Our country and its emancipation from every form of oppression, as we know it, stands in a very precarious situation. Three years ago, what was left of our bourgeois democracy, was quite literally made a laughing-stock, when a party with a communal and theocratic-fascist agenda was elected to power. But this is not surprising: the world over, a trend has set in where imperialism has suffered major jolts while capitalism is on the decline; and it’s but natural for the ruling classes to unmask the mask of civility from the inherent barbarism and brutality within the dictatorship of capital. Fascism is, after all, capitalism in decay, and India is not immune from this international change. Being a literal marketplace for the goods and services produced in the imperialist states, it was necessary for a change in the regime so that it becomes easier for our economic machinery to be organized by the ruling classes in a way to benefit the interests of Empire. This is amply evidenced by the fact that, rather than having a native kind of capital investment, we’re still at a stage where our society is economically organized on agrarian lines and where the mode of production is semi-feudal in nature. This has a curious effect on the superstructure of the Indian State, where Brahminism has legitimized the feudal nature of patriarchy and the practice of casteism and untouchability. All these factors undoubtedly make the Indian State a very complex entity to study and analyze, but when armed with dialectical materialism and looking at the historical processes that have shaped our country, one can start to actually appreciate the enormity of the task standing before us.
Even as the hegemonic grip of Hindutva fascism threatens to tear apart the last vestiges of Indian bourgeois-democracy, time and again, we have seen oppressed sections rise up and assert their inalienable rights that are nominally accorded in a liberal democratic setup. At the very forefront, we have seen students rapidly responding to any unfavourable changes to their lot and even facing the brunt of the wrath of the ruling classes – including lathi charges and rubber bullets. There has been a proactive attempt by the students themselves to unify the struggles of the working class and the struggle of the poor and landless peasants along with their own struggles. This conscious effort, to realize in practical terms, the need to unify actual struggles on various fronts is indeed a commendable one and it should be unequivocally praised. These students are carrying forward that baton of responsibility that has been passed on without falling, since 1967. The students and youth of today are heroic, conscious and aware of the sacrifices that are required to completely free the oppressed from their lot. They tread the path of revolution; they tread the path of New Democracy.
However, there exists another band of young people who don’t quite grasp the seriousness of the contradictions they presently face. Either due to their class and caste privilege or due to the extensive exposure of State propaganda, they feel that there’s no need to unify struggles. For them, their goals are “liberty, equality and fraternity” but these words echo aimlessly as vague phantoms that lack concrete context or material analysis. Such people believe in reform and non-confrontation, seeking to uphold subjective notions of identity and emotions over the objective nature of material truth. They tread the path of reformism/revisionism; they tread the path of social justice.
When the Naxalbari Uprising and the eponymous Movement were underway, the revolutionaries and their ideologues were constantly occupied with the need to fight the revisionism of Nikita Khrushchev, the revisionism (and later, betrayal) of the CPI (M) and the repression of the Indian State. Today, we class and politically conscious students face new challenges altogether: the Soviet Union’s gone and China has faced an economic counter-revolution; the CPI (M) continues to be with the very people it had the responsibility to overthrow; the continued repression of the Indian State – more intensified ever since the lackeys of imperial interests dressed in saffron, have taken power; and the existence of non-proletarian trends in the student movement that could be put under the umbrella term of social justice. And if we, the genuine revolutionaries need to prevail, we need to not only analyze and expose the hollowness of social justice rhetoric but to also champion and show the correctness of the New Democratic path.
So, what are social justice and New Democracy? How are they different? How one can doom us to servitude while the other can forever end the exploitation of human by a human? Let’s look at each claimant and for ourselves, decide which path for the road to liberation to take:
As the name might suggest, social justice means justice offered to marginalized and oppressed sections within the context of a particular society. Superficially, the aims of New Democracy and of social justice might seem to be the same, and in actuality, they’re pretty much the same. We want justice to Muslims, to Dalits, to Tribals, to women, to LGBTQ people. We want the unfair practices and traditions targeting these people, which are rooted in feudalism, to be immediately and effectively, stopped. We, ultimately, want their emancipation.
Sadly, that’s where the similarities end and the irreconcilable differences begin. Social justice and their proponents, who – for the lack of a better term – are called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), don’t reject the division between classes but reject two essential, fundamental aspects of any society: contradiction and class struggle. They hold that the individual and – therefore subjective – interpretation of the world to be of more, paramount importance than what actually exists as truth – that is, material objects. Constructing politics out of identities, as if identities were eternal and static, they tend to repeatedly ignore the inner machinations of motives. Consequently, social justice and identity politics hardly are able to fundamentally solve any of the problems that they fight against. Even the “fighting” aspect is not free from critique, for it certainly involves collaboration and reformism. This has made the unfortunate incidents that have led certain elements in feminism and anti-casteism to take the social justice road, even when these two movements (in the Indian context) started out as revolutionary, democratic ones.
The proponents of social justice belong to the petit-bourgeois, privileged youth living in posh residential areas of the city. With the amount of class and caste privilege they possess, they’re able to scratch the surface of the deep-rooted inequalities plaguing our society. But their powers of analysis are sordidly limited, thanks to having no theory to ground and guide their analytical powers and ignoring the material conditions of their own country while they dogmatically tend to quote/copy-paste theories and ideas from liberal, bourgeois intellectuals from the West. Because of this, their chief malady is a disunity between theory (and lack, thereof) with practice. Most importantly, they tend to rely on a lot of emotion and subjective feeling to drive their politics home, instead of making an informed opinion based on studies and an objective methodology in analyzing what’s going on.
