AMBIGUITY OF A LEGACY
Ranabir Samaddar
The problem of a legacy is that while it can be broken down to measurable parts and is usually broken down in that manner, to grasp the problematic of legacy it necessary to recompose these parts into an organic, systematic, and logical overview. The idea of legacy is of course proprietorial. We think of legacy papers, valuation, and finally and most importantly, the time.
These are predominantly tasks of measurement. Legacy institutions including heritage commissions and restoration authorities involve methods and methodological problems of measurement. There are many legacy institutions – universities and academies, houses, places of religious worship, periodicals and newspapers, and various associations as institutions for the collective elaboration of a historical-cultural life. We can thus speak of “types of legacies”. Yet when we speak of legacy, something intangible overwhelms us defying measurement. Political legacy is one such mystique.
Here we speak of one hundred years of the Indian Communist Party – a huge legacy, its mystique, and the necessary ambiguity of this legacy.
II
The Indian Communist Party was born in 1925 at the first conference of the Party in Kanpur with S. V. Ghate as the first General Secretary. Since then, the Party has gone through several splits with two major ones. In 1964, a split led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which evolved into being the largest communist party in India. In 1967-69 another split occurred with more radical sections leaving the latter and forming in 1970, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In 1973, the original Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) again split. In 1974, Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist (Liberation) was formed. In 2004, based on the merger of two radical groups an even more radical party was formed, the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
These splits have been over doctrinal issues, methods of class struggles, path of revolution, nature of Indian society and the state, character of the Indian bourgeoisie, etc. The parting of ways has also been occasioned by splits in world communist movement, as in 1964 and 1967. Above all, furious debates and quarrels have occurred over the most difficult question of revolution in a post-colonial society with a parliamentary political system. What is the path to social transformation in India, is there an Indian path to revolution Since the foundation of the Indian Communist party, this has posed an unresolvable challenge for Indian communist party thinkers, ideologues, and leaders. This is not to say that disputes were only doctrinal. Besides the limited nature of political ideas of the Party leaders, personal animosities, petty interests, and power squabbles were factors in the history of splits, disunities, and narrowness in the movement. In this sense, communists fared no better than the nationalists of the colonial era or later on, the socialists.
Yet, the communist movement has survived. In time, it transformed into Left movement, gave birth to various Left mass formations, or inspired them, and at times the movement became bigger than the Party. The notion of Left gave communists respectability and security. Elections and periodic election victories in some states propelled the trend to transform a Leninist party into a mass party with Leftist ideas. Leaders periodically on the eve of their party congresses, conferences, and plenums rolled out numbers of party members, members of mass organisations, etc. Middle class people with vague natural sympathy for the Left joined the party. History has to yet give its verdict if this transformation was an unalloyed achievement. The Party became left and democratic leaving far behind the communist nature of the ideals, goals, and ways. The movement expanded, but what remained of a party that had begun a century ago with a commitment to the goal of revolution We must not lose the paradoxical significance of the issue at stake. The nationalisation of the Party was effectively attained. While gaining some following, the Party became acceptable to liberal, centrist, and rightist parties in political process.
Before we go into details of that, however, we must recall one more instance as to how narrow sectional formations featured the Party from its birth.
