Social democracy meets postmodernism: the secret pleasures of being Stalinist
December 26, 2007
By Saroj Giri, Sanhati. Open for comments
We are told that the CPIM is mounting a Stalinist defence of the Stalinist horrors they enacted in Nandigram and elsewhere. Wondered what a possible post-modern defence would look like? Something like Professor Patnaik’s? Perhaps it is senseless to raise such a question. But there are parallels. Does not the Negri-inspired postmodernist transmogrification of imperialism into a cool, decentred, frictionless Empire amount to a defence of imperialism? The CPIM is late-capitalist social democracy, accomplice of crony capitalism, or social fascism, as in China, but being late-capitalist it also has affinities to certain kinds of ‘post-’ thought, as seen in PP’s recent polemical apologia. This is my hypothesis: what we are witnessing in the present debate is an ideological admixture of post-Marxism and social fascism, mix between postmodernism and social democracy (the communalism-postmodernism mix notwithstanding). Further, what if PP is not just mounting a postmodern defence of Nandigram but is accusing the postmodernist Left of engaging in a Marxist sin: of being messianic, metaphysical, of positing a transcendental subject-position (didn’t the postmodernists attack the Marxist-Lukacsian notion of the proletariat as the transcendental subject-object?).
Well, finally, is it the unravelling of a knotty story we are witnessing, post-Nandigram? Why are the CPIM, the social-democratic left, and the post-modern left fighting with each other? One immediately remembers how during the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai, the CPIM and so-many other non-party political formations, NGOs, Gandhians, socialists, post-modernists all came together to jointly fight against capitalist globalisation. This Stalin-Gandhi pact, CPIM-postmod ‘unity in diversity’, perhaps without being explicitly intended to be so, however, served a distinct ideological purpose: to keep out the Maoists who organised the Mumbai Resistance.
Today, the most honourable ideologue of the CPIM says that the post-modern left was with us and wonders as to why they are opposing the party now. The post-moderns accuse the CPIM in turn of being unable to shed its Stalinist know-all monopolistic claim to truth and its dictatorial attitudes. From the debate between these two ‘camps’, which is degenerating into a spat, we now know that the CPIM and post-moderns were together on a lot of issues and, as PP tells us, they were together in their fight against communal fascism.
Understanding the CPIM’s role of capitalist henchman as Stalinism in action (in terms of its Stalinist claim to truth and History), therefore seems like the underside of the secret solidarity between the CPIM and the post-modern left facilitated by none other than the CPIM’s shift to the right. What founds this secret solidarity between the two sides is most definitely the belief in the end of the class struggle shared by both sides. Isn’t the supposed end of the class struggle, proclaimed by the postmodernists, what ultimately forms the framework for the CPIM’s acceptance of neoliberalism? If the class struggle is over, if capitalism is going to stay, then can one attack the CPIM’s vanguardism in favour of capital without being tendentious and pretentious?
What if therefore it is precisely the critique of the CPIM as Stalinist, as though it has the monopoly over truth, which blocks off from view its real, pragmatic, capitalist core? For whatever Stalinism was, it was certainly not a pragmatic accommodation to capitalism. What if the CPIM far from having anything to do with Stalinism actually now believes that the working class is neither structurally nor subjectively ready for revolution, that the class struggle is over. And this is where the postmoderns and the CPIM join hands. Contrary to what is being told, Buddhadev is not appealing to some abstract notion of History or Truth in order to justify his actions in Nandigram but is pointing to the real, ground situation. The situation is supposed to be such that there-is-no-other-way: TINA-argument.
The CPIM is saying, we do not know the truth, we are merely responding to the practical ground situation, which has created a situation where we are having to kill certain people in order to protect the interests of our party and its supporters. Any other party in our place would have done so, so are we doing. What is the problem with this? This is a completely realist, pragmatic approach, an approach which for a party with a red flag is nothing but plain opportunism in favour of crony capitalism. Only the genius of someone like PP can figure out how to remain a Marxist partisan in such a party! There is one help coming to him though: from the postmodernists, whom he surely loves to hate, who portrays him and his party indeed like a partisan, by calling the party Stalinist. This is now perhaps the only evidence he and the CPIM have to claim their ‘communistness’.
