Discovering Das Kapital

by Isaac Deutscher

Topics: Education , Marxism

 Places: Global

This talk by Issac Deutscher was originally published inMonthly Review on December 1967 to commemorate the 100thanniversary of Karl Marx’s Capital. We are making it available here on the occasions of the 150thanniversary of Capital. In the original editors’ note to this article, 50 years ago Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy wrote: “This is the text of a talk given last summer on the BBC’s Third Programme. It is reproduced here by permission. Isaac Deutscher is the author of distinguished biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and at the time of his death at the age of 60 last August he was working on a biography of Lenin.” —The Editors

The conditions in which a young Polish intellectual studied Das Kapital in the 1920’s or 1930’s were very different from those prevailing in most countries in the West. To us the Marxist forecast of the collapse of capitalism was not an apocalyptic vision related only remotely to the realities of our daily life. The old social order was crumbling before our very eyes. This was the overwhelming fact of our existence. We could not escape it. My own childhood and adolescence was shaken by it again and again. I grew up in Cracow and in a little town half-way between Cracow and Auschwitz, on a tip of land wedged between the frontiers of three empires. As a boy of ten and eleven I watched the downfall of the dynasties of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns. Overnight there vanished the ancient powers, sanctitities, and fetishes that had held our people in awe for many generations. We felt the hot breath of the Russian Revolution. Then, just across the frontier, the Commune of Budapest flared up and was drowned in blood.

At 13, I absorbed from the adults the tense mood in which they watched the news of the Red Army’s advance on Warsaw. For years we lived almost constantly on the brink of civil war, amid galloping inflation, mass unemployment, pogroms, abortive revolution, and futile counter-revolutions. But even before these cataclysms, in the remote and spuriously idyllic pre-1914 era, Marxism had been, in our parts, the accepted ideology of almost the entire labor movement. Our right-wing Social Democrats no less than our Communists still considered Das Kapital as the “Bible of the working class,” like the old Bible, dusty and unread, but revered. Portraits of Marx and Lassalle stared at us from the wall of every trade union local and socialist youth organization and even of many Zionist clubs. I got my first inkling of historical materialism from older schoolmates; and although my own middle-class and orthodox Jewish upbringing inclined me against it, the shakiness of our social existence made me reluctantly receptive to some of the revolutionary ideas in the air.

I tried to read Das Kapital in late adolescence, but did not persevere. It seemed too hard a nut to crack, and I was not really interested in political economy. I had precociously started out as a poet and literary critic, and was in search of a philosophical approach to art. I was therefore interested primarily in the broad lines of the Marxist Weltanschauung. Turning away from Das Kapital, I tried to grasp these from Marx’s and Engels’ minor works, and from the writings of Plekhanov, Lenin, Mehring, Bukharin, and others. But their philosophical theories always pointed back to the socio-economic realities underlying the multiple forms of human consciousness.

And so I found myself scanning Das Kapital again and swallowing more popular expositions of its economic doctrine. I found these convincing enough, and I felt that they equipped me quite adequately for further literary and philosophical work and for political struggle. It was even with a hint of irritation that I read Marx’s warning in one of his prefaces to Das Kapitalthat science knows no straight and broad highway and that “only those have a chance of attaining its clear summits who will not dodge the toil of climbing up its steep pathways.” I wondered whether Marx had not made those pathways just a little too steep. Sometimes his dialectical subtleties seemed to me a trifle over-elaborate in an old-fashioned manner, and I wondered just how relevant they were. His exposition seemed to me too slow and leisurely for someone like myself, impatient to understand the world and to change it quickly. I was relieved to hear that Ignacy Daszynski, our famous Member of Parliament, a pioneer of socialism, an orator on whose lips hung the parliaments of Vienna and Warsaw, admitted that he too found Das Kapital too hard a nut. “I have not read it,” he almost boasted, “but Karl Kautsky has read it and has written a popular summary of it. I have not read Kautsky either, but Kelles-Krauz, our party theorist, has read him and he summarized Kautsky’s book. I have not read Kelles-Krauz either; but the clever Jew, Herman Diamond, our financial expert, has read Kelles-Krauz, and has told me all about it.” Unlike the great Daszynski, I had at least read Kautsky and a host of other popularizers.

Meanwhile I had committed myself politically: I had joined the outlawed Communist Party. For years I was busy editing literary journals, writing political commentaries, illegal manifestos and leaflets, addressing workers, organizing even peasants, conducting, as a soldier, underground propaganda in Pilsudski’s army, and all the time dodging the gendarmerie and the political police. In these circumstances I could not even dream of tackling Das Kapitalseriously.

The time for that came a few years later, in 1932, when I was expelled from the party as spokesman of an anti-Stalinist opposition. I felt the need to re-examine my own political thinking and the principles of communism and Marxism. I decided to take nothing for granted. Could Stalinist policy and practices be justified in terms of Marxism? Has Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism stood up to the events of our time? These were the questions that troubled me. I made up my mind to plough through the whole of Das Kapital,all three volumes of it, and also the many volumed Theorien über den Mehrwert, Marx’s history of economic doctrines. I was determined to scrutinize this whole intellectual structure coolly and skeptically, keeping my eyes open to its possible flaws and cracks. The esprit de contradiction got hold of me; at moments I was almost bent on proving Marx wrong. Perhaps because of this intense involvement or because of my greater intellectual maturity, I did not this time find “the steep pathways” at all forbidding.

In the next three or four years I read and re-read the great work in its entirety five or six times. I also plunged into the vast economic literature to which Marx referred; studied his bourgeois, academic, and social democratic critics; and acquainted myself with the varying interpretations and developments of Das Kapital offered by Kautsky, Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Bukharin, and others. I had left my starting point, poetry and aesthetics, far behind, and invested all my intellectual passions in monetary doctrines, the trade cycle, land rent, capital concentration in agriculture, the falling profit rate, the impoverishment of the working class, and other aspects of the dismal science. From explorations of Ricardo, Sismondi, Sombart, Bohm-Bawerk, and the early Keynes, I returned again and again to Das Kapital and was ever afresh captivated by the richness of its theoretical and historical texture and the crystal clarity of the analysis. The toil of the uphill climb was transformed into sheer excitement. I shall never forget the thrill with which from the “summit” I then viewed the boundless horizons on society that Marx, I felt, opened to me. No other work has ever impressed me with a comparable force.

But what about those flaws for which I had been on the look-out? Try as I did, I could not detect them. Every time I re-read the opus, I found it more rigorously argued and more convincing than I had thought it to be. I saw where, in the opening chapter, one might dissent from Marx and follow the theorists of marginal utility. That theory, however, failed to satisfy me-I could not accept it as an alternative to Marx’s conceptions of value, commodity, and labor. And once I had accepted his premises, I could not help following him all the way through to his conclusions.

I was aware that Marx analyzed capitalism in its “pure form,” as the chemist analyzes his elements, whereas in reality capitalism has absorbed and carries within itself the wreckage of all previous social orders. Yet no one underlines this more emphatically than Marx himself, and no one has elucidated the structural complexities of our society with anything approaching his historical realism. It is true that he dealt with laissez-faire and not with later quasi-monopolistic forms of capitalist organization. This, I reflected, did not render his analysis obsolete, for he shows precisely how the monopolistic forms grow out of laissez-faire; and he reveals, as no one else does, the organic connection between these phases of economic development. Even as early as in Poverty of Philosophy, published 20 years beforeDas Kapital, while he argued against Proudhon’s idealization of free competition, he demonstrated how free competition tended towards monopoly, its dialectical opposite. Then, in Das Kapital, he dramatically extrapolated the process of concentration of capital to describe the “historical tendency of accumulation” leading to the expropriation of many entrepreneurs by ever fewer “magnates of capitalism.” Even when, for the sake of argument, he assumed perfect competition, he did it only in order to prove that that competition was necessarily self-destructive. And so I could not (and I still cannot) help being puzzled by those of his academic critics who argue that Marx was unaware of the “imperfect competition” of our time. In truth, all later treatises on monopoly capital, non-Marxist and Marxist, including those by Hilferding and Lenin, are but illustrations of the manner in which economic evolution has on this point confirmed Marx’s predictions.

