Commentary: Why Is the Left More Divided Than the Right? Apart from their ability to change regimes at their will in the postcolonial nation states, rightist forces have also managed to keep their partners together. In contrast, the left has miserably failed to keep its ranks together. But the contest between the left and right, whether at the ideological plane or at the level of practice, is rooted in an uneven playing fi eld where the odds have always been stacked in favour of the right. Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban@yahoo) is a long-time contributor to EPW and is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980). In recent history, Sancho, too many comrades have been killed by comrades. – Graham Greene: Monsignor Quixote, 1982 Gmyati shatru baro shatru (A popular saying in Bengali, meaning the antagonist in the ranks of your own kin is the biggest enemy.) The left all over the world has set a record of sorts by prioritising the antagonism among its siblings in the socialist kinsfolk over the primary objective to eliminate the common main enemy – the capitalist system. In its violence, the leftist internecine strife harks back to the chronicles of the Christian-Jewish and Catholic-Protestant fratricide, the Kaurava-Pandava war in Hindu mythology, and the Shia-Sunni hostilities in Islam’s history. By a quirk of history, the left (by which I mean those who believe in a socialist system of equitable ownership and distribution of resources, social justice and democratic rights) inherited this spirit of fanatical internecine warfare that once marked the feudal society ruled by the right (a term to describe the followers of both past religious orthodoxy and the modern capitalist system). Significantly enough, the right had in the meanwhile overcome those divisions within itself, and in modern history we find two historically incongruous wings of the right quite often managing to unite in opportunist alliances – e g, the US-Taliban-Al Qaida axis in their war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the recent past. Coming down to our doorstep the bonhomie between the merchant of virulent Hindutva Narendra Modi, and the merchants of the Indian corporate industry in investments in Gujarat is an apt example. While the modern right – the capitalists – has been able to successfully unite the feuding constituents within their own camp in contrast, the left has continued to replicate the traditional type of primitive warring among its own ranks. Commenting on the splitting of the left, one perceptive observer recalls Freud’s theory of “narcissism of minor differences” whereby “it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them”.1 There is however a major difference between the growth and nature of the left and the right. Through the course of three historical developments in the west, the fissiparous feudal right of medieval Europe gave way to the birth of a modern unified bourgeois right. Describing the consequences of the coming to power of the bourgeoisie in 19th century Europe, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels referred to the gradual obsolescence of the traditional religious prejudices that kept people divided: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away…” . Explaining how the capitalist right overcame these divisions, they continued: The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. 2 The Right’s Upper Hand In today’s era of globalisation, the right has been able to extend this process of unification and centralisation of capitalist economy all over the world. Gone are the days of the internal conflicts that ravaged the right for centuries over territorial possessions – the last trace of which was the second world war in the 20th century. The Yalta agreement following it, cemented the territorial division of “spheres of influence” between the old right (the western capitalist states) and the new left (the Soviet Union-led socialist order) that had emerged then as a power in the post-war international scene. During the decades that followed, the left failed to consolidate the “sphere” that was allotted to it, while the right managed to keep its house in order – without any territorial disputes between states, or major domestic upheavals within metropolitan centres in the west. Right-ruled capitalist states in the west have had of course their share of domestic conflicts. The most violent has been the century-old Irish Republican Army (IRA) militant uprising. But the prevalent political system in the UK has apparently allowed such age-old nationalist conflicts to move from the violence-ridden arena of terrorism to power sharing on the floors of Parliament. The Basque separatist armed movement ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty) in Spain has been more or less contained. The militant black resistance in the US of the 1960s was neutralised by the policy of reservation that allowed the materialisation of a black sub-elite and its co-option into the capitalist ruling establishment, as witnessed by the emergence of President Barack Obama as the poster boy of the capitalist right. In contrast, the left-ruled socialist states have not only succumbed to the temptations of the capitalist market economy (in the erstwhile Soviet Union and China) but have established a notorious model of inept and violently ham-handed treatment of domestic dissent. They have inherited the Stalinist legacy of paranoia which was institutionalised by the infamous Moscow trials in the Soviet Union whereby an entire generation of dissident communists was eliminated in the 1930s. This was followed by the