The Left, Caste and Dalits: A Troubled Relationship

(This post appeared at Jack Stephen's blog, The Mustard Seed. My thanks to Jack for having invited me for writing the post).

The Indian Left has had a troubled association with the caste question.

The major reason, in case of the Left has been the over arching importance that Marxism has attached to class and class conciousness. This has been true of the Marxist Left which includes the original and later CPI, the CPM and even most of the Maoist formations. The socialist parties, specially under Ram Manohar Lohia and to a lesser extent Acharya Narendra Dev acknowledged the issue of caste since the fifties though from the backward caste, and not a Dalit perspective.

This post, however, focuses on the relationship between the Marxist Left and Dalit politics.

The class based approach of the Marxist Left gave little importance to caste, and even saw it as an impediment for growth of class consciousness. It's mass fronts consisted of the trade unions, the peasant associations, landless agricultural workers. Outside these class based fronts were those for women, students and the cultural wing (the famous Indian People's Theater Association).

No scope was seen for a Dalit or any other caste based association. In fact, when the DS4 of Kanshi Ram began to grow in the 1980s, it was seen, even by those cadres in the existing communist parties who came from a Dalit background, as reactionary and dangerous- since these threatened to break the unity of the class based fronts along casteist lines. At no time, till the Mandal Commission forced it to take a firm stand, did the Indian Left see centrality of the caste question in India.

Within the CPI and the CPM, the leadership has been, even till recently, primarily drawn from the Brahmins or the local dominant castes, with very few exceptions. Neither have these parties made any conscious attempt to bring cadre from the Dalit strata into leadership positions. Instead, they have recreated in their internal structures the imbalances of society.

This is not to deny the fact that they have also been relatively less susceptible to casteism, and many among their cadre continue to be within these parties because of the relative absence of casteism within these parties in comparison with others. This is especially so where Dalit movement has been weak or non- existent.

In comparison with some other countries, the Indian communists' participation and acceptance of parliamentary politics has been long and unquestionable. However the stress of political action also blunted the social and mass based actions that these parties should have been involved in.

This came out very clearly when, after the CPI(M) Congress in 1998, in reply to a question as to why the Left had failed to strike roots in Uttar Pradesh, the then party General Secretary H.S. Surjeet explained the reasons thus:

"There has been no social reform movement in the state".

This surely is a case of putting the cart before the horse, since for those on left of the political spectrum, reforms are only a part of a much more comprehensive radical agenda. The task of the left is to carry out changes that go beyond reforms and not wait for others to carry out the job. Surjeet's words raise an existential question for the CPI(M).

Another reason of this dichotomy between the Left and the Dalit movement has been that Dr. Ambedkar, by far the most towering leader of the Dalit movement if not its only one till the rise of Kanshi Ram, had been an opponent of Marxism. His focus remained the social upliftment of the Dalits and as a politician his sensibilities honed in English liberalism restricted his view. W.N. Kuber puts it thus:

In 1937, (Ambedkar) founded the Independent Labour Party, for sometime joined hands with the communists in the labor field but did not take consistent attitude and fight class battles. Though his community was downtrodden and landless and mostly wage- earners, still he could not make them class- conscious, because of the weakness in his inherent thinking. After the Poona Pact he tried to lead the working class, but failed and left the field forever, and chose to become the leader of his community.

(source: Ambedkar: A Critical Study by W.N. Kuber, 1973. Page 304)

His insistence on Buddhism as an alternative to Marxism also did not help to build bridges.

Buddhistic countries that have gone over to communism do not understand what communism is. Communism of the Russian type aims at bringing it about by a bloody revolution. The Buddhist communism brings it about by a bloodless revolution. The South East Asians should give a political form to Buddha's teaching.... Poverty cannot be an excuse for sacrificing human freedom.

(Source: Ambedkar, Life and Mission, page 487, quoted in Kuber).

To the over arching importance that Dr. Ambedkar gave to conversion as a salvation for the Dalits (then called the Depressed Classes), the scholarly CPI leader Hiren Mukerjee commented:

But merely by changing one's religion, one cannot bring a solution, particularly to the kind of problem that we have in our country. That is why I say the conversion to Buddhism was a gesture, a moral gesture, with certain conceptual connotations of its own. Buddhism is a magnificent religion, but somehow it was eased out of India. If by some miracle, Buddhism is brought back again, well and good. But things do not happen in real life like that.

(source: Hiren Mukerjee: Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Extirpation of Untouchability, page 46, quoted in Kuber)

If the Left parties are more sensitive to the caste question in recent years, it is because of the battle lines that were drawn in the aftermath of the Mandal Commission and also because of the political base that caste based parties, especially the Bahujan Samaj Party have been to create for themselves. While these made a dent in the following of all existing parties, the ones specially impacted were the Congress and the Left.