More important still, Marx shows how in relation to the workers, even laissez-faire capitalism was never anything but monopolistic. There never was nor could there be any perfect competition between capital and labor, for even under the most “just” wage system, in conditions of an ideal exchange of equivalents between employer and worker, capital alone is in command of the means of production; and it alone appropriates surplus value. As long as this is so, I concluded, Marx’s theory cannot be outdated, no matter how much the secondary features of the social order might be modified.

Even at that time, 30 or 35 years ago, I saw the essence of Marx’s theory, not in this or that aspect of his analysis of the trade cycle, or even in his views on the impoverishment, relative or absolute, of the working class, important though these views were politically. Admittedly, he left some issues unresolved and some loose ends. But for me the essence of his analysis lay in what he says about the central contradiction of our social system, the conflict between the socialized process of production and the unsocial character of the control which capitalist ownership exercises over that process. Inherent in this is the worker’s estrangement from his own labor, from the products of his labor, and from the structure of society which his labor perpetuates. Our “welfare state” has on the face of it toned down this estrangement, but only by deepening it: and it has cruelly aggravated the individual worker’s alienation from other workers, that is from his own class.

The study of Das Kapital not merely confirmed me in my Marxist conviction and in the sense of its incompatibility with the tortoise nature of social democratic reformism; it also revealed to me the full depth of the gulf that lay between classical Marxism and the cynical expediencies, the dull scholasticism, and the inquisitorial methods of Stalinism. Ever since, it has seemed to me as incongruous to blame Marx for Stalin as it would be to blame the Bible and Aristotle for the dogmas of the medieval Church and the Inquisition. It was as a Marxist that I went on opposing Stalinism.

Slowly at first, but then irresistibly, I was entranced by the style of Das Kapital. It set what has remained in my eyes the highest standard of reasoning and expression, a standard none of his disciples, not even the greatest, has ever attained. While I realized that it would be unfair to apply this standard to other thinkers and writers, Das Kapital seems to have left me with something like a heightened sensitivity to the style of all reasoning on social and political problems. I thought that I could recognize the quality of any socialist or communist statement by its language and form. For a long time it was usually my aesthetic sense that was first offended by any piece of counterfeit or phony Marxism; only after this would I proceed to examine its political, philosophical, or economic content.

Even now it is usually a kind of aesthetic discomfort that first puts me on guard against any pretentious piece of pseudo-Marxist argumentation. I often experience this discomfort when I follow fashionable debates between the meta-Marxists, para-Marxists, Existentialists and Structuralists on subjects such as alienation, the young and the mature Marx, the “humanization” of Marxism, and the categories of dialectical reason.

Reading Das Kapital, I realized why its author never bothered to offer his readers a systematic exposition of the principles of dialectics, although occasionally he threatened to do so. He evidently preferred to apply these principles rather than to expound them; and how right he was. The fact is that attempts to formulate the rules of dialectics usually result in arid scholasticism. Dialectics is indeed the grammar of Marxist thinking. But just as one shows one’s mastery of grammar not in reciting its rules, but in living speech, so one shows one’s grasp of dialectics not in mulling over its formulae, but in coming to grips with specific, large and vital issues in history and contemporary affairs. No doubt the rules of dialectics have to be learned; a good manual, like a good grammatical textbook, has its uses. But one-sided preoccupation with abstract methodology is often a form of ideological escapism, even if those who indulge in it love to dwell on Praxis and spell Praxis with a capital “p.” Das Kapital is the supreme example of the dialectical mind in action, of the dialectical mind using all its power of abstraction to plough up layer after layer of empirical social experience.

Marx was, of course, greatly concerned with the problems of his philosophical workshop as well, and with the nature of his intellectual tools, those he had inherited from others and those he himself invented. But the workshop and the tools were not ends in themselves-they were there to process the economic and socio-political raw material and to turn out the finished product.

Last but not least, Das Kapital was for me a memorable artistic experience. I realized that like a few other epoch-making discoveries, it was the result not merely of rigorous reasoning and heroic research, but of a creative imagination which had harnessed reasoning and research for one of its tremendous leaps. In science, such leaps have produced new visions of the universe, of the structure of matter, and of the emergence and growth of the species. Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, each of them must have been endowed with an extraordinary capacity of image-making to be able to see the world in a startlingly new shape, perspective, and light, hidden from predecessors and contemporaries. A withdrawn artistic genius lived in each of these giants of science. The same, I think, is true of Marx. For how otherwise would he have been able to focus his thoughts and ideas into that image of society’s past and that vision of its future which have ever since inspired one section of mankind and haunted another?

Marx’s artistry is more directly evident in the massive and classically pure architecture of Das Kapital, in the force and suppleness of its language, in his grave dramatic pathos, his satire and his imagery. I know that what I am saying may baffle those who have tried to tackle Das Kapital in the English translation and have found his prose involved and cumbersome. I once had a similar experience with Shakespeare whom I first read in wretched Polish translations. Only after I had learned English and heard his lines spoken on the English stage did I succumb to the full force of his poetry. Wer den Dichter will uerstehen, muss im Dichters Lande gehen.Unfortunately, Marx’s style and language cannot be easily Anglicized, although the existing translations are far more clumsy and stiff than they need have been.

As to the merits of the original, I would like to recall that Franz Mehring, a fastidious literary critic (and Marx’s bitter opponent before he became his follower), devoted a special essay to the poetic quality of Marx’s writing. He analyzed the similes and metaphors of Das Kapital,underlining their rare combination of imaginative inventiveness and conceptual precision; and he found a parallel for them only in Goethe’s metaphors and similes. For a German literary critic this was, of course, the supreme tribute.

One final remark: for over 30 years after I had studied Das Kapital, I never went back to it. During all this time I merely glanced at its pages on a few very rare occasions. Recently, I began reading it anew because I had undertaken to write a full-scale study of Das Kapital. I have so far gone through the first three chapters, those reputed to be exceptionally involved and abstruse-Marx himself was slightly apologetic about their “abstract and Hegelian” style. I find myself still fascinated by the old familiar pages; but what strikes me about them now, as it never did before, is their essential simplicity.

(World copyright © by Tamara Deutscher)

Demonitisation: Witless and Anti-People

PRABHAT PATNAIK

Wednesday, November 09,2016

NEW DELHI: Narendra Modi went on national television at 8 p.m. on November 8 to announce that from midnight of that very date, i.e. in a mere four hours’ time, 500 and 1000 rupee notes would cease to be legal-tender.

The justification advanced for this bizarre move was that it would strike at “black money”. An additional argument was thrown in, to the effect that fake currency notes used by “terrorists” would now cease to be effective, and some particularly enthusiastic supporters of the government even went to the extent of calling it a “surgical strike against terrorism”.

I shall come to the fake currency issue later. Let me first look at the “black money” argument which even President Pranab Mukherjee has gone out of his way to endorse. This argument, namely that the demonetization of 500 and 1000 rupee notes constitutes an attack on “black money”, is based on an utter lack of understanding of the nature of “black money,” a conception of it that is staggering in its simple-mindedness.

The implicit understanding is that “black money” consists of hoards of cash which are held in trunks or pillowcases or buried under the earth. With this understanding, it is then suggested that if 500 and 1000 rupee notes are demonetized, then people going to banks to exchange large amounts of old notes for the new legal tender would make the banks suspicious; and banks in turn would convey their suspicions to the tax authorities who would then catch the culprits. “Black money” would thus get exposed, and this would discourage further transgressions in future.

Now, the second part of this argument, even assuming that “black money” actually consists of cash-hoards, makes little sense. If a person possesses, say, unaccounted money of Rs.20 crores, and that too in 500 and 1000 rupee notes, then such a person will certainly not come with the entire Rs.20 crores to a bank to change it into the new legal-tender (he will not be allowed to do so anyway); he would rather send several factotums to the bank, each carrying a small amount, and would do so over a number of days prior to the December 30 deadline.