The efforts to form a communist party in/of India began outside the country by revolutionaries based abroad. However, the fact is that there was no worthwhile nation-wide organisation of the revolutionaries at that time. During the 1920s and the early 1930s the party was poorly organised, and there were several communist groups working with limited national co-ordination. The colonial government banned all communist activities, which made the task of building a united party difficult. Between 1921 and 1924, there were three conspiracy trials against the communist movement: in the first two, Peshawar and Meerut Conspiracy cases, communists living abroad were put on trial. However, the third one, Kanpur (then spelt Cawnpore) trial had political impact. S.A. Dange, M. N. Roy, Muzaffar Ahmad, Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani, Malayapuram Singaravelu, Ghulam Hussain, and R. C. Sharma were charged as communists seeking to undermine the sovereignty of India with a violent revolution. This case, more than activities of the communists, was responsible for introducing communism to a larger Indian audience. Chettiar was released on account of illness; Roy was in Germany; R. C. Sharma was in French Pondicherry; and they could not be arrested. Ghulam Hussain confessed that he had received money from the Russians and was pardoned. Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani and Dange were sentenced for various terms of imprisonment. After the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy case, it took the Indian communists more than a decade to begin a proper all-India organisation of the communists. All these explain as to why communists in India are not particularly commemorative about their party’s own history, why the quarrel about the year of its birth (1920-21 or 1925) appears a century later as inconsequential, why a proper party history begins with only 1940s when the local efforts by revolutionary organisers started bearing fruit, and why even 1925, the year when the Party was formed, is by and large forgotten.
Amnesia has taken hold of Party leaders and rank and file. Perhaps, even critical, revolutionary historians have probably chosen to ignore it.
Yet must it be so The classic History of the CPSU (B), published in 1938, is disputed by many for being a tailored history which erases the roles of opponents in the Party and glorifies the elect ones. Yet, its approach instructed generations of communists and tells us even today as to how to look at the past of the Party. The History of the CPSU (B) begins by saying,
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) has traversed a long and glorious road, leading from the first tiny Marxist circles and groups that appeared in Russia in the eighties of the past century to the great Party of the Bolsheviks, which now directs the first Socialist State of Workers and Peasants in the world. (It) sprang from the Marxist circles and groups which had established connection with the working-class movement and imparted to it a Socialist consciousness… The C.P.S.U.(B.) grew and gained strength in a fight over fundamental principles waged against the petty-bourgeois parties within the working-class movement… The C.P.S.U.(B.) gained strength and became tempered in the revolutionary struggle against all enemies of the working class and of all working people—against landlords, capitalists, kulaks, wreckers, spies, against all the hirelings of the surrounding capitalist states. The history of the C.P.S.U.(B.) is the history of three revolutions: the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1905, the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 1917, and the Socialist revolution of October 1917…The study of the history of the C.P.S.U.(B.) enriches us with the experience of the fight for Socialism waged by the workers and peasants of our country….
The important point here is the way the Party’s history is linked to the history of the working-class movements, the organisational situation of these movements, and to consider the Party as inalienable from the condition of the working class. The Party, the movement, and the broader situation of the working people are tied in an interlinked scenario. History of the CPSU (B) became a grammar of how to look at the past of the Party in a relational frame, and not see the Party history as a text by itself.
This came out clearly on another similar occasion for remembering, understanding, and framing the legacy of a communist party towards further revolutionary work. In 1921 thirteen comrades met in Shanghai and founded the Communist Party of China (CPC). Hundred years later, President Xi Jing Ping in a centennial commemoration in Beijing to explain the legacy harked back to the occasion. Again, we find the time travel into the past, the nation’s difficulties and achievements, historical phases and continuities in this hundred years’ span, and the repeated emphasis on the fact that the CPC survived because it never left the people by the wayside. If in the CPSU (B), class and oppressed peoples were the bedrock of the Party, in the centennial speech of the leader of the CPC, it was the nation. “To realize national rejuvenation,” Xi Jing Ping said,
the Party has united and led the Chinese people in pursuing a great struggle, a great project, a great cause, and a great dream through a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, and innovation, achieving great success for socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era…. All the historic achievements and changes in the cause of the Party and the country have provided the cause of national rejuvenation with more robust institutions, stronger material foundations, and a source of inspiration for taking greater initiative. Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people have shown the world that the Chinese nation has achieved the tremendous transformation from standing up and growing prosperous to becoming strong, and that China’s national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability.
As if the leader of China was saying, communists can conquer the world provided they remember the path of transformation and the lessons, but most importantly they remember nation and the people. History is the grammar for the future. History is also an enabler. It makes the present a workshop of future making practices.