The second reason is the recognition of near absolute identity of the Dalits as one of the more oppressed sections in the country. Earlier observers, even among the most radicals ones, disdained this. Groomed in the modernist, Nehruvian framework in the backdrop of global appeal of Marxism, the caste factor was pushed under the carpet. It was even seen as an obstacle in establishing class-consciousness.

This has now changed, and rightly so. The communists and the Dalit movement share a complementary role. While the Dalit movement has articulated the social and political aspirations of the oppressed community, it has lacked a firm economic program, with the result that once power is gained (in Uttar Pradesh, for example), the lack of a class based theoretical perspective restricts it to either parliamentary politics or the perspective, often narrow, of a single leader. A Marxist understanding and placing the Dalit movement within a larger national and world wide struggle for emancipation complements this social and political approach.

It is not that this has not been attempted, it was there during the brief existence of the Dalit Panthers Movement in the 1970s before its disintegration. It was also there in the approach of Sharad Patil who broke away from the CPM to form the Satyashodak Communist Party in Maharastra in the 1980s.

Given the ossification in the dominant Left, however, this dialogue will have to be initiated by the cadre of the Dalit movement and independent Marxists.

(This post owes much to Raghbir Singh, with whom I've had numerous discussions on the topic. He had first "warned" me about the "threat" from DS4 way back in 1987. Needless to say, we have both substantially revised our understanding since then.)

A New Blog for DD Kosambi

I had set up a site on the Indian historian D.D. Kosambi many years back, perhaps in the late nineties, as a tribute to a man who has contributed so much to applying the dialectical method in investigating ancient Indian history. In my student days, it was very inspiring to read his books starting with The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline. Over the years I have received a number of emails on the site which only indicates the interest that still exists in Kosambi.

A lot more material is now available on the internet about D.D. Kosambi than when I started out. My initial project was to scan and make available on the internet works by the number of Marxists that have contributed to our understanding of India and its history. For various reasons, the original project never beyond putting up some of his works online.

Only a few months back, I was amazed to find that Arvind Gupta has made available all the significant works by Kosambi on the internet. It lessens my feeling of guilt at not having completed my initial project.

Since his death in 1966, many of Kosambi's formulations have been disapproved. Still, his works retain their significance for their pioneering efforts and rigour that has laid the foundations of modern Indian historiography.

His quintessentially humanistic streak that still inspires many to read his works is best reflected in his own words.

"The subtle mystic philosophies, torturous religions, ornate literature, monuments teeming with intricate sculpture and delicate music of India all derive from the same historical process that produced the famished apathy of the villager, senseless opportunism and termite greed of the ‘cultured’ strata, sullen, uncoordinated discontent among the workers, general demoralization, misery, squalor and degrading superstition. The one is the result of the other, one is the expression of the other…it is necessary to understand that history is not a sequence of haphazard events but is made by human beings in the satisfaction of daily needs."

This blog will serve the purpose of collecting links to internet resources on Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi and his works. There is a Wikipedia entry on Kosambi now, and has a number of useful links, this blog will supplement the Wiki entry and link to a wider range of information on the internet.

The new blog is here.

Why the Left lost the battle of Globalization

Perry Anderson in an interview by Harry Keisler (see video)

Harry Keisler: One of the concerns in your Elberg Lecture is that internationalism, which we've talked about as being a guiding theme in the way you've looked at problems, is now the perspective of international capitalism. Whereas the opposition, the protests, tend not to have the same capacity to think and act globally.

Perry Anderson: For the century between, shall we say, the 1840s and the 1940s, the capacity to transcend one's own national limitations and national interests for a much wider set of interests, and to translate this transcendence into actually organized actions, belonged on the whole to the labor movement and to the left. The capacity didn't belong to businessmen, capitalists, and so on. Since the 1950s, that has very dramatically changed. We have seen in the postwar order a higher degree of coordination, the ability to make a more than national viewpoint on the interests of the system, for the interest of the system, on the part of the privileged. Whereas, those who are less privileged are more and more confined to a local region and at best a national framework of action, and that's partly to do with the destruction in some of the traditions of the Communist International, and the withering away of many of the traditions of the alternative Socialist International as well.

Globalization and the Lumpenproletariat

Gabor Steingart on the changing nature of the European lumpenproletariat.