In fact even this prolonged effort would be unnecessary, since all sorts of intermediaries would come up fairly soon who would do this job of exchanging old notes for new ones on behalf of customers for a consideration. With such “black operators”, exchanging “black money” from the old legal tender to the new legal tender, the idea, mooted by “experts” on several TV channels, that demonetizing 500 and 1000 rupee notes would unearth illegal cash-hoards makes little sense.

More importantly, however, this very conception of “black money” is absurd. Indeed the term “black money” itself is a misnomer, since it conjures up the image of a stock of money which is supposed to be held not openly, in the form of bank deposits, but clandestinely in the form of currency notes, and that too in pillowcases or in containers buried in the earth.

Actually when we talk of “black money” we have in mind a whole set of activities which are either entirely illegal, such as smuggling, or drug-running, or procuring arms for terrorist organizations, or are undertaken in excess of what is legally permitted, or are not declared at all so that taxes are not paid on them.

If 100 tonnes of minerals are extracted but only 80 tonnes are declared to be extracted, in order to reduce tax payment, then we have a case of “black money” being generated. Likewise, if $100 of exports are undertaken but only $80 are declared, and the remainder $20 are kept abroad in Swiss Banks, which is against the law, then we have a case of “black money” being generated. Or if rupees are changed into foreign exchange through the hawala route and kept as deposits abroad, then we have a case of “black money” being generated. In short, “black money” refers to a whole set of undeclared activities.

“Black money”, it follows, refers not to a stockbut to a flow. ”Black activities”, like “white activities”, are meant to earn profits for those engaged in them; and simply keeping a hoard of money earns no profits. What Marx had said about business activities also holds about “black activities”, namely that profits are earned not by hoarding money but by throwing it into circulation; the “miser” does the former, the capitalist the latter. And those engaged in “black activities” are capitalists not misers.

Of course, in any business money is also held for a shorter or longer period (e.g. during the C-M-C circuit); but this is true as much for “white activities” as for “black activities”, so that the belief that the differentia specifica of “black money” is that it is held while “white money” is used for circulation, is completely without any basis. All money circulates, with occasional pauses when it is held, whether it is employed in “black activities” or “white activities”. The essence of unearthing “black money” lies therefore in tracking down “black activities”, not in attacking money-holdings per se. And this requires honest, systematic, and painstaking investigation.

Long before the days of computers, the British Internal Revenue Service had earned the reputation that it would eventually catch up with any tax defaulter simply through a process of grinding and meticulous investigation. True, Britain is a small country compared to India, but that only means that the size of the tax administering personnel has to be larger, tailored to the needs of the country; and if this is done, then unearthing “black money”, at least in the domestic economy, is merely a matter of patient and efficient tax administration.

A sizeable portion of “black activities”, however, is operated through banks located abroad; indeed some would say that this constitutes much the larger portion. Narendra Modi himself before his election had talked of “bringing back” the “black money” stashed abroad, suggesting that the bulk of “black money” was located abroad, even though his remark displayed the same naïve understanding that “black money” referred to a hoard rather than to a range of activities. But if foreign banks constitute the predominant source of funding “black activities”, then the demonetization of 500 and 1000 rupee notes, while causing much hardship to ordinary people, will do little to eliminate such activities.

This is not the first time that such demonetization of currency notes has occurred in India. In January 1946, the 1000 and 10000 rupee notes were demonetized; and in 1978 the Morarji Desai government had demonetized 1000, 5000 and 10000 rupee notes from the midnight of January 16. But even in 1978, let alone in 1946, this had caused no hardships for the ordinary people, since most of them had scarcely ever seen such a note, let alone possess one. (Even in 1978 Rs.1000 was a lot of money and common people hardly saw notes of 1000-rupee denomination). But that move of the Morarji Desai government, even though it did not impinge on common people, did not end the scourge of “black money” either. The Modi government’s move, while equally ineffective in countering “black money”, has the added flaw of impinging severely on common people.

Some have argued that, whether or not the demonetization of 500 and 1000 rupee notes itself has the effect of countering “black money”, it represents a long-term move away from a cash-using economy, and amounts in that sense to a restraint on unaccounted activities that are typically not financed through recognized institutional channels. But quite apart from the fact that “black activities” financed through foreign banks will still escape detection in a cashless India, the very idea of a cashless India represents a pipedream of a segment of the elite, which is totally unaware of the difficulty that a common person faces in obtaining a credit card, or even opening a bank account (despite Modi’s loud boasts about expanding people’s bankability). The move towards a cashless economy, while not being realized, will simply become an additional means through which the common people will get squeezed.

But, what about the other argument that such demonetization acts against terrorism by preventing the circulation of fake currency notes printed “across the border”? This argument hinges crucially on the assumption that the technology employed in printing the new legal tender will prevent any possibility of faking it. Let us accept that assumption. Even so, the introduction of such new legal tender which cannot be faked, at the expense of the existing legal tender, could have been effected in a gradual and altogether unobtrusive manner, exactly as the introduction of new currency notes in lieu of the old ones is routinely effected.

It is not as if the government was expecting an avalanche of fake notes on the night of November 8; why could it not have avoided the sudden, surprising, and massive attack on the security and convenience of the people that it launched on the night of November 8?

What the Modi government has done is unprecedented in the history of modern India. Even the colonial government had shown greater sensitivity to the convenience of the people than the Modi government has done by demonetizing only those notes which were possessed by the super-rich and not those possessed by the people at large. This “emergency measure”, however, is in line with the numerous other measures being currently pursued by the Modi government which has embarked on an undeclared “Emergency”: it is as fatuous as it is against the people.

Posturing on Black Money

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:

Posturing on Black Money

The announcement made by the Prime Minister about the demonetization of the Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes is not going to yield the desired result of unearthing black money. It will have limited effect and is more like political posturing.

The claim that the demonetization will check black money, fake currency, corruption and terrorism lacks substance. By the Prime Minister’s own admission, the bulk of black money generation and storage is in off-shore accounts in foreign currency.  Counterfeit currency can be generated for any denomination. The announcement of a new Rs 2000 note alongwith another Rs 500 note does not in any way prevent future possible counterfeit circulation. It’s an established fact that terrorist funds flow through electronic transfers and not through currency transactions. 

        

By allowing the conversion of the existing 1000 and 500 currency notes within the prescribed time limit, no effective measure is there to prevent benami conversions. Further, transactions through plastic will continue as usual. 

In effect what this would result in is a total disruption of the payments and settlements that are part of daily life of our economy. It will  burden the vast mass of our people from daily wage labourers, fishermen, small businesses, traders and vendors selling at the door step. What is going to happen is the disruption in livelihoods and bureaucratic harassment of ordinary people who wish to change the currency notes. 

The basic avenues for money laundering through Participatory notes and diversions through tax havens remains untouched. There is no attempt to curb the roots of generation of black money such as in the real estate sector.

This is a measure to cover up the utter failure of the Modi government on the economic front, of joblessness, high prices and no pick-up in domestic demand, crippling all sections of our population, especially the working classes, and ruining the peasantry.

The CPI(M) demands that the government make public forthwith the names of those holding bank deposits and accounts in tax-havens and those refusing to return humongous loans from nationalised banks estimated at over Rs 11 lakh crores, if it is really committed to recover and curb black money.

An interview with The Wire, Prabhat Patnaik

In an interview with The Wire, Prabhat Patnaik, renowned economist and emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, talks about the future of Left politics, the directions neoliberalism has taken and more.

Excerpts from the interview:

Eminent Marxist intellectuals like Samir Amin, John Smith and others hold the theoretical conclusion that contemporary capitalism has reached a stage of explosion. Their argument is that unlike the previous crisis, no malleable mechanism is available for capitalism to survive and sustain. Has capitalism reached a dead end?

Like capitalism reached an impasse in the inter-war period, it has now come to a dead end. There is no clear way available to capitalism to get out of the crisis it happens to be in. The fascism they are imposing, happening all over the world, will not help them to get out of the crisis. In 1930, fascism meant military preparation. Now, you are not going to have military preparations and what is more no fiscal deficit. You have globalised finance, which doesn’t like fiscal deficit and government spending. It would like the government to handover resources to the capitalist to induce investment and get out of the crisis. Now the governments have reduced interest rates to the lowest level, zero, everywhere. It has suddenly reached a dead end.