suppression of workers’ resistance in Berlin and the popular uprising in Hungary in the 1950s, and the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to smother reforms. The same model has been pursued by the Chinese Communist Party which unleashed cannons on students’ demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and continues to stifle the movement for self-determination of the Tibetans. We have to remember at the same time that the rightist rulers of the western democracies were in no small measure responsible for creating the paranoia that had shaped the anti-democratic mindset of the leftist rulers of the socialist states. Ever since the birth of the Soviet Union, when it was encircled by western capitalist powers which engineered a civil war in Russia, they had tried to overthrow every socialist state by covert and overt operations. In the post-world war period, the US which became the reigning power in the rightist camp, refused to respect the Yalta agreement – defined borders of the “spheres of influence”, and began to intervene in the “sphere” of the socialist states, denying them the right to carry out their own experiments in building a socialist alternative to the capitalist system. Rightist Offensive From the 1950s onwards it began its global anti-left offensive through a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-operated sophisticated strategy of espionage in the communist states, combined with subtle indoctrination of dissident left intellectuals (through magazines like Encounter and the India-based Quest). Still later, they tried to oust communist regimes through CIA-trained armed mercenaries. It is acknowledged now that the CIA played an important role in fomenting dissent against the socialist regimes in east Europe, arming Khampa rebels against the Chinese government in Tibet, and as recently, militarily and financially sponsoring religious fundamentalist outfits like Al Qaida and the Taliban to oust the left government in Afghanistan. In other parts of the world in order to cleanse them of any leftist and indigenous nationalist influence, they resorted to CIA-backed military offensives to oust and eliminate the nationalist and left politicians in these countries – Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. In south-east Asia by the 1960s the right had managed to defeat, if not wipe out leftist guerrilla movements in Burma, Malaya, Thailand and the Philippines and prop up their own local agents as tin-pot dictators, with the help of US and British forces. During these decades, the only defeats that the US suffered were in Vietnam and Cuba – the two that the left could uphold as their success stories. Apart from their ability to change regimes at their will in the postcolonial nation states (their erstwhile colonies), the rightist forces have also managed to keep their partners together. Notwithstanding the occasional conflicts between the US and the European capitalist states, they have come to each other’s aid at times of crisis (e g, bailing out financially crippled states with massive injection of aid). To paraphrase Marx, we can say that the right has “lumped together their own nations, their own governments under one code of laws, following one class interest, into one global order”. In contrast, the left has miserably failed to keep its ranks together. Cracks began soon after the end of the war with Yugoslavia under its communist leader Tito breaking away from Stalin’s leadership in the late 1940s, protesting against Soviet hegemony. This was followed by a never-ending series of crises within the left camp: an outbreak of rebellion by the Tibetans against Chinese Communist rule in 1954, the uprising against the communist regime in Hungary in October 1956; the shocking disclosure of Stalin’s misdeeds made by Khrushchev in 1957 at the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); a vertical split in the world left camp in the 1960s on the issue of the strategy and tactics to be followed for a socialist transformation (either through peaceful coexistence as advocated by Khrushchev or armed insurrection as propagated by the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party). All these developments, accompanied by ugly battles over territorial claims between China and the Soviet Union, and later between China and Vietnam (unthinkable in the Marxian paradigm of international working class solidarity, but similar to the long forgotten pattern of war-like behaviour of rival capitalist states of the past) dented the image of the left as a unified force capable of fighting the right. The left’s power was further weakened by the turn of events in the Soviet Union and China – the two sources of their political inspiration. While the Soviet Union collapsed under its own economic and political implosion, ironically again China which in the 1960s accused the Soviet regime of revisionism and social-imperialism, under a new communist leadership in the 1990s chose to follow the same path of neo-liberal model of economic development that was inaugurated by the Soviet leaders like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and is continued by Putin. This marked the surrender of the erstwhile leftist states to the right’s global order. The New Global Challenge The disputes that are taking place today between the western capitalist states on the one hand and Russia and China on the other therefore, have nothing to do with any ideological right-left divide, but are basically “minor differences” among partners which are adjustable within the parameters of the right-dominated political and economic global system. In