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

Marx and Engels on the nature of the lumpenproletariat:

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

and here is a reference to this class in Grundrisse that I found interesting and needs to be kept in mind when looking for the modern lumpenproletariat- since there has been a significant rise in the services sector since Marx's time- note the interesting reference to the 'honest' and 'working' lumpenproletariat that stands in marked contrast to his comments on the class elsewhere (in the Manifesto, quoted above, and elsewhere)

The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it is not consumption of capital. Since one of the contracting parties does not confront the other as a capitalist, this performance of a service cannot fall under the category of productive labour. From whore to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and 'working' lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc. He who represents money in this relation demands the service only for its use value, which immediately vanishes for him; but the porter demands money, and since the party with money is concerned with the commodity and the party with the commodity, with money, it follows that they represent to one another no more than the two sides of simple circulation; goes without saying that the porter, as the party concerned with money, hence directly with the general form of wealth, tries to enrich himself at the expense of his improvised friend, thus injuring the latter's self-esteem, all the more so because he, a hard calculator, has need of the service not qua capitalist but as a result of his ordinary human frailty.

See also the Wikipedia entry for the term.

Link to Der Spiegel article via Eugene Plawiuk's Le Revue Gauche.
Image Source

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Part I


Part II



The videos may help sharpen your understanding of dialectics.

Link via Postmodern Anarchist

Inside the Mind of Mao

(On the eve of the 57th anniversary of the foundation of People's Republic of China)

Sidney Rittenberg was the only American ever to join the Communist Partyof China, working closely with Mao while translating his works into English.

His interview published in Al Jazeera sheds interesting light on The Great Helmsman who may be dead but whose presence looms large as various groups lay claim to different aspects of Chairman Mao's thought as it evolved from the days of the Long March to the disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Understanding the mind of Mao is also to understand the reversal of the socialist revolution in China.

Understanding the mind of Mao's is to also understand the mind of the "Communist" leaders in China today, as they go about building capitalism, in the words of author Wang Anyi, "with the enthusiasm of a proletarian revolution."

Excerpts from the interview:

SR: I think it was his own ideology in Marxist clothing. Not that he was not a sincere Marxist. But his view of Marxism was to take dialectic materialism and use it to analyse Chinese reality and then develop a Chinese programme.

He had no interest in copying what was done in the Soviet Union or any other country.

In the days before the PRC [People's Republic of China] it was whether the Chinese revolution would depend on the peasants or urban industrial workers. And the orthodox Soviet line was that Marxism belonged to the proletariat. There was no Marxism in the mountains they used to say. The peasants are backward.

But Mao said when the Party educates the Chinese peasants they could be just as good revolutionaries as anyone else in the world. That was the bedrock of his thinking.

AJ: Mao has been revered across the world. Why, and does he deserve it?

SR: I don't think he deserves reverence.

I think he deserves acknowledgement as a serious historical leader at a certain period and he needs to be studied, both the good and the bad.

...

And I think he was not content with seeing China plod along. He wanted to see China advance to a prominent position in the world during his lifetime and I think he became overly ambitious.

He said in 1958 at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward that he would use the strategy and tactics of a people's war and not use the Soviet way of brick upon brick to build the economy.

This was totally unrealistic and resulted in this huge man made famine.

I think it was what went on inside his head that was the problem. His plans during the Great Leap to catch up with Britain and America met with opposition from almost all his sober-minded colleagues. This awoke the conspirator and narrow envious peasant in him.

Link via Naxalrevolution


Tags: China, Mao, Socialism

New, and More, Socialism

A decade and half after the shock collapse of 'existing' socialism in Soviet Union and numerous announcements of the final victory of neo- liberal capitalism, movements for a left wing alternative and New Socialism begin to emerge from Latin America, Ronald Aronson exudes the new confidence and explains why The Left Needs More Socialism.

He also puts the historical role of the former Soviet Union- warts and all- in furthering the cause of Socialism in the last century.

Ugly as it was in so many ways, the Soviet Union not only spurred imitators but stimulated and sometimes supported resistance movements and, more relevant to us, along with the presence of vigorous socialist movements and ideas it encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist. The 1930s through the '70s saw important and still relevant efforts at social change led by anarchists (Spain), social democrats (Scandinavia), non-Stalinist Communists (Yugoslavia, Italy), coalitions of socialists and Communists (Chile), and coalitions of leftists and less ideological forces of national liberation (Nicaragua, South Africa). Until the end of the cold war, alternatives to capitalism and Communism seemed both thinkable and possible.

Harry Wainwright observes that Left parties- traditional or newer ones, that are succeeding in Europe are those that link themselves with broad based social struggles.

The most successful parties on the European left are those that have immersed themselves in social movements, especially the movements for global social justice, while at the same time using electoral footholds to open up political institutions. What is happening across Western Europe is that significant swaths of public opinion have far more radical expectations than social democratic parties can meet, but most of these voters are slow to shift party loyalties..."Social movements are the engines of transformation," says Fausto Bertinotti, leader of Italy's Rifondazione and the Mediterranean maestro of this strategy for outflanking conservative political institutions. Political parties must recognize that they are "but one actor among many," he insists.