Thus the present CPIM-postmodern debate serves a distinct ideological purpose: to allow the CPIM to live off the Marxist tradition. Presenting the horrible acts of the CPIM, even as abuse, as condemnation, as Stalinist, as belonging to the Marxist tradition serves to not only malign this tradition itself but also to allow the CPIM to legitimise itself as part of that tradition. It only serves to forever present the CPIM as the upholder of the Communist tradition, and push the entire spectrum of what we know as the Communist Left further to the right, as cowering to the interests and depredations of capital. Thanks to its beloved critics, the CPIM surely derives a secret pleasure in being called ‘communist’, ‘Stalinist’ even as it has spawned and openly runs an entire fiefdom of capitalist interests. You can eat the cake and have it too, Patnaik sure realises: do Keynesian, state welfare economics and present yourself as a Marxist partisan! The opposition between the CPIM and the postmoderns therefore defines an ideological field which makes all this possible. This is of course NOT ideology as false consciousness but ideology as ‘blocking off’: blocking off the Maoists, blocking off class struggle, by reserving the communist, Marxist signifier for certain and not other forces.
Far from any presumed and abstract, violent imposition of some truth in the name of History, the CPIM today is claiming that there is no such truth but the immanent logic of capital to which all must submit. What happened in Nandigram is the final answer to the critiques of CPIM labelling it Stalinist since, contrary to Stalin, the CPIM is submitting to immanent history, history-as-it-is, not acting in the name of some transcendental History. For the CPIM, man does not make history, and he definitely has to submit to history under all circumstances. Thus they argue that the horrors they committed in Nandigram are not the choices they made but imposed on them, on the party. It is as though the CPIM is a victim of neoliberalism. No wonder PP and others must stand with the party!
Interestingly, what is missing from PP’s analysis is the most “Stalinist’ of all categories: totality. He, like Chomsky and others, does mention the ‘larger fight’ against imperialism but we have no clue where and how forcibly building a SEZ in Nandigram would fit into this fight. Like the post-modernists and post-Marxists he thinks that particular situations demand particular responses: nothing is universalisable. We cannot draw any general conclusions from CPIM’s specific moves in favour of capital. Today is a specific context in the history of global capitalism where the party has to take certain hard decisions which might not fit in the perfect world of middle-class messianic moralists but is part of the real, everyday politics.
There are multiple realities, multiple truths – what the party did in Nandigram cannot always be viewed in terms of the totality of corporate globalisation, in terms of the larger fight against imperialism. Nandigram is an exception: otherwise the party is actually fighting imperialism. Do we except Nandigram from the larger totality? Says the CPIM, the postmodernists are right: you cannot impose a meta-narrative about Special Economic Zones being always pro-imperialist particularly since the situation in Bengal is a particular situation. Don’t postmodernists argue that the local must be privileged over the global? Hence global capitalism is bad but not local, Bengali capitalism under CPIM. It might be pro-imperialist elsewhere but in Bengal it is not imperialist: come on, shed your essentialist, positivist, determinist notions and allow for multiple meanings! Moreover, the CPIM supporters are in a minority in Nandigram, driven out as refugees: don’t we support the marginalised, the subaltern, the minority, the fragment?
Let us now take PP’s assertion that in contrast to the postmodernist left’s middle-class intellectual far-from-messy-politics radicalism, we need to be partisan and live up to reality and take sides, distinguish between different kinds of violence etc. For PP, being partisan is to side with the Party and understand that there are conditions where, one has to take account of the concrete conditions where the Party might be forced to act in a particular way. CPIM ideologues always draw our attention to the ground situation, to compulsions of being under the bourgeois Central government, of the need to industrialise etc, to giving what the people want (there is a large middle class who favours industrialisation): such an approach completely negates partisanship.
Being partisan is precisely going against these ‘real’ conditions: it is to refuse to act according to what the ‘situation demands’. But it is not just saying no from the comforts of our homes; it is to redefine what constitutes reality, redefine the very idea of what is possible and what is not through the partisan act. Now we do not need the CPIM to come tell us that we need a party, an organisation in order to accomplish this and no amount of individual subversive acts can help. A partisan act by the party is to make the impossible possible and not to adjust to the compulsions of the system, which is what the CPIM is doing. That is why the partisan act cannot be a free-wheeling, radical individualist, middle-class moralising but must be itself a political programme. Patnaik here speaks sense. But PP’s ‘organised left’, his party has a capitalist political programme and that is why theoretically, in principle, this party is close to post-Marxism, postmodernism of one kind or the other.
