The task of the Left is against all irrationalism

By Prabhat Patnaik

akhbar Year 2002, No 5 October-December

This new phase of imperialism is based on the emergence of a new form of international finance capital. The rapid propagation of neo-liberal economic policies was a result of this confluence. And the masses, disillusioned with the years of bourgeois rule, were reluctant to defend the dirigiste economic policies, even though neo-liberalism was later to cause havoc to their livelihoods. This hegemony was by the emergence of divisive tendencies among the people. Two points however need to be noted about this transformation.

• First, anti-democratic movements resembling in some ways the Hindutva phenomenon have mushroomed all over the world; the assault on reason, and the accompanying attack on democracy, are not specific to India.
• Second, communal fascism, even while promoting its own agenda, is, very definitely, engaged also in promoting the agenda of imperialism.

The attack on the livelihoods of the masses that the hegemony of international finance capital entailed, through deflation, unemployment and cuts in social wage, often gave rise to a refracted form of anger, not against the oppressors but against some other segment of the oppressed themselves, breeding ethnic, religious and communal conflicts. Even when there was anger against the oppressors, this itself often took the refracted form of an anger against their skin colour, their religion, their culture, their customs, and their commodities, breeding fundamentalisms in an atavistic quest for piety and purity. But a consequence of this was that others among the domestic population with the same religion and cultural affinities were made targets of attack in an irrational frenzy.

The fact that accentuating unemployment provides a fertile soil for divisive tendencies among the people is well known. Needless to say, all these irrational ideologies do not ever address themselves to the question of improving in any way the conditions of the downtrodden. It follows then that we cannot accept either of the following two positions:

• we cannot support imperialism, and the sundry irrational movements that hitch their bandwagon to it, in their attack on such irrationalism as is hostile to it, in the name of "modernity" and "civilization";
• equally, we must eschew support to irrationalism, that is hostile to imperialism, just because it is "anti-imperialist", overlooking the fact of its being a handmaiden of feudal reaction.

An enormous amount of discontent is building up among the peasantry, not just the landless or poor peasants who eke out a precarious and marginal existence, but the middle and even the rich peasantry which has not escaped the depredations of the imperialist-dominated world market. The task of the Left is to mobilize democratic opinion against all irrationalism, and to link this mobilization with a movement against imperialism, since the phenomenon of imperialism is what underlies the flourishing of all irrationalism in the contemporary epoch. Courtesy: People's Democracy