Tags: Socialism

Gramsci's Prison Letters

The theoretical legacy of Marx and Lenin weighed heavily on the communists throughout the 20th century. Indeed few original political theorists emerged from within the mainstream Marxist movements.

Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks were published posthumously after his death in Mussolini's prisons was the most brilliant exception. Christian Spurrier writes on the tragedy of Gramsci as revealed in his letters to his wife and sons.

There can be no better evidence that his spirit triumphed than the last letter he sent Delio: "Darling Delio, I am feeling a little tired and can't write much. But please write to me all the same and tell me everything at school that interests you. I think you must like history, as I liked it when I was your age, because it deals with living people, and everything that concerns people, as many people as possible, all people in the world, in so far as they unite together in society and work and struggle and make a bid for a better life. All that can't fail to please you more than anything else, isn't that right?"

Technorati Tags: Antonio Gramsci, Marxism, Socialism

What China Needs

...is a massive dose of Marxism, according to wisdom that has dawned on the Chinese Communist Party.

The CCP after having dumped every tenet of its official ideology, has decided to make China the center of world Marxism, a slot left woefully empty after the demise of Soviet Union.

3,000 "top Marxist theorists" and academics from across the country are to be summoned to Beijing to compile more than a hundred Marxism textbooks, each one to contain contributions from between 20 and 30 scholars.

Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the party's chief official in charge of ideology, was reported to have told a meeting of propaganda officials and theorists that the leadership saw the project as a means of resolving various issues facing the country, and had given it "unlimited" support.

...

In the past decade and a half, the party has dismantled the state sector, thrown hundreds of millions out of work, given up on collective agriculture, celebrated the art of getting rich (not least through its own corruption), embraced the market "with Chinese characteristics", dumped the principles of free education, healthcare and cheap housing for the workers and created one of the most unequal societies in the world. Workers are not allowed to form trades unions, have little job protection, suffer appalling labour conditions and routinely go unpaid for months on end: a recent study by the National People's Congress concluded that migrant workers were owed more than £5bn in unpaid wages.

...

Far from abandoning Marxism, according to Professor Cheng, China has taken the lead in its development. One of two academics invited to lecture Politburo members last year on the need to modernise Marxism, Professor Cheng said recently that the Politburo had been studying the knotty question of how to reconcile the contradictions between Marx and free-market reforms.

To employ Marxist shorthand, it is a negation of negation- that can end either in a higher form of Marxism or its demise. Or is it a case of "unity and struggle"- perhaps the CCP's dialectics has some undecipherable Chinese twist too.

Is this going to be mere lip- service to Marxism?

Or will this spawn a new revisionist Marxism, battered, post- USSR, as it is by a number of post- isms including post- modernism and the lit- crit mob?

It is more likely a device to disarm the New Left Marxism that is being espoused the more sensitive Chinese intelligentsia and their efforts to return Marxism as praxis. It is certainly a contradictory policy- it violates China's continuous slide into a worst form of capitalism.

Meanwhile the stand of the two major Indian 'communist' parties is appalling, they sincerely believe that the CCP is ushering in socialism in China. The CPM's stand is understandable, it was a product of the Soviet- China split in the sixties when it decided to go with the China line. That of the CPI is less so, but then, it wants to wag its tail too, as a loyal B team of the CPM.

Original source here.

Technorati Tags: China, Socialism, Marxism

Pankaj Mishra - Neo Narodnik Turn

Pankaj Mishra, a very well read commentator and the author of a forgettable novel whose main character was, according to one reviewer, emotionally dead, seems to be the latest convert to neo- narodism, (mis)reading the case of Doosri Radha as "a sign of individual resistance".

And almost every day the newspapers carry signs of individual resistance to a homogenising modernity. The police officer donning the robes of Radha is not only self-consciously harking back to Wajid Ali Shah, the last great ruler of Awadh, who also dressed up as Radha and whom the British denounced as effeminate before deposing him. In his androgynous dress, he is also rejecting the role required of him by a hard, hyper-rational world.

The spiritual guru refusing to part with his holy staff is claiming his right to individual dignity of a higher order than that provided by a national security state which spouts endless nonsense about "terrorism" and requires its citizens to live with constant paranoia and fear. India today is full of such "irresponsible fools". They hint why the country will not be fully modern for a long time, and why this may be a very good thing.

It is not clear why the case of Doosri Radha should not be considered as one of an exception or a deviant case and why it needs to be compared to Wajid Ali Shah's behaviour.

Mishra has ended his essay with what should have been its starting point. He needs to explain why would India not being modern be such a good thing, after all. In the absence of such an explanation, his words carry little more than a rhetorical flourish.

His stance needs to be seen in the background of a wider battle of ideas and politics that is going on in India.

