Challenges for the Indian Left

This volume stems from essays written in theEconomic & Political Weeklyon the crisis confronting the Left in India along with the challenging of the basic concepts of communist politics liks democratic centralism, essays which were responded with critical philosophical reading of Revolutionary Marxism, especially on the need of understadning Hegelian dialectics for constructing mass-based communist politices. While the theme of the crisis of the Left formed part of the debate in theEconomic & Political Weeklythere was a dialectical counterpoint that located the crisis in the form of parliamentary politics of the Left that worked in the strange thematic of Marxism devoid of Marx and emancipation devoid of humanity. The crisis of the Left in India was thus not merely pointed to a form of politics that was becoming irrelevant to the Indian masses in the form of social engineering. The crisis was understood as a form of philosophically uninformed Left politics that drew more from Stalin to Mao than on Marx’s emancipatory repertoire itself. The debates on this theme of whether Stalin to Mao are not merely relevant to revolutionary politics, but whether both were essentially counterrevolutionary form a part of this volume. The analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union and whether socialism collapsed in the early 1990s or whether the rise of Stalinism in the late 1920s signified the collapse of socialism forms an important part of this work.