In the light of these illustrative instances, the amnesia about 1925 is only a sign of our half-dead brains. We do not want to rake up the past too much. Routine celebrations will be welcome. But we loath being called as quarrelsome doctrinaires. We are advised to be satisfied with the present. The Party therefore comes out regularly on the eve of its Central Committee sessions resolutions on “Present Situation and Our Tasks.” But it is a superficial present. Like a cover the present hides the uncomfortable pasts and forecloses the possibility of future making practices.
III
The text of the Chinese leader’s speech on hundred years of the Chinese Communist Party reads like a manifesto. And, this is what a speech on such occasion should be. As a manifesto, it is a written declaration of intentions, motives, or views of one who has written – an individual, group, or a party, or government. A manifesto often rejects received knowledge in favour of a new idea. It makes clear its message. It ruthlessly mobilises the present to make a new sense of a past which we loath to open up. A centennial occasion is for drawing up manifestos. When we are scared or too cautious to declare our present aims, we take to gentle remembrances. Politeness becomes the order. We bid good bye to our constituencies, followers, and fellow travellers. We think, rhetoric is for demagogues, whereas rhetoric is one of the most persuasive forms for composing a manifesto.
In short, a Party centenary is not just an occasion of celebration, but also to restate aims, the path, and reinforce the character of the Party and the movement that the Party claims to have stood the test of time. But if the spirit lacks, celebration will ring hollow in the ears.
In India, celebration will surely follow among different bands of followers of the movement and different communist parties. Yet the spirit will be lacking with nation and the class – both these two realities – emptied of their political significance by the neoliberal onslaught coupled with defenceless condition of the communists. The communist parties know that they embraced parliamentary democracy and their lives have been re-conditioned by decades of parliamentary life and experiences of advantages and limitations. Now they have no political alternative – an alternative political imaginary – to a crumbling parliamentary system wrecked by the neo-liberal and right-wing onslaught. And, ironically, even in terms of parliamentary life, barring a few periods, there is nothing much to show in terms of expansion of the Party and the Party-led movements. Yet, as mentioned earlier, mass movements have not died down. They flare up here and there – on this issue or that. They show resilience and autonomy. The Party does not gain from that, because the Party is unable to tie these movements conceptually, ideologically, programmatically, and organisationally in the frame of a radical social transformation. Besides, there are now very few leaders who straddle both the worlds – of party-building and leading mass movements. Leaders of yesteryears like A.K. Gopalan, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya, Ravi Narayana Reddy, Bankim Mukherjee, Nripen Chakrabarty, A.K. Roy, Charu Mazumder or Kanu Sanyal, are rare today. On the other hand, there were also leaders like Promod Dasgupta or leaders who served the Party in Parliament or Assembly like Jyoti Basu, Bhupesh Gupta, or Hiren Mukherjee, who focused on organisation building or parliamentary work. But rarely they could bridge the two worlds of party organisation and mass movements.
Similarly, the hollowness of a single-minded strategy of gaining governmental power in a state as way to accelerate the path towards radical transition is also laid bare today. Yet the Party centenary has not provoked any interrogation of the policies of the Party. Para 112 of the CPI (M) Party programme declares the desirability of participating in bourgeois elections and reiterates the stand that “the Party will utilise all the opportunities that present themselves for bringing into existence governments that pledge to carry out a modest programme of giving immediate relief to the people.” And, “…the formation of such governments will give great fillip to the revolutionary movement of the working people and thus help the process of building the democratic front.”