It was in the 1980s that the last remnants of the so- called Nehruvian consensus broke apart. The 1990s saw the emergence of liberalization and a one- sided globalization- the mainstream discourse both in politics and in the realm of ideas has been thereafter been dictated by these phenomenon. The ruling ideas of every age, Marx had insightfully written, are the ideas of the ruling class.

The subsequent reactions to these have been from (1) the egalitarian modernizers i.e. the communists of the Old Left- by and large continuing the Enlightenment tradition, however archaic these may be worded as and (2) the counter modernizers or the Neo Narodniks, who oppose modernization itself. Some of the latter derive their ideas from post modernist trends in the West.

But many of the non- modernizers like Bhiku Parikh derive from elements of Mahatma Gandhi's thought most elaborately laid out in Hind Swaraj. Louis Fischer, in his biography of Lenin had pointed out why neo- Narodism, an ideological trend that the Russian Marxists including Lenin had pitilessly criticised from a Marxist viewpoint ("What the Friends of People are..."), holds a much stronger sway in India.

Technorati Tags: Pankaj Mishra, India, Modernity

Profile of Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman

Nicholas Fern profiles Zygmunt Bauman, the otherwise low- profile sociologist who was born in Poland, grew up in the Soviet Union where he championed humanistic Marxism and where he "attributes to Antonio Gramsci what he calls his 'honourable discharge' from Marxism". He later joined the Leeds University in 1971 retiring in 1991. More recently he has been (rightly in my view) critical of the disillusioned left that moved towards post- modernism following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Fern has well- summarized both the man and his works in this write up.

New Labour, in the form of Geoff Mulgan's forward strategy unit, flirted with Bauman's ideas, but found them too downbeat in days when things could only get better. Bauman once assured Tester that "this world of ours needs socialists more than at any other time. Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes." Someone else seems to think so. When I contacted Varcoe, he had recently been asked for an introduction to Bauman by a representative of Jacques Delors.

Technorati Tags: Sociology, PostModernism, Theory, Marxism

Two Tactics of Social Democracy, Lenin and Slovoj Zizek

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Lenin's important work: Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.

Slovoj Zizek pleads for Leninist Intolerance:

...to repeat Lenin does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that Lenin is dead, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up....

...To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different era: it's not that his notions such as a centralized party seem to pose a totalitarian threat; it's rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture. What if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with our epoch, that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it.

Review of Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service

Lenin: A Biography
By Robert Service
Papermac (Macmillan), London £12 (Special Indian Price £7.20), Pages 494

One of the first actions that symbolically marked the demise of socialism in the former USSR was the bringing down of the statues and pictures of Lenin.

The irony, in the first place, was that the state that he more than anyone else was responsible for bringing into existence had iconized one of the most iconoclastic figures in the pantheon of human history. Lenin himself would have approved the demolition of his statues, though not of much else that accompanied it in 1991.

Robert Service, author of the book under review, is no Leninist, indeed, he has little sympathy for the kind of politics that Lenin espoused. Yet he has written a fairly readable biography though he does not entirely succeed in convincing the reader about why Lenin’s "extraordinary life and career prove the need for everyone to be vigilant". Much of what is contained in the book indicates otherwise.

It must be said to the biographer’s credit that he places his subject to the scrutiny of facts and therefore avoids the extreme conclusions of other authors who have written about the Russian Revolution in general and Lenin in particular. In the last one-decade these include Dmitri Volkogonov, Edvard Radzinsky, Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes.That Service manages to do a doublethink (to borrow a phrase from Orwell’s otherwise flawed "1984"), is another matter.

To this reviewer whose early introduction was to the hagiographies on Lenin churned out by Soviet publishers, the recent researches have tended to be more in the nature of additions of some facts or in the de-mythologization of others.

The qualitatively new dimensions have been few: the impact of Russian agrarian extremists in addition to Marx on Lenin’s thought and his many edicts and decisions during and after the Civil War that can be considered to be the genesis of the later totalitarian state. In the book under review there is new light on Lenin’s exchange of letters with those close to him, particularly Nadya Krupuskaya and Inessa Armand.

Beyond these points, even Service has little to add and there is a reason that despite his attempts to highlight the negative aspects of Lenin, he inaugurates the book with the sentence: "Lenin was an extraordinary man".

With the proverbial wisdom of hindsight, the first point need not really have surprised us. After all, there was substantial material to indicate the violent program of the agrarian socialists and their impact on Russian revolutionaries. Dostovesky’s "The Demons" and particularly Joseph Conrad’s near- prophetic "Under Western Eyes" had underlined these streams of Russian revolutionary thought much earlier.

Regarding Lenin’s role in setting up the later Stalinist State, it needs to be read cautiously. While it is hard to imagine that the Soviet State would have been fundamentally different if Lenin had lived longer or if the leadership had passed on to someone else other than Stalin, it is also incorrect to see Stalinism as being a direct and legitimate continuation of Leninism.

