Daily Times

The main opposition in India, the Congress Party, was not only decimated in the May 2014 elections, its fortunes are still languishing. Most other bourgeois parties are regionally limited and are based on caste, creed, ethnicity, linguistic and narrow nationalistic, communal and religious prejudices. The CPI and the CPI (M) dominated the states of Bengal, Tripura and Kerala for over 35 years and lately carried through policies of neoliberal economics, leading to demoralisation and revulsion amongst their mass support base. The land they distributed in West Bengal in 1978 was forcibly extorted from the peasants by the same Left government after the 2002 elections.
Despite winning the largest vote and seats in the 2005 election, the communist parties’ abandonment of the path of a socialist revolution and their neoliberal economic doctrine not dissimilar to the social democratic parties of Europe in the last decade and other bourgeois parties ruling in different states of India, including the BJP, led to their disastrous defeats in the subsequent elections. In last year’s election these communist parties’ leaders were campaigning for ‘secularism’, ‘democracy’ and Keynesian capitalist economics, while Modi demagogically called himself a ‘tea vendor’ fighting a ‘prince’ (Rahul Gandhi) born with a golden spoon in his mouth. This demagogic rhetoric only worked because the Left parties had abandoned class politics and refused to reject Indian capitalism that had devastated the lives of India’s oppressed masses, 860 million of whom live in absolute poverty in the notorious filthy and crime-infested slums of Indian cities. This led to their lowest ever number of seats in parliament. This was the ultimate fate of the policy of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ adopted by the communist parties’ leadership.
In the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the May 2014 elections, most Left leaders were in a grim state of shock, cynicism and demoralisation. Some called Modi’s victory the triumph of fascism. Others came up with the perspective of a prolonged period of stark reaction and rejected the possibility of a resurgence of the class struggle. Some even defected to BJP and other right wing parties to continue their perks and privileges of being in government. However, the thumping success of this general strike has not only refuted their perspectives but has brought forward the revolutionary potential of the Indian workers and youth for the world to see. The trade union leaders had to give way to the rising tide of workers’ revolt from below. They were in a way forced to call this general strike. Their credibility and leadership was at stake if they refused to respond to the simmering rage of the workers.
However, despite its success, the strike will not halt the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism nor will it resolve workers’ problems and hardships. Modi and his ruling elite will drag out protracted negotiations for months without any positive outcome to exhaust the workers and damage their fighting spirit and morale. The politicisation of this class struggle is the burning need at this moment in time. There is ferment in the communist parties but its degree and intensity is not yet clear. Although they have been decimated in the electoral field, no alternative party or tradition of the working classes has emerged as yet. The conflicts in the leadership, especially the CPI (M), are now out in the open. Unfortunately these polemics are not of an ideological or political character but mainly organisational and personal accusations and criticisms. But a whole new generation of youth and activists have emerged in the political arena more than 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union and the capitalist counter-revolution in China. The older generation of the leadership and activists of the communist parties were demoralised by these colossal historic events. These Left leaders and intellectuals lost faith in their perceived ‘socialism’, which was in reality its caricature, which they naively or opportunistically followed. This reflected in their politics of retreats, compromises and capitulations to capitalism for a whole period of time. Several retreated even further from the theory of two stages to one stage, i.e. bourgeois democracy.
However, the disastrous rule of capitalism in India is creating immense revolt against the system. There is at present an aversion amongst the masses and the youth to politics in general. Yet in this turbulent period there will be accidental parties and figures emerging in this vacuum and the sharp process of a new political awakening that opens up now. Aravind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party’s ascent to power in Delhi is just one example. But these will be temporary and superficial phenomena. As the class struggle surges, these will vanish and the impact of the struggle on the political consciousness of the youth and the workers will open up new avenues for the growth and development of the forces of revolutionary Marxism. However, this will be a protracted process precisely because of the weakness of the Marxist forces — the indispensable subjective factor for a successful revolutionary transformation. It remains to be seen whether the communist parties can take the leadership of these new waves of class struggle or they have been doomed by their historical compromises with capitalism in the name of democracy, nationalism and secularism. Their refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past, change course and adopt a revolutionary path for the overthrow of capitalism will doom them to political extinction.
One thing is certain. This general strike signifies a turning point in the class struggle in the subcontinent. Under Hinduvta’s stark reaction, with a leadership that had lost confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, its success is spectacular. Capitalism as a historically obsolete and economically redundant system has failed to develop or improve human conditions in India. Rather it has intensified the poverty, misery, disease, ignorance and deprivation amongst the masses. Even the slightest respite in the plight of the masses cannot be achieved within the confines of this dreaded system. But now the processes will accelerate in this epoch of sharp turns and sudden changes. Sooner rather than later the perspective of a revolutionary transformation can be on the agenda. This strike action has glaringly revealed the potential of the Indian proletariat to unite and fight as a class in this vast and diverse land. A socialist revolution there will not only transform and emancipate the teeming millions in India, it will lead to revolutionary upheavals throughout the Indian subcontinent, which encompasses more than 40 percent of the world’s poverty. In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, there cannot be separate alienated revolutions but a wave of revolutionary insurrections can lead to the creation of a voluntary socialist federation or a USSR of this South Asian subcontinent. That would in reality mean the salvation of about one fourth of the human race. Its impacts on the world stage are unfathomable!

(Concluded)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com