Further, if going from cause to cause without any political programme, like the postmodern moralists, is vacuous and apolitical, then a so-called political programme without any ‘cause’ is nothing but nothing but a recipe for defending the dominant order. Worse, such a “political programme’, such an ‘organised left’ stands against those armed with both a cause and a political programme and who are engaged in a revolutionary political praxis. What is a partisan without a cause? Is he very different from a postmodern left moralist? Such a partisan is one who defends the system against those who want to transform it. PP is partisan in favour of the existing conditions, whereas the Marxist notion of partisan was to be partisan against the conditions, against the very reality, to as it were rupture the given status quo and restructure reality.
But what is even more striking is the manner in which the CPIM, even when it is self-criticising itself, is always responding to very liberal, or hideously humanist ways of questioning violence on ‘innocent villagers’. It is here again that the post-Marxist character of the CPIM comes out clearly. It is completely playing the liberal-humanist, pseudo-postmodern game of presenting its own supporters (among ordinary people; I do not count the gun-toting CPIM thugs on bikes here) in the most apolitical manner – as ‘innocent’ villagers hence in need for some elitist, top down support from the state and the party. For Stalin, the most innocent private gesture of an individual could suffice in terms of the totality to land the person in the camp of the ‘enemy of the people’: no innocents were allowed. Contrary to this, the debate around the Nandigram violence is done by two camps, each with their own set of innocent villagers to speak for. For both camps, it is only the Maoist, invisibly present in its absence in Nandigram, who is not innocent. The Maoist is not innocent but partisan: and, unlike Prof Patnaik and the postmoderns, a partisan with a ‘cause’?
To be fair, perhaps it is true that the postmoderns and Gandhians have been ungrateful to the CPIM. PP points out that with communal fascism relatively weaker today, the former allies could afford to attack the party. But then if tomorrow communal fascism gets stronger, the Gandhians, social movements activists, NGOs, postmoderns etc will run to the CPIM, if issues regarding the peoples movements have to be raised then they need the CPIM, so much so that a National Advisory Council was formed by the present government to that end. Surely, the postmoderns and others cannot ditch their friend and ally so openly. What if communal fascism rears its head again, what if the Maoists actually take over Nandigram and bring back not the rhetorical Stalinism but real Stalinism?
saroj_giri@yahoo.com
January 20th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Is it correct to compare the cpi(m)-leaders with Stalin, or call them ‘Stalinists’?
CPI(M) leaders have declared openly and unashamedly that since ‘there is no other alternative’, they are now busy to ‘develope’ capitalism in West Bengal. And to fulfill this goal they do not even hesitate to deprive the peasants of their lives and livelihoods. And hence the struggle against them in West Bengal, in essence, becomes a part of the world-wide ongoing struggle against capitalism-imperialism.
There is no doubt that Stalin made a lot of serious mistakes in Soviet Union. Even the democratic rights of the people were to some extent violated. But should we assess him on the basis of exaggerated propaganda of the imperialists, counter-revolutionaries and the betrayers? Have we done any scientific analysis of his mistakes, and positive –yes, positive contributions? While criticising him for his mistakes, should we forget the fact that he led the people of a backward capitalist country to turn their country into a powerful socialist country fighting against all the conspiracies and onslaughts of the imperialists and the counter-revolutionaries? And it was he, who led the Soviet people to crush Hitler’s Germany, thereby saving the people of the world against fascism. Should we forget that in the context of Soviet Union’s war against Hitler, he even refused to ‘buy’ his son’s release from the fascists (who was subsequently killed by them) in exchange for the release of a few fascist Generals? And the fundamental difference between Stalin and the cpi(m) leaders was that what they have been trying to do is nothing new–to work for capitalism in the garb of communism; while, in contrast, Stalin’s goal was not to develope capitalism, but socialism as an alternative to capitalism, which was simply unpreceedented in the history of human society.