Lenin was, as Service rightly points out, capable of reversing his decisions in the light of new developments- he often took an isolationist position but then used all his force to carry the rest of the Bolsheviks along with him. This was not the case with Stalin, who preferred the somewhat more "convenient" option of physically eliminating his rivals.

If Lenin resorted to polemical pamphleteer- ism for the dissemination of his ideas, Stalin paved the way for simplistic sloganeer-ism masquerading as profound truths. This was carried to its logical culmination in the Red books in Maoist China that pioneered the "communism for dummies" trend, if you will.

Besides, by reversing the early 1920s economic policies, Stalin deviated grievously. Though it may be conjectural to state this, it is possible that the ex- USSR might have developed those policies at an earlier stage that China adopted in the 1970s. As Roy Medvedev has forcefully argued in his recent book "Post- Soviet Russia: A Journey through the Yeltsin years", a pragmatic symbiosis of market features would have been a historically judicious choice compared to the barrack socialism that finally evolved.

The author recounts information about Lenin’s pedigree, including Mongol and Jewish ancestry. The family background of Lenin was generally ignored in the official biographies about Lenin and therefore the chapters on Lenin’s childhood and early upbringing make for interesting reading, if only for their novelty. Even Louis Fischer’s "Lenin: A Life" focused more on his later years.

The author also touches some of the important works like the "April Thesis" and "The State and Revolution"- attributing these generally to Lenin’s whims or wily scheming. Though one expects that he would have discussed these more seriously in his previously published 3-volume work on Lenin’s political thought, it is necessary not to underestimate his theoretical writings and to throw out the baby with the bath water.

A number of principles still carry a lot of weight, one of them being Lenin’s critique of Narodism. In India, for example Narodism in the form of Gandhism and neo- Narodism in the writings of third- world theorists like Ashish Nandy and Vandana Shiva has been a much stronger current than in the Russia. In this regard, one still needs to "go back to Lenin" to use a cliché popularized by Soviet writers. As the early 21st century comes to resemble more and more the early 20th century, this need may become all the more relevant as does a much more critical attitude.

Then there are certain aspects that Service either does not expend himself fully on, or does not touch at all.

For example, he points out that despite all his faults, Lenin was the acknowledged leader among both the Bolsheviks as well as his closest adversaries, the Mensheviks. If Plekanov was respected, Martov loved but still it was Lenin that the people followed, there must have been some reasons. Many of the other leading revolutionaries were extremely educated and forceful personalities in themselves. Despite that, why was there such universal agreement regarding Lenin? Service answers this with a thundering silence.

An aspect of Lenin’s personality that has recently been highlighted by Volkogonov and Radzinsky as well as Service needs attention. This is the supreme importance that Lenin attached to his personal security. While Volkogonov terms this "cowardice", Service does not go so far, but even he does not attempt to provide an explanation.

The reason may be partly psychological and partly borne out of conviction on Lenin’s part. In his seminal work "What is to be Done?" Lenin had indicated that the working class cannot accomplish revolution by itself and there is need for an intelligentsia that grows outside the working class that develops theory and injects class- consciousness into the working class.

Tsarist Russia on the other hand was powerful enough to silence the rebellious intelligentsia. It must be remembered that Nikolai Chernesvesky’s literary and philosophical works were written only in his early years. Once he returned from his incarceration, he became completely silent. His mental faculties had been ruined. Lenin must have been fearful of a similar fate befalling him- his brother Alexander’s execution would have been a gory reminder too.

An aspect that needs attention from Lenin’s biographers and scholars of the Russian Revolution is a more judicious treatment of the personalities that he was associated with. In Service’s account, these personages appear and disappear like passing silhouettes except for Krupuskaya, Inessa Armand and Stalin. This leaves one not only with numerous loose ends but also does not help to adequately compare Lenin with some of the other leading figures in the Russian Social Democratic movement.

This is specially true of the important Menshevik theoreticians Yuli Martov, Pavel Axelrod and Alexander Bogdanov (whom Service considers to be Lenin’s intellectual superior and with whom Lenin engaged in polemics in "Empirio- Criticism and Materialism"), not to mention Trotsky , Stalin and Bukharin.

The last three at least have had their share of biographers (Isaac Deutscher for Trotsky and Stalin, Stephen Cohen for Bukharin). It is the leading Mensheviks who have been ignored by historians.

As for Lenin, the current biographer does not achieve what Deutscher accomplished for Trotsky. The need and the long wait for a definitive biography of Vladmir Illyich Lenin are not yet over.

