PUBLISHING

A new imprint

The CPI(M) launches a publishing venture, with a view to enlarging the domain of socialist theory and restoring some of the traditional concerns ofLeft-wing politics to their earlier centrality.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

INDIAN industry is in recession, though there seems to be no slump in the bazaar for ideas. Publishing as a business is flourishing as never before, in harmonious step with the burgeoning of literary talent in India. Since it is by definition driven by a spirit of opportunism - the eye for the main chance being the main determinant of commercial success - the marketplace of ideas has, inevitably, closely mirrored the fortunes of various political doctrines.

Left-wing ideas and Marxist doctrine have at first look fallen upon lean days ever since the breakdown of the socialist system in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The moral atmosphere created by the decisive rejection of a 75-year old experiment in the Soviet Union was far from conducive to the sustenance of a creative Left-wing political discourse. In addition, there were the material difficulties created by the drying up of the sources of Left-wing literature. Publishing houses in the Soviet Union and the erstwhile eastern bloc had played a crucial role in maintaining the availability of the classics of Marxist-Leninist literature. In the 1990s, these were simply forced to close down on account of the crisis of economic viability.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has now initiated a publishing venture outside its established party channels, in order to remedy the latter problem. LeftWord Books, an imprint of a publishing firm controlled by the party, will seek to enlarge the domain of socialist theory and restore some of the traditional concerns of Left-wing politics to their earlier centrality. The first offering of this publishing venture, a collection of essays to commemorate the passage of 150 years since The Communist Manifesto, was released in Delhi on March by CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet.

The volume takes its title, A World to Win, from that stirring phrase of The Communist Manifesto. Edited by Prakash Karat, a member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau, the volume has essays by the historian Irfan Habib, the economist Prabhat Patnaik, and the political theorist and literary critic Aijaz Ahmad. It presents the full English text of The Communist Manifesto, as translated by Samuel Moore in 1888. It also reproduces Friedrich Engels' preface to the 1888 English translation and a detailed publishing history of the tract in various Indian languages.

R.V. MOORTHY
CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet releases the book A World To Win, marking the launch of LeftWord Books, in New Delhi on March 15. With him are Polit Bureau members Prakash Karat (left) and Sitaram Yechury.

SPEAKING on the occasion of the launch, Aijaz Ahmad described the manifesto as a tract that was ahead of its time. All its prophecies about the evolution of capitalism were made at a time when the system was in its incipient phase of growth in Britain. France was still very much an agrarian society and Germany was yet to attain the basic level of political unity and bourgeois solidarity that is essential for capitalist development.

Yet the forecast that capitalism would operate on a world scale to accelerate the polarisation of society into two antagonistic classes, had proven remarkably prescient. There were, naturally, aspects of this evolution which remained obscure to even the sharpest perception 150 years back. Ahmad drew pointed attention to the growing productive role of women. The centrality of the so-called "women's question" was not a consequence of intangibles, such as their work in households and farmsteads, but of their direct contribution to capitalist output. This made it essential that the Left movement should reckon actively with the specific question of gender justice, and not cede the leadership of the women's movement to anti-Communist forces.

Prabhat Patnaik drew attention to the rapid extinction of the celebratory mood in right-wing circles since the break-up of the Soviet Union. It seemed less than a decade back that the triumph of capitalism was complete. But the 1990s have brought unforeseen miseries to the majority of the global population. Latin America and Africa, which suffered the worst of the 1980s - now recognised as the "lost decade" for the project of world development - saw a pronounced aggravation of their economic plight in the following decade. And they were joined in their gloom by Asia, which had seemingly held out against the tide of the 1980s. Indeed, said Patnaik, today the entire global economy, with the exception of the United States and the United Kingdom, is sunk in recession. And ongoing processes seem to indicate that these two countries will not be able to resist the onset of a generalised crisis for too long.

The prognosis, then, is that capitalism will mount a savage campaign to maintain the system of privileges that it has built up over the years. As Ahmad put it, the political choice was very clear - between a universal war of devastation and the liberation of all for the liberation of each. In the memorable words of Rosa Luxembourg, the choice was between socialism and barbarism.

In the creation of LeftWord, Patnaik saw an opportunity to redress one of the most serious shortcomings of Indian socialist thought. Although in practical terms the Left movement in India had been extremely innovative in the range of responses it had managed to evolve to concrete circumstances, the theoretical contributions had been relatively modest.

The crisis of capitalism did not mean that socialism would revive spontaneously. Rather, the circumstances for reintroducing socialism into the political agenda were more appropriate than at any time in the last decade. This called for a reconstitution of the socialist project as a "theoretical whole", said Patnaik. And this in turn required the Indian Left to shed its reticence and take up actively the challenge of theoretical work.

Releasing the book, Surjeet pointed out that the demand for the classic works of Marxism-Leninism had been rising all over the world since the demise of the Soviet Union. LeftWord could step into the breach created by the withdrawal of low-cost publishers from Moscow and East Berlin. At the same time, in addressing current topics it would not be constrained, as the Soviet publications were, by reasons of state. Surjeet recalled that the tendency of Soviet political theorists to take an overly lenient and accommodative stance towards the Indian ruling classes was always an irritant in relations with the Left movement in India.

A World to Win is dedicated to the memory of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the doyen of Indian Marxism who passed away exactly a year ago. He had in the last weeks of his life consented to write the foreword to the proposed volume on The Communist Manifesto. That promise remained unfulfilled. But in launching the publication project, Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury and Sukomal Sen - the three trustees of LeftWord - obviously hope to reinvigorate the rich vein of theoretical work that E.M.S. sought all through his life to explore.