Intractable Conflicts in Contemporary India: Narratives and Social Movements by Savyasaachi

Author:Savyasaachi [Savyasaachi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367734640
Google: OxIBzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55872462
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Critiques of the left politics from Europe

With the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes of Eastern Europe the left appears to have failed to achieve its goal of a successful communist society. Most erstwhile citizens of these communist regimes have horrid memories of the life that existed in these societies. Although they are not entirely happy with their present post- communist regimes, they are unwilling to go back to earlier experiments with communism and left politics. Like in India, the left-centric parties appear to be on the losing side when it comes to electoral politics. Sometimes they make coalitions with conservative parties in order to gain votes in elections. This phenomenon some Marxist intellectuals see as a sign of increasing failure of radical politics in the context of Europe.

United States Marxist Fredric Jameson contends that the post-modern is the horizon within which every radical political movement develops today (Jameson 1991: 297–418). The Post-modernist critique of meta-narratives, foundationalism, universalism, historicism, modernity has provoked Marxist thinkers. Feminist, Black, Dalit and other identitarian political thought has additionally posed a serious challenge to the assumptions of the left. Post-Marxism is a response to this challenge by reconsidering the earlier dogmas and hypothesis. Jacques Rancière (2008) along with Earnesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2014 ) have enriched our understanding on the complexities involved in our time. Laclau and Mouffe (Laclau 2014) provide a critique of class ‘essentialism’ in Marxism along with a critique of western liberalism. New social movements, for them, unlike old social movements such as the labor movement articulate concerns that are beyond the class concerns. This does not signify that class is not a concern for new social movements but the centrality of class is undermined bringing to foray other issues such as gender, caste, race, environment, etc. This new understanding is very pertinent for social movements everywhere. They see the role of social movements to develop a critique of liberal democracy and provide alternatives to representative democracy.

Let us first examine the arguments of Laclau and Mouffe in their critique of Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe in their magnum opus ‘Hegemony and Socialist Strategy’ (Laclau 2014) endeavour to renovate Marxism, keeping the contemporary socio-political context in mind. This has now come to be designated as ‘post-Marxism’. They relook at the concept of hegemony from Lenin’s usage of it to that of Antonio Gramsci. Lenin, according to them, introduced new elements in his fight to bring about communism in Tsarist Russia. He replaced class determinism of classical Marxism with a more dynamic logic of ‘class alliances’. The classes who are supposed to carry out the revolution were far removed from those that were predicted by earlier Marxism. Lenin also forged this alliance in a non-capitalist country, which the earlier Marxism declared almost impossible. This challenges the self-proclaimed scientificity of earlier Marxism. Leninism also showed the importance of agency in pursuing progressive transformative politics. However, Leninism has a limitation – it just remained a ‘theory of revolution not a theory of society’ according to the authors (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 1981 ).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.