fact, the erstwhile leftist states and the right-ruled states are moving closer in a joint offensive against a new global challenge – terrorism based on a religious ideology. Masquerading as pro-poor and anti-west, a regressive Islamic ideology is making inroads into the hearts of the discontented Muslim population not only in the Muslim-dominated west Asia, but also across Muslim-inhabited territories in other parts of the world. The discontent has been bred by the denial of the rights of the Palestinian people, the discrimination against Muslim minorities in Africa and China and the massacre of Muslims in successive riots in India among other things. This space of Muslim disgruntlement has been usurped by the Islamist sectarian terrorist outfits – a tragic outcome of the failure of the left to direct such popular resentment in a secular and democratic direction of an anti-imperialist movement that unites all sections of the oppressed. An Uneven Playing Field But the contest between the left and the right, whether at the ideological plane or at the level of practice, is rooted in an uneven playing field where the odds have always been stacked in favour of the right. The organic unity of the right is bound by the common urge for private profit that lures every individual to the siren’s song of easy money, and drives him/her to join the cut-throat competition to scramble up the ladder of upward mobility to make good. The agenda of the left on the other hand is addressed to the need for collective action (instead of individual efforts for self-achievement) to bring about equality in society. But it is here that their constituency is fragmented by conflicting and divergent interests – perpetually changing – stemming from differences in class positions and socio-religious origins of their components (landowning small farmers, landless labourers, skilled industrial workers and unskilled proletariat, tribals and plains people, religious and caste communities). While the leaders of the left are driven by the ideology of uniting the oppressed and exploited poor on the demand for equality, the ideologues of the right are clear in announcing their disbelief in equality. Their logic is best expressed in unambiguous terms by the bursar in an old English college in a story by G K Chesterton, called The Crime of the Communist, written way back in the early 20th century: You must remember I’m a very vulgar person. I’m not a thinker. I’m only a businessman, and as a businessman I think it’s all bosh. You can’t make men equal and it’s damned bad business to pay them equal; especially a lot of them not worth paying for at all. Whatever it is, you’ve got to take the practical way out, because it’s the only way out. It’s not our fault if nature made everything a scramble. I suspect that deep down in the minds of our industrial magnates it is this attitude towards their employees that had remained embedded in their psyche and their labour policies. The recent explosion of labour discontent in the Maruti factory in Gurgaon could have been a violent response to this psyche. Both the Gandhian concept of trusteeship (assuming that the Indian industrial houses will have a change of heart and become trustees for the social uplift of their workers), and the present new-fangled concept of corporate social responsibility (expecting the big business houses to look after the social needs of the workers) can be dismissed by the workers as “all bosh” (to use the term of Chesterton’s businessman against the right this time)! The left is at a disadvantageous position in another respect too. While the right (with their money power) can poach upon the constituency of the left and buy off large vulnerable sections, the latter can snatch barely an inch from the turf of the right. So, while the right could recruit a “labour aristocracy” from among the proletariat to divide the left, the latter at best have been able to wean away a handful of the upper and middle class educated members from that turf through their ideological appeal. These brave leftist souls who quit their privileged class joined the struggle for a revolutionary change whether in Russia, China and Cuba in the past or Chhattisgarh today against heavy odds of both the superior military offensive of the right, and the burden of the long-established internal regressive forces that keep the 13 popular base of the left backward and dispersed. The left today faces the combined challenge of the religious right (which thrives on the traditional conservative values still held sacred by large sections of our population) and the neo-liberal right (which breeds consumerist values that ensure it a steady market among newer sections of the population). The right has drawn lessons from Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest through a long history of ruthless competition ending up with accommodation among their constituents to make themselves “fit” to rule over the world. Should the socialist left adopt from Darwin the path of natural selection whereby they can come out from the shell of their dinosaurian past, adapt themselves to new socio-economic conditions, and survive and transform into a unified force that can create new forms of resistance against the manifestations of social Darwinism? Notes 1 Rakesh Shukla, “Adversial Matrimonial Law Dynamics, Intimate Relations and the Narcissism of Minor Differences” in International Journal of Applied Psychoanaltic Studies, 2012. Online: wileyonlinelibrary 2 Communist Manifesto.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 17:21:48 +0000
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