With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs ... more With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs that there is pressure for the two to unite to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in the 2014 National Elections. These views echo the line of the General Secretary Sitaram Yechury of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), a view that seems to echo the old revisionist S.A. Dange line of the former united Communist Party of India, which talked of a collaboration with the Indian National Congress and total abandonment of the idea of the Indian Revolution. This essay claims that the Left needs to go back to its philosophical roots and rediscover themselves rather than getting involved in the tactical maneuvers of parliamentary politics, tactics that are increasing becoming devoid of ethics. It also claims that the Left in this philosophic discovery totally transcends Stalinism of all sorts, which is stated not merely as a deviation or an accident, but a counterrevolution against the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and Marxism in general. In this philosophical rediscovery, the essay also asserts that liberalism and Gandhism are alien trends to Marxism and cannot be considered otherwise. Instead, one needs to go to Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar for a radical critique of the Indian rightwing project.
The financialization of the economy and the criminalization of politics in India which has led to... more The financialization of the economy and the criminalization of politics in India which has led to the rise to power of the Indian neoconservatives led by the Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP) have created a splintered secular democratic opposition and a declining parliamentary left. Without a doubt the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the consequent entry of India into the not-so-brave world of neoliberal capitalism. The old ideologies of secularism, socialism and non-alignment (the three pillars of the ruling ideology of India until 1991) are now forgotten for an aggressive hyper-capitalist and ethno-nationalist ideology. For those who are pessimistic about the given course of things, especially with the complete surrender of the parliamentary left to bourgeois politics, the Maoists seem a ray of hope. However a counter-narrative is put up by the ruling elite for whom the Maoists are not only terrorists, but anti-nationalists declaring war on not only the Indian state, but the Indian republic itself. This essay, while being a review of Bernard D'Mello's book India After Naxalbari, is also a reflection on the Indian Maoist movement. The following questions are fundamental to understanding the Indian Maoist movement, namely whether it is a genuine democratic and revolutionary mass movement or left adventurism that degenerates into 'anarchoterrorism', which instead of helping the cause of the working class, is actually helping the state move in a more rightwards direction. It also states that the Maoist movement in India itself has to be located within a rigorous epistemological break from Marx's original repertoire and that this Maoist ideology has to be understood less with dialectics and people's movements and more with sophistry and messianic apocalypse.
The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and unders... more The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and understand his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for a critical questioning of the postulates in the modern sciences that deal with the ‘mind’ question. For Marx, there is nothing called the ‘mind’ especially nothing called the mind that is independent of the body. Instead there is the human essence (das menschliche Wesen). The problem is that the modern sciences have an unexamined base, namely the structure of estrangement and the logic of capitalism. These ‘modern sciences’ of the mind range from brain sciences and behaviour psychology which reduce humanity to ‘things’ in a way not very different from the way that Stalin had transformed humanity into ‘things’. This essay is a consequent examination of Marx’s dialectical materialism with the claim of the necessity of transcending both Old Materialism and Old Idealism. The inability to not involve these double transcendences would lead to the sighting of the ghosts of the past which weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs ... more With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are murmurs that there is pressure for the two to unite to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in the 2014 National Elections. These views echo the line of the General Secretary Sitaram Yechury of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), a view that seems to echo the old revisionist S.A. Dange line of the former united Communist Party of India, which talked of a collaboration with the Indian National Congress and total abandonment of the idea of the Indian Revolution. This essay claims that the Left needs to go back to its philosophical roots and rediscover themselves rather than getting involved in the tactical maneuvers of parliamentary politics, tactics that are increasing becoming devoid of ethics. It also claims that the Left in this philosophic discovery totally transcends Stalinism of all sorts, which is stated not merely as a deviation or an accident, but a counterrevolution against the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and Marxism in general. In this philosophical rediscovery, the essay also asserts that liberalism and Gandhism are alien trends to Marxism and cannot be considered otherwise. Instead, one needs to go to Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar for a radical critique of the Indian rightwing project.
The financialization of the economy and the criminalization of politics in India which has led to... more The financialization of the economy and the criminalization of politics in India which has led to the rise to power of the Indian neoconservatives led by the Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP) have created a splintered secular democratic opposition and a declining parliamentary left. Without a doubt the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the consequent entry of India into the not-so-brave world of neoliberal capitalism. The old ideologies of secularism, socialism and non-alignment (the three pillars of the ruling ideology of India until 1991) are now forgotten for an aggressive hyper-capitalist and ethno-nationalist ideology. For those who are pessimistic about the given course of things, especially with the complete surrender of the parliamentary left to bourgeois politics, the Maoists seem a ray of hope. However a counter-narrative is put up by the ruling elite for whom the Maoists are not only terrorists, but anti-nationalists declaring war on not only the Indian state, but the Indian republic itself. This essay, while being a review of Bernard D'Mello's book India After Naxalbari, is also a reflection on the Indian Maoist movement. The following questions are fundamental to understanding the Indian Maoist movement, namely whether it is a genuine democratic and revolutionary mass movement or left adventurism that degenerates into 'anarchoterrorism', which instead of helping the cause of the working class, is actually helping the state move in a more rightwards direction. It also states that the Maoist movement in India itself has to be located within a rigorous epistemological break from Marx's original repertoire and that this Maoist ideology has to be understood less with dialectics and people's movements and more with sophistry and messianic apocalypse.
The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and unders... more The second part of this essay on Marx’s philosophy of the mind says that one must read and understand his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 for a critical questioning of the postulates in the modern sciences that deal with the ‘mind’ question. For Marx, there is nothing called the ‘mind’ especially nothing called the mind that is independent of the body. Instead there is the human essence (das menschliche Wesen). The problem is that the modern sciences have an unexamined base, namely the structure of estrangement and the logic of capitalism. These ‘modern sciences’ of the mind range from brain sciences and behaviour psychology which reduce humanity to ‘things’ in a way not very different from the way that Stalin had transformed humanity into ‘things’. This essay is a consequent examination of Marx’s dialectical materialism with the claim of the necessity of transcending both Old Materialism and Old Idealism. The inability to not involve these double transcendences would lead to the sighting of the ghosts of the past which weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
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