service sector.
Peasants became part-time migrant workers. Cities became the nodes of logistical reorganisation of the economy and also the battleground of various sections of society asserting their own interests. Migration became the single most defining feature of the new situation.
The phenomenon of stable mass organisations working as the base of a communist party that would maintain internal discipline and expand through aligning and leading mass movements is by and large over.
The Party has no answer to the massive rise of religiosity, in particular in urban India. It refuses to learn from the populist governments at the state level on how to survive and confront the attack of unfettered capitalism.
After Independence, communists had gradually focused on votes, Parliament and small reforms that would benefit people at the ground level, winning state elections, and finally building a new culture for a new, progressive India. Intellectuals came to be prominent in the party hierarchy. Cultural activists became party icons. Workers and peasants occupied the backseat.
Opportunities arose in moments of conjuncture when possibilities of putting an imprint on the power structure emerged as if from a void. The decade from the mid-1960s constituted one such moment. People wanted change. The Party wavered. It did not have the language to amplify the desires and demands of the working classes, leave aside the task of setting up organs to represent ordinary people in times of cataclysmic changes.
Instead, its mantra became either “follow the Janata Party” or, later in the first decade of this century, “follow the Indian National Congress”.
Going mainstream
Taking stock of the Party’s influence over the last century, it is worth noting that various welfare measures once introduced by communist administrations at local levels in India are no longer novel. For the Party, the factors of crucial factors of caste, gender, environment, migration, the desire of subordinated social groups for autonomy call for a new strategy of social transformation.
On one hand, the Leninist vision of a party that will be the “tribune” (which upholds the rights of the people and to whom the people come for direction and leadership in their struggles), not only the “vanguard”, is as valid as ever for a communist party to remain on the path of radical social transformation.
On the other hand, new conditions call for combining a revolutionary strategy of being a tribune with addressing the desire for autonomy by the marginal sections of society. Without autonomy, a national party of transformation cannot meaningfully work today towards its goal.
Even the international situation has changed. A policy of peace, new initiatives for global co-existence, aligning with and learning from countless novel practices at the ground level for better managing life, policies of protecting the vulnerable sections of population and understanding their desires – all these call for a new approach and a new vision.
Communists as a social force should have been best poised for this task. For this, they must learn from others, such as populists, democrats and others working for social justice and dignity. Lenin had to learn from the dedication of Russian populists while Chairman Mao in China repeatedly called for learning from mistakes and building unities. Today’s China has revived itself through the road of self-rectification.
And Indian communists? Will they remain satisfied with an ambiguous legacy of a hundred years? To survive for a hundred years – will that be the final achievement?
Ranabir Samaddar is a political thinker associated with the Calcutta Research Group. His books include Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2019).
