Remember the bearded German who said that after the workers and peasants had established their triumphant new state, the rich would be consigned to the dustbin of history? If Karl Marx were to visit the headquarters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), he would find that the only entity poised on the edge of the historical trash can is his own doctrine. The struggle of the revolutionary comrades to remain relevant after the so-called ‘end of history’ and the fall of the Berlin Wall has become the stuff of a myriad publications. And in contemporary India, with ‘elite’ figures like Veer Savarkar and Shivaji fast becoming icons of Hindu India, the comrades are finding that revision is far more important than revolution.No wonder West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya recently apologised for the mistaken assessment that the Left has traditionally made of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Netaji was a great and fierce patriot, Bhattacharyya humbly muttered, a role model for thousands. Never mind that a few decades ago Netaji was once an ‘imperialist dog’ a ‘traitor’ or ‘militarist agent’. Never mind that Netaji’s Azad Hind Fauj was nothing but an ‘arm of fascism’, today for a party eager to battle the Trinamool Congress’ attempt at mopping up Bangla patriotism in West Bengal, Netaji has not only been rehabilitated but Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, head of the women’s wing of the Azad Hind Sena, was even the Left’s presidential candidate last year.Pity the poor apparatachik! Gandhi was once a ‘bourgeois’ leader with counter-revolutionary ties to big business. Today he is the Mahatma whose ideals must be emulated. The 1942 Quit India movement was once seen as antithetical to the ‘people’s war’ prescribed by the Comintern, today the Left apologises for its ‘blunder of desertion of 1942’ and admits that it was overdependent on the international line. The politics of caste was once seen as backward and reactionary, today even the politburo will openly admit that caste has threatened the relevance and ideology of class struggle. Left history is now seen as one too circumscribed by economic determinism and, as for Left economics, well we all know what happened to that! The comrades are being forced to change with the times and admit that in the era of the global market, materialism is no longer dialectical.
