Death by arrogance

There is something knee jerk about the debates around any major event in India. If the country loses in cricket, obituaries litter the way. The same goes for elections. When the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) lost in West Bengal, post-mortems were a dime a dozen. This prompted protests from leading scholars and activists, claiming the Left was alive and well.

These were eloquently written documents and you hesitate to criticise them because many who have signed it are people you greatly admire. The struggles they invoke virtually constitute the conscience of a generation.
Let us be clear about one thing. The Left is not the party and many in the Left would be embarrassed by the ossified statements of Marxist apparatchik like Brinda Karat or Prabhat Patnaik. Basically, the intellectuals who justify the CPI(M) have become second-rate commissars indifferent to change and the cry for change. West Bengal was tired of the CPI(M), tired of the party that had criminalised itself and was virtually strangling a society. Between its stalinism and gangsterism, the CPI(M) had to go. Its post-election excuses are close to comic. But the Left is a bigger process and goes beyond the idiocy of current party life.
There is, sadly, something about the Left that is defensive. In an ironic way, just as the best use of Mahatma Gandhi came from the social movements and not from Gandhian custodians, the most creative use of socialism and Marxism came from the non-party movements. The Narmada movement against the dam was a creative use of Marx and Gandhi.
The creativity of the Left came more from dissenting imaginations than the ideologues. Wherever the Left had found a hearing aid and listened to the voice of human rights groups, peaceniks, feminists and ecologists, the Left has been innovative. Wherever it saw itself as part of a pluralistic force, the Left has survived. As a rubric for struggles of justice, the Left has been profound. Yet this pluralism was by osmosis. The Left had no innovative theory of pluralism. For years, its ideological gravitas made it oscillate between technocratic expertise and a pompous positivism where it saw itself as the sole trustee of truth. For too long, a great part of the Left moved as committee rather than community. It never outgrew the arrogance of ideology. I remember many times in Delhi, where leading professors would smile smugly pretending they were part of a presidium of truth. The Left’s suppression of dissent in the academe needs some reflection.
What do I mean by a theory of pluralism? It requires confidence to realise that the Left as a perspective, while insightful is incomplete. It needs the generosity especially of Marxists to realise what socialism has added to its imagination. Socialists were far more courageous in resisting the emergency than the Marxists were.
The Left was slow in recognising the truth of the margins as it was too committed to the idea of planned development and the officialdom of trade union and party. The Left survived when it joined this wider pluralism of forces, many of whom spoke in dialects, the Left had to learn. For example, when class did not-quite make sense against caste, the Left had to learn to be open to the work of sociologists, many of whom spoke a more liberal idiom. The Left’s contempt for sociology and anthropology in the Sixties and the Seventies was a crass example of its illiteracy and ideological stuffiness.
What makes the Left ideologically stuffy and often politically correct is its understanding of science which was still stuck in the Bernal era. As a result, a great part of the Left had no creative understanding of science or of the way science hegemonised other knowledges. Science, instead of deconstructing ideology, has constructed itself as one. Because of its umbilical chord to almost positivist-statist science, the Left became an extension counter to the Congress regime. Its participation in the scientific temper debate showed it did not even understand great Marxist scholars like Joseph Needham who claimed that Marxism had to be translated from German to English idioms and dialects.
The innovation of the Left in recent times has been from an imagination to understanding imaginaries, worlds not yet born, horizons as yet inarticulate. But to consolidate this without dogmatising it, the Left needs more civic epistemologies. All too often it parades itself as a form of correctness when it could be more playful, allowing itself to see not just the absurd in the other but in itself as well. While its missionary puritanism will take it far, a touch of the comic, an ability to laugh at the pomposities of the past might make it more liveable.
What are the challenges before us, as a collectivity, which is quarrelsome in its approach? I think the goal before us is the democratisation of democracy. The old notion of democracy built on citizenship, rights, electoralism and the nation state while still relevant need newer imaginaries. Citizenship needs a different idea of being as it confronts marginal groups being ignored in most development programmes.
The Left needs a more creative understanding of the informal economy, a sense of both fortunes and misfortunes at the bottom of the pyramid. Second, it needs a theory of obsolescence, not just technologically but to understand how people are being treated as waste. It has to deconstruct its idea of progressivism. Its notion of security needs to be kneaded into a theory of peace which includes a critique of its own proclivity for violence. The guerrilla and the satyagrahi have to combine in more surprising ways.
Democracy has ironic ways of becoming populist or authoritarian and the Left, by confronting its own ironies, must be ready to combat such a development. By creating a more liberal sense of its past, it might be ready to construct futures which go beyond the denial of its obituaries.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist