?The first person was shot dead. The second was stabbed to death. And the third was beaten to death.? That was the statement made by CPI(Marxist) district secretary in Idukki in Kerala, MM Mani, about his party murdering political opponents in cold blood in the past. Juxtapose this verbal vitriol with an ideological document that was released by the CPI(M) in its 20th National Congress in Kozhikode titled ?Draft Resolution on Some Ideological Issues?, and you know how far the party in India has moved away from the fundamental self-sacrificing value system on which Marxist ideology was based.
One of the stalwarts of Marxism, the Algerian-born philosopher, Louis Pierre Althusser, warned about the degeneration of Marxism in his book Reading Capital, which in Bollywood terms can be thought of as a sequel of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. He overtly warns in the book that the Marxist ideology is so generic that any act or event can be justified as a vindication of its philosophy. It is not just MM Mani who as an after-thought used Marxist ideology to justify gruesome acts. Even the CPI(M) politburo members in the document use the backdrop of the financial crisis to strangely endorse Marxism.
The Left in India use Marxism in the Althusser sense and seem to live in their own world where even a financial crisis can be used to justify their ideology. The idea very simply is that capitalism?s crisis can be thought of, as if by default, as an exoneration of the creed of ?Marxism-Leninism?. Never mind the non-sequitur involved here. Just because one ideology is breaking does not mean that the other is mending. The fact that capitalism is in a crisis does not imply that ?Marxism-Leninism? stands absolved ?except in the ?manichean? world that the Left in India inhabit. As we all know, the Left in China, who for the most part of the twentieth century were the most radical, have embraced capitalism in a more insistent way than the Left in India. The Left in China see the crisis in financial markets in the West more as an opportunity for their country?s economic development through welfare enhancing tools of capitalism, such as FDI and industrial growth, than as an ideological debate which keeps us moribund.
The communist?s ideological formulations regarding the crisis of capitalism are quite na?ve, and keep trumpeting how correct Lenin was about the nature of finance capital. That the financial market today is an altogether different ball-game than what it was in Lenin?s time seems to have completely escaped the Left in India. The only real difference, according to them, lies in the fact that unlike in Lenin?s time, finance capital and the market operate at the ?international? level now, rather than at the national level then.
As a former banker, I find the cavalier fashion in which the document treats issues of credit, investment and financial market quite astounding. One doesn?t have to be a banker to realise that something like the expansion of credit has changed the relation of ordinary Indians to capitalism. Earlier, for a middle class person to buy a house, she had to wait till she accumulated enough money to do so. Through home loans, welfare in housing has been enhanced overall. Even agricultural and small and medium enterprises? credit, which flows through the banking system, has been economically beneficial to farmers and small businesses. One only has to have lived in the new economic age to realise that ?capital? in all its forms has transformed the average Indian?s economic well-being. The problem is not with finance capital but with greed and extravagance, which manifests in the form of excessive leverage?a primary cause of the financial crisis and a crisis for capitalism. However, one doesn?t throw the baby out with the bath water. Surely, there were excesses made in the West. Like the Left in China, we need to learn our lessons and strategise our own economic prosperity, rather than try to justify an ideology for self-serving ends.
More strangely, the document uses outlandish logic to indirectly defend Naxalism. Marxist-Leninist don?t even concede that their ideological off-shoot has caused more economic harm to the country in recent years than even terrorism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a non-partisan way, described Naxalism as the single largest threat to the country. The Left choose not to condemn any of the high-profile kidnappings of foreign tourists or IAS officers in Odisha and other neighbouring states, but instead justified them as a sign of lack of governance. Earlier, the underworld in Mumbai or local gangs in Bihar used to resort to roguish crimes like kidnapping. Now the Naxals do it as a routine matter. The Left chooses to rationalise this menace, as it is a spin-off of their own ideological thinking. MM Mani?s recent utterances about the party?s ?deeds? aren?t any different from the macabre acts the Naxals indulge in. The Left in India need to go back to their ideological roots to understand the self-sacrificing value system on which the Marxist ideology was based, else they risk falling into the ideological ambush that Althusser warned of.
The author, formerly with JP Morgan Chase, is CEO, Quantum Phinance