Will the centenary of the Party occasion any examination of the serious reversals the Party has experienced in the last few decades Where does the nation stand or the working classes stand with respect to the Party How do the three – party, nation, and class – relate to each other today and to what differential degrees In short, colonial and postcolonial realities and the received ideas and ideologies – these two never fused with each other for any substantial time. The Party remained a Janus-faced organism. Hence, it was always torn between militant activism and its scholarly, traditional, organisational leadership, engaged in party office managing, party organ running, and supervision and surveillance of membership. The focus of the Party on parliamentary politics impacted party building, its expansion, and character of this expansion. At least in the forties and fifties in the last century, the Party could claim to be the vanguard of advanced culture and intellect. Yet, that too became a shackle in the long run. Intellectuals and cultural vanguards appearing as asset proved to be a burden for a party that wanted to expand among workers, working people, and peasants. For that, the Communist Party needed respect for what Antonio Gramsci called “common sense” of the people. Gramsci had remarked that radicalisation of common sense with the help of intellectuals will be “an intellectual event.” That event never occurred.
The behaviour of the CPI and CPI (M) in the turbulent time of late sixties and early seventies of the last century showed the anxiety of the Party in an age of uncertainty. The Party did not know what is “risk.” It behaved like a petty property owner concerned with saving what it had. But what did/does it have A few thousand members A few hundred offices When in the new century populist change came, those thousands of members and hundreds of party offices were of no use. The Party missed the bus in the sixties and seventies of the past century. It missed opportunities later also – in fact quite a few times in its century long life. It cannot blame anyone for its unfortunate state today. It claimed to be guided by Lenin among others, but had no clue to a Leninist understanding of conjuncture. It repeatedly spoke of “crisis”, a favourite term in Indian party lexicon and central committee resolutions. But what is a crisis without an understanding of conjuncture and the possibility of a rupture
In these hundred years, the nature and composition of class struggle changed a number of times. The anti-colonial phase followed by the early nationalist phase, then the phase of privatisation and liberal reforms, and now the hard corporate rule accompanied by a return of primitive accumulation on a wide scale. Old stable class compositions have transformed. The peasantry has witnessed a gigantic change of its condition. Each of these transformations was marked by political crisis, revolt, and re-composition of power. How did the Party cope with this series of mutation of class struggle This is a crucial question if we are to understand the nature of a political legacy in a historical-material manner.
The last hundred years of the Party and the movement in India marked by some significant success and large failures thus bring up the question: What will be the nature of a communist party in a postcolonial condition, particularly in the neoliberal age In what way will that party be still a Leninist Party, if it must remain a transformative party Or, have the Indian communists bade farewell to the idea of a Leninist Party altogether
IV
As an answer to the question posed above, we cannot take recourse to a trite formula, namely that earlier leaders were great, and leaders of our time are pigmies. Or, former leaders were revolutionaries and the latter are a group of revisionists who cling to parliamentarianism and have captured the party. We also cannot take refuge behind an oft-assumed play of fate. To get an answer we must resolutely stick to an analysis of conditions that allow and enable a party of social transformation to grow and become the vanguard of the people. Will the Indian party be ever a revolutionary party A Leninist party
Clearly, the postcolonial condition of the country is the point from where to begin. It is reasonable to say that the decline of the Party’s strategic capacity, organisational strength, and a future-looking vision started with the onset of neo-liberalisation on a global scale, and certainly in India. The political effects and consequences of the neoliberal transformation as the determinant of India’s destiny took more than a decade to become clear. Of course, this was not particular to India. Many other communist parties of the world perished in the neoliberal storm. Large parties like the Soviet, Italian, French, Spanish, and the parties of eastern Europe (including East Germany) suffered the same fate. Maoist parties fared no better though a few survived and tried to adapt to new situation.
Of course, communists the world over are trying to regroup, revive, and reorganise in different ways. It is a different story, which will require another hard reflection.
