Marxist Sans Marxism

Nidhu Bhusan Das

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharyya has the recent refrain: Either leftism or death. Noble declamation. They swear by leftism but never again pays lip service to Marxism after the fall of the socialist regimes in East Europe and dismantling of the Soviet Union in the wake of Perestroika and Glasnost laid out by Mikhail Gorbachev.The Left Front led by CPI (M) rules the eastern Indian state since 1977.During their long rule the proletariat has not emerged as a distinct class with ability to govern. Instead, a red bourgeoisie has come into being, and a coalition between the left rulers and the capitalists is quite evident. This is, no doubt, a compromise.

Lenin, by way of discussing compromises in class struggle with the bourgeoisie, emphasized that they can be and, in the case of the opportunists, are a means of preserving and protecting the capitalist system, in the final analysis representing acts of treachery against the revolutionary proletariat. Way back in 1984, Alexander Titarenko, Head of the Chair of Ethics and the History of Philosophy at Moscow State University, in his essay ‘Lenin on the Relationship Between Politics and Morality’ wrote: ‘Principles and ideals cannot be changed at will, proceeding from considerations of success here and now.They are not subject to fashion like shoes or clothes. Principles and ideals form the humanist core of the communist world outlook, and it is precisely on their basis that man cognizes changes of reality and, at the same time, witnesses their further mutual enrichment and development.’ Lenin demanded that a Marxist politician should have high moral qualities such as depth of convictions, integrity, a keen conscience, a sense of class justice and loyalty to communist moral ideals.

The ruling Marxists in West Bengal appear to be miles away from the communist moral ideals. They have surrendered the ideals at the altar of electoral politics and forces of market economy which has phenomenal expansion across the globe under the process of globalization in the unipolar world. The forcible eviction of peasants from their land acquired for Tata Motors at Singur, the atrocities on the people of Nandigram who were unwilling to part with their fertile land for the chemical hub of the Salim Group of Indonesia demonstrate the abject surrender of the communist moral ideals.

A basic postulate of Marxism is that the superstructure of the society reflects the nature and interest of the class which dominates the basic structure i.e., the economy. Law represents the superstructure. The left government has invoked the law made by the British colonial rulers in 1894 to acquire land at Singur, and that too not in public interest but in the interest of a corporate house. The bonhomie of the Bengal Marxists with the corporate entities at home and abroad smacks of aberration.