I would say the capitalism always requires some kind of exogenous support to keep its accumulation going. For a very long time, colonial relations provided the exogenous support. In the inter-war period, this disappeared and in the post-war period, you have the state providing the exogenous support. Financial capital does not like state intervention, it wants to directly stimulate investment to generate employment and growth. Now the state itself is confined to balancing the budget or having a 3% fiscal deficit. So the state does nothing. You have globalised finance and you have the nation state. So if the individual nation state doing anything against globalised finance, then finance will leave. Coordinated action on the part of nation states, which could challenge globalised finance to stimulate the world economy, is something which is not even talked about. So capitalism at the moment has run out of options. It is yet to become clear how it will come out of this. This provides a very good opportunity. It provides once more some kind of revolutionary possibilities.

That revolutionary possibility can come about and be realised only if there is commitment on the part of revolutionaries to support the petty producers, peasants etc. It is essential in countries like ours to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance. That goes against the other kind of thinking, which I believe is the real factor crippling the Left at this moment. This thinking says that the Left believes in modernity and modernity comes through the development of productive forces, and therefore the Left must develop productive forces and if this requires the taking away of peasants’ land, let us do so. That is what happened in West Bengal and it finished off the Indian Left for quite some time to come. There was a blow to the Left in West Bengal and West Bengal was the biggest state the Left had. So I believe that the idea of the development of productive forces being central, as something that should be done even if it entails the destruction of petty production, is something which I totally reject. I believe it is a suicidal theory as far as the Left is concerned.

People like you talk about delinking of countries like India from globalisation. But a number of Left intellectuals from the First World, like Slavoj Zizek, are fearful of such a delinking of Third World countries from globalisation. They think that such a delinking is a retreat from modernity and a return to pre-modernity and parochialism. Why should Third World countries be delinked from globalisation?

In a society like ours, linking with so-called modernity, which is neoliberal policies and globalisation, is responsible for the emergence of fascism. In other words, I do not see fascism as separate from neoliberalism. I see fascism as pro-communal liberalism. [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is carrying out the neoliberal agenda far more actively than many have done before him. In a society like ours, we have a peculiar combination of globalisation on the one side and the most backward, obscurantist, reactionary, communal, fascist agenda on the other side.

These two are not separate. Globalisation is not fighting against it. On the contrary, globalisation is sustaining it. They sustain globalisation. They will do Hindu pujas and the rest of it, but will also push for globalisation. I think people like Zizek, who actually talk about globalisation as being the harbinger of modernity, are not looking at the comprehensive impact of globalisation on a society like ours. Modernity in a society like ours came with anti-colonial struggle, and the anti-colonial struggle was delinking from the British Empire. People like Zizek are not aware about the complexities of Third World societies.

There is a right-wing upsurge in many parts of the world. Samir Amin describes this as the return of fascism in contemporary capitalism. Is this the structural crisis of capitalism, that necessities such fascist emergence?

I see it as a revolt against globalisation. Globalisation has created an enormous amount of inequality everywhere in the world. There is stagnation or worsening in the conditions of workers. Joseph Stiglitz says that the real wage of American daily workers today (he said this in 2011) is lower than it was in 1968. Productivity increases everywhere so the surplus increases and inequality increases. Now the crisis has imposed itself on top of this. Therefore people from everywhere have become the victims of globalisation. When they become the victims of globalisation, they want a way out. Now the liberal bourgeoisie are not giving anything alternative. The Right does not actually have a way out but they say that we are going to do something differently. The only thing different to do is to to attack immigrants, to attack Muslims, to attack minorities and do on.

At the economic level, they may in fact prevent capitalists from investing in China and other such countries, which is called the ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ policy. So they do not really have an alternative but they did come and say the system has to be changed, and therefore they say they have some agenda and people turn to it. On the other hand, where there is a progressive agenda like Bernie Sanders’s for instance, people turn to that agenda also. So people want to get out of this globalisation. I see it as revolt against the globalisation which is being led at present by the Right. That is because the Left has not come up sufficiently to lead this revolt. I was talking earlier about the Left’s attitude, which is completely paralysed. In Europe, for instance, the Left is completely paralysed because they want the European Union. German finance dominates the European Union but nobody in the European Left talks about delinking. I think this notion of equating progress with globalisation implies the Left had somewhere missed out on people’s anger against it. The Right is capitalising on it. The Right does not have an agenda other than the fascist agenda of minority bashing and things of that kind, which is not going to get people out of the crisis in which they are. Employment does not get generated simply by minority bashing. So that is the case at the moment. I hope the Left makes a come back, because the crisis is not over.

Because of the ascendency of Hindutva politics in India, the progressive sections of the country fear that India is moving towards fascism. But the former general secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, writes that the present regime should not be called fascist. Instead he describes it as authoritarian. How would you define the nature of right-wing Hindutva politics?

You are not going to have exactly the kind of fascism you had in the 1930s. In other words, I am not saying that you will have concentration camps. Fascism doesn’t consist of one particular way, in which it manifested itself in the 1930s. Contemporary fascism would be quite different from what it was earlier and I think there are certain obvious features of that. One is that fascism is something which is also a movement. It actually uses mass movement mobilisation. Now I think this fascism came on the basis of the mobilisation on Babri Masjid. This fascism has its popular base. It is not like the Emergency, like an imposition from the top. But it actually has a popular basis. All these vigilante squads are typical of fascism. The second thing about fascism is that it is also supported by the corporates. So you have a combination of corporate support with fascist vigilant groups which are visible in India. It is against reason. It is against democracy. Every symptom of fascism is being satisfied by the ruling dispensation in India.

I would say that still we haven’t got a fascist state. Because if you have a fascist state then of course the fascist state would immediately prevent any criticism of it and it would become authoritarian. I think authoritarianism is growing but it is not yet a fascist state. So the way I would put it is that we have fascists in power pushing the state towards a fascist state as it would be in the current situation; not in the 1930s style. But still we don’t have a fascist state at the moment. But on the other hand, the fascism is growing. I would not say that a fascist state is impossible in contemporary India, nor would I say that these fellows are not making efforts to make India into a fascist state. I believe that it is very important to fight against them right now. I would call it communal fascism. Amartya Sen coined the term communal fascism, which I think has some appeal because it is a mixture of communalism and fascism. On the other hand, it is not only confined to communalism. It is against Dalits, it is against the rights of state governments. The GST, for instance, is an attack on the rights of state governments. Even the Congress supports it. It doesn’t mean that it is not an attack on state governments. So you have a centralisation that is taking place.

There emerges the need for political unity of secular forces against growing Hindutva politics. People like Irfan Habib have pointed towards such a unity. The success of the grand alliance in the Bihar assembly elections showed united resistance of secular forces. But an important left party like the CPI(M) abstained from this unity. Was that the right decision?

I believe it was the wrong policy. I believe it was wrong on the part of the Left. Why? Suppose I live in Bihar. Who would I have voted for? If it is the case that a committed Left member, committed Left activist votes for a non-Left combination, that means the Left made a mistake. If I feel that I can’t vote for the Left candidate and I must vote for the other candidate, then obviously my party is doing something which I don’t accept. I believe it is wrong. In fact it is very strange. In Bihar when the BJP was defeated, everybody on the Left was celebrating.

Irfan Habib wrote about this. He said it is completely wrong. I am not saying that simply. I see a connection between neoliberalism and fascism. I am not simply saying that just have an alliance with all other forces in the country. But it has to be an alliance which is based on a particular agenda. I think the Left has to take the initiative in bringing everybody into an alliance in which there is some agreed agenda. Of course you can’t say that do away with neoliberalism. But let’s say we freeze neoliberal reforms at the phase they are. We don’t want labour market flexibility; we don’t want all the other measures, financial sector liberalisation etc. All of which they are trying to do. We freeze reforms. But on the other hand, we try and provide certain specific advantages to the poor, specific benefits to the poor, transfers to the poor. I think in 2004-05, this is what has done. I think MGNREGA was made possible because of the insistence of the Left and I believe it is a major legislation. It was one of the most important legislations in post-independence India. Why don’t we agree on five or six legislations the government can do. And we freeze neoliberalism where it is. No more privatisation, no more labour market flexibility, trade unions have the complete right to strike and protest, and we mobilise resources in order to provide certain rights. You have to concretely negotiate it. I think what is required is not just all parties banding together. Bihar was like that. I am not holding that up as the model. You have to enthuse people to support an alternative. Therefore the alternative must have a clear programme. So I would rather suggest a programmatic unity of the widest sections of the population than of the political parties against the emerging fascist threat.

