What do you do when you are travelling with a Monk in the train to a destination and back which last you more than 12 hours. Particularly when you have a relation with him for 30 long years. Particularly when the relation is not that of a Guru and Sisha. A Teacher and Pupil. When you are a Marxist and the Monk a Hindu mystic. When your relation is based on a dialectical opposition relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions, concerned with opposing forces? You engage the Monk in more of Dialectical Discussions. Into discussions related to contradictions on the fall of Communism and rise of Capitalism.
For the Monk, the collapse of Communism in the USSR in 1991 made the world-historic victory of capitalism seem certain. For Swami Somananda who had predicted the fall of erstwhile USSR, as far back as 1985,the dissolution of the Soviet Union enacted on December 26,1991,acknowledging the independence of the erstwhile Soviet republics and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States was inevitable. As was the lowering of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian Flag. It was for this alone that he had the RAW visiting him in a scurry to find if he had any link with the CIA.
It was 1985,I was in the Anandabazar office,The Telegraph had been launched and had reached its new found fame, Swami Somananda came calling . Among this and that, he predicted the fall of USSR, sometime between 1990 and 1991. I was aghast ! There was no sign of USSR disintegrating in the horizon. 1985 saw the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was the first to promote liberalization of the political landscape termed as Glasnost and capitalist elements into the economy known as Perestroika.
During this time he also predicted the fall of the Left Government in West Bengal. West Bengal was then governed by the Left Front, which was dominated by the Communist Party of India (CPM). In 1985 Jyoti Basu was the Chief Minister of the state. After his resignation, due to health reasons on 3 November, 2000 Buddhadev Bhattacharya became the Chief Minister of West Bengal. In the 2011, the 34 years of Communist rule came to an end. It was the world's longest-serving democratically elected communist government which made Kolkata the key base for Indian communism.The erstwhile left front led West Bengal state government holds the Indian record for the longest period of governance.
What do you do when you are travelling with a Monk in the train to a destination and back which last you more than 12 hours. Particularly when you have a relation with him for 30 long years. Particularly when the relation is not that of a Guru and Sisha. When you are a Marxist and the Sadhu a Hindu mystic. When your relation is based on a dialectical opposition relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions, concerned with opposing forces?
You engage the Monk in more of Dialectical Discussions. Into discussions related to contradictions on the fall of Communism and rise of Capitalism.
The fall of Communism and contradictions of Capitalism immediately called the new world order into question as globalisation brought with it what Jacques Derrida calls the plagues. Apologists for capitalism are now fearful of the return of Marx's ghost. George Soros sees the ghost in the form of the anarchy of finance capital. Anthony Giddens sees the ghost in the rise of right fundamentalist ideology. Without realising it, they pose the problem in terms familiar to Marxists: the contradiction between dead and living labour and the rise of the dead reclaimed by the living. But is there a way out for capitalism?
George Soros, one of the richest men in the world, has spent millions trying to restore capitalism in Russia. But he lost much of his money with the collapse of the Russian economy in August 1998. He claims that the global finance system is out of control and needs to be regulated. His calls for a return to an "international" like Bretton Woods, or some body attached to the IMF, have been echoed with increasing frequency after the so-called Asian "meltdown". His fear is that the casino of finance capital will bring an end to the new world order and the return to anarchy and revolution. If Soros fears the collapse of the new world order, Tony Giddens, the apostle of the post-scarcity global society, claims that the new world order can be managed by social scientists as advisers to the politicians of the "Third Way".The recent discussions between Soros and Giddens about the unstable state of the world are premised on the "death" and "burial" of Communism. Giddens believes that Communism has been banished: ". . . the spectre which disturbed the slumbers of bourgeois Europe for more than seventy years . . . has been returned to its nether world".
Yet it seems that these speeches at the graveside of Marxism are premature. The ghost of Marxism continues to haunt the big bourgeoisie despite every effort to exorcise it. The Communist Manifesto is being fleshed out as never before by a capitalist world system out of control. The end of the cold war and collapse of Communism has allowed capitalism unrivalled domination over its "other". Yet everywhere the forces of disorder manifest themselves , from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, the instability of the "Middle East" and Central Asia, to the renewed worker and peasant uprisings in Latin America and South Asia. In order to exorcise the ghost of communism, it is necessary to provide a philosophy of rebellion and redemption that can empower the intelligentsia. Post-Marxism needs a new priesthood.