Indian communists faced a situation of double jeopardy: postcolonial condition and neoliberal age combined to make India different. Class relations changed. Old class formations disintegrated in a noticeable way between early 1990s and 2020. The corporate barons took over the entire economic structure. Industrial decline combined with rise of virtual accumulation, primitive accumulation, resource extraction, and investment in services sector. Peasants became part time migrant workers. Cities became nodes of logistical reorganisation of the economy, at the same time the battle ground of various claim making sections of the society. Migration became the single most defining feature of the new situation. One can go on in describing the changes in Indian society and economy. Suffice it to say, that stable mass organisations working as the base of a communist party that would maintain internal discipline and expand at the same time through aligning with and leading mass movements is a phenomenon that is by and large over. The Party has no answer to the massive rise of religiosity, in particular urban religiosity. It refuses to learn from the populist governments at state level as to how to survive and face the neoliberal onslaught. Finally, its squeamish attitude to law and nationalist orientation have cost its proletarian commitment. Probably it is beyond repair.
We may say, that is what it was to be. After independence, communists gradually focused on votes, parliament, and small reforms that would benefit people at ground level, winning state elections, and finally building new culture for a new, progressive India. Intellectuals became prominent in party hierarchy. Cultural activists became Party icons. Workers and peasants occupied the backseat. There is a wonderful short story/memoir written by the Bengal communist leader of yesteryears, Somnath Lahiri, of a young dock worker who was flourishing as party leader of the area being deputed to become a party office manager in the city! The Party steadfastly worked on this strategy decade after decade – never rethinking. It was as if the Party was thinking somewhat along the line of what Antonio Gramsci had termed, a “war of position,” that would require united front with sections of society and an “eternal” effort to occupy a hegemonic position in society. Meanwhile, moments of “manoeuvre” came and went by. Opportunities arose in moments of conjuncture when possibilities of putting an imprint on the power structure emerged as if from a void. People wanted change. The Party wavered. Fundamentally, it did not have the language to amplify the desire and demands of the masses, leave aside the task of setting up organs to represent the masses in times of cataclysmic changes. “Follow the Indian National Congress” became instead the mantra.
Is it then the fact that in the post-colonial condition, “war of manoeuvre” would never become a fruitful strategy In this connection, one may see the fate of the Italian Communist Party, roughly born (1921) around the same time as the Indian Party. Having crossed hundred years, and at one point of time on the verge of capturing national power, the Party lost scores of chances, stuck to its policy of no risk, slow advance, winning positions of “hegemonic command”, and in the end losing everything. Disappointing the working population, its million-strong cadres, nationwide followers, and countless institutions, the Party broke down and fragmented. It can invoke only the memory of an illustrious past that will not come back. Gramsci’s “war of position” has come home to roost. And, Palmiro Togliatti’s legend is now in tatters.
V
The sacrifices of yesteryears are now congealed as memories. As political directions and indications, they are now rarely marshalled by the Party. At the same time, various welfare measures once introduced by communist administrations at local levels are not novel any more in India. Caste, gender, environment, migration, desire for autonomy – these all call for a new strategy of social transformation. On one hand, the Leninist vision of a party that will be the “tribune” of the people, not only its “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 the art of combining strategy with autonomies of various sections of the society. Without autonomies 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 ground level for better managing life, policies of protecting those vulnerable sections of population who need care and protection, and understanding the biopolitical desires of the lower orders of the society – all these call for new approach and a new vision. The Party has to reorient its strategy so that it can draw from biopolitical responses from below to the crisis of the neoliberal order, the visions and desires of the lower orders.
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 other social forces working for justice and dignity. Lenin had to learn from the dedication of Russian populists, Chairman Mao 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 hundred years To survive for hundred years – will that be the final achievement
Till now, the truth has been that without a communist movement, or at least a programme to build such a movement, there is no communist party; and if there is no communist party, there is no communist movement, by which we mean a communist movement that can be sustained. Yet in India, as in many other postcolonial countries, this intrinsic link has been torn. In India, there is a Party, but not a communist movement, and in many other countries the basic tenets of the movement are carried by fighting masses and nations without a Party in firm existence. It is an agonistic field, without any modern Prince – the Gramscian imaginary of a Party – to lead the society to emancipation. The century-long legacy, which we cannot throw away and at the same time which baffles us and we do not know how to make use of this legacy, must now await the elaboration of its inner ambiguity. At the same time, the ambiguity defines us.
