(Below we reproduce excerpts from a speech by Prof. Randhir Singh, the grand old man of the academic world and a reputed Marxist intellectual, delivered as part of a lecture programme arranged by the Delhi Chapter of the Indian Institute of Marxist Studies.)

Marxism in an Age of Scepticism

What I propose to do is to offer a certain framework, a totalising view of how I see the Indian situation today, politics included, which could then be the basis for a discussion later. The framework obviously is a Marxist framework as I understand it.

I'll just make a couple of very general observations on Marxism and then go on to talk on the present political situation. Most criticism of Marxism has been of a nihilistic kind. Hobbes once said that if the geometrical axioms were to affect human interests then even they will be disputed. He went on to say that if the statement that the three angles of a triangle were harming the interests of those who are dominating society, even this statement will be questioned. He further says that if it is said it cannot be questioned that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then in that case, those who are dominating society will burn the books of geometry. And this is something that must be remembered about Marx's sociology which has suffered at the hands of its enemies as well as its friends. At the hands of the enemies, it is what I referred to a moment ago, a nihilistic orientation, i.e. Marxism must give us an answer to everything under the sun and if you cannot give an answer to everything then you have no answer at all. The kind of demand they make on Marxism, the same demand is not made on any other school of social philosophy. No school of bourgeois thought is asked to do the kind of things Marxism is asked to do.

On the other hand, the friends of Marxism have said: yes, we have all the answers. Marxism has been very much disfigured by scientistic interpretation of Marx - "I have the answer, I have the science". In fact, to my mind this is one of the reasons, if not the only reason, as to why there are still such sharp fights between so many groups of ultra-left in Punjab. They have their own pockets of influence but they find it impossible to come together and one reason is that each group's leadership says that we have it and you don't. This is a persistent part of communist culture.

One comes to Marxism by different routes. Most people in the mainstream communist parties, their leadership, came to Marxism via Moscow Marxism. The powerful Naxalite movement, when it came up, it came via Maoist Marxism. Lots of people in our universities are now coming to Marxism via New Left Review. Some even come to Marxism via individual thinkers, say, Gramsci. All these schools contribute something. You don't dismiss them at all. But always in my opinion, it is important to get back to the basics of Marxism - going back to Marx. And then you will not find the kind of scienticism I'm questioning.

3-4 years ago CPI(M) organised an international conference in Calcutta. That conference came up with a declaration that the science of Marxism-Leninism is invincible. My response was that if it was that kind of an invincible science then socialism will not be in this kind of a mess. Well, nobody can deny today that socialism is in a mess, specially after the Soviet collapse. Don't make those kinds of dogmatic claims.

Dogmatism is helpful. Gramsci was quite right in saying, "when the movements are weak dogmatism helps, in the sense, I'm alone but history is by my side. I have the truth." He spent 20 years in jail with that kind of spirit. But it also becomes a barrier between you and the changing reality around, which does not allow you to come to terms with that reality because it is a kind of dogmatism.

So, therefore, Marxism must be understood in the sense, with Marx - of course, and to a great extent even now, I can say - it remains an unfinished project. Firstly, Marx was not a system builder, this should be clearly understood. He is not like a Plato or a Hobbes. In fact, it was after the failure of the revolution of 1848 when Marx was faced with the important question of why the revolution had failed, he tried to understand the system which he was trying to overthrow. And he devoted the next 20 years to the study of capitalism. And mind you that study he never completed. Only the first volume of Capital gets published under his own signature. The second and third volumes were put together by Engels from his notes and then later Kautsky put together the Theories of Surplus Value.

One sentence in Anti-Duhring will be a good example for this gathering. It says, "Generations which will put us right are likely to be far more numerous than those whose knowledge we are in a position to correct." He is not just talking of addition but he is asking for correction. The search for Marxism does not end or begin with Marx and if in this search we are questioning the significance of Marx then we are not denying Marx. We are only entering into the field of Marxism.

Therefore, to me there are some basic positions which hold, there are empty spaces, there are silences in Marxism, far too many questions are raised, many are unanswered but it still remains the best point in entering into understanding society. So far, compared to what other schools of thought today have to offer, Marxism still offers a great deal more, particularly on the mode of production, the social formation on which he spent 20 years - his work on Capital. And this age with the all the talk of Marxism disappearing will pass. We are socialists because of capitalism. If capitalism remains socialism will remain.

Now today there are Marxisms in plural, the enemy is very much within and therefore you have to be revolutionaries in an essentially skeptical age, and not an age of faith - we are conquering, we are marching! Till the seventies it was believed that socialism is the wave of the future. Here, one should remember what Engels said, "A Marxist is not one who quotes me or Marx. Being Marxist is being in only one sense and that is think as Marx would have thought in those cases."