If Soros is its financier and Giddens its sociologist, then Derrida is the philosopher of post-Marxism. His mission? The "new middle" needs to deconstruct the left . Jacques Derrida, darling of the post-structuralists writes Specters of Marx, claiming that we are all in "debt" to Marxism as the New World Disorder crumbles. Derrida asks, "Where is Marxism going? Where are we going with it?" He recounts how he re-read The Communist Manifesto after some decades. "I knew very well there was a ghost waiting there, and from the opening, from the raising of the curtain. Now, of course, I have just discovered, in truth I have just remembered what must have been, haunting my memory: the first noun of the Manifesto, and this time in the singular, is 'specter': 'A Specter is haunting Europe ¬ the specter of Communism'". Derrida's salutes Marx and reveals his desire to reclaim the spirit" of Marx .
Upon re-reading the Manifesto and a few other great works of Marx, I said to myself that I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say (for example in Engel's "Preface" to the 1888 re-edition) about their own possible "aging" and their intrinsically irreducible historicity. What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses? Not only in view of some progressive enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order of a system, but so as to take into account there, another account, the effects of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques and new givens? No text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming worldwide, concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought -- and this goes beyond the railroad and the newspapers of the time whose powers were analysed in such an incomparable way in the Manifesto. And few texts have shed so much light on law, international law, and nationalism.
Derrida repeats the familiar refrain that Marxism is transformed as society is transformed. The power of Marxism to predict the changes Derrida talks of , in politics, technology and media ,comes from the method of abstraction which uncovers the developmental dynamic of capitalism and its laws of motion. Marx expected that Marxism would disappear along with the withering of the state under socialism. Yet neither capitalism nor Marxism has been fundamentally transformed despite the rush of ex-Marxists into the post-al camp. However, Derrida believes that there is a "Marxism" that can be true to transformed capitalism. It was the "Marxism" that Marx denied at birth. So Derrida wants to magically "transform" Marxism at its inception. He wants to reclaim the "memory" of Marxism from the doctrinaires, and to produce a new Marx for the "future".
It will always be a fault not to read and re-read and discuss Marx,which is to say also a few others and to go beyond scholarly "reading" or "discussion". It will be more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility. When the dogma machine and the "Marxist" ideological apparatuses : states, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case a certain Marx, or his genius, of at least one of his spirits.
Derrida recognises that the end of "official" Marxism has left a political vacuum to be filled. He is appalled at the apparent victory of the new right and wants to reclaim Marxism to bolster the appeal of deconstruction. He will do this by recouping "one of Marx's spirits" conjured up from his youth which will bear a striking resemblance to deconstruction. Derrida recognises the "inheritance" of Marxism that cannot be wished away by the "end of ideologists". He knows because he opposed official Marxism in his youth, and it still haunts him.
Nevertheless, among all the temptations I will have to resist today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation, who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of the world in which the Marxist inheritance was and still remains, and so it will remain absolutely and thoroughly determinate.
One need not be a Marxist or a communist in order to accept this obvious fact. We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not. Among the traits that characterise a certain experience that belongs to my generation, that is, an experience that has lasted more than forty years, and which is not over. From the cloister of a Roman Catholic School to the cradle of a Hindu home. I am speaking of a troubling effect of "déjà vu", and even of a certain "toujours déjà vu". I recall this perception, hallucination, and time because of the subject I shared with the Sadhu.
To end , as we were reaching Howrah station,I told Swami Somananda : I am a Marxist but Not a Communist. To this he quoted Karl Marx to say : If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Communist.
[In a letter about the Communism which arose in France 1882]
Summary of a conversation with Swami Somananda on the way to Jhargram and back on 25th.of April 2015 for the opening of Shikshagram.
Image : The Sadhu and the Marxist at Jhargram Station. Shib Shankar.