Mainstream Left parties in the country are losing sight of their original political goals, social scientist Rajan Gurukkal has said.
The Left had metamorphosed into wealthy fiefdoms governed by hierarchical, competitive, and inviolable bureaucratic command structures, he said. Dr. Gurukkal was talking at a ‘Left parties and people interface’ here on Tuesday.
Social preparation for revolutionary change had become a long-term agenda for Indian communists. Their political end was in the distant future and they aspired to achieve it by creating party structures and accumulating wealth akin to States. In the process, the means had become the end in itself for the Left, he said.
Consequently, communist parties inherited the very bourgeoisie and techno-capitalist tendencies they were created to negate. The traits were reflected in the internecine feuds for power, establishment of personality cult-oriented monolithic internal command structures, accumulation of wealth, and systematic destruction of grassroots-level participatory democratic practices inherent in communes originally envisaged by Karl Marx, he said.
Communist parties no more credibly represented segments of society which cried out for emancipation.
They were no more engines of social change that strived to inculcate class consciousness amongst the toiling masses to mobilise them for revolutionary change. Marx had never claimed that communist parties would be stable and permanent entities. As class character changed, the parties would also change in nature. It was wrong to link such changes to any one leader, he said.
However, the tendency had perceptibly weakened the Left in India. Communists alienated themselves from the masses. But it did not signal the end of the Left in the country. Left ideals migrated to the realm of environmentalists and groups which championed for the rights of women, transgender people, forest-dwellers, tribes, migrant workers, sex workers, disorganised labour, sexual minorities, and other marginalised sections of society. India, in this sense, was still strongly Left, Dr. Gurukkal said.
Left parties and people interface organised
'Parties not representing sections of society'