19 December, 2001
Published: The Tribune, Chandigarh 13 Jan 2002

Review of: Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, Jazz by Eric Hobsbawm

Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz
By Eric Hobsbawm
Weinfeld and Nicolson, London
£20, 1998

Majority of the human race consists of the common people. People about whom, if one were to go by Lord Acton's dictum ("History is nothing but the biography of great men"), there would be no place in history. Writing such individuals out of the story would leave no significant trace on the broad historical narrative.

Eric Hobsbawm differs with this line of thought. He does not accept the opposite version either- that each one of us is "as big as you and I". He feels that little people may not be "as big as you and I" as individuals but collectively, such men and women are major historical actors. For this reason, he calls this book about them as Uncommon People. Hobsbawm should know. He has spent an entire lifetime studying and writing about the common peoples' history, starting from Primitive Rebels in 1959. He is considered to be the greatest living historian, even by sceptics who otherwise feel that he is a brilliant man unfortunately caught in the time warp of Marxism. It is about him it can be said that it to be as learned as he is, and to write as well, would be enough for most historians, to be as gifted with flashes of brilliance is a rarity even among the greatest writers.

The present work is a collection of the writer's essays and reviews written between the 1950s and mid 1990s' The essays are collected under four sections: The Radical Tradition, Country People, Contemporary History and Jazz.

The first section is related to the evolution of working class and its movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An essay on Tom Paine, the American "moderate" revolutionary is illuminating. Paine belonged to an era of self- made men at a time when it was difficult to divide people as employers and the employed, the exploiter and the exploited. Despite his moderation even by the standards of his time, his Age of Reason was the first book to say in common man's language that the Bible was not the word of God- a classic statement of working class rationalism.

The Luddite movement has for long been considered to be a frenzied, pointless and ultimately historically doomed movement. Hobsbawm opines that it was a mode of collective bargaining devised by the working people in the initial years of mechanisation. Also, the use of machines was more of a defensive weapon in the early years of capitalism rather than an offensive means of increasing profits.

Another essay probes into the different labour traditions in France and Britain. Though the latter was the country, in Marx's words, of "classic capitalism", it was the working class of France that was much more revolutionary in nature while the British working class remained more susceptible to religion. The reason, Hobsbawm avers was, because that religion in England displayed streaks of radicalism but in France, Roman Catholicism was demonstratively conservative and hence the working class movement developed fully independently of it.

The Labour Party in England emerged as a distinct party of working people only after 1918. An essay on Harold Laski marks him out as a person who, despite being "neither an original thinker nor a natural writer" (none of his 25 works have survived), was the left's "megaphone" for a long time, leading to the most radical labour government ever in Britain in 1945 under Attlee. Incidentally, Laski, like so many leaders of the Left in Europe and Russia, was a Jew (Hobsbawm is of Jewish parentage too).

In "May 1968", a study of the leadership of the student movement in that memorable year of student radicalism, rightly traces the origin of the movement in the alienation of the young people in the developed world. It expressed only the social and cultural discontents and did not have political aims itself, though it used political phraseology.

He also points to the persistent affinity between revolution and puritanism, though the founders of Marxism were quite unpuritanical, and in the case of Engels, quite anti- puritanical. Among the rebellious young, those who are, or were, closest to the traditional left wing politics tended to be most hostile to any forms of personal dissidence.

The seven essays related to jazz reflect the passion the writer has for the strand of music owing its roots to Black music as an early form of Black protest in this century.

The concluding essay on the contribution of America to the Old World, is perhaps one of the finest one. This contribution Hobsbawm locates not in the contribution of the elite urban culture of which the United States is the centre of the world, but in the contribution of the common and especially native people on the rest of the world. It was the discovery of America that precipitated the idea of Utopia in the minds of the radical Europeans. Its discovery stimulated the researches of Darwin and Wallace culminating in the formulation of the evolution theory. It was also the first European transatlantic country that made a more complete break with the institutions of the Old World. Four of the seven most important agricultural crops in the world today are of American origin: potatoes, maize, manioc and sweet potatoes (the other three being wheat, barley and rice).

For these and many other insights one feels pleased to have read this book. Even though most of the essays have themselves passed into historical classics, the flashes of brilliance are as fresh as ever. Sample the following:

Latin America is the last bastion of the left in the world. For this reason its literature has so far escaped the worst consequences of the privatization of the imagination. But for how long?

Indeed, it is a cynical world today. No longer the world that produced such outstanding social historians as Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. For that reason alone, one wishes that Hobsbawm's writings never end.

10 September 1998, Sydney
Published: The Tribune October ?? 1998

Review of: On History by Eric Hobsbawm

One who wins, does not learn

On History
by Eric Hobsbawm
The New Press, New York ,1997 Price: $25.00

The book under review is a collection of Eric Hobsbawm's essays and lectures delivered over the last 3 decades. The range of the topics revolves around, as the title announces, on the theorization of history. Clearly, Hobsbawm is far more scintillating and powerful when actually writing history and the book under review is therefore cannot be classed along with his other works. Partly, the vintage of the papers in not in the favor- most of the issues are quite old and even hackneyed.