Electorally, the Left has registered significant losses all over the country. Bengal is an example. How could you explain such an electoral setback for the Left? What are the challenges before the communist movements in the country?

The most fundamental challenge before the communist movement everywhere in the world, particularly in India, is not to be hegemonised by neoliberalism. In theory, it is not. The whole Bengal thing was such a case. Let us not put the blame the communists. What is happening is that the middle class, from whom the intelligentsia is drawn, is a beneficiary of neoliberalism. And because the intelligentsia ultimately influences the communist movement, as it is a movement based on thought and reason, that beneficiary nature of the middle-class intelligentsia is transmitted to the communist movement. Suppose you are a communist leader. You have five friends. All those friends are middle-class intelligentsia. The revival of communism in India must start with giving up the hegemony of neoliberalism and therefore even accepting unpopularity in the middle-class intelligentsia circle for the sake of defending the peasantry and petty producers, fisherman and all the rest. That is where the Left constituency lies.

I think what happened in West Bengal is that to create jobs, they opted for industrialisation. Car factories don’t produce many jobs – they produce very few jobs. It was a middle-class demand. The middle-class demand was forcing them. The presumption was that the peasantry supports us anyway. Let us try getting the middle-class youth on our side by doing this industrialisation. But in the process, middle-class youth didn’t come and they lost support of the peasantry. It is very important for the revival of the Left not to get hegemonised by neoliberalism. Buddhadeb Battacharjee’s government was hegemonised and that is why when Pinarayi Vijayan appointed a lady from Harvard as an advisor, I was completely opposed to it. It is not because I have anything against her. If there is any suggestion that the Left is making concessions to neoliberalism, I would oppose that.

There are a number of different popular struggles going on in our country. In many of them, there is no presence of Left political forces. How would the Left engage with such struggles and social movements?

I think if there are struggles done by people other than the Left, you should not get worried. Of course people will struggle. But there is a big difference between the Left and all these struggles. The Left is the only force which has a political presence. That is why I am very upset about the Left in the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh elections doing things which marginalise it. Irom Sharmila, whom I have great respect for, got 70 votes. Can we imagine that Medha Patkar lost her deposit? Social movements do not have any political credibility among the people or any political support. The Left is the only movement which has both a social and a political presence. Consequently, I think all social movements, whether they like it or not, ultimately come to the Left asking can you raise this in parliament – even those who are opposed to the Left. For instance, when the MGNREGA demand was ongoing, a lot of people who were in the social sector came to the Left and said please raise it in parliament. They had a relationship. I think that relationship needs to be developed. Whether it joins the environmental movement or not, the Left has an enormous social presence among trade unions, the working class, the peasantry, youth and so on. And it has a political presence. I think the Left has to emerge as the champion of all movements, all pro-people movements, even though it is not leading. And they also need to recognise it.

How does Marxism address the caste question? How do you respond to the allegation that because of its class dogmatism, the communist movement and Left political praxis in the country failed to address caste and organise resistance again caste based exploitation?

Caste is an existing form of oppression in society. What we have is, as E.M.S. Namboodiripad put it, a ‘caste-based feudal system’. Capitalism is built upon a caste-based feudal system. And therefore, capitalism is carrying caste inequality forward as it existed in the earlier system. As far as the most oppressed castes are concerned, they are no better off, not in any fundamental sense, in the current society than they would have been earlier. They will continue to remain like this. Even if you have some Dalits who become prime ministers, presidents, professors, the bulks of Dalits, who are labourers, are actually getting squeezed under neoliberalism. The point is that while caste as a form of exploitation manifests itself, simply intervening at the level of caste is not enough. For the very simple reason that capitalism is spontaneous and this spontaneity generates, as Marx said, at one pole poverty and wealth at another pole, on the basis of a pre-existing social structure. Therefore, poverty at one pole necessarily would be the poverty of those who are most oppressed in the existing social structure. As that is the case, there is no question in my view of any liberation for the Dalits or any oppressed castes without overthrowing capitalism.

On the other hand, while that is a necessary condition, I am also aware of the fact that even in a socialist system, caste would not automatically disappear. You would have to make a conscious effort to overcome caste. Even in a socialist system, though you have full employment, somewhat ‘lower’ jobs would be left for the poor or the ‘lower’ castes. So that kind of a division would continue to exist. There is a division of mental and manual labor. That division won’t disappear the moment you are in socialism. Even within socialism, you do have to have a struggle against caste oppression. So I see socialism as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for overcoming caste oppression. I would actually define socialism or a socialist society in India as one where caste would disappear. It means that annihilation of caste is the barometer of socialism.

The communist movement in India is not a homogeneous thing. Bengal communism is quite different from Kerala communism. Kerala is one state in which the communist movement and the social emancipation movement went hand in hand, which is why communists are very powerful among the Ezhavas. In Bengal, that is not the case. There, it was much more a trade union thing, which of course made inroads into the peasantry later when it became powerful. The communist movement in Bengal never had a history of fighting for social emancipation.

On the other hand, a lot of later communist leaders in Kerala like Krishna Pillai and A.K. Gopalan began political life with the temple entry movement. So communism in Kerala grew out of social struggles. So the communist movements differ from one place to another. But it is certainly true as a general criticism that in large parts of India, the communist movement didn’t take the social emancipation agenda seriously enough. I would agree with that criticism. Bengal is one example of that. It is a fact that the entire top leadership is from an ‘upper’-caste background. It is true that the ‘upper’ castes got higher education, they develop theory, they develop consciousness, but the point is that the communist movement has to explicitly address itself to the task of overcoming it. And if they are in power for 30 years it is very important that they should have addressed this issue explicitly. But I don’t think it has done this sufficiently. So I would agree with that criticism that the communist movement hasn’t given enough sensitivity to the caste question.

In Kerala, the issue is different. There is great difference between North India and South India. In the south, the social emancipation movement began a long time ago. In a sense, the DK and DMK occupied the place in Tamil Nadu that the Left did in Kerala. Someone like Karunanidhi calls his son Stalin. There was a kind of Left thinking that was there then. But it was not thinking that proceeded with the usual Left line. But in large parts of North India, the social emancipation movement was not linked to the communist movement. It also began late. I think the social emancipation movement in the North India finished off the communist movement in North India. It took the form of identity-caste politics, especially intermediate caste politics, and later Dalit politics. The communists were squeezed out by that kind of identity politics. That is because they themselves didn’t do enough to participate in the social emancipation movement.

Different kinds of identity politics are very active in a democratic system like ours. One kind of Left approach towards identity politics is to dismiss it altogether. Another approach is discarding class politics altogether for identity politics. As a Marxist, how do you approach identity politics?

Identity politics is not one thing. The BJP’s is also identity politics, Hindutva politics. You have oppressed identity politics; identity politics of the oppressed Dalits. Identity politics of the bargaining kind is another. For instance, the Jats want reservation; Patels want the same. You also have the identity politics of a fascist kind. The BJP is trying to promote this. Identity politics is a general term.

