Politics and Ethics in Communist Practice:From the Margins of the Indian Left
Rajarshi Dasgupta Let me begin by explaining the subtitle, which should be relatively easier than the title. Who or what exactly belongs to the margins of communist politics in India? First, let me tell you about certain practices – activities and forms of activism that are no longer paid much attention practically nor thought through in theoretical terms by the dominant communist parties today. In fact, it is doubtful how far communists will currently like to identify the core of their work with such activities. Secondly, I am going to look briefly at a history, or rather micro histories of a movement, consigned to anodyne hagiographies in places like West Bengal, where communist memories primarily dwell on the heroic nostalgia of creating a hegemonic regime. Thirdly, my attempt is to tackle these issues and frame them conceptually in such a manner, which the available communist vocabulary does not allow. It does not possess the resources, which are necessary for a critical hermeneutic of the political and the ethical in the field of everyday practice. That is why I would like to turn to a different set of categories and reading strategies sidestepping the familiar Marxist methodologies here. But is it not paradoxical to study the communist movement in terms that are distant and alien from its own forms of discourse? I would say no, for we are going to study these very forms of discourse – the practice of putting them together, constituting them, building them word by word, act by act, point by point. The specific problem I have in mind is the practice of speaking the truth – its implications for the self and its relation to other/s. There is little doubt that the question of relating with the other is of paramount importance to a communist. I have discussed on other occasions how an entire set of maneuvers – physical and mental – ascetic exercises were geared to a passage of ‘becoming declassed’ which ensured a normative identification with the masses – the workers and peasants as communists saw them. This was an extremely fraught process – what we usually describe as rooted in the ordinary people, having to compete with other models like that of the satyagrahi, not always successfully but often ending up in a subterranean conversation. Unlike Gandhi’s soulforce and karmayoga, the Indian communists traded in historical materialism and labor. But the question of speaking the truth was never too far from the political performances across the spectrum. How did communists see the status of truth-speaking as an activity intrinsic to politics? What were the kinds of truths invested in such contexts? This is where we must leave the customary communist pedagogy behind and look for other kinds of truth and, as we shall see, other kinds of relation to truth. Speaking the first type of Truth: Utopian Broadly, I would say there are three significant kinds of speaking the truth in communist practice. The first kind of truth is very strictly speaking what is not true in an objective sense – that is, it is not out there in the reality around us but symptomatic of a possible future – a truth that is teleological – that states what is to come as per the law of history tomorrow. But this does not mean it is a determinist thing, a rhetorical article of mechanical faith in progress. It is in fact a far more unpredictable and complicated move that arises out of trying to understand the other. And its function is to fiercely combat accepted wisdoms, in particular, the cynicism of the common sense that wryly explains why certain things never change in a desirable manner, why the status quoist inertia finally comes to win the day. This is of course the truth about utopia – which is not based on the existing state of knowledge but on its profound subversion – the place of an ‘as if’ which breaks down and reassembles the sense of reality in a way that makes it more meaningful and productive. Let me give you a concrete example. For much of the middle of twentieth century communist activists and intellectuals have racked their minds to understand why the peasants – reduced to dying of hunger in thousands in the infamous famine of forties – never rebelled. Was the very impulse of rebellion basically alien to their class character as peasants? The question is actually not very distant for us at a time of mass suicides and predatory dispossession of land today. However, one of the ways in which the communists sought to address the question is to search for something like an organic intellectual – a poor peasant cum Marxist theorist who would be able to answer the riddle. The question took many shapes within the communist movement and became the subject matter of a number of cultural productions – plays, poetry and short stories. I want to draw your attention to one particular short story, titled ‘Chhiniye Khayni Kano?’ roughly translatable as ‘Why did they not loot and eat?’, given the well-known fact that there was widespread hoarding of foodgrains at this point. The communist author of the story, Manik Bandyopadhyay, plotted the story around a conversation between a bhadralok babu communist who wonders if the peasant is submissive by nature and an old robber, Jogi dakaat, who explains to the babu how hungry bodies can only rebel after a square meal and how they give up when the hunger multiplies: there is no energy left, the body survives at the bare limits of life. The important point to note is not this reason that is no doubt worth serious consideration but the character of Jogi dakaat. What we are looking at in such a character is precisely that organic peasant intellectual that was not there to be found in reality. Jogi dakaat is more of a horizon than an esoteric social bandit dear to Eric Hobsbawm. He is coming from the future into a short story that turns