And yet, the book makes for a good reading, pepperred as it is with insights, personal anecdotes and the keen sense of observation that Eric Hobsbawm retains about life. Primarily, the collection focuses on a defense of the Marxist method of interpreting history, evident in "Marx and History", "What do Historians Owe to Karl Marx" and "On History from Below". It is interesting to know how the first generation of Marxist historians was reared in the 1930s in the universities of England-

When I was a student in Cambridge in Cambridge in the 1930s, many of the ablest young men and women joined the Communist Party. But as this was a very brilliant era in the history of a very distinguished university (Cambridge) many of them were profoundly influenced by the great names at whose feet we sat. Among the young communists there, we used to joke, the communist philosophers were Wittgensteinians, the communist economists were Keynesians, the communist students of literature were the disciples of F.R. Lewis. And the historians ? They were Marxists, because there was no historian we knew of at Cambridge or elsewhere ………thirty years later the economic historian Sir John Hicks was to observe: Most of those (who wish to fit into place the general course of history) would use the Marxian categories, or some modified version of them since there was so little in the way of an alternative version that was available.

Eric Hobsbawm not only played a key role in the writing of history from a Marxist point of view, but in a sense made history by interpreting it. This was all the more notable since Marx's direct contribution to the writing of history is negligible- most of his comments were only indirect and peripheral to his main works- like the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bounaparte and the footnotes in the "Capital".

The writer underscores the importance of Marxist historiography in Third World societies where historians have far less sophisticated tools for collecting statistics and facts and therefore find the general methodological approach of Marxism more relevant. He also draws attention specially to the French school of historians (Annales) who prepared the ground for Marxists to make a fuller contribution to it during and after 1950s, when the latter began to occupy seats in academic institutions.

It was the French tradition of histriography as a whole, steeped in the history not of the French ruling class but of the French people, which established most of the themes and even the methods of grassroots history- Marc Bloch as well as Leferbre.

Interestingly, reflecting on Indian historiography since the times of D.D.Kosambi, one is struck by the singular lack of influence, if not ignorance, of the Annales school on the writing of Indian history, profoundly influence though it was by Marxism.

The writer's observations on the 'civilizational debate' that has been triggered off by Samuel Huntington's "Clash Of Civilizations" are acute and worthy of consideration even though not made in response to Huntington.

As late as the 14th century, the Arabic historian, Ibn Khaldun, showed little interest in Christian Europe: "God alone knows what goes on there", he observed, two centuries after Said 'Ibn Akhmad, who was convinced that nothing could be learned from the northern barbarians. They were more like beasts than men. In those centuries the cultural slope ran in the opposite direction. Here precisely, lies the paradox of European history. These very U- turns or interruptions are its specific characteristics. No other civilization except the Roman civilization actually faced permanent destruction, so civilizations like the Chinese or the India never felt a need to "go back" to their classics. Without such a collapse of cultural space, would a need for 'Renaissance'- the need to back on a forgotten but supposedly superior heritage have arisen ?.

The erroneous conviction of Western philosophers not excluding Marx", Hobsbawm avers, "that a dynamic of historical development could only be discovered in Europe, but not in Asia or Africa, is due at least in part, to this difference between the continuity of the other literate and urban cultures and the discontinuities in the history of the West.

Not ignoring the fundamental import of the history of Europe in transforming the world after the 15th century and its role in making world history possible at all, this can be a potentially possible area which historians can explore. In the Indian experience, the system of caste, for example, despite all its deformations did provide a stability for a long time. In these times of caste conflagration, it might pay to retrieve those possible aspects of the caste system, while doing away with its more pernicious deformations.

Finally, in the paper on Has Histoy made Progress ? Hobsbawm defends his well- known position on the dicey area of contrafactual studies. However, it is in The Present as History that Hobsbawm is at his best in piquantly delivering the most powerful statement in the book. Interestingly, he quotes another (non- Marxist) historian, Reinhard Kosselck:

The historian on the winning side is easily inclined to interpret short term success in terms of a long- term, ex- port teleology. Not so the defeated. Their primary experience is that everything happened otherwise than hoped or planned.…..they have a greater need to explain why something else occurred and not what they thought would happen. This may stimulate the search for long- term causes which explains….the….surprise…..generating more lasting insights of, consequently, greater explanatory power. In short run, history may be made for the victors.. In the long run the gains in historical understanding have come from the defeated.

Marxist historians, with the fall of Soviet Union behind them, have a future after all.

06 Jan 1998 , NJ
Published: The Tribune ?? 1998