This blog has basically been inactive for a year or so, and in that time I've embraced Marxism-Leninism. I was specifically recommended Enver Hoxha's Imperialism and the Revolution and after reading it a handful of other texts, like this one and this one, and by having good conversations with friends of mine as we began to discuss and understand their content and historical significance, I'm actually fully confident in endorsing this ideology and worldview.
I've been unimpressed with Marxism in the past and that's because I primarily have understood it through the Indian "example". Left-wing politics and ideas give me the chills, and I mistakenly believed Marxism-Leninism to be a left-wing ideology. Understanding better the development over time of both left-wing ideologies and Marxism-Leninism, I've gained a growing appreciation for the distinction. They are unrelated, opposed things.
CPM is a revisionist, Gorbachevite party which espouses a form of social-fascism based on the later Soviet Union. Like the post-Stalinist Gorbachevites themselves, they are nothing but a criminal gang. Neither their ideological fascism nor their overt criminality are stand-out features for a political party to me, and it was their banality, not their remarkable evil, that's led me to dismiss them in the past.
The Naxalite insurgency might have a romantic image as a movement for liberation, and it may be tempting to hope that the future of India lies with some villagers way out in the boonies somewhere else, but the major accomplishment of this insurgency is keeping tribal areas in a state of perpetual warfare for decades. To Maoists, as their supporters have consistently explained it to me, the big aim of Maoism was to establish a "new democracy" by waging a "peoples' war" which has no use for the urban proletariat but desperately, desperately chomps at the bit to enlist the support of an obviously nonexistent benevolent "national bourgeoisie". To think the Naxalites are a revolutionary force just seems obviously wrong, even to one who does not understand Marxist-Leninist ideology. Revolution isn't something that happens when you do enough war, it's something you do to end wars.
My thoughts on both of these groups haven't changed at all and if anything they're much harsher after my embrace of Marxism-Leninism.
It never would have occurred to me that either of these parties were revolutionary organisations which sought to establish the proletariat as a hegemonic social class, because neither are, but Marxism-Leninism is defined by the establishment of the proletariat, not "the oppressed", "the marginalised", any combination of constantly fracturing and conjoining "identity groups", or whatever other thing, as the hegemonic social class. This is accomplished by developing and maturing the organisational capacity of that social class along a correct ideological line until we are ready to seize power.
Understanding ostensiblly Marxist ideas mostly through the lens of Indian "interpreters", none of whom are worth anything because they have all held deeply anti-Marxist ideologies, I had important misunderstandings of Marixsm, and of basic concepts like "the proletariat", for example. The terms are misused often, online, in academia, and in mainstream Indian politics, making the real meaning of these terms and ideas obscure. In misusing these terms, Indian "communists" create new non-Marxist, in fact anti-Marxist theories, which have been handily disposed of once and for all by the life's work of Enver Hoxha. For this reason, Imperialism and the Revolution is the most important book for Indians to read, period. Time has proven him correct on enemy after enemy, from the Eurocommunists and the Titoites to the Kruschevites and Mao Zedong Thought. I&TR is especially important in understanding the ongoing applicability of Lenin's model of capitalism in the present era to every country on Earth in the present day, even India which thinks quite incorrectly that its vast cultural, social, and economic distinctions somehow constitute a difference in kind from the global state of economic degeneration.
My politics in the past have been tools which I have used, yes, in an attempt to gain an analysis of what's happening around me, but this pursuit was muddled by the sometimes greater need to express anger and process personal traumas which were closely and permanently bound with the urgent political situation in India. Often -- not as often on this blog as in other places, but it's probably happened -- the intention was not to lay down intellectual truth but to knock down intellectual walls in an intentionally disruptive manner, like Diogenes presenting his featherless biped. I don't think this was an inappropriate way for me to act at the time, particularly as the avowedly "political" terrain this took place in is all a show anyway, and I knew and wrote about that then. But having found a correct theory through which truth may be arrived at, it feels outdated and immature to persist in that mode.
The correct course of action now is to work towards establishing organisation and understanding of Hoxha's line. I've focused on I&TR in particular, because it is vitally important to eliminate third-worldist ideology in India, which unforgivably has been adopted by Indian "Marxists" of all kinds.
Every Indian political ideology derives ultimately from Maoist third-worldism. Although Maoist third-worldism is a tool of Chinese imperialism, it's been adopted by the Indian political mainstream which also openly aims to establish itself as an imperial hegemony in the so-called "third world", and competes openly with China in doing so. In India, as in China, this takes the form of an imperialist national and ethnic chauvanism, and many forms of racial oppression in India, for example in Assam against Bengalis and in Delhi against Northeasterners, as well as against Kashmiris both in India and in Kashmir, are informed by this ideology. Racial oppression is very difficult to talk about in India and I'll leave that at that for now, but it is a problem worth taking seriously which has had and continues to have very serious impact on Indian history and speaking truthfully it must be addressed in order to bring any serious change to the place. But not through tumblr discourse. This is not an appropriate place for that.