I completely support the demands of the identity politics of the oppressed for reservation, for affirmative action, etc. On the other hand, while doing so I also know that identity Dalit politics is not the annihilation of caste. Caste is not going to disappear through Dalit identity politics. And identity politics is something which is perfectly compatible with capitalism. Given the spontaneity of capitalism, even the gains identity politics can make soon get lost. Take a simple example. We have the idea of reservation in the public sector. Now what you have is the privatisation of the public sector, in which reservation goes. So the gains identity politics might have made earlier is something which is disappearing. The same is true of OBC reservations. Identity politics of the oppressed, while I would support their demands, I know it is not the solution. Therefore I would say even though I support their demands, I would suggest that class politics must be brought in – fighting peasant struggles, trade unions, working class struggles, etc. Additionally, it is very important that there should be, for instance, a worker-peasant alliance, which the Left is trying to build up. It must aim at developing a notion of citizenship which is independent of identities by giving to everybody economic rights. For instance, if you have a universal right to employment; in that case the Patel agitation is no longer relevant. The Left should say yes to reservation. But the L eft should also say that we believe in a universal right to employment and if we come to power even within this society, not socialism, we are going to introduce a universal right to employment.

I think the Left has to break, go beyond identity politics. It has to put before everybody an alternative agenda, that agenda has to start up with the development of the concept of citizenship. Identity politics thrives because in a situation of crisis, people are fighting against one another. It is the ideal way of breaking class politics.

Marine Drive in Mumbai. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The pain of demonetisation still continues in different forms across the country. What would be the real motivation behind such an economic decision? It caused significant hardship to the people, why was there no large-scale resistance?

The pain of demonetisation is there even now. I saw in the Telegraph newspaper that the correspondent went to cover the by-elections in Dumka (Jharkhand). A tribal woman wants to repair her mud hut before rain comes. She has saved Rs 9,000, which she can’t access. The suffering of people is intense. Now anybody who says there is no suffering by pointing out that the BJP won the UP elections is completely wrong. It has no connection. You can win elections on the basis of many things. But the suffering of the people is there evidently to see.

Even today, in large parts of the country, there is a cash shortage. It’s not correct to say the situation is normal now. Unemployment has definitely increased. Everybody knows it. A lot of migrant labourers went back to their villages. They have seen a drop in their living standards. So demonetisation has been an attack on the poorest of the country. It has done nothing and it is not going to do anything about unearthing black money. The same government, with demonetisation, has brought a finance Bill saying companies’ donations to political parties can be any amount and doesn’t have to be revealed. Then what black money are they unearthing, what corruption are they fighting? So it is completely bogus. It is just an attack on people and all these things on fighting corruption are an eyewash.

Two questions arise. Why did it happen and second why is there not any revolt. Why did it happen? It is difficult to say. Because I believe these are fascist people. Unreason is an important part. And unreason takes the form of spectacular things. They just think it is a natural thing to do. And they are bringing the feeling of doing big things, impressing the people that they are doing something big. I can’t think of any other explanation. There is no rational explanation that I can think of. Their objective may not be actually doing away with black money. But just to impress people. In that they succeeded. So how can you say it is irrational? I mean by irrational an action which presumes irrationality on the part of other people. If I think that going 5,000 times around the Tirupati temple is going to get rid of black money and I do that. I know it is not going to get rid of black money but I know people are gullible enough to think that it is for the national good. In that I believe an action of unreason may be smart. But I am thinking other people are irrational. Then I am catering to irrationality.

Why has it not had effects? The point is that in this country, I think for a long time collective forms of struggle have just disappeared. You may have the identity-based struggles. But collective forms of struggle have disappeared for a long time. To my mind, the recent doctors’ strike was the first strike of that kind involving everybody of that profession after the railway strike of 1974. I am not talking about one-day/two-day strikes of trade unions. But prolonged strikes based on specific demands which involve a whole profession, which involves the country as a whole, have just disappeared. I think that is a contribution of neoliberalism. That is the one way neoliberalism contributes towards the emergence of fascism.

In the recent years, the Gujarat model of development has been propagated as the model that could be followed by every other state in the country. Earlier it was Kerala model of development that was renowned. You had worked as the vice chairman of Kerala state planning board. Is Kerala still a model?

Kerala had a specific trajectory of development. If you have larger expenditure by way of welfare expenditure, transfers to the poor, not only are you developing the human development index, you are also increasing purchasing power, you can have a higher rate of growth. I made a calculation between 2004-05 and 2011-12. The per capita growth rate of GDP of Kerala was the same as in Gujarat. But it was not by inviting multinational companies. Much of that period was the Left Democratic Front (LDF) regime period and V.S. Achuthanathan was chief minister. So it was not done by inviting multinationals, not getting people out of their land, nor depriving tribals of their rights.

It was actually done by once more reviving the health system, increasing expenditure on health. But I think the Kerala model faces a very significant challenge from neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is one which actually denies state resources. If a state is denied resources, naturally they would invite big business to come and set up plants. So neoliberalism necessarily entails a shift in the Centre-state relations in favour of the Centre. And the Centre is not going to give you money to spend on hospitals and education and so on. So the biggest threat to the Kerala model now is the increasing centralisation of resources. This is a part of the neoliberal trajectory. I think because of this, they would try to destroy the Kerala model of development. The challenge before the LDF is basically to what extent they can find ways of sustaining the Kerala model. From 2006-11, when Thomas Isaac was the finance minister, he found good ways of mobilising resources. Now even taxing powers are removed from state governments, with the GST.

Now the GST has replaced all other taxes in the country. The government circles claim that GST would result in a 2% increase in GDP growth of the country. But economists like Amartya Sen and you have expressed significant concerns over the new tax. What are the reservations you have regarding the GST?

The Indian constitution had erected a financial federal structure as a complement to the political federal structure. The constituent assembly had been aware that if the states were reduced to the status of mendicants approaching the Centre for resources, then that ipso facto would entail a subversion of the federal polity. Hence, it specified certain particular taxes to be levied by the states, as distinct from others that were left to the Centre. The Centre, however, adopted over the years various means, which we need not go into here, to ensure that the states remained starved of resources and had to depend upon its goodwill, i.e. that they were indeed, as far as possible, reduced to a mendicant status. The Goods and Services Tax regime takes this assault to an unprecedented height. It amounts to a formal abridgement of the constitutional rights of the states. This is clear, obvious, indisputable and not even denied by anybody. By substituting a GST for the sales tax which the constitution had explicitly assigned to the states, and which was the main source of states’ revenue (approximately 80%) and by providing that GST rates are to be decided only at the GST council where every state is just one member, together with the Centre, and therefore quite powerless to alter the rates it can charge, it is clearly taking away states’ powers.

The question relates to the basic structure of the constitution. Just as one cannot declare the country a “Hindurashtra”, even if the Centre and all the state governments at a particular point of time unanimously agree that this should be done (for that would violate the basic structure of the constitution), likewise one cannot take away the states’ powers even if the Centre and all state governments at a particular point of time unanimously agree to institute a regime that does so.

The claim that a GST would contribute much to GDP growth is based on entirely spurious econometric exercises. The talk that GDP growth would go up by 2% or 3% is derived from theoretical models, all of which make assumptions that have no basis in facts. Tax reforms, in short, would not make an iota of difference to investment behaviour of capitalists which is governed primarily by the expected growth of the market, though capitalists argue otherwise in order to push for tax reforms which are advantageous for them, as the GST would be. The gains of such reforms are simply pocketed by them, without stimulating any larger investment and growth.

The case of the United States is instructive in this regard. The argument is often advanced that a uniform GST across states, even though there may be varying rates, is necessary for creating a national market. Interestingly, the US does not have any such uniform rate, but a plethora of them across states and commodities. It would be ironic to claim that the world’s most powerful capitalist country does not have a unified market! The reason why the US does not have a uniform rate like what the GST entails is because it values federalism greatly. Even the most powerful capitalist country of the world, in other words, is willing to place certain constitutional values like federalism, upon which it is founded, above capitalists’ preferences. There is no reason why India should not do the same.

This is the 100th year of the Russian revolution. What is the legacy and contribution of the Russian revolution and the Soviet state? Contrary to Marx’s prediction, a socialist revolution took place not in a capitalist country but in a backward feudal country like Russia. How did that happen?

At least four important contributions of the October revolution which are of global historic importance have to be recognised. Firstly, it was responsible for the defeat of fascism; everybody in the liberal democratic universe who attacked the Soviet Union conveniently forgot that the liberal democratic universe was saved from fascism by the Soviet Union. In fact, many people are raising this question that in today’s world, if there is fascism, what is going to save the world from fascism? The liberal democrat cannot take on fascism.

