Marxism—South Asia

About 2 pages (610 words)

Marxism Summary

Marxism—South Asia

Marxist ideas have had a deep and enduring influence on political, economic, and literary thinking in South Asia, even though Communist parties have been in power in only a few regional pockets. This influence has advanced along two routes: anticolonial political movements and thoughts on economic development.

The Communist Party of India was established in 1925. From 1920, the idea of class struggle was closely linked with the nationalist movement, partly because such a connection was favored by Moscow and inspired by Lenin's thesis that imperialism was a mature stage of capitalism. Partly, it appealed to a section of nationalists disillusioned by the Indian National Congress's elite leadership. That feeling was strengthened after the sudden withdrawal of the noncooperation movement (1920–1922). This connection between class struggle and nationalism was for the Communists a source of both strength and weakness. Strength because it was expected to bring the working classes into the nationalist movement while staying at a distance from the Congress, which was seen as representing the national bourgeoisie, and weakness because it led to intellectual division. In the most famous dissent, M. N. Roy argued and almost persuaded the Comintern (the international association of Communist parties) that the two agendas, class struggle and nationalist movement, needed to be separate. Soon after, in 1926, Roy was expelled from the Comintern. The Communist Party of India, which followed Moscow closely thereafter, suffered credibility when it abruptly changed its line on anticolonial struggles after Russia entered World War II as an ally of the British.

Following India's independence from Britain (1947) and the creation of Bangladesh (1971), new national Communist parties were formed. These parties splintered for a variety of reasons: intellectual tensions arising from the appeal of Maoism and the emphasis on peasant struggles, regional tensions arising from local concerns, and political tensions concerning participation in parliamentary politics. A major development came in 1957 in Kerala when, for the first time in world history, a Communist state government was voted into power as a result of a democratic election. In the last six elections West Bengal, too, has produced Communist governments.

Before India's independence, a main current within the Indian National Congress was convinced of the need for state control of productive resources to ensure a more equal distribution of income and wealth. This socialist strand was inspired directly by the Soviet developmental model, with the emphasis on state ownership, redistribution, and central planning, and indirectly by classical Marxism with its accent on equity and fair distribution. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, these ideas were incorporated into India's developmental policy and philosophy and became part of an informal consensus among Indian intellectuals. Such Soviet-influenced developmental ideas were popular in greater South Asia as well. In this way, gaps were bridged between the political parties of the left and the mainstream intellectual tradition in political economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union, China's economic reforms and rapid economic growth in Southeast Asia and East Asia were some of the major forces that weakened the socialist development strategy and the link between leftist politics and policy discourse.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Marxism was on the wane both politically and intellectually. Struggles for representation and empowerment of the underprivileged carry on, but are not focused on the concerns of workers. Still, Marxism has left a deep and enduring impact on ideas about rural political change, on the trade-union movement, on historiography, and, in the cultural sphere, on theater and film.