Well said; let anyone who cares to go beyond the mass of critical thoughts created by themes like Achutanandan Vs Pinarayi , Media syndicate and Maudany take a fresh look. Thanks for sharing this. Regards, Venu
On 29 May, 11:34, damodar prasad <[email protected]> wrote: > The Left might have become the laughing stock of the nation post elections, > but laugh is the last thing we should be doing. It is a matter of tremendous > concern that a country with such a vast pool of industrial and agricultural > proletariat has just 24 Members in Parliament to speak on their behalf. > > This is the lowest ever since the first Parliament of 1952, during which > time the strength of the Left on the floor was matched by their > extra-parliamentary strength in the field with representative control over > peasant and worker organisations and syndicates. Not like at present when > the low numbers in Parliament is matched by a drastically shrunk base in > representative bodies of working class interests. > > So is the Left leadership worried in any way? From the tone of the inner > party stock-taking going on in the CPI(M), in Kolkata, Delhi and > Thiruvananthapuram; and the preambles to the forthcoming June 6 meeting of > the CPI in Coimbatore, it certainly does not seem like any lessons have been > learnt or any yardsticks for evaluation have been evolved. All one hears are > strident and arrogant sounds indulging in mutual slanging, just looking for > scapegoats to apportion blame. > > The question arises, what are the criteria for self-evaluation that Left > parties should be laying down? Is it at all a ‘political’ evaluation to > propose (as in Kerala, for example) that the Left was drubbed due to its > poor alliance strategies (particularly with the communal People’s Democratic > Party of Madhani) or due to the whiff of a financial scam that enveloped it > in the wake of the SNC Lavalin case. How ‘political’ is it to lay the reason > for their setback at the door of something as silly as inner-party > dog-fights (in this case, the prolonged spat between Chief Minster V S > Achuthanandan and the CPI(M) party Secretary Pinrayi Vijayan)? > > In other words, these are mere day-to-day events in the life of any party > and stuff on which their electoral strategies are built. But what should > distinguish ‘Left’ evaluation from the rest? Is it enough for them to be > stuck in the rut of the ‘tactics and strategies’ discourse? Or is it > important that they embark on the route of a theoretical evaluation which > tries to find answers to a whole range of new questions? > > Some of the questions that demand answers in a public sense need > enumeration. Like, why is it that in this time and age, the Left is > splintered into three — the CPI, CPI(M) and the CPI(ML)? It has been a good > twenty-five years since anyone has even bothered to analyse what the > ideological divisions between these three and their various off-shoots are. > Besides delivering the conventional gyan than the two big CPs are > parliamentary and believe in the ballot-box while the ML are > extra-parliamentary and profess the line of ‘armed revolution’, we really > have not had either a serious theoretical analysis nor a theoretical debate > on the reasons for the continued fractiousness of the Left or why it is so > impossible for the splinters to fuse together into a common front. > > It’s not now enough to admit, like a few senior leaders of the CPI(M) did, > that the party has lost touch with ‘reality’. We also need to hear what that > idea of ‘reality’ is with which they feel distanced. Is it possible that the > organised Left has steadily been losing touch with newly-developing > realities, regionally, nationally and internationally? > > *One has not heard party leaders telling us about, say, climate change or > why caste is consolidating in India or how they understand emerging issues > of gender, ecology or culture. We have not heard from Left parties on why > they stand opposed to opponents of mega-projects like dams, SEZs or nuclear > programmes who have been taking up the cause of millions of internally > displaced people. We have not heard from them on issues of human rights > abuses in India; for example, neither the parties nor individuals within it > even made a token noise against the treatment of someone like Binayak Sen. > Even after the initial absurd justifications for what happened in Nandigram, > they seemed to lack the courage to face the truth. They have not been able > to explain why they need to wait for a global capitalist like Tata to > develop West Bengal industrially before obtaining the ideal conditions for a > proletarian revolution in the state*. > > The Left parties have not been able to explain their holier-than-thou > posture, when it is clear that they have devolved into a conservative, > inflexible, intellectually moribund club, mortally scared of both > self-critique or external evaluation. But one would like to offer a critique > from the outside here. It is from Karl Marx who warned us (in ‘The 18th > Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’) against “doctrinaire socialism” which > “surrenders this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie.” This is the ‘reality’ > the Left needs to ponder. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. 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