Legacy in its immaterial existence is best realised as self-knowledge. Thus, “we know what is our party’s legacy. Who are you to evaluate it”. Nevertheless, legacy is a social fact, a part of the world’s rational order. The transfiguration of an immaterial existence into a social fact is a kind of mutation due to the test that Great Time puts before it. Through this test, the transfiguration doubles the value of every personal and collective experience of suffering, pain, and misfortune. This added value in return increases the mystique. Legacy is thus a formative test for our contemporary political life. As political subject our collective life is a long fabric of legacies whose ambiguity tortures us.
Negotiating legacy is thus a difficult political question. Can the society interrogate the Party’s legacy The supreme theorist of the Leninist Party, Vladmir Ilyich Lenin himself, reminded his comrades during a time of great uncertainty and turmoil, that the Party must understand the meaning of the slogan, “All Power to the Soviets!”. He told, his party had the majority of workers’ support, half of soldiers’ support, but had to work for the support of the peasantry, and without the Soviets the Party would not have survived the crisis of war, anarchy, hunger, and collapse of the country. Twenty years later as the Second World War began, the Party was once again displaced by the Red Army, the Soviet nation, and the Soviet state. Likewise, in China, Mao’s advice to his Party (known as the “mass line”) was to follow and practise the dialectic of party and the nation/society with care, skill, and historical sense and wisdom. Thus, in phases of agrarian revolutionary wars and war against Japanese aggression, the Party had to be repeatedly reconstituted because of what we may call the “externalities” – the civil war, Long March, etc. The reconstitution never stopped permanently. It occurred on a number of occasions in post-revolutionary China’s 77 years. It is as if the society has repeatedly reminded the Party, Gramsci’s Modern Prince, of the undeniable nature of the latter’s social existence. We have to work towards such a dialectical history to make sense of the Party’s hundred years’ legacy in India.
Yet it is a fact that the Party and the hundred years of Indian communist movement have shaped our postcolonial present in an ineradicable way. Comrades formed a Party. It became an organisation of a new type that the colonial nation had not experienced before. Of course, this style of organising had its lineage. Beginning with second half of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, roving bands of Wahabi campaigners had propagated their ideas, wandering monks had preached themes of service to people, and nationalist agitators had travelled the length and breadth of the country to preach swaraj. In this milieu communists became mohajirs and finally formed a party in 1925. Yet, as branches, committees, cells, commissions, plenums, conferences, congresses, and membership norms multiplied, the old tradition died down. The Party in time forgot the society. It became a sect.
This is not to say that this transfiguration of a party to sect is an abnormal event. A sect carries in it not merely a history of a philosophical doctrine, but also a history of forms of collective life, modes, and styles of activity and thinking – in short, a history of the emergence of a new being. There is something paradoxical in this destiny of a Party transforming into a sect. On one hand, this is a social destiny. In other words, in the postcolonial milieu of the country, the Party could not be a party of the entire nation. With its goal, it had to become a sect – sooner or later. Communists survived precisely through this transfiguration. On the other hand, the imaginary of a wider society known as the nation precisely for this reason remained beyond the Party’s reach. It was and still remains a challenge, one may say a permanent challenge: for the Party to remain a Party with its sect-like life and yet be the symbol of the society, the nation. All communist parties face this paradox. By engaging and coping with this paradox successfully, which means contingently, the Party survives and flourishes – whether in China or elsewhere. But the paradox does not vanish away. The constitution of the Party as an ethical subject is assuring to the subject, but makes the subject an eternal target of critique – a demand that the Party must lose its arrogant self. The Party must be a dialogic subject.
[Note to Readers: The “Party” in this article is an idea as well an organisation in material form. There are several communist parties in India. The “Party” refers to them all. This is not to say that their differences are meaningless. However, for the purpose of this article, they are all, “The Party” – the organisation without which communists do not and cannot survive. – RS]
Top - Home