It could be argued that my allegations are nothing more than personal ones, directed at a set of particular individuals in mind. But it can be easily countered that these conclusions are based upon long observations, and they point out to this one thing: due to their peculiar class and caste position, SJWs find themselves in an uncomfortable position. On one hand, they realize that the present system of oppression and exploitation is detrimental for individual liberty, while on the other hand, they fear the loss of their own privileges if these social justice movements return to their radical and revolutionary roots. This is one of the principal reasons why social justice movements tend to become nothing more than hypocritical lip services that at once beguile the masses and aids the oppressors to perpetuate their oppression. Compartmentalizing and limiting struggle and politics to just identity, they fragment (and thus, prevent) the growth of revolutionary movements and of the Revolution, itself. In fact, in essence, social justice wants a cosmetic change without fundamentally changing anything, due to their inability to understand the relationship between oppression(s) and their source(s).
In this manner, the rhetoric and sheer hollowness of social justice stand bare. Inspired and led on by the highly liberal and subjective philosophy called postmodernism, social justice movements have committed a great disservice to the growth and development of people’s movements. And even today, the effect that SJWs have wrought upon the world is clearly felt within the urban cultural landscapes of Indian cities.
Now that we know the untruths and trickery of social justice, having briefly gone through its core issues and the effect it has on its actual practice, one might fall down into utter despair. But we’re still left with New Democracy, and so, let’s see what it has to offer.
In the opening lines, we have briefly pointed out how the Indian State is internally feudal and externally under the control of Anglo-American imperialism. On the superficial level, these two might seem unrelated but by remembering Vladimir Lenin’s characterization of imperialism, we’d know that both these conditions have a symbiotic relationship, whose benefits are shared by the imperialist powers and their compradors that they have directly or indirectly set up in the colony/semi-colony. As a result, the development of that country lies in limbo, experiencing the rapid development of infrastructure on one hand while crippling poverty and societal oppression on the other. This further has enabled the growth of communal forces because the superstructure of the Indian State was decidedly feudal and it catered to the cultural and social interests of the dominant community to assert its cultural hegemony on questions of caste and gender. Given this condition, social justice would grossly fare inadequate. It would seek to merely bandage the wounds that the system has suffered, naively believing that the oppressions that are a part of societal existence have no relation to the standing, historical structures that continue to occupy spaces in Indian discourses.
New Democracy is a literal break from this rank reformism and selling-out. It is a departure from liberal democracy in many, many ways. It recognizes the antagonism that is present between the oppressing and oppressed classes, it understands that the questions of caste and gender are inevitably tied to the questions of who own the means of production and how they strive to maintain it. Instead of abstracting from the concrete in order to explain what is going on, we abstract from the concrete in order to merely investigate and study it while trying to understand the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, so that we can successfully apply concrete tactics to concrete conditions. We believe that societal forces have a material basis and the axioms of contradiction and class consciousness play a very significant role in it. If a long lasting change has to be affected, a fundamental change has to be made possible and that is possible only when we break free from the chains that the present, exploitative systems binding us. No compromises, no equivocation but a pure adherence to revolutionary principles and considerations of the masses over one’s personal loss of privilege and inconvenience, thereof.
New Democracy involves the non-negotiable resistance to imperialist advances that the West has successfully made ever since our “independence”. It includes the overthrow of the compradors who not only allowed the semi-colonial loot and plunder of our land, labour and resources but also who partook in deriving profits from this very act. It focuses on questioning the excesses of the present state of affairs for as long as it exists and challenging the authority of the exploiter-enabled government by any means necessary. Ordinarily, the common conception is that we support armed struggle – and this is not entirely false. However, struggles can be conducted in various, complementary ways and this inevitably includes promoting an alternative set of cultural norms and practices that not only defy the established grounds of accepted narratives but also create a space for the growth of values and ideas that can give the individual the power to realise their ultimate potential, even as they can connect with the wider collective of the broad masses. In terms of providing alternatives to the existing administrative structures, it places the ultimate power to the broad masses of the people and it gives them the authority to oversee, review and critique the work of the government and the New Democratic state. This involves mandatorily allowing the people to not only elect their deputies but to also review their work – and in the case of non-delivery, recalling them. It also involves expanding the existing set of Fundamental Rights to include economic and social rights, as well as making the Directive Principles of State Policy enforceable by a court of law in case the elected government does not deliver on its mandate; finally, it would involve actually federalizing the state structure so that it eliminates the sole monopoly of the Federal Government to dictate laws and policies.
For fifty years, such has been the object. We are not the ones to brag about our successes or to complain about the risks we face in our historic task of emancipating toiling humanity. So many have sacrificed so much for a dream very few dares to even think of nowadays. Leaving every kind of privilege and comfort behind, they answered to the call of their convictions. No action of historic significant value is easy, and especially when that task concerns dethroning the bloodsucking parasites and their imperialist overlords from their seats of ill-gotten power and wealth, it was never going to be a walk in the park. Despite hardships and setbacks, the class and politically conscious youth of today draw enormous strength from those who not only gave up their lives against the British but also against the “independent” “leader” who replaced them seventy years ago.
One can clearly now see where does social justice stand and where does New Democracy stand. One represents compromise and collaborationism, the other avowedly reject both and seeks to create something new by destroying the present series of maladies.
The question is, what would be your path of struggle?