The Soviet Union played a crucial role in the defeat of fascism. The second contribution is that it actually set up the most gigantic welfare state the world has ever seen. We talk about welfare capitalism, but that is nothing compared to the welfare state the Soviet Union had created. The third thing is that it was the first time in modern human history that actually you had an economic system characterised not by unemployment, unutilised capacity and existing poverty. But it was characterised by complete full employment and labour scarcity, a different kind of economic system. It gives you a glimpse of what is possible. Fourth, the most important contribution is that it was responsible for decolonisation. I don’t just mean decolonisation in the sense of formal independence. I mean decolonisation in the authentic sense of Third World countries capturing their own natural resources which had been under the control of the colonial powers, of metropolitan companies associated with colonial powers. This happened everywhere. When Gamal Nazer nationalised the Suez Canal, there was an Anglo-French invasion and it was the Soviet Union which stopped this threat to Egypt.

It was happening in India. The oil companies were taking huge amounts of resources from India. They brought crude oil. When refineries were set up here, the government of India said that you are actually charging too high prices for crude oil. If we are importing from Soviet Union, we can get it at a lower price. They refused to do that. Then the Soviet Union started helping in the prospecting of oil in India. In fact it liberated India from the shackles which are imposed by the seven sisters in oil and a large number of metropolitan capitals in all kinds of other industry. The point is that building up the resource base of the country, building up heavy industries not just in our country but all over the world, is something made possible by the existence of the Soviet Union. Even the political liberation of many of these countries is obviously because of the existence of the Soviet Union. Churchill didn’t give independence to India. The point is that we must never forget the role of Soviet Union in bringing about decolonisation. I think these are enormous historic contributions.

Of course the Soviet Union could not develop a political structure because it became a one-party dictatorship, so it could not really last and they could not make the jump from a one-party dictatorship to a political structure appropriate to a socialist country. But on the other hand, the world conjuncture on which the Soviet Union has been created was namely an imminent world revolution. That changed after the Second World War. So, an imperialism which has been characterised by an inter-imperialist rivalry before is no longer characterised by inter-imperialist struggle. Instead, there was a kind of unity among them. So the whole situation had changed. And the Soviet Union could not adjust to these situations; neither ideologically nor in terms of institutions. So it has collapsed. But its historical contributions are just outstanding.

Was the Russia revolution a negation of classical Marxist theory?

It depends how you see classical Marxist debates. Whether by classical Marxist theory you mean literarily anything Marx wrote. I think there were even references in Marx about a worker-peasant alliance, but it is exactly true that it was an innovation. Marxism is not just kind of textbook or Bible or something. It is actually opening up a way of looking at the world and Marxism is also a development. For instance, Lenin talked about monopoly. Monopoly did not figure in Marx. So the world changed. In fact, the world changes in the way Marx analysed. Marx himself analysed the centralisation of capital. Marxism continuously develops. If it doesn’t develop, it becomes religion. It is a science, not a religion, because it develops.

Earlier, I was talking about the theory of imperialism. It was not there in Marx. So it is a development. The point is human thought can’t remain at the level it was in 1857. The Bolshevik revolution carried forward Marxist revolutionary dielectrics. So it is a carrying forward of Marxism.

While theoretically comprehending the crisis of capitalism, the famous German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg declared that there exist only two possibilities before the world: either socialism or barbarism. It seems that even after 100 years, those words are important in describing the predicament of present world. Do you subscribe to such a view?

I agree. But we have to interpret the ‘barbarism’. Barbarism is taking the form of a fascist takeover all over the world. And a fascist kind of takeover basically pushes us back by centuries, by at least one century in India. Because it would revive communalism, it would revive unreason, it would revive casteism, etc. Either we move forward or we actually move backward. That is the current situation. But the European Left, because of their belief in what I call productionism – development of productive forces – they are actually hegemonised by neoliberal thinking.

What is the alternative of the Left today anywhere in the world to globalisation? What is the reaction of the European Left to the fact that Left governments coming to power cannot deliver what it promised? On the contrary, it had to accept the draconian measure of austerity. The point is that it is as long as the Left remains within the same thinking as the hegemonic thinking in the current era of globalisation, it can never break out of it. The condition for the revival of Left is that they wake out of hegemonic thinking and defend the petty producers, peasants and the entire army of people. We talked about the Bolshevik revolution breaking away from the Marxian paradigm, that was Lenin’s contribution. He saw the revolutionary role of the peasantry. No Marxist has done that before and that produced the October revolution.

Do you see any possibility of a socialist revolution in the near future? Why you believe in socialism?

I think it will take time. Because it would require theoretical preparations, social preparations, it would sharpen the class struggle, it would require experiments, many of which will fail, so it takes time. But there is no doubt about it. I believe in mankind. Human beings are very intelligent beings. They certainly will be able to erect for themselves a social arrangement that actually promises and gives everybody freedom and liberation to ensure creativity. I think my belief in socialism basically comes out of a belief in human beings.

The Latin American model of socialism is hailed as 21st-century socialism. The Latin American model is described by a number of intellectuals as an example of a socialist transformation in a bourgeois democracy without any revolution or class struggle. How do you evaluate the socialist experiments in Latin American countries?

People fetishise revolutions, particularly young people and the ultra-Left. The argument is that unless we have armed struggle, revolution is impossible. Fundamentally, revolution is a social transformation. You attempt social transformation through class mobilisation, through class struggle. Democracy provides the best conditions for class struggle. Because it provides total freedom for the class mobilisation of workers, peasants and so on in a bourgeoisie society, not in a socialist society. Within a bourgeois society, democracy provides the best way of doing this. The advance of class struggles within a bourgeois democratic structure widens the democratic structure. This is prevented by the ruling class. So the armed conflict is imposed on the revolutionary class by the ruling class. In Latin America, there was a period when they tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez. They tried various things. Armed struggle may take the form of class struggle in such situations, where the ruling class tries various things. It is the situation where you can, for instance, frustrate the ruling classes and if so then you could see a march over them. What I mean is the scale of armed struggle may be very small. These are the questions of concrete ways in which the class struggle manifests itself. The form of class struggle depends on the situation. It would be a fetish to say ‘No no, we must start with armed struggle,’ as it would be to say ‘No, the democratic form is all that we need and we do not require armed struggle’.

In Latin America, the Left is in power in many countries. The stage Latin America reached was the stage of redistributions. They did not make any fundamental change in the nature of the production structure in order to push in a socialist direction. It was ‘redistributioinism’ rather than socialism. Basically, what happened is because of the world commodity booms, all Latin American commodity producers’, producers of oil, etc made enormous economic gains. In the old days, these were appropriated by the rich, corporate multinationals. Now it is used by the state for development measures. It was a very interesting thing. It was a wonderful thing. It was a great historical achievement. But at the same time, that in itself does not constitute socialism. Socialism would entail a change in the production relations. Now, before any such thing could happen, the commodity boom itself has collapsed. Since the commodity movement has collapsed, much of the Latin American Left is in deep trouble. Everywhere there is a threat to the Latin American Left. Because all these countries actually, one way or another, are dependent on world commodity movement which has now collapsed.

If a revolution breaks out, what kind of revolution it will be? A revolution lead by the proletariat or a revolution of the ‘multitude’?

When I talk about the proletarian revolution, I have in mind a revolution in which the proletariat leads the entire working people, peasants, petty producers, etc. Obviously it is not a world of petty production that you are going to build. The point is to defend them and then what you are going to do is to improve their condition and then reach the higher form of collective ownership and collective life – cooperatives, voluntarily cooperatives and collective forms. That is the long revolution. To talk in terms of multitude, the multitudes too have to do class struggle. Capitalism would not give up its power easily when the multitude struggles. I believe that capitalism is subject to certain spontaneous tendencies. Those tendencies would continue to exist as long as the capitalism exists.

