L(D)F’s Irrevocable Tragedy in the Assembly Elections!

Unilinear Marxism is in world crisis. Jyoti Basu, the CPI-M’s longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal, said before his death that ‘socialism is not practicable’. The Left (Democratic) Fronts of Kerala and West Bengal can no longer lay claim to the titles of Socialist or Communist. That is why irrevocable tragedies wait for both these Fronts in the coming Assembly elections. Disillusionment will seize their sincere cadres in the post-election period and they will strive to seek the cause or causes that have led to this catastrophe.

The Causal Chain

DR PRADIP GOKHALE, the illustrious authority on the Buddhist Dignaga School, has reviewed my Vol. IV: ‘Primitive Communism, Matriarchy-Gynocracy and Modern Socialism’ in the fore-most Marathi monthly Navbharat. He admits in it that I have discovered Dialectical Logic (DL). Soviet scholars claimed to have discovered DL. But Marxism even today considers that the mind is homogeneous. Christopher Caudwell urged that Freud’s discovery of dual mind should be included in Marxism; but it was the dark age of Stalinism and after his death in the Spanish Civil War, Maurice Cornforth denounced Caudwell as anti-Marxist.

Dignaga’s (late 4th century) philosophy of Sautrantika Vijnana-vada was based on the epistemology of the dualism of the mind: sa-vikalpaka (consciousness) and nir-vikalpaka (subconscious). His great disciple Dharmakirti (7th century) took great strides in logic; but he could not reach DL, because his researches were limited within the confines of the mind and could not reach its projection into the two Srutis of Vaidiki and Tantriki, which later came to be known as the two currents of Brahmani and A-brahmani. The suppressed gynocratic (Vai-raj, Stri-rajya) current, with which originated the trinity of Sva-tantrya (Liberty), Samata (Equality) and Mitrata (Fraternity, Democracy), became the Subconscious of Indian history.

In the absence of DL, Formal Logic ruled the roost. Dialectics developed without its logic, and hence it was bound to be unilinear, class. Marxists or Communists in India hugged class, while the Ambedkarites remained votaries of caste. The representatives of the economic proletariat and social proletariat remained at loggerheads instead of uniting as the real revolutionary force of India. Both went on decaying and deterio-rating. The result is the predicted tragedy.

Revolution and Reformism

GOKHALE thinks that the criteria of revolution and reformism I have presented respecting Buddha and Ambedkar upgrades Ambedkar also as a revolutionary and not as a reformist. All the revolutions that were accomplished beginning with the Russsian one to the post-World War II revolutions in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, took place in class societies and were of bourgeois democratic type. Each of them required methodological uniqueness and Marxist philosophy permitted it. But the Indian anti-varna-slavery revolution that Buddha accom-plished, being a non-class one, required the new philosophy of Dialectical Realism (Pratitya-samutpada). After accomplishing it, Buddha declared in the Vasettha-sutra that the new jati society that took its place would require a new Dhamma (philosophy) to abolish it when its time would come. The Mahayana acharyas formulated caste-abolishing philosophies from Tathata-vada to Sautrantika Vijnana-vada and teaching at the Nalanda Mahavihara, lived as bhikkhu pilgrims of the Stri-rajya of Sri-saila. It was the unparalleled age of Enlightenment of the caste-ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. Though Ambedkar was a non-Sanskritist, he could have perused great works in English on this age and could have synthesised Sautrantika Vijnana-vada with Marxism. But instead he embraced the Neo-Buddhist religion, though Buddha had forbidden formulating a new religion. He has in addition fashioned a bourgeois Constitution to perpetuate the semifeudal caste system, in the mire of which his followers are wallowing. How can he be called a revolutionary after all this?

Buddha’s so-called reformism should be seen in the context of the revolutionary strategy of the varna-slavery abolishing Pancha-othamma. When Japanese imperialism invaded China, Mao halted the New Democratic revolutionary programme of abolishing landlordism in order to absorb the landlord class in the anti-imperialist front. It was a temporary tactics for strengthening the New Democratic Revolution. Buddha’s reformist programme for the oligarchies should be seen as a tactics in the varna-slavery abolishing revolutionary strategy.

Revolutionary Proletariot

JOTIBA PHULEY was the first revolutionary thinker of modern times to define Indian feudalism from the a-brahmani methodological point of view and compare its abolition with Western bourgeois democratic revolutions. His disciple Ambedkar organised the untouchables separately from the general varna category of Sudras and was the first to call them social proletariat. Though the Dharma-shastra included the Adivasis in the Ati-Sudra category, Ambedkar excluded them from the category of social proletariat. Untouchables were the only section of the Indian people who responded and participated in his anti-caste mass struggles. First untouchables arose in the lifetime of Buddha in the feudal caste monarchies of Magadha and Kosala. Ex-untouchable bhikkhus like Sunita and Sopaka were in the forefront of the greatest revolution in Indian history led by Buddha. But they became social proletariat (SP) during the twilight period of British imperialism. British imperial capital had added economic proletariat (EP) to the age-old social one. His unconcern with the caste exploitation and oppression of the SP led to the split of the dual Indian proletariat in the post-independence period. The rural agricultural proletariat is also dual. The Caste-abolishing Bourgeois Democratic Revolution too is a dual one. The surplus land above the ceiling, according to the National Sample Survey, is 21 million hectares. (Actually it is far greater.) Being owned by the elites of the dominating peasant castes, it can be confiscated for redistribution among the land-poor and landless OBCs, SCs and STs in order to create the home market for industrialisation, but it can be acquired only by the Caste-abolishing Democratic Revolution. Hence this dual revolution has to be led by the industrial and agricultural SP. That is why this SP is a revolutionary one. The land-poor and landless STs and OBCs are its allies. The non-elite peasant mass, which today supports the caste-class system, can be made its ally only through unprecedented Enlightenment, the ideological arsenal for which has been made ready by me through my lifelong work.

Therefore, the impending electoral tragedy can be transformed into revolutionary recovery.

The author is the General Secretary, Satyashodhak Communist Party, Dhule (Maharashtra).