Daily O
If Sangh isn't fascist enough for Prakash Karat, it's his problem
Backroom parlour tricks by now mostly irrelevant CPI(M) leaders is something Indian democracy can certainly live without.
When comrade Prakash Karat decides to endorse the Sangh Parivar as an "authoritarian"
entity rather than a "fascist" one, and says that they have no
intention of "working for the overthrow of the bourgeois parliamentary
system", he raised at least two larger questions - one of left
characterisations of political orders relating to internal schisms that
portend or reflect inner-party tensions, and another of the threat of
fascism (or authoritarianism) that really confronts India today.
I shall address the first question first.
Comrade Karat insists that there is no fascist threat in
India today; there is merely "an authoritarianism that is fuelled by a
potent mix of neo-liberalism and communalism".
This, of course, could apply equally well, say, to the Left
Front government in West Bengal in its last years until its spectacular
collapse in 2011 (we could add casteism to the suggested mix here) - so
perhaps comrade Karat needs to address the related question: "what makes
the BJP not the CPI(M)?"
I doubt he knows the answer; perhaps he should ask the large
numbers of CPI(M) members in West Bengal (soon to be Bengal) who
defected to the BJP - that is, the ones who hadn't already defected to
the Trinamool Congress.
Or perhaps the difference is that the CPI(M) didn't have the
services of "the RSS, which has a semi-fascist ideology" - but what,
indeed, is "semi-fascist"?
The RSS is, in fact, the longest-running non-stop fascist
show in the world, the mousetrap of fascist paramilitary organisations,
having been founded in 1925, and its leadership has never made a secret
of its endorsement of fascist ideas: no analogies or quibbles about
definitions are needed.
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury. (Photo credit: PTI) |
"The classic definition of fascism leaves no room for
ambiguity. Fascism in power is 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the
most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of
finance capital.' In India today, neither has fascism been established,
nor are the conditions present - in political, economic and class terms -
for a fascist regime to be established."
Ah, we should say to ourselves now, so we should wait till
fascism has been established, leaving no room for ambiguity, before we
fight it? Are we then to characterise fascism from its position of power
and say that what we have is "not-yet-fascist" (and by the time we can
agree that it is, it has arrived, we cannot effectively fight it, and it
is too late)?
Do we not need instead urgently to see fascism as a mass movement of the right (as some non-party-line communists did, and as Jairus Banaji urges us to do now)?
And did not comrade Dimitrov,
from whom comrade Karat selectively finds these words, also say: "The
development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in
different countries, according to historical, social and economic
conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international
position of the given country"?
The thing about communist characterisations is they are
also supposed to tell you what to do politically. If the rise of the BJP
and the Sangh Parivar to power isn't about (Indian) capitalism in
crisis inventing its own saviour in a fascist party, but merely an
"authoritarian" party, then there is no need to ally with other parties
against it, in the way that the Popular Front sought to mobilise all
anti-fascist forces together against fascism after 1935 - when it was
too late.
Italian fascism had long been triumphant, and the National
Socialists had come to power in Germany by 1933, while the official
Communist Party line was "class against class".
On the other hand, if the BJP is a fascist party, this
would now justify alliances with other "bourgeois-democratic" parties
against that fascist power. It all hinges on what the Communist Party
should do.
But the CPI and the CPI(M) in India are now increasingly
irrelevant: they control no trade unions, few governments, and can only
celebrate a coalitional (and Popular Front) victory in a students' union
election at one university.
In other words, what they choose to do, and how they
characterise Indian political conditions - authoritarian, fascist,
semi-fascist, or semi-circular, is of no concern to anyone but
themselves.
The backroom arguments of comrades Karat and Yechury are
being presented now as if they are at the core of the larger problems of
Indian democracy.
By any "classic definition", then, to quote comrade Karat,
these are not communist parties at all. They are not even the kind of
social democratic parties despised by communists in the "class against
class" years from 1928 to 1935.
What "communist" party aligns itself with its own
nationalism when that nationalism is that of an oppressor? Which
"communist" party regards Kashmir (or any other part of any existing
state) as an "integral part" of India (or any other existing state) in
defiance of any right to self-determination? Which "communist" party
sells peasant land to multinational corporations? Justifies rape and
murder by its cadre?
But all this is irrelevant to what is after all an academic
debate based on doctrine, not really existing Communist Party practises
in India. We must remember that we are dealing with arguments from a
static view of history, imposed by Stalinism, and now imported from past
to present without regard for context.
In rejecting a "popular front" strategy now, comrade Karat
is suggesting this: if you can read today's circumstances in the light
of past history, you can do the same things you did then once again.
No matter, then, that the first time round you failed. This
is a strange version of the Marxian dictum of history repeating itself,
as farce, parody, or slapstick.
It's ironic, in the interpretation of the "popular front"
line for India in 1935, comrades PC Joshi, Victor Kiernan and Michael
Carritt argued (as comrade Karat does now) that fascism was not an
immediate danger in India; but as fascism was capitalism in crisis at
"home", and imperialism the external manifestation of capitalism,
therefore in India the popular front was to be interpreted as a popular
front of bourgeois-democratic parties against imperialism.
This was soon to land the party in an awkward situation
when fascism went to war with imperialism; but at the time they
effectively worked around a Stalinist party line. Debates, however,
continued as to what was to be done about fascism's influence and growth
in India - in other words, even though fascism was not considered an
immediate threat, it was not denied that fascism existed and needed to
be taken seriously.
And to turn to the question of what we might be willing to
consider fascism, and why we might consider it so: it is hardly to be
expected that fascism today would appear to use the same forms that had
been discredited after the Second World War: new positioning is
necessary.
Fascist movements are not original, not ideologically
consistent, and are clearer about who or what they are against than what
they are for. They are also willing to improvise or to borrow popular
(and populist) elements from other movements.
Fascism is not therefore to be seen as a specific
European import which comes ready-made and relatively clearly formed. We
need to see a "fascist repertoire" being used in different ways in new
contexts.
The repertoire includes an organic and primordialist
nationalism, a controlling statism that disciplines the members of the
allegedly organic nation to act as, for, and in that organic (or
völkisch) nation which must therefore be duly purified and preserved,
purged of its non-völkisch elements.
In the service of that authentic völkisch nation, a
paramilitarist national discipline is invoked; and the coherence of the
repertoire is maintained by invoking a sense of continuous crisis and
the potential for decay of the organic nation if that discipline and
purity is not preserved.
If we would rather call this "authoritarian" than
"fascist", fair enough. But we had better not forget to fight it before
it is too late. At any rate, this will not be the last of what we have
to say on the subject of fascism in India.