Communism

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there has been an increasing shift from class-based politics to politics based on mobilising “people” within the left-wing political praxis and rhetoric. Such tendencies are visible even within the left rhetoric in Kerala. In the particular context of Kerala, this process is enmeshed with sub-nationalist sentiments and concerns around vikasanam (development). It is possible that this tendency can metamorphose into different directions, depending on the tactical priorities of the left in Kerala.

Satyabhakta’s engagements with communist politics, the Hindi print public sphere, and workers’ movements in the Gangetic heartland often intermeshed caste, gender, and nationalism, with an indigenous communism. Signifying a strand of the Hindi literary project, he represents some of the suppressed traditions of left dissent, and takes us back to debates between internationalism and nationalism, materialism and spiritualism, class and caste. Even if his ideas were, at times, amateur, they provide us with the everyday lived realities of communist lives, and utopian dreams of equality, which need to be taken into account and historicised seriously.

The 20th century brand of socialism, following the Bolshevik victory as the prototype of socialisms, has nothing to do with socialism as envisaged by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It can be considered only as one among different varieties of socialism such as guild socialism, anarchist socialism, market socialism, and so on. The Marxian socialism, as a portrait of an alternative society after capital, is based on the "associated mode of production." The fundamental characteristic which separates socialism envisaged by Marx from the prevailing socialism is that Marx's socialism, conceived as an association of free individuals, is a completely de-alienated society with no commodity, no money, no waged/salaried labour, no state, all of which are considered as instruments of exploitation and repression of a class society used to put down the immense majority of the humans. The 20th century socialism is quite aptly recognised as a system of party-state, two avatars. Characteristically, and in total opposition to it, in no discussion of the nature of the society after capital-- that is, socialism--by Marx and Engels we find these two avatars. They disappear along with capital, the last class society.

Maharashtra evidently does not need its heroes. The birth centenary of Gopal Mukund Huddar has come and gone with scarcely anyone remembering him. From being a 'sarkaryawaha' of the RSS, Huddar went on to fight in the Spanish civil war and join the Communist Party of India. He ended up being not entirely acceptable to both the worlds he traversed. But that does not matter in the final analysis. In our dismal and post-ideological times the memory of somebody like Huddar can keep the principle of hope alive.

Since the thirties of the last century, India has witnessed a good few instances of intense sincere efforts of some somebodies to disown or step out of their bourgeois class allegiance and rush towards the proletarian heaven. It is a long and impressive list. Mohit Sen, who was felled by a massive cardiac seizure in the first week of May, was a partisan belonging to this series of ideologues who wanted to be nondescript non-kings.