Is it then correct to compare the cpi(m)-leaders with Stalin, or call them ‘Stalinists’?
April 9th, 2008 at 7:45 am
I cannot agree more with the previous respondent. Are we really aware of Stalin’s stature as a leader, his integrity as a thinker and his commitment to the ideals which are now so shamelessly paraded by all and sundry? May I humbly draw the author’s attention to the following article: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm
This was Stalin’s cautionary note against overzealous collectivization, which if anything was a far worthier cause than a naked espousal of capitalist agenda. It will be obvious that to utter Stalin’s name in the same breath as the “Party” apparatchiks in WB is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. Why are we so prepared to gulp down everything that solicitous “historians” and “analysts” with obvious anti-left affiliation have been gleefully shoving down our throats for decades? Why dont we bother to check out whatever facts there are before they are thoroughly buried under a mountain of hate-filled misinformation? I am not here to defend every aspect of Stalin’s leadership, but if we dont sift through the lies, who else will?
However, barring the references to Stalin and “Stalinism” I’d like to commend the article as timely and impassioned.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I ought to have reacted to Dipankar Chakrabarti’s response to Saroj Giri’s accusation of Stalin. DC appears too coward to admit Stalin’s excesses. After the opening of Comintern Archives, one of the few good things during the last years of Gorbachev era, it is time to read Nikita Khruschev’s Secret Speech on the last day of 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. There was nothing that Khruschev concocted in his speech which should be read with the report of CC of CPSU to Congress. We have now the outstanding book,Comintern and the Destiny Communism in India, based on his research at the Comintern archive. The only other scholar who studied there was the late Subodh Roy, a participant of the Chittagong Armoury Raid. He was sent by the CC of CPI(M) there. He brought several hundred files but the CPI(M) too is too coward to reveal them. Roy brought them in the late 1980s but two volumes of history of Indian communist movement by the CPI(M) makes no reference except one (and very important) admission: Comintern’s erroneous colonial thesis at the Sixth Congress, scripted by Stalin. This was a stab at the back of revolutionary movement in India, although partially corrected (for a short time) during the PC Joshi era when Dimitrov Thesis was experimented albeit half-heartedly as Stalinist legacy remained deep-routed. Admission of the error, however, questions the split in the CPI in 1964, atleast on ideological grounds.
Stalin’s contrbution in leading the successful battle against the Nazis and abolition of unemployment in the USSR remains indelible but there is no basis in assuming that had Trotsky. Bukharrin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Riazhanov were in power these tasks were ignored. Rather memoirs by Zhukhov suggests that Stalin wasted time in reacted to Barbarosa Plan and helped Nazi forces penetrate easier.
Russification of world socialist movement is a negative contribution by Stalin and there is unassailable documents from CI archives that Stalin acted against Lenin’s colonial thesis in sync with M N Roy.
There is no denying - as Isaas Deutscher said - that in the struggle against imperialism we are all Stalinists but it would be a grievous error to assume that Trotsky et al would not be anti-imperialist. To go a little adrift, Paul Sweezy et al of MR school gravitated towards socialism,reading Trotsky’s classic on Russian Revolution. This school is sternly critical of Stalin. Acc to Sweezy, roots of restoration of capitalism in the USSR were sown during the post-war years of Stalin era.
Some incorrigible people doubt authenticity of Comintern archives in their gossips. Did anyone of them or their acquaintances visited and studied the Comintern Archives?
Chakrabarti’s urge for evaluation of Stalin’s ‘positive’ sides more importantly while admitting his negative ones is a hackneyed old logic. We say Marxism-Leninism is scientific, although this aspect seems to have been overstated at least when we look back at practical applications, even from the time of Marx, without denying that attempts at applying dialectical (=scientific) logic were made umpteen times by the CPs the world over. But the idea of subtracting negatives from positives is at the most an auditor’s task. Otherwise, it looks like patting at the back of a student of math,phys.chem or biosciences for correct aplication upto a stage although the experiment ended in an error at the end. Does such kudos reflect scientific mindset.
Lastly, anyone interested in reading Khruschev’s speech may click http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html.
Sankar Ray