Vanishing Trick of Capitalism

Capitalism has become so dominant, so powerful, that it has become 'invisible'. It is invisible and that is why so powerful. It is a very testing fact of the debates on today's globalisation. People refuse to give names to this globalisation, this liberalisation, privatisation, NEP, economic reform, SAP and others. No one calls it capitalism. We were globalised before 1947. We called it imperialism. But for today's globalisation we are not willing to give it the name of capitalism. It is capitalistic globalisation with a structural logic of capitalism; whatever be new in it, the basic character remains. The West may not have done many things but one thing they always did, they were absolutely first rate in their critique of capitalism. And this is precisely what has disappeared. When capitalism needed the sharpest critique for the cause of challenging its domination, capitalism has virtually disappeared. Disappeared in the terminology of the left also.

History is a very cruel mistress. Till recently we used to believe that it has been cruel to Gandhi and Nehru. Now we know that it is also very cruel to Marx and Lenin. And in this historical process the collapse of Soviet Union is a landmark, just as Revolution was a landmark. Very often the left believes that business can go on as usual. It cannot go on as usual. It is posing the kind of problems which have to be confronted and which were not confronted earlier on. And if they are not confronted then the cruelty of history will be very much manifested in the years to come. I'm referring to a historical fact - all the parties of the Second International, the Marxist parties, including Karl Marx's own party in Germany, the Social Democratic Party, were committed to socialism. The debate between Bernstein and the rest was about peaceful transition or revolutionary activity. But it was not about necessity or otherwise of socialism. All these socialist parties were committed to oppose the war which was on the horizon. When the war came, most of these parties lined up behind their own ruling classes. Only one party stood out, the Bolsheviks. Not one of these socialist parties ever recovered their commitment to socialism. They went from bad to worse. Now the best of them hope for capitalism with a human face. Then came the second wave of revolutionary parties, Marxist parties, parties of the Third International. There was no historical guarantee that they would not meet the same kind of fate as the parties of the Second International. And to the extent all the communist parties in our country ultimately are born or grown out of that, they carried a lot of the dirty baggage of revisionism and reformism with them.

What I'm going to say about Indian politics, to my mind, is the most important aspect of revolutionary politics. Marx put it in his own way. He said that communists are different from others on the left, they understand the line of march and the ultimate end. Somewhere else he wrote that what distinguishes the communists from others is that in the struggles of the present they represent and take care of the future of the proletarian movement. Indeed, it will be the same for us.

The Immediate and the Ultimate

Basic problem of revolutionary movement has been to link the immediate results of the struggles of today with the ultimate struggles. It is a worldwide phenomenon that one is so involved with the struggles of the present, of the immediate, that the ultimate is lost sight of. This is then defined as revisionism or reformism. Then comes a reaction, that there is only the ultimate, only revolution and nothing else. And it is a historical fact that the talk of revolution is a very good cover-up for political passivity: I will only make a revolution and do nothing. After all, if you have to make a revolution begin damn well here. It is easier to hang on the gallows than to build a trade union.

... It doesn't therefore mean that you don't have to go for alliances, you have to do it all the time. If necessary, as Lenin once said, you have to crawl on your belly to get somewhere, it is not only flying the banners. But when you enter into a compromise, it should be for strengthening that move, to defend the future of the movement in the struggles of the present. Very often what happens is that in the mainstream communist parties (these are broad generalisations, don't apply to everybody) in theory and because they are communist parties, they are always talking about change in the system. But that is for highdays and holidays. Day-to-day practices are totally reformistic. What should have been a tactical manoeuvre to keep the BJP out of power, for instance in joining the UF, has become the be all and end all of assistance - keep it going somehow.

Indian State and Society

We had a national struggle and won over freedom in 1947. The character of that freedom, to understand it, you need to have an understanding of the history of the national movement, its nature and character. I loosely describe it as the Gandhi- and bourgeois-led movement with the consequences or what happened in 1947. I'm interested in making one basic point here and that is what happened in 1947 - the point is generally neglected, even with the left. The Marxist historians look at the historical process like this: In 1947 we won political freedom and after that the Indian people are going on to win economic freedom. So one struggle continues into another struggle. It's a linear understanding of historical processes. In India, struggle for political freedom is one and struggle for economic freedom is another. The flaw in this understanding is that what happened in '47 was not a economic or social revolution putting people in power. It's a transfer of power from foreign rulers to Indian ruling classes. And then the ruling classes in India have an agenda of their own. Now I should not be seen as guessing a very conscious process. I don't generally do that in terms of consequences or intentions. I see it as a process historically taking place. The new Indian state, the state power, the new rulers represented by Indian National Congress set about a task which Engels once defined as carrying out the economic necessities of the national situation. Mind you, he is not defining it in class terms at all.