The thing making race in India most difficult to talk about is that it is the product of proletarianisation in the 20th and 21st centuries, as opposed to caste which is considered to predate this period significantly. The liberal worldview (and India is a deeply liberal country) is that "axes of oppression" should be handled one at a time, over a period of centuries of gradual electoral reform, rather than through revolutionary change. "The marginalised" are supposed to spend these centuries offering martyr after martyr to the sacred election of officials. In India many send their martyrs off for this proudly. But having seen elections themselves used as an instrument of horrific and incomprehensible violence in 2019, I am not okay with it anymore.
Because of proletarianisation, that is, the mass displacement of people from their ancestral homelands, you end up with Biharis in Kolkata and Northeasterners in Delhi. Racial antagonisms are possible to create only after this mass transport of people under conditions that leave them vulnerable. By creating racial antagonisms in growing cities, the unity of the working class is undermined. These conflicts are manufactured and avoidable, but their function is to prevent the maturation of the working class, keeping recently displaced people vulnerable and exploitable. The same is true of caste. The same is true of "religion". The pop-criticism that the proletariat in India can't or shouldn't seize power because they're a "privileged class" is dopey, obscene, and racist. Being that we all now live in Kolkata or Delhi or wherever, in clearly unacceptable conditions, the question is not who should be in control of India's one alotted dollar but how a country can actually be developed which creates acceptable living conditions for the people in it.
The most disgusting thing to me is the talk about "overpopulation" as though it's futile to talk about building a country where 1.4 billion people can live in decent conditions. That, right there, is the primary conflict: the ruling class does not want to, and cannot, develop a country which can sustain human life.
I have spent the last couple years traveling throughout eastern Europe. There are ruins here, particularly in Albania, that I think people should come to instead of Mecca in order to instantly understand everything about how a ruling class can turn a thriving, industrial society into a hyperexploited country with a lower standard of living than India. Poverty, desperation, prostitution, and addiction exist here alongside shut-down factories, making it very clear that this is actually the way that the bourgeoisie consider that people should live, in eastern europe and India and everywhere. The constantly-declining conditions in America and Europe Proper make this clear as well.
Indians talk about their ruling class like little babies that they're holding their hands until they learn to walk, when they should be spoken of as brutish, killable tyrants.
Going back to the discussion on the proletariat as a "privileged class" and a tool of caste exploitation, to be frank, any qualified state, even a non-socialist one, should have handled caste oppression as a zero-tolerance matter. Caste is a product of anarchy and lawlessness, and the imposition of law, any law, which is the basic responsibility of a state, can eliminate it in India quickly as it has everywhere else in the world, even under wartime conditions!
In India, uniquely, caste has been mainlined and philosophised into a modern political system. This is completely unforgivable, and means that caste cannot be eliminated in India without revolutionary political change, and not only that but that its elimination is necessary to any successful revolution; any revolution which does not eliminate it will be eliminated by it. This is why, historically, socialist states have prioritised resolving inter-tribal and inter-communal conflicts, which, to be clear, is all caste is. Caste isn't magic. This is not Marxist-Leninist ideology, it is basic statecraft, so elementary I don't feel like it should need saying, but I know that it does.
And the question to me is, everyone knows that India is a violent and unequal society where naked oppression is practiced unapologetically. Right now, the overwhelming tone of the country is deeply deprived people fighting each other in a perpetual tribal war, hoping to gain each others' resources. These resources only dwindle; the development of the country is something which never happens. It is a lawless country where pogroms are common and the urban areas are full of vulnerabilities and people being exploited and taken advantage of.
The country's political thinkers have thrown their intellects completely behind defending and legitimising liberal democracy, hoping to throw shoulds at it until the Indian constitution is a document with legal standing, as though all that is necessary is to wokescold the politicians and the voters and the journalists and the universities until they create supply of liberalism to fill the demand made by you. This was essentially the theory I've been operating on my entire life, as if tyranny could be gently nudged until it creates a just world worth living in.
Countries have been developed before. India's failure to develop has been usually rationalised, to be blunt, along the lines of racial or cultural inferiority. The economic factors behind this have not been explored.
But they are in Imperialism and the Revolution, and everyone should read it and understand everything. When you do that, you understand perfectly why India hasn't developed and you understand why it's pointless to talk about annihilating caste or to even look at racism until we get on the same page about this.
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