If the will of the multitude (let’s proceed with the phrase multitude) is to prevail, then you have to overcome capitalism. When you overcome capitalism, what do you substitute in this space? That is number one. Number two, when you overcome capitalism then they will hit back. We were talking about armed struggle earlier. In that case you would have to have some ways of fighting it: having an ideological consciousness to fight it. That ideological consciousness does not reside in all petty producers. Look at the peasant society. But that people from different backgrounds come together in factories to work together gives that particular group of people, whom we call the workers, a certain potential consciousness which is higher than that of these scattered petty producers. Other groups may have some collective consciousness.

You can have the Yadavs being together. They are different from Dalits being together. But Yadavs and Dalits together in a common fight requires a mobilisation and consciousness beyond what they have historically experienced. So the point is that we may proceed with the function of multitude. Ultimately, we would have come up on the same kind of propositions which Marx made. Gyorgy Lukacs once said the characteristics of Marxism is that every supposed advance made beyond Marxism actually represents a fallback to ideas that precede Marxism. So his point is that you cannot go beyond Marxism without changing the society that produced Marxism, and when you try to do that, then you actually go back to something pre-Marxian. Capitalism has changed, capitalism has become different and Marxism is outdated. These arguments are absurd.

A number of liberal thinkers categorise Marxism as an obsolete theory. What is the relevance of Marxism in the contemporary world?

I think Marxism analyses the contemporary world in a way which nobody else did. Lenin had said the strength of Marxism lies in the fact that it is true. The point is that it is a genuine scientific discovery. By that I don’t mean all had Marx written 100 years ago. This way of looking at the world is the only way of looking at this world that is correct, and that can take us forward. When we go beyond this world, Marxism may not be relevant. In fact, Mao said 1,000 years from now people may not have heard of Marx. Because once we go beyond capitalism, new problems would arise, there will be a new mode of production and laws of motion would be different. In today’s world, there is no going beyond Marxism. As I quoted Gyorgy Lukacs earlier, every attempt to go beyond Marxism implies a fall back to pre-Marxism.

There are a number of debates on what constitutes the Chinese model of development. The Chinese economy has been called a model of market socialism by a number of economists. A number of liberal intellectuals attribute the economic success of China to the capitalist road it has chosen since 1978. Is China on the socialist track?

To my mind, market socialism is a contradiction in terms. In the sense that if you have a socialistic economy, the socialistic economy can use the market and should use the market. I am not in favour of its commanding economy where some ministry gives directives to enterprises on what and how much to produce. You have to use the market. There is a difference between using the market and commodity production. Let me give an example. A commodity-producing economy is actually fragmenting the different units of production. It fragments the working class. Each worker of an enterprise is engaging in producing a product that is competing with another worker, who is engaged in producing products in other enterprises. If it is the case, workers themselves get profits depending on which enterprise is successful. Then you are have a situation where workers are competing with one another. The whole point of socialism is to overcome the competition of workers against one another.

If the relationships between enterprises are mediated completely through the market, in that case, of course, it is the negation of socialism and what is more, any such economy in which you have relations being mediated entirely through the market is an economy that cannot function without unemployment, without a reserve army of labour, etc. If you have market socialism in that sense, like in a capital society, you have enterprises which are owned by capitalists and competing with each other in the market. In a socialist economy, you have enterprises, some of them are owned by capitalists, some of them are owned by the state, some of them are owned by workers’ cooperatives, competing against each other. In that case, we would actually reproduce many other features of capitalism that is not socialism.

So to my mind, market socialism is a contradiction in terms. Socialism must use the market. I believe socialism must be characterised by full employment. If socialism is characterised by full employment, then the question would arise why do people work? If I can get a wage, why should I work? So when I say socialism is characterised by full employment, what I mean is everybody has either a job or even if he/she doesn’t have a job, he/she gets a wage. Because it is society’s job to find employment for everybody, not individual jobs. So that being the case, why would people work? People would work precisely because in a socialist economy, the motivation for work is that I must realise myself through my work, through my being member of the community to which I belong, etc. So socialism therefore may use the market. Socialism is the building of an alternative society and that alternative society cannot be built if enterprises are simply related to one another through the market. That being the case, I think market socialism is a contradiction in terms. I think Yugoslavia was a classical example of market socialism.

In China, there are different features. I think China has a significant amount of state property and the state gives directives to the enterprises. So they are not fully autonomous, in that sense, to make profits as per as market conditions. Now on the other hand, the Chinese actually opened the economy to world trade at the time when the world economy was booming. Now the boom of the world economy has come to an end and the Chinese economy itself is now facing significant setbacks. I think in these new situations, what China does would determine the direction it goes. If China revives its domestic market, it can revive its domestic market by improving the condition of workers and peasants. In that case, China would once more move in the direction of progress. But if in this situation, China does not expand its domestic market but in fact tries to stimulate some bubble, in that case China would not have brought about reduction in inequality which has gone very rapidly. I think I would say in China is really depends on the direction in which it goes. We have to wait and see. But I agree the direction it is going recently is not a socialist direction, which does not mean that China has become a capitalist country. Mao Zedong used the term capitalist road. China is taking the wrong road. It may have high rates of growth, but on the other hand, significant inequality and so on. I don’t think it is the road to socialism.

We are living in a world where education is becoming increasingly commoditised and social science subjects are being bypassed as irrelevant. What are the impact and consequences of this phenomenon?

They have a critical role in society. Engineers are not going to criticise multinational corporations. The whole idea of contemporary capitalism, which is neoliberal globalised capitalism, is to destroy thought. One way of destroying thought is precisely through the commodification of education. It benefits them both ways. On the one hand it opens up profitable opportunities. On the other hand it destroys thought. If you destroy thought, no critiques are produced. No Left can be produced. No critical person can be produced. In such a case, even the criticism that occurs then would be the mindless criticism of terrorists. When people are desperate they take to arms. But it will be a fruitless effort because you are going to bring back a paradise of 2000 years ago or whatever. So it will be an irrational outburst, or anger rather than a rational attempt at constructing a new society or reforming the existing society. Capitalism is not a planned system. Terrorism is something which they are worried about. But they generate terrorism. I think the destruction of thought is one of the most important features of contemporary capitalism. We have to fight against it; everything has to be fought inch by inch.

A Theory of Imperialism written by Utsa Patnaik and you discuss how imperialism is still a relevant category in the age of globalisation. Is it really the case that imperialism has become obsolete Marxist terminology? Even Leftist thinkers like Antonio Negri talk not about imperialism but about empire. How do you analysis imperialism in the present historical context?

As we discussed in the book, the point is that imperialism is essential for capitalism, which is concentrated in the metropolitan areas. Look at the world; capitalism is concentrated in the metropolitan region. This metropolitan capital has to squeeze petty production and much of the petty production produces goods in areas located within the tropical region. So it has regional dimensions. The social dimension comes in the sense that metropolitan capitalism or capital accumulation needs to squeeze the petty producers, particularly the peasantry, and it also takes control of resources which are  available in the tropical region.

That fact that capitalism cannot do without squeezing petty producers which are located in a different region is what we call imperialism. Its necessity arrives not just in that it requires those goods but it requires those goods which are subject to increase supplying price, at prices which don’t entail continuous inflation and therefore threaten the value of money in the metropolitan region. So if you can continuously keep squeezing petty producers, you can take goods away without increasing supply price. In our view, it will be impossible for capitalism to survive if it does not accumulate. So it is essential for capitalism to squeeze the petty producers. There are people like Antonio Negri who talk about empire etc. The problem with them is that they do not have a theoretical understanding of capital accumulation. Now, if we look at it empirically you can say anything, you can talk about empire, you can talk about US imperialism and so on. But the moment you look at it theoretically, then capitalism requires a lot of goods which are available only at increasing supply prices.

It is true that you could have innovation whereby prices may not rise. For that it requires state investment. State investment is something which capitalism does not favour, particularly in Third World states, because it imposes fiscal discipline on the state and the state cannot tax the capitalist rich because that is something against their own interest. So they do not want active state intervention for land augmentation, etc. Capitalism has to impose a squeeze on the petty production economy. We call that imperialism. That is essential for the functioning of capitalism.

Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. are independent journalists associated with the People’s Archive of Rural India.