The Left in India has been asking a wrong question and they could not get a right answer. I mean, you ask the question - state is an organ of which class? CPI says it is an organ of the national bourgeoisie, the CPI(M) says it is an organ of the monopoly bourgeoisie in alliance with the landlords and with the international bourgeoisie and the ultra-left talks of a comprador and semi-feudal kind of a thing. You ask the wrong question of state as an organ. What I'm trying to suggest is that state is an organiser of society in the interest of the class-exploitative structure as a whole. That is the basic Marxist understanding, within that, state can be an organ at a particular point of time of, even controlled by a particular class. But, generally speaking, state is not an organiser of a particular class.

Marx never wrote a book on state but he does discuss it in a few contexts. For instance, he talks of Bismark and the situation in Germany. The bourgeois revolution does not take place, the revolution from below as it happened in France or earlier on in somewhat mild form in England. A bourgeois transformation is imposed from above by Bismark, carrying out the job which a bourgeois revolution had done. He carried out progressive reforms. This Bismark had contempt for the bourgeoisie. He wouldn't hesitate to kick them when necessary. Now do you call Bismark an organ of the bourgeoisie.

So, here are some people in power, the state power they have with a Nehruvian vision, influenced up to a point by the Soviet experiment of state power and so on, out to carry out the economic necessities of the national situation. So what they were trying to do was seen as a national project. And what they succeeded in building is a class system and in my opinion, an India-specific capitalism. And if this is what they have built then the struggle for economic freedom is not a continuation of our political struggle. It is part of a struggle against the new ruling class establishment. It is not that the entire Indian people won political freedom nor the entire Indian people go on to win economic freedom. Struggle for economic freedom is more complex and it is a class struggle now. If you want to define it in national terms then the task of the Indian people is to rescue the nation from the ruling classes.

All I'm trying to say is that Nehru was carrying out the economic necessities of the national situation and these necessities end up as creating an India-specific capitalism. India specific means what? That has to be looked into and I'm only hinting at it. A quotation by Marx comes in very handy. Somewhere he wrote, "There are countries which suffer from the development of capitalism and some by the lack of development of capitalism." They suffer from the new, they suffer from the old. They suffer from the living, they suffer from the dead. Here all the evils of semi-feudalism are entering into capitalism and all the evils of capitalism are entering into semi-feudalism. There is a certain secondary character, a lumpen-comprador character about this capitalist development. And Marx said long back, "Secondary diseases are more dangerous than primary diseases. They are more difficult to cure and they are more lasting."

Nevertheless, given our early thrust on protectionism, import substitution, planned effort, by and large the public sector helped the private sector. This development was questioned even in the beginning and so also today; finally, this path of development has been abandoned. So long as the Soviet Union was around, Indian ruling classes had a certain manoeuverability between the two superpowers. With the Soviet Union gone, with the offensive of global capitalism, the Indian ruling classes have by and large decided to surrender.

Nationalism and Socialism

We need to have a more resilient attitude towards nationalism but still we need to have a class dimension to it. Here we have to look at the proletariat more critically. Marx said in the Communist Manifesto that proletariat itself constitutes the nation. Let the real people themselves constitute the nation. In fact what is happening in our country with the mainstream communists is that even socialism has been made an adjunct of national development. This is an important theoretical point I'm making. They say, India's national development is not possible through capitalism but through socialism. This is precisely utopian socialism. Socialism is not just the vision of good life which a nation establishes. Socialism is basically a thrust. You can not have socialism for all Indians. Socialism for the Indian people means disappearance of certain other things which are very much there in this country. If you look at India, look at the contradictions, look at the forces generated by these contradictions, look for the forces that can struggle for a better India which will be a socialism whatever be the stages.

No to Globalisation

Left as a whole in my opinion is very strong in criticising NEP but is very weak in offering an alternative. Because they still haven't posed that question that sharply to themselves. The basic question has to be raised and answered. If asked I'll only answer in a very broad and general way. The crux of globalisation is that your economic development should be governed by external imperatives linked with the global market. What we have to opt for is to govern our economic development by internal imperatives. These are our people, their needs and these are our resources. It is really a case of putting politics in command and not market in command. It doesn't mean you cut off from the world but the basic thrust for your economic development should come in terms of your assessment.

Macdoff has calculated that if all the Third World countries were to go in for export-led growth then we would need a market double the size of the present world market. And even then what will happen is all these Third World countries will be cutting each others' throats in the global market.

The left needs to come up saying no to globalisation and not just no to this kind of globalisation